First aired episode for the second season
The crew discovers Amelia Earhart among eight humans captured from Earth in 1937.
Notes: This episode was actually produced for the first season but was held back. Also this was the first time Voyager or for that matter any Federation starship landed on a planet.
--Richie
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By Gordon Lawyer on Thursday, March 04, 1999 - 5:51 am:

Curious that the radio in that pickup could get the distress signal seeing as how AM radio waves can't leave the atmosphere, as they bounce back off the ionosphere. The possibility of that planet not having an ionosphere is a bit improbable. I'll admit I'm not sure what the ionosphere does, but it's probably something that is necessary.

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By Rodnberry on Sunday, January 17, 1999 - 5:00 am:

Another point: They found an old rusted Ford Model A (or was it a T?) floating in space, right? Well, doesn't iron need oxygen, let alone water, which has oxygen in it, in order to rust? There's no oxygen in space, or if there is, it's way too sparse to create rust, I'd think, but I'm not a scientist so I'm not sure. But let's think on this: If you take a piece of iron, dip it in water, then place it, wet, in a vacuum sealed container with absolutely no air whatsoever in it, would the iron rust? If that same container had the iron partially submerged in water, then vacuum sealed, would the iron still rust? Just wondering. If anyone knows more on the subject please let me know.

And one last point, now that it's on my mind. How the hell did the car get into space, anyway, and how could it have been floating for so long in it without some Klingons or other races using it for target practise? Or being smashed to bits by an asteroid or comet or falling into some star's gravitational pull and eventually becoming so much space slag or evaporated completely?

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By Cableface on Wednesday, January 20, 1999 - 2:20 pm:

That's a toughie.As I understand it, something only rusts in water because of the oxygen in the water.I'm not sure what effect a vacuum or zero-gravity enviroment would have on the oxygen content of the water but I would imagine that it would have the same effect.Unless we were talking about open space, in which case the water would either freeze or evaporate.Either way, nothing could rust in it.But, I will stand corrected if I'm wrong.

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By ScottN on Wednesday, January 20, 1999 - 5:52 pm:

Maybe it was rusted before it got zapped into space?

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By Rodnberry on Thursday, January 21, 1999 - 3:17 am:

I thought that, too, ScottN. But I'm still wondering how it got up there in the first place, but since it's never been explained (but then I've only seen it once and don't remember if it was or not) then I guess we'll never know.

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By Mike Konczewski on Thursday, January 21, 1999 - 3:15 pm:

It was explained; the descendants of the captured Earth people put it in space as a kind of warning beacon/homage to the 37's.

I'm sure the truck was rusty before it went into space. The vacuum of space would have prevented the truck from rusting away to nothing, just maintained it's 20th century amount of rust.

Here's more of real nit--there's strong evidence to support the theory that Amelia Earheart starved to death on a Pacific island after she survived the crash-landing of her plane. I've heard an interview with a forensic scientist who's examined the bones that are supposed to be Earheart's.

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By Brian Lombard on Thursday, March 04, 1999 - 11:40 am:

Yeah, the history channel had a documentary on her the other night which petty much said the same thing. There weren't any actual skeletal remains found, but there were items that could be attributed to her - a shoe from her era, that was her size, and of a brand we can prove she wore. Also plexiglass of the type her windshield was made of, as well as a metal component from an aircraft, as yet unidentified.

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By Johnny Veitch on Saturday, March 06, 1999 - 6:22 am:

I alert you to a line from the episode:

JANEWAY: Rust? How could anything rust with no oxygen in space?

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By Mike Konczewski on Monday, March 08, 1999 - 6:58 am:

She was jumping to the conclusion that it had rusted in space, rather than the obvious conclusion that it had been rusted before it got there.

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By Mark Bowman on Thursday, May 20, 1999 - 1:35 am:

How can the truck's AM radio (which is very
prone to inerference) pick up signals,
especialy through all of the metal Voyager is
made of? Also, with all of the feilds and stuff
all over the ship, the radio would
be getting alot of inteference, don't you
think? (hold up an AM radio to a TV set, or
even hold your remote to it and press some
of the buttons to see what I mean. I can still
remember a program in a magazine for a Timex
Sinclair/Spectrum (I beleive it had no sound)
that would let you play music through a near by
AM radio via the interference that it puts out.

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By Doug23t on Friday, June 04, 1999 - 3:46 am:

It would be helpful if Amelia Earhart disappeared about 10 years later. Then this episode would be called 'The 47s'

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By BrianB on Friday, July 09, 1999 - 5:36 am:

Wouldn't a truck in space result in a cracked block? That's some antifreeze.
We know Tom is the expert of all things 20th-century and all things automobile. And Janeway demonstrates herself as the expert on ancient farm animal droppings!

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By Omer on Friday, July 09, 1999 - 3:03 pm:

I'm not sure... they could have defrozen it while transporting... or after that

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By Keith Alan Morgan on Thursday, July 15, 1999 - 7:11 am:

After 4 centuries in space the truck is still intact and starts up with no problem, yeah right. Meteroids and micrometeoroids could have punched holes in it. The cold of space should have frozen the water, oil, gas & battery fluid. I also found it hard to believe that the manure & alfalfa seeds would still be stuck on it.

It's said to be a 1936 Ford, and 1936 was the manufacturing date. Wouldn't 1936 be the year it hit the market? I would think the manufacturing date would actually be 1935. (but I could be wrong.)

Why is it dangerous for a shuttle to go through trinimbic turbulance, but okay for the much bigger ship.

Those puny little legs are supposed to hold up the ship? What about the ground below sinking under the weight?

There's an SOS from the plane. A PBS special I believe stated that Earheart didn't know Morse Code.

Why are there lights on inside the cryo-stasis chambers?

The Closed Captioning has statis instead of stasis.

So are the humans on this planet bad shots or were they aiming to miss?

So the Briori traveled 70,000 light years across the galaxy just to pick up slaves? Sheesh.

The captain's log refers to Evansville's cities as an "amazing experience". Gee, would have been nice if they had shown us this experience.

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By Chris Thomas on Thursday, July 15, 1999 - 7:54 am:

Well I don't know morse code, but I do know how to deliver an SOS using it, which most people know but that's all.

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By BrianB on Thursday, July 15, 1999 - 10:31 am:

What did V'ger eventually do with that truck? Did they return it to space, return it to the farmer or did they recycle it into the replicator system?

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By BrianB on Thursday, July 15, 1999 - 10:33 am:

Maybe Tom put it in his quarters as a souvenir. Maybe he had to minaturize it first. "Vrooom, vrooom!"

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By BrianB on Thursday, July 15, 1999 - 10:35 am:

P.S. miniaturize (shrink).

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By Trickster on Thursday, July 15, 1999 - 12:59 pm:

Maybe a bigger ship has more inertial dampeners/structurial integrity fields.

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By Butch Brookshier on Friday, August 06, 1999 - 7:46 pm:

Re:Rodnberry Jan. 17/ Ford stopped using letter designations for their vehicles at the end of the 1931 model year. Re:Keith Morgan July 15/ Vehicles are manufactured from approx. July to June. In this case the 1936 truck would have built from July 1935 to June 1936. The thing that I wonder about concerning this truck is how a not too prosperous looking farmer could afford a nearly new truck? I think it would have made more sense in the episode for it to have been 3-5 years old. This would made it much more likely to have been rusted.

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By Back from the abyss, Omer on Tuesday, August 10, 1999 - 10:55 am:

Oh, some tid bits about Emilia Erhart(sp?) - first of all, she was in her fourties when she disappeared. The actress looked 25-30 to me, but maybe I'm ignorant.

Second, Emilia Rehart was a Nazy enthusiastic. This should make her a less then perfect subject to Janeway's admiration, and also, she probably wouldn't have put up with the black guy and the japanease guy.

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By Keith Alan Morgan on Wednesday, August 11, 1999 - 3:54 am:

I believe it is spelled Amelia Earhart, and Nazy is spelled Nazi.
I was not familiar with her political or racial views, Earhart is famous as a pioneering woman aviator and that is probably what Janeway admires.
Also a lot of pre-war Americans supported the Nazis, but as soon as most of them saw where it was leading or had led to, suddenly they started pretending they were never supporters. Had Amelia lived she, no doubt, would have renounced any support she had given, or claimed she was misinterpreted.

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By Omer on Sunday, August 15, 1999 - 4:09 pm:

MMM... still, she's been a Nazi supporter, and she knew Nazi world view. So she was against the black and the asian and the jews. What she claimed or didn't claim in person made no diffrence

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By George Dent on Monday, August 16, 1999 - 7:56 am:

Wasn't Walt Disney a member of the American Nazi Party?

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By Kylie Jenkins on Monday, August 16, 1999 - 7:59 am:

The brief summary mentions this was the first time a Federation starship landed on a planet. Didn't the Enterprise-D land on a planet, albeit after a huge nosedive from the sky?

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By Richie Vest on Monday, August 16, 1999 - 2:51 pm:

Kylie I would assume that they meant a safe landing and not a crash as the Enterprise-D was . Also half the Enterprise was missing.

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By ScottN on Monday, August 16, 1999 - 4:01 pm:

Re: Voyager Landing... "Look, It's the Secret Weapon!" - Official Glossary Entry

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By Biff B on Thursday, October 07, 1999 - 7:12 pm:

The History Channel is running a documentary on Amelia Earhart on Friday, Oct. 8 at 8pm edt.

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By KAM on Friday, October 08, 1999 - 3:10 am:

Does it include her being kidnapped and taken to the Delta Quadrant? ;-)

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By Biff B on Saturday, October 09, 1999 - 1:56 pm:

It did give a brief mention about UFO abductions.

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By Mark Swinton on Saturday, November 06, 1999 - 3:41 pm:

So how did the truck end up floating in space and not down on the planet with all the other "abducted" technology?
(Because there wouldn't have been a show if it hadn't been left there to find, and it was a very good show- indeed, seeing it as I did at the end of season one (and the first Voyager video I ever got) it was a most worthy conclusion.)
And are we expected to believe that without the truck radio, Voyager wouldn't have picked up the distress signal from the plane? Because Morse Code is transmitted on a frequency that these ultra-sophisticated sensors can't pick up?!

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By Chris Thomas on Saturday, November 06, 1999 - 10:49 pm:

If you read Mike Konczewski's post near the top of the page, you would have found an answer: "It was explained; the descendants of the captured Earth people put it [the truck] in space as a kind of warning beacon/homage to the 37's."

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By Keith Alan Morgan on Sunday, November 07, 1999 - 12:15 am:

I don't think anyone in the episode states that the truck was put in space by the humans.

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By Aaron Dotter on Friday, November 19, 1999 - 5:07 pm:

How did the manure and dust stay on the truck? Surely the pull of the truck's gravity would not be enough to hold it there.

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By Chris Thomas on Saturday, November 20, 1999 - 2:04 am:

Wouldn't it have just stayed frozen on, given it was in space?

