Dreadnought

*** (3 stars out of 5)

Once upon a time, B'Elanna went over Chakotay's head and re-built a Cardassian doomsday device to attack its own masters and blow up their entire planet. She only had a brief time to reconsider whether this might be overkill before the missile vanished in the Badlands.

Guess what's baaack?

Stubborn, efficient, arrogant and paranoid, the Dreadnought has mistaken inhabited Rakosa V for Cardassian fuel depot Aschelan V. It's an easy mistake to make: they both have a Five in their name.

Dreadlocks tricks B'Elanna into thinking it has respected her authority, but it has actually decided that everyone is lying about the whole "Lost in the Delta Quadrant" Deal. The arrogant AI won't shut down. After all, what are the odds a senile extragalactic cyst would kidnap a nuke to mate with? O.K., you and I know it's a fairly common occurrence, but not Dreadsy-kins.


Meanwhile, Tom is insubordinate and Jonas keeps leaving messages for Seska: 'Call me baaaack! Why'd you leeeave? Was it meeee?'

The Rakosan First Minister Kellan has decided to hurl wave after wave of his own men at the unstoppable force. Like the Mighty Hercules cartoon where Hercules always insisted on leaping headfirst at the invulnerable Mask of Vulcan (no relation) a couple of times just to see if he was still as invulnerable as last week.

With 2 million lives at stake I probably would have had those pilots evacuating people instead. Am I the only one not taking crazy pills?

As Janeway sets the ship to self-destruct in Dreadnought's path, Torres gets the missile into an argument with itself over whether it has Bieber Fever or Lady Gaga Reflux.

We just saw B'Elanna spend an entire episode arguing with machines in 'Prototype' and here she is again versus "Dreadnought", a talking missile. Like 'Dark Star' but minus an unconvincing alien made out of a beach ball. They're lucky that Roxanne Biggs-Dawson is so darn riveting. It's a very watchable episode thanks to her.

And it looks like Samantha Wildman will need a name for her baby after all. I'm in favour of Greshkrendregk, myself. It's better than Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassicmaxarodenfoe.