“Deadlock”
Written by Brannon Braga
Directed by David Livingston
Season 2, Episode 21
Production episode 137
Original air date: March 18, 1996
Stardate: 49548.7
Captain’s log. While helping Neelix with some repairs in the mess hall, Wildman goes into labor. (Why a xenobiologist is fixing tech in the mess hall is left as an exercise for the viewer.) The labor goes on for quite some time. While the crew on the bridge waits expectantly, they discover a Vidiian ship nearby. Not in any great rush to have their organs harvested, they go around the Vidiians through a plasma drift.
The birth is complicated by the infant’s cranial ridges being caught on Wildman’s uterine wall. The EMH has to beam the baby out, and then puts it in an incubator, as the transport has caused some minor complications.
Voyager hits what seems to be subspace turbulence, which shuts down all propulsion systems. Torres reports that antimatter is draining, despite all containment units being intact. The ship is losing power, which results in the Wildman infant dying in the de-powered incubator. Janeway recommend proton bursts to stop the drain, but before Torres and Hogan can start the process, Voyager is hit with proton bursts that do considerable damage. Casualties pour into sickbay, and the EMH almost goes offline as well.
Kim goes to fix a hull breach on deck fifteen with a portable force field generator he’s been working on, as the automatic force fields aren’t going up. Tuvok can’t trace the source of the proton bursts, but they’re continuing and doing tremendous damage.
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Chakotay takes over ops and tries magnetizing the hull to slow down the damage from the bursts, which works up to a point.
Torres, Hogan, and Kim work to seal the hull breach, but a conduit explodes and injures Hogan. Kes is summoned to treat him, while Kim and Torres work on the breach. But the damage worsens from another burst, and Kim is blown out into space and killed. As she’s approaching Hogan, Kes disappears through a spatial rift. Torres tosses a busted conduit part through the rift also, and scans it: there’s air on the other side of the rift, at the very least, so Kes should be safe.
Janeway evacuates deck fifteen. Tuvok gives a bleak damage report, and then parts of the bridge catch fire—the fire suppression systems are offline, so Janeway evacuates the bridge, transferring control to engineering.
She’s the last one off the bridge, and just before she departs, she sees ghost images of herself, Chakotay, and the rest of the bridge crew, including Kim.
We then see a completely intact bridge, with the crew alive and well, and Janeway #2 seeing a ghost image of herself abandoning the bridge.
Kim #2 scans the bridge, and there was a spatial disruption, but it only lasted a second. Sickbay also reports that they found a duplicate Kes on deck fifteen, unconscious.
In sickbay, Wildman #2 is holding her very-much-alive daughter, while Kes #2 is shocked to see that, aside from a minor phase-shift, Kes #1 is the same as her.
When Kes #1 awakens, she reports what happened. Janeway #2 shows her the conduit that Torres threw through the rift, which is from Voyager, but that part is intact in the hull of deck fifteen.
They soon figure it out: Voyager has been duplicated. The subspace distortion they detected in the plasma drift may have been a subspace scission—a theory Janeway is familiar with from a Kent State experiment that tried to duplicate matter. Voyager #2 has been firing proton bursts to stave off their declining antimatter, but those bursts are affecting Voyager #1. Janeway #2 stops the bursts, but now they have to figure out how to communicate with Voyager #1.
Janeway #2 has one other tidbit from the experiments, which explains the problem: the theory didn’t work with antimatter, which couldn’t be duplicated. So both ships are trying to share the same amount of antimatter.
The two Voyagers make contact, and Janeway #1 is initially skeptical, but Janeway #2 knows too much to be a trick. Their first attempt to merge the ships fails, and makes matters worse—the antimatter leak has become a hemorrhage, and the comm link between ships is down. Janeway #2 goes with Kes #1 through the spatial rift and coordinates repair notions with Janeway #1. However, Janeway #1 insists that the only thing to do is destroy the beat-up Voyager #1 so that the mostly intact Voyager #2 can continue home.