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By Aaron Dotter on Saturday, November 20, 1999 - 7:25 am:

Could be, I didn't really think about it that way. The thing is, even if the manure froze to the truck, the dust on the windshield wouldn't, would it?

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By Chris Thomas on Saturday, November 20, 1999 - 9:25 pm:

Maybe there was a thin film of moisture in it?

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By Anonymous on Thursday, December 16, 1999 - 8:06 pm:

If it was a 1936 model truck, and it was dragged into the Delta Quadrant in '37, how could it have rusted so much in the space of one year (even if a farmer was using it for heavy utility work?)
Maybe Paris was mistaken about the date.

Also, a sort of anti-nit: space is so incredibly immense that there is a very small chance anything could have hit the truck over the three hundred years it was floating.

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By Mark Swinton on Tuesday, January 18, 2000 - 6:26 pm:

Oh, and how would Janeway have been able to identify "horse manure"? Smells of that sort are caused by bacteria. Bacteria, like all other forms of life, perish in the cold vacuum of space.
Enough said...

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By Tom Edwards on Wednesday, January 19, 2000 - 1:28 am:

But their spores can survive.

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By Mark Swinton on Wednesday, January 19, 2000 - 10:41 am:

For that long?

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By Chris Thomas on Thursday, January 20, 2000 - 12:46 am:

Maybe they had an alien encounter which prolonger their life - anything is possible in the Star Trek universe.

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By BrianB on Tuesday, February 01, 2000 - 9:04 pm:

Whatever became of Jarvin who was involved with a young woman in quantum mechanics?
What ever became of the "young woman"?
Whatever became of quantum mechanics?
According to Janeway there were 152 crewmembers aboard V'ger at this time.

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By BrianB on Tuesday, February 01, 2000 - 9:28 pm:

John Evansville introduces himself, his colleague Karen Berlin, but what about his stunned partner? Wasn't he (I presume) a colleague and worthy of an introduction?
What is his name anyway, Joe Cleveland?

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By BrianB on Tuesday, February 01, 2000 - 11:11 pm:

KAM brought up a great point. Why did the Briori travel 70,000 light-years just to pick up slaves?
Why did the Briori leave eight of their abductees in stasis? Were they never brought out to be enslaved or experimented upon? According to Evansville, the Briori kidnapped over 300 humans. I guess they thought 300 were enough to control and enslave. And eight is enough to keep in cold storage. Why?

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By Mark Swinton on Wednesday, February 02, 2000 - 4:42 am:

Maybe (bizarre thought) the Briori extracted DNA from the people in stasis in order to "breed" slaves. That doesn't explain the fact that such a large number were kidnapped, but it does make sense if you consider that the slaves would probably have been dropping like flies under the duress of Briori treatment and the Briori thus thought a few spare humans as breeding stock "just in case" would be a good idea...

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By Charles Cabe (Ccabe) on Wednesday, February 02, 2000 - 11:19 am:

>What is his name anyway, Joe Cleveland?>

Perhaps he was Klinger Toledo?

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By Gary C. on Saturday, March 25, 2000 - 1:32 am:

Can a population of 300 people grow to a population of 100,000 in the span of 400 or so years? Can some mathie please crunch the numbers for me?

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By Charles Cabe (Ccabe) on Saturday, March 25, 2000 - 10:57 am:

Well, if there was an average family of 4 kids and 2 adults, each generation would double the population. Assuming 20 years per generation, 400 years would be 20 generations. Thus the approxamate population would be 300x2^20=314,572,800. So yes, it would be possible.

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By Jwb52z on Saturday, March 25, 2000 - 11:42 am:

So, having less than the number of inhabitants that Charles suggests are possible tells you that they may have not had all that many kids during each generation.

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By norman on Saturday, March 25, 2000 - 8:22 pm:

Tom Paris, the twentieth century hobbiest, does not know who Amelia Earheart is?!!!!

What a way to save money! We never see the cities!

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By Anonymous on Monday, March 27, 2000 - 8:31 am:

Did Janeway ever mention the allmighty "Prime Directive" in this episode? It seemed so important to her just last season when she refused to buy the "transjector" on the black market when it would have given the crew a chance to get home.

But now, when there's a chance of getting home, she doesn't seem to care about the Prime Directive or Star Fleet regs. Does she even scan the planet for life forms or native populations before rushing into the underground chamber and waking up Earhart & Co.?

Another example of inconsistent writing as I see it.

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By Jwb52z on Monday, March 27, 2000 - 12:42 pm:

Anonymous, the Prime Directive doesn't apply when you're dealing with humans no matter where they are. Humans are not considered another civilization. The Prime Directive only prohibits the meddling in the affairs of other civilizations that are among many things pre-warp.

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By Aaron Dotter on Monday, March 27, 2000 - 7:22 pm:

And she did scan the planet but there was interference.

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By Eli on Tuesday, March 28, 2000 - 10:19 am:

The prime directive doesn't apply to humans? I've never heard that? Could you give a source?

I thought the prime directive was a non-interference policy, not an ethnicity policy. What does race have to do with it? There are very isolated human populations here on earth, right now, that we would not want to interfere with.

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By DonnaL on Tuesday, March 28, 2000 - 10:36 am:

I'm guessing Jwb52z is talking about investigating distress calls that are being put out by Humans or trying to rescue them. I can't see how that would be covered by the Prime Directive.

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By Jwb52z on Tuesday, March 28, 2000 - 12:43 pm:

DonnaL, I'm also talking about the fact that the "interference" thing doesn't apply to human colonies or civilizations of Federation Citizens that are human.

