Warhead (Star Trek: Voyager)

The 118th episode of *Star Trek: Voyager*, "Warhead" is the 25th installment of the fifth season and originally aired on UPN on May 19, 1999. In the 24th century, the starship USS Voyager comes across a sentient alien bomb.

An away team discovers a crashed, damaged small spacecraft on an uninhabited planet. The Doctor advocates for rescuing its fully sentient programming, which appears to be in distress, and returning it to its creators. The artificial intelligence has corrupted memory and cannot recall its purpose, but the crew soon learns it is a weapon of mass destruction. Following the Doctor’s request, Captain Janeway keeps the missile on board but orders B’Elanna Torres and Harry Kim to disarm it before it regains its memory.

During the disarming process, the warhead’s intelligence seizes control of the Doctor’s holomatrix, trapping Kim and Torres in sickbay. Threatening to detonate, it demands that Janeway take it to its target. While the crew searches for a way to disable it, Kim attempts to reason with the bomb, but it refuses to listen, insisting it must reach its target and threatening to destroy the ship if not obeyed.

The crew reconstructs the warhead’s damaged memory and discovers its creators, the Druoda, had ended hostilities with their enemy and issued recall orders to their fleet of sentient warheads. Most complied, but 32 warheads malfunctioned and never received the order. This warhead is one of them, forcibly crash-landed by the Druoda via remote to prevent detonation. The warhead believes the recall order was faked by the enemy.

Kim argues that the recall orders are protected by a nearly unbreakable code. Eventually, the warhead is convinced that hostilities are over. However, 31 other warheads have also malfunctioned and already located Voyager, ignoring the Druoda’s stand-down order. The warhead realizes what it must do. It is downloaded back into its body (freeing the Doctor) and returned to its companions, where it detonates, destroying itself and the other smart bombs.

The episode was released on LaserDisc in Japan on June 22, 2001, as part of *5th Season vol.2*, with English and Japanese audio tracks. This was the last season released on LaserDisc, and the set contained six double-sided 12-inch optical discs with a total runtime of 552 minutes. It was also released on VHS paired with "Equinox, Part I".