Star Trek: 10 Disastrous USS Voyager First Contacts

Gedrin's morbid regret that his wife "didn't show more courage at the end" tells you a great deal about the Vaadwaur. Captain Janeway's reply was valid, but Voyager was going to need more than an umbrella to get through the plasma bombs.

We love the now (still catchphrase-less) Captain of the Enterprise-G, but this disastrous first contact was really Seven of Nine's fault. She freed Gedrin from stasis first without asking, albeit out of compassion for the species. Janeway should probably have read a few more Talaxian folktales before waking the rest of the Vaadwaur up too. 'Demons with a golden voice,' the Vaadwaur were a particularly bellicose bunch before their imposed 900-ish-year hibernation, often using their vast network of subspace corridors to conquer other worlds.

The episode Dragon's Teeth ends on an ominous note: 53 Vaadwaur ships ("ion signatures") escape into the subspace corridors, and Janeway warns Seven of the potentially catastrophic consequences of her actions. The conclusion seems to set up the Vaadwaur's recurring return, which never materialised. One of their ships did appear briefly in the episode The Void, and they got an off-hand mention in Friendship One, but we may never really know what kind of chaos the Vaadwaur caused!