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By Keith Alan Morgan on Wednesday, March 29, 2000 - 12:33 am:

The NextGen episode The Masterpiece Society stated that the Prime Directive doesn't apply to Humans. At the end when Picard wonders if helping the people was the right thing to do Riker says the Prime Directive doesn't apply because they're human.

Also if you watch the Classic episode Bread And Circuses, Kirk recites the Prime Directive and it sounds like it was originally meant to prevent interfering with developing civilizations on other worlds that don't know about life on other worlds or space travel.

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By DonnaL on Thursday, March 30, 2000 - 10:22 am:

Jwb52z & Keith: I agree with you both. If the Prime Directive were too broadly applied or defined, then you could never enforce any Federation laws, you could never rescue anybody abducted, you couldn't even trade or have contact with any other society for fear of interference. That would be ridiculous. Why bother going into space?

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By Dusk on Saturday, August 12, 2000 - 8:08 pm:

Someone asked:
KAM brought up a great point. Why did the Briori travel 70,000 light-years just to pick up slaves?

Perhaps four hundred years ago there was a wormhole that was stable enough to travel through that happened to open up near Earth? It could have destabilised since then and disappeared, or whatever it is wormholes do when they stop being wormholes.

>Why did the Briori leave eight of their abductees in stasis? Were they never brought out to be enslaved or experimented upon? According to Evansville, the Briori kidnapped over 300 humans. I guess they thought 300 were enough to control and enslave. And eight is enough to keep in cold storage. Why?

I thought it was because of the uprising... they brought over 300 - either because that's how many they wanted or because that's all the capacity their ships had or whatever - then used the slaves as they needed 'em. If you have three hundred slaves but only need two hundred right now, it makes sense to put them in stasis - if you have the technology -rather than having to feed them, provide 'em somewhere to live and all while they just sit around doing nothing. Then when you need another ten, just defost another ten, and so on... and because the slaves revolted, they never got to defrost all of them. The slaves, presumeably having minimal understanding of alien technology, wouldn't know how to defrost them.

I like the wormhole theory because it explains why all the abductees were taken within the same year - the wormhole collapsed shortly after discovery, so they couldn't go back and get more. Possibly

As for the truck, I'd imagine the raids on Earth were fairly hit-and-run... grab what you can and sort it out later. The truck, being rusty and not having any interesting new technology in it, wouldn't have been of much use to them, so they blew it out of an airlock on the way home - no point hauling useless stuff around. And the plane was presumeably of interest to them, at least at first, so they kept it at first and then left it on the planet once they'd got whatever they needed from it.

Something occured to me - the SOS signal was obviously being maintained by the humans rather than the Briori. However, it's unlikely the revolting humans would have immediately set up the alien battery to keep the signal going, being more concerned with survival (biting the hand that feeds you means no hand and no food.) So, how long *would* that original battery have lasted? Long enough for the humans to move beyond hand-to-mouth existance and start using the Briori technonolgy? Or did they develop their own technology based on their 20th Century knowledge? In which case, the battery would have to have lasted for *ages* to give them time to come up with an alternative.

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By Dusk on Saturday, August 12, 2000 - 8:18 pm:

OK, I've got another thought. The world the 37's were found on, I'm guessing was not the Briori homeworld. They had ships like Voyager, which means they travelled between worlds and therefore probably colonised the empty ones. There is no way 300 20th Century humans could have wiped out - or even just defeated - an entire spacefaring civilisation, and there's no mention of other slave races that could have helped them. So the Briori they overthrew had to be an offshoot of the main civilisation. In which case, when that group of Briori stopped contacting and trading with the homeworld (due to the uprising), how come nobody came to find out why? If an entire planet ceases responding to communication, surely someone will want to go see what happened? Even if the main government never bothered to look, wouldn't some enterprising scrap-merchant want to see what leftovers they could pick up? Three hundred slaves, at least one starship and plenty of everyday technology has got to be worth salvaging.

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By Keith Alan Morgan (Kmorgan) on Saturday, August 12, 2000 - 9:27 pm:

OK, I like the wormhole theory.

The people were worried about a Briori counterattack. That's why they wore the suits and fired.

As for why the main group of Briori never came by? Maybe they were assimilated by the Borg? Or wiped out in an interstellar war? Or they died from Smallpox? ;-)
Maybe the slave-capturing Briori were renegades and the rest of the Briori decided to leave the now free Humans alone?

I wonder if the Briori are related to the Her'Q from the Gamma Quadrant who raided the Klingon Homeworld? (The Sword Of Kahless)

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By steph on Thursday, September 07, 2000 - 1:04 am:

by far, the most idiotic trek episode of all time.
nit #1- japanese guy says they are all speaking
japanese, before he speaks & the u.t. i.d.'s his
language.

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By steph on Thursday, September 07, 2000 - 1:07 am:

nit#2- a tiny group of people on a planet unknown
to them, choose not to join a group of 150 people,
and instead to live w/out a
U.T. even.

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By steph on Thursday, September 07, 2000 - 1:09 am:

nit #3- amelia e., an adventurer who has dedicated
her life to flying, passes up the chance to fly
beyond her wildest dreams (on Voyager.

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By steph on Thursday, September 07, 2000 - 1:11 am:

ok, cancel nit #2. but nit #1 and 3 still stand.

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By steph on Thursday, September 07, 2000 - 1:22 am:

nit #4-Chakotay, who grew up on a colony (not
Earth,) rhapsodises about the AZ desert & the
Gulf of Mex.

