Chakotay falls in with an alien militia when he crashes on a planet.
Clever and bold. While I spent most of the episode expecting a twist (in particular, that Voyager would have contacted the other side), I was expecting something more along the lines of ‘war is hell, both sides are terrible’. Instead we get something that’s a lot more interesting, in terms of Chakotay being put through psychological conditioning.
Given his history with the Maquis, it’s pretty believable that Chakotay would follow the kind of path we saw here, even without much in the way of conditioning. Two bold things were also tried – spending so long on one story without cutting back to Voyager, and also the ‘faux-Chaucer’ dialogue. Both worked, although the dialogue didn’t work for me until right towards the end of the episode.
484 down, 253 to go.