Slow-moving. One-third in and there’s still not much going on, except for the fact that everyone seems to be having (or planning to have) a relationship with everyone else.
The dialogues between T’Ryssa Chen, Taurik and Konya were cringe-worthy in print. I can’t imagine how they translate to the screen.
And oh yeah, that time travel thing. You will need a suspension of disbelief to accept that a vessel traveled back in time, drifted for centuries, and (AND) the ship’s on-board computers still functioned like a charm, even though the ship suffered battle damage prior to making the jump through time.
The way the story of Armageddon’s Arrow is written by Dayton Ward, some of the Starfleet characters seemed too childish (in manner of speech and action) and sentimental to be assigned on an exploratory mission. This Utopian mindset is puzzling, given that the Federation just emerged from the Borg invasion.
For instance, Lieutenant Elfiki made a complete mess of her interaction with Sasel Pitrotha after their capture by the Raqilan military.
“We weren’t spying,” Elfiki snapped, then cleared her throat as Worf cast a warning glance in her direction. “It was not our intention to spy. Our scans detected the presence of life on this moon, and we came to investigate.” Though she was telling the truth in the strictest sense, Worf knew that her statement, delivered in defense of Pitrotha’s accusation, left several openings for someone keen enough to recognize and exploit them.
Pitrotha appeared to be such a person.
“Investigating signs of life?” he asked. “And when your scanners revealed to you the presence of such life on our moon, what did you do? Did you make any attempt at communication, in keeping with your mandate to form ‘peaceful relations’ with the ‘advanced civilizations’ you find during your ‘investigation’ of other people’s soverign territory?” He smiled, but it was not a pleasant expression. “No, of course you did not. Instead, you chose to turn and flee at the first sign of detection. These are not the actions of friends, or those who wish to be friends.”
Later…
Lieutenant Elfiki, however, could not resist one small ploy.
“You might want to tell your technicians that I armed the shuttle’s self-destruct mechanism prior to your taking us into custody. It’d be a damned shame if one of them accidentally triggered it.”
When Pitrotha laughed, it echoed off the room’s smooth metal bulkheads. “I admire your poise, outsider, though I suspect you are being less than truthful with me. Rest assured that my people are quite good at what they do, and I have every confidence that they will detect and disable any triggers or traps you may have left for them.”
In the end, most of the characters come across as one-dimensional and predictable, at times even so incompetent that they have to be saved by transporter beams and a plot twist that surprises nobody.