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By Newt on Thursday, September 07, 2000 - 4:15 pm:

steph,
I don't know if I would call it the Most Idiotic. I think this one might have to duke it out with Theshold for the title. But yeah. It is out there. My favorite part, "Landing the Ship" (insert somekind musical cue). It really didn't put me on the edge of my seat, (oh, no will Voyager make it?).

Now that would be an episode, crash the ship and not save the day in the end. I know, too un-Trekish.

W

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By Mark Swinton on Sunday, October 08, 2000 - 11:43 am:

Nit #1 is a not a nit. The Japanese Soldier clearly states "I demand that you release me immediately!" before making the comment about understanding everyone. The UT thus had plenty of time to note his origins and extrapolate accordingly.

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By TCapp on Sunday, January 21, 2001 - 11:08 pm:

Why didn't Tom take Amelia to the holodeck so she could at least have the illusion of flying that ship? That would have probably made her day!

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By TJFleming on Friday, March 30, 2001 - 1:20 pm:

"Class L planet--oxygen/argon atmosphere." Apparently no nitrogen to speak of. So what's the vegetation made of? No nitrogen=no amino acids=no food chain for animate life as we know it, particularly humans.

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By Heyst on Tuesday, May 15, 2001 - 10:07 am:

Wouldn't the battery be dead on the pickup?

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By Jwb52z on Tuesday, May 15, 2001 - 11:50 am:

The nitrogen is in the soil, not the air.

By LUIGI NOVI on Wednesday, May 16, 2001 - 1:43 am:

Rodnberry: They found an old rusted Ford Model A (or was it a T?) floating in space, right?

Luigi Novi: Neither. It was just an old Ford truck. It was a 1936 truck, which means it couldn't possibly have been a Model A, much less a Model T. Just looking at it says that it's far more modern than that. The first Model T went on the market in 1908, the Model A in 1927.

Omer: Earhart was in her fourties when she disappeared. The actress looked 25-30 to me, but maybe I'm ignorant.

Luigi Novi: No way is Sharon Lawrence 25. Don't get me wrong, I think she's gorgeous. But is 39, so she was about 34 at the time of this episode.

Omer: Second, Emilia Rehart was a Nazi enthusiastic. This should make her a less then perfect subject to Janeway's admiration, and also, she probably wouldn't have put up with the black guy and the japanease guy.

Luigi Novi: Wow, I never knew that. Then again, Henry Ford was a virulent anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer too, so Paris and Janeway can both sit at the "Flawed Idols" table.

Here are the nits for this episode from my Nitpick document, including ones I compiled from othe sources. After the end of the second season, a guy named Hal Schuster wrote a book on the making of Voyager. Interestingly, Chapter 10 is titled, Nitpicking the Episodes, and features a brief plot synopsis, followed by "Key Quotations," "Plot Misfires," "Equipment Malfunctions," and "Memory Failures." (Gee, I wonder where he got this idea from?) The first nits with a HS- are Hal’s. The next ones that begins with TL- are by Tim Lynch, who reviewed Voyager only until the second season at Psiphi. The ones after that that begin with Tony- are by a guy named Tony who has an anti-Trek site. The ones after that are mine.


