Friendship One

*** (3 stars out of 5)

The warp-powered Friendship I probe was launched in 2067 and it went a bit beyond a couple of dirty naked pictures and a gold LP. This probe had a complete How-To Manual for advancing to 2067 technology, AND a complete retrospective on the Number One Hits of Macklemore!

Lost in the Delta Quadrant 130 years ago, it turns out the manual has a chapter called Build-Your-Own Apocalypse. The first people who found it are now fleshy-headed mutants in a missile-strewn wasteland and radiation has made them enemies of society, eh?

The bright, shining faces of the Uxali greet the away team with a free kidnapping and murder Joe Carey from Season One to remind us that he existed. The head honcho seems eager to make humans pay for their ancestors' naive interstellar "Tommyguns For Toddlers" program. As usual, throwing torpedoes and Borg nanoprobes at the problem is the cure for what ails 'em.

Captain Janeway, the Federation's most prolific explorer in generations, weighs in with a baffling opinion: that the benefits of exploration don't justify the loss of a single life. Say whaaat?
Replicators? Transporters? Interplanetary peace and brotherhood? Toasters that love? Lot of benefits! Not worth ONE life? People are going to die anyway. Let's keep the benefits, shall we?

"Friendship One" opens on a conversation typifying what Admirals will be saying to Janeway from now on:
"Really? Descended from Dinosaurs, huh? And they were flying around in Amelia Earhart's biplane? Riiight. And how much of this "leola root" did you ingest exactly?"