HS-How do tricorders work? Do they have metal detectors? Paris sees the Japanese officer’s gun, but apparently, Fred Noonan’s didn’t show up on anyone’s tricorder. Transporters are programmed to recognize weapons, as at the end of The Most Toys(TNG) and Maneuvers, so why aren’t tricorders? Sure, it’s an archaic weapon, but officers often do surveillance of pre-warp societies, and may come into contact with races with inferior technology.
HS-Noonan has the African man take Paris and Kim’s phasers, and they allow him to do so, even though Paris has a clear shot at Noonan. True, Noonan’s gun is pointed at Janeway, and striking him may cause him to reflexively pull the trigger, but couldn’t Paris instead melt the gun instantly before Noonan or anyone else could do anything?
HS-After Noonan takes the away team hostage, Tuvok orders all security personnel to the cargo bay. he obviously intends for all of them to rescue the away team. Is this wise? Shouldn’t some security personnel stay on Voyager? Doesn’t this leave the ship vulnerable?
TL-So the atmospheric interference prevents sensor readings and beaming, but lets AM radio through? You can’t get AM radio under a tunnel!
TL & Tony-Both Tim Lynch and Tony wanted to know why doesn’t Voyager monitor AM radio. Kim says it’s because it does not travel faster than light. Does Voyager regularly ignore the entire electromagnetic spectrum? They’re far from home, looking for a planet that can provide food, energy or otherwise help them get home, and you’d think they’d set up a computer program to monitor a huge band of radio frequencies, looking for signs of intelligence. Heck, SETI has a system that does that now! Besides, they monitored AM radio in The Cage(TOS), didn’t they?
TL-How did that pickup truck get into space?
TL-Did the creators, (as with the Caretaker’s holo-environment in the pilot episode) think EVERYONE on Voyager, (Klingons, Bolians, Bajorans, Vulcans) would consider three Earth-like cities "just like home"?
TL-NO ONE stayed on the planet? NO ONE asked to come on board? Tim Lynch felt that having some stay and some come on board would’ve better illustrated the change that the crew undergoes as it journeys back to the Alpha Quadrant, and would’ve been more realistic. He half-jokingly speculated that Janeway and Chakotay went to the wrong cargo bay, or that Tuvok neck pinched everyone who tried to approach the cargo bay with the intention of staying on the planet.
TL & Tony- Both Tony and Tim Lynch were astounded that the truck’s battery and gasoline work okay after 430 years. Furthermore, Tony pointed out that in outer space, the oil will all sublime into space, and vacuum welding would have frozen all the moving parts. Even if the car was only in space for thirty minutes, the water in the battery and the gasoline in the tank would all boil out in a matter of minutes.
Tony-Also, they spotted the rust as trace debris coming from the truck, which was a short distance away. Wouldn’t the sensors pick up the much larger mass of the truck first ?
Tony- Janeway sniffs the manure in the pickup truck to verify it's horse manure. Sterilized manure has no smell, and nothing sterilizes quite like 400 years in space.
Tony-The AM radio in the truck should not have been able to pick up the plane’s SOS. It was the wrong frequency, and WAY too far away.
Tony-Earhart’s plane, which Tony refers to as a Lockheed Electra (but which is actually a Lockheed-10 Electra) has been in an open oxygen environment for 400 years (430, actually), yet there is no rust, the leather and wood components have not rotted, and the radio is still sending out an outdated SOS. The distress systems from that era used a rotating mechanical cam and vacuum tubes. Even with an alien power source at the core, it will NOT last 400 years.
Tony-The crew revive the 37s without using the equipment that was keeping them frozen. Why the rush? These guys have been here for 400 years! Why not give Tuvok some more time to figure out how to use the computer, and in the meantime, go exploring on this planet? The people who froze these guys might be lurking nearby, and there might be a city or three 50 miles away!
Tony-The crew finds the 37s not just in suspended animation, but specifically, in cryogenic suspension, meaning they were frozen, yet they inject some drug into them. Uh, don’t you need to have some blood circulating for an injection to take effect? These guys are frozen. How can a drug affect them? Also, Kim takes opens the Japanese guy’s pouch to take the pistol, but wouldn’t a frozen leather pouch be pretty stiff and difficult to open?
Tony-Tuvok said he doesn’t think they can run the ship with less than 100 people. Why not? The crew ran the original enterprise on a skeleton crew a few times, and once completely under computer control, and in the movies they did it with just the bridge crew (I believe he’s referring to ST III.), and the Enterprise ran with just Crusher on board, and once with just Riker and Picard, and they were in the holodeck at the time. (And of course, Tony is only referring to short term jaunts. The episode One showed just Seven and Doc running the ship, and after Doc was damaged, just Seven, and that was for a month.)
Tony-These natives lived here for 15 generations, 430 years, overturned an alien race, mastering its supply systems, and don’t know what cryogenic stasis is. The Briori must have had faster than warp travel, but the humans on the planet say there is nothing left of the ship. Tony feels that the Voyager crew violated the Prime Directive by contacting the humans, but he’s wrong. First of all, the crew didn’t contact the other humans directly; they didn’t even know they were there. Second, the humans already knew that other alien races exist, because such a race kidnapped them many generations ago, and they eventually overcame them and now use their technology.

MY NITS
Great Exchange: Hey, Kate, what do you think of this week's script?
Kate Mulgrew: Manure. HORSE manure.

I didn't say it was a great exchange that was in the episode, did I?

-Why doesn’t anyone in the 24th century know what a car is? First, Worf didn’t know in The Big Good-bye(TNG). Now in this episode, Kim, an expert in engineering, can’t tell a car from an early hovercar? What the hell is the matter with these people? I know what a chariot and butterchurn is!
-When Janeway orders to land Voyager on the planet, Paris says he’s never landed a starship before. Are you telling me that EVERY crewman trained in the specifications of the Intrepid-class ship died in during the transport to the Delta Quadrant in the pilot?
-Does anyone else find it difficult to believe that those four tiny little chicken legs on Voyager can hold it up when on a planet? I may have read somewhere in a magazine article that the ship uses antigravity to keep it up, but aside from the fact that articles are not canon, if it has antigravity, what does it need legs for?
-When Janeway and the crew find the suspended animation chambers, she wipes the dew from the Japanese officer’s chamber, and says, "he’s human." How does she know he’s not Deltan, Betazoid, Iotian, Edo, El Aurian, Sikaran, Yaderan, etc.? All those races (plus a bunch more I haven’t mentioned) look identical to humans.
-The 37s must have taken lessons from the Antideans from Manhunt (TNG) on how to remain in a state of suspended animation while standing up.
-This episode was the first to explicitly state that the comm badges have universal translators in them. Unfortunately, this doesn’t explain how the badges "send" Japanese into the Japanese soldier’s ear, and English into the Americans’ ears. Wouldn’t this system require an implant in each person’s ear, as depicted in Little Green Men(DS9), so that each person’s implant gives them the message in their own language? (And if you add a contact lense, almost undetectable to enemies, it might explain how everyone can read alien consoles, as in Faces and Maneuves.
-In trying to convince the 37s that they’re in the 24th century, Janeway, quite rudely, grabs Kes’ head and reveals her ear structure. Wouldn’t it have been more polite to simply ask Kes to part her own hair, or at least say, "Excuse me, Kes, but I want to show Mrs. Earhart something..."?
-After Tuvok orders all security personnel to the cargo bay, we see that six security guards, in addition to Chakotay and Tuvok, form the rescue team. There are only six security guards on Voyager?
-If the Briori brought the 300 humans, or the 37s, to their planet as slaves, why were some put into suspended animation? Did the Briori return and say, "Oops, we overestimated! We don’t have enough work for all 300. Okay, just take some of them and freeze them for later."
-As Janeway and her away team escort Earhart and the others out of the cave, the human slave-descendants ambush them, and Fred Noonan takes a shot in the chest. Doc later says in sickbay that he has severe trauma to his thoracic cavity, and there is a visible wound on the left side of his chest. This is consistent. But he also says that he has lacerations to his carotid artery. How did Noonan injure his carotid artery? The carotid artery is located on the side of the neck, running from behind the ear down to the collar. He wasn’t hit anywhere near this.
-After Doc heals Fred Noonan, he says that he’ll fine, except for a hangover. There aren’t hangover remedies in the 24th century? We have them today! What happened to the antiintoxicants Bashir gave the commando team in Apocalypse Rising.
-When Earhart sits at the helm, she asks Paris how fast Voyager goes, and Paris says warp 9.9, or in her terms (he uses miles), about 4 billion miles a second. First of all, Stadi said in Caretaker that Voyager’s top speed in warp 9.975.
-Second, the warp calibration chart in The Star Trek Encyclopedia gives warp 9.9 as 3.27 trillion kilometers per hour. 3.27 trillion kilometers is 2.027 trillion miles. 2.027 trillion miles divided by 3600 seconds in an hour = 563 million miles. So warp 9.9 is 563 million miles a second, not 4 billion miles a second. Personally, I think Paris was just bragging a bit to Earhart.

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By Jwb52z on Wednesday, May 16, 2001 - 1:44 pm:

::How does she know he’s not Deltan, Betazoid, Iotian, Edo, El Aurian, Sikaran, Yaderan, etc.? All those races (plus a bunch more I haven’t mentioned) look identical to humans.:: Luigi Novi

Not quite, Luigi. Deltans are bald and have no body hair except for eyebrows and eyelashes.

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By Anonymous on Thursday, March 14, 2002 - 5:03 am:

Nit 1 - The Truck in space,
The fuel survived? - how - most tanks have vents, and the fuel would have vented into space... - if it froze, the fuel would split the tank
Nit 2 - The Truck in space,
The Battery, if frozen, would split and destroy it, if warm enough to be liquid, and it's vents were sealed, the age of the battery, means it would be dead, self discharge would have killed it.
Nit 3 - Guess what - The Truck....
The radio, in the 30's car radios were very expensive, about the same cost as the truck ?, and also they were valve based - so once switched on take about 30-60 seconds to work,
Nit 4 - The Airplane
The transmitter was powered from a alien device, ok, but the radio was the original one, which from the 30's was valve based, valves in the 30's were not very well sealed, and air would get into them, you were very lucky if a valve from the 30's lasted more than 10 years,....

There are other problems with the 'From the 30's', but this ruined the episode...

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By ScottN on Thursday, March 14, 2002 - 9:27 am:

Anti-nit on number 4. It was in space. There was no air to get into the tubes. In fact, it should have improved the tubes' performance, as any residual air inside the tubes would have leaked out!

BTW, Anonymous, you're obviously British .

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By Anonymous on Sunday, June 08, 2003 - 10:09 pm:

The Japanese officer says there are many Japanese here, and that he could be very happy here.

What is the likelyhood that someone who has lived through years of Japanese pride and honor, and who I would think would have grown up with some type of Japanese supremecy idealogy (He was in the Military) be able to adopt the tolerent and equality idealogy of the 24th century? (or todays)

There wasn't any hidden motive when he said he would be happy here, was there?

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By John A. Lang on Saturday, May 22, 2004 - 9:01 pm:

Near the end, Janeway says, "I'd like to see your cities". I'm assuming she went and saw them...however, I feel cheated that WE didn't!

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By John-Boy on Sunday, August 28, 2005 - 8:04 am:

This episode first aired on The United Paramount Network 10 years ago today!

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By LUIGI NOVI on Sunday, August 28, 2005 - 2:38 pm:

And tomorrow will be the tenth anniversary when the reviews starting coming out hailing it as the worst episode of Trek ever (at least until later in the series' run).

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By Mr Crusher on Friday, September 01, 2006 - 2:05 pm:

11 years and 4 days ago.

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By Torque, Son of Keplar on Friday, September 01, 2006 - 8:45 pm:

Darn you mr crusher, now we have to wait another year before posting anything... however, I do wonder why this ep was called the 37's and not something like the 47's...

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By the 47s tm on Friday, September 01, 2006 - 10:35 pm:

Torq-polls, I wondered the same thing

"The nitrogen is in the soil, not the air." Jwb52z

I'm pretty sure it would have to be in both to operate how TJ claims. People can survive in an oxygen/argon atmosphere, but I don't think they can without at least eating something with nitrogen in it.

Did planes run on gas in the 30s? I ask because Amelia said her plane ran out of "gas" when I'm pretty sure she should've said fuel.

Janeway evidently can't count because she asks how many cyrogenic chambers there were and we can clearly see four on each side.

When Paris started up the truck, Tuvok pulls out his phaser and looks around the cargobay like the engine noises were coming from somewhere else. Sure the sound would've echoed but Tuvok heard the truck starting up.

inblackestnight: I'm pretty sure it would have to be in both to operate how TJ claims. People can survive in an oxygen/argon atmosphere, but I don't think they can without at least eating something with nitrogen in it.

DescentJS: But logically they would have to eat something in order to survive.

inblackestnight: Did planes run on gas in the 30s? I ask because Amelia said her plane ran out of "gas" when I'm pretty sure she should've said fuel.

DescentJS: It's an expression. It doesn't matter what fuel the vehicle uses. We even say that people run out of gas once they are exhausted.

I also just realized something else. If you have a 20th century earth truck in space, and a 20th century earth plane on the surface of a planet. Isn't it logical to make the assumption that people who look human are indeed human.

DescentJS: But logically they would have to eat something in order to survive.
I didn't imply otherwise.

DescentJS: It's an expression. It doesn't matter what fuel the vehicle uses.
It does matter to pilots and people whole work on planes. You call jet/plane fuel 'gas' in front of a pilot there's a good chance they will correct you. And you put gas in plane not made for it there will be problems. I just don't see Amelia saying gas if it actually is fuel.

inblackestnight, Amelia should be saying gas. Jet fuel is, I'm given to understand, primarily kerosene with additives to help it work properly in high altitude situations.
Amelia's plane had spark fired radial engines. It would use gasoline. Todays aircraft grade gas also has additives for altitude issues, but is still primarily gasoline. Hot rodders with high compression engines used to buy aviation gas because it had a higher octane rating than gas for road vehicles.

me: It does matter to pilots and people whole work on planes.
That should be who work on planes.

Ok, so jet fuel is different than gasoline, and swapping them out is still not recommended. I didn't know which Amelia's plane used, but had it been fuel it would be a nit saying gas. Also, I doubt people who put jet fuel in their cars worry about engine failure causing them to loose altitude.

Aviation fuel comes in various ratings, the lower ratings are more or less identical in octane rating to gasoline used in cars. It is, therefore, perfectly possible to run some types of aircraft engine on none-aviation gasoline. (This does sometimes require some minor work on the engine and fuel system, but nothing that seems to require significant alteration or specialist equipment).

However, this is for modern fuels. In the early days of aviation the gasoline used in aircraft was identical to what was used in cars. This was desirable since flying was primarily a hobby for the well off, who were known for using any large flat area as a landing field. As such early aircraft needed to be able to use any gasoline available, and it was easier to find car fuel than 'aviation' fuels.

1) In a post above, it is stated that the episode explains the presence of the truck in space: "the descendants of the captured Earth people put it in space as a kind of warning beacon/homage to the 37's".

Unless there is dialogue missing from the episode on Netflix streaming, I don't think that is true. I just watched it and did not see any explanation for the truck being where it was.

2) Apparently the truck is light-years from the 37s planet, either in interstellar space or in a different star system: After they pick up the SOS on the truck's radio, Kim says the signal is coming from "a planet in a star system bearing 310 mark 215".

If the truck was launched into space by the abducted humans' descendents, why would they have put it so far way?

3) I doubt the plane's SOS radio signal would be strong enough to be picked up by a car radio across interstellar distances.

4) After Kim detects the rust trail leading to the truck, Janeway tells him to follow it at 1/4th impulse, or 12.5% of light speed. Assuming she wants to reach the tail end of the trail in no more than an hour, that would mean the trail was detected from at most about 125 million kilometers away.

In an area the size of the Delta Quadrant (2 trillion cubic light-years, with 8 x 10^38 cubic km per cubic light year) the odds that Voyager would randomly pass within 125 million km of the truck's rust trail are too tiny to contemplate.

It is possible that Voyager found the rust trail within a star system, while investigating something else in that system. But even so, traveling for about 50,000 light-years across the quadrant, Voyager would pass within days' travel time of only hundreds of thousands of stars, out of 50-100 billion stars in the quadrant. Therefore, the odds that they would pass close enough to the system containing the truck, that they might decide to investigate that system for some reason, would likely still be millions to one.

5) Note that this is but one of multiple Voyager episodes involving incredibly unlikely encounters with beings or artifacts from Earth (as well as Ferengi and Klingons), who are in the vicinity of Voyager's path through the Delta Quadrant by pure chance (including "Tatoo", "False Profits", "Distant Origin", "One Small Step", "Prophecy", and "Friendship One".

There was definitely no explanation for the truck.

Distant Origin was slightly less unbelievable, because in that case, the Voth were looking for Voyager, and not the other way around, they were shown investigating witnesses to Voyager (which had to take some amount of time), and they have transwarp technology. So it was slightly more plausible.

More...

1) Why did the Briori not simply beam their human abductees out of their vehicles and directly onto the Briori ship? If they lacked the transporter technology to do so, why did they take the farmer's truck and Earheart's airplane with them, all the way to the Delta Quadrant, instead of just dumping them out of the airlock as soon as the abductees were aboard? Did they want to keep some primitive Earth machines as souvenirs?

2) Why did the Briori not take the guns away from the Japanese soldier and Noonan before putting them in cryo sleep?

3) I'm not sure that 300 humans would be a large enough genetic pool to survive for 20 generations, given the problems with inbreeding.

4) What was Voyager doing when they detected the rust trail from the truck?

At that point, for some reason they must have been traveling on impulse drive, or at very low warp speed. As I noted above, since Janeway told Paris to head for the rust trail at only 1/4th impulse, the rust must have been at most only tens of millions of km away. If Voyager had been traveling at its normal cruising speed (Warp 6 or better?) when Kim detected the rust, in the 30 seconds it took for him to notify Janeway and for her to issue her order to Paris, they would already have covered more than a billion km. At 1/4th impulse a journey of that distance back to the detection point would have taken more than 10 hours.

1. They were looking to complete their Matchbox Lifesize Collection, before realizing they already had two rusty pickup trucks with horse manure.

2. They received too many complaints from the NRA.

3. Little-known detail that was cut from the original script: The average "human" on that planet has three arms, eyes that are not quite aligned, and produces about a pint of drool a day.

4. Reporting to Paramount. When they detected rust, they thought their sensors were picking up Berman & Braga's control of the franchise.

This episode uses one the rumours concerning Amelia Earhart, that she was used by the U.S. Government to spy on the Japanese.

Interestingly enough, a Japanese soldier is among the humans taken by the Briori, along with Earhart and Noonan.

I wonder if Amelia and Fred got together in the end. Both their spouses are long dead, so there is no adultery here.