Janeway #2 convinces Janeway #1 to give her fifteen minutes to think of a better solution. When she returns to her own ship, both Tuvoks report Vidiian ships approaching. Neither ship has weapons functioning, and the Vidiians are able to take out Voyager #2 (they can’t detect Voyager #1 for reasons that are never adequately explained). The Vidiians board Voyager #2 and start killing people indiscriminately, then scanning them for useful organs. The EMH manages to hide himself and the Wildman infant, but everyone else in sickbay is killed.
Janeway #2 sets the autodestruct, and sends Kim #2 and the Wildman infant through the spatial rift to Voyager #1. The autodestruct takes out both Voyager #2 and the Vidiians, while Voyager #1 is left completely intact (well, as intact as it was after all that damage), er, somehow.
Kim #2 is a bit freaked out by the whole thing, while Wildman is grateful to have her daughter alive and well again.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently, a subspace scission can totally duplicate a ship. This notion will never be mentioned ever again.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Both Janeways are determined to make sure that at least one of the two Voyagers makes it out alive, and both are willing to self-sacrifice to save the other.
She’s also the one who’s familiar with the scientific theory that they’ve put to unexpected practical use. I must admit to loving when they go the Janeway-as-science-nerd route…
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok shares that T’Pel’s labor with her and Tuvok’s third child lasted 96 hours, to the horror of the rest of the bridge crew.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. EMH #1 asks if EMH #2 ever picked a name. EMH #1 works his ass off to deal with casualties and try to save the Wildman baby, while EMH #2 manages to save the baby from the Vidiians.
Forever an ensign. Kim dies, but his duplicate is saved in the end. This is the second time Kim has died on screen, after “Emanations.” It’ll happen again in “Timeless.”
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix thinks absolutely nothing of asking the incredibly pregnant Wildman to fix stuff in his mess hall, even though she’s a xenobiologist and not an engineer. Because Wildman is a good person, she does it anyhow.
Do it.
“Mr. Kim, we’re Starfleet officers—weird is part of the job.”
–Janeway summing up Star Trek as a franchise.
Welcome aboard. The various Vidiians are played by Bob Clendenin, Ray Proscia, Keythe Farley, and Chris Johnston. We also have recurring regulars Nancy Hower as Wildman and Simon Billig as Hogan, as well as twins Samantha and Emily Leibovitch debuting the role of Naomi Wildman as an infant. The Wildmans will next be seen in “Basics, Part II” at the top of season three, while Hogan will next be in “Tuvix.”
Trivial matters: The Wildman baby is finally born, though we won’t learn her name until “Basics, Part II.”
The duplicates of Kim and the Wildman baby being from a Voyager that is slightly out-of-phase with everyone else on the ship is a plot point in the String Theory trilogy by Jeffrey Lang, Kirsten Beyer, and Heather Jarman, as the two of them are immune to the mental trickery performed by the Necene in those novels.
The body of Kim that was blown into space is found by the Kobali (who will be introduced in “Ashes to Ashes”) and altered into one of them in the Star Trek Online game.
The novel Echoes by Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, & Nina Kiriki Hoffman will postulate that the duplicate Voyager is actually from a parallel timeline.
Set a course for home. “How long does it take to deliver a baby?” The very beginning and very end of this episode annoy the crap out of me. First off, where the hell does Neelix get off asking Wildman for help fixing things when she’s about to pop her baby? The poor woman’s been pregnant for a very very long time—she conceived before Voyager went to the Badlands, “Cold Fire” was ten months after that, and there’ve been eleven episodes since then—so maybe don’t ask her to crouch down and do stuff for you because you’re too impatient to wait for your turn in the maintenance schedule? Also, in case I didn’t make it clear already, Wildman is a xenobiologist, which means she knows, basically, nothing about fixing tech. That’s an engineer’s job.
And then there’s the ending. Why are Kim #2 and baby Wildman #2 the only ones that Janeway #2 sends over? At this point, Voyager #1 has 146 people on board (they had 154 when they left the Ocampa homeworld, seven have died, and one left the ship after being exposed as a spy), and one of those 146 is confined to quarters for being a murderer. Wouldn’t it have made more sense for Janeway #2 to give a general order for anyone who doesn’t want to die (and hadn’t already been killed by the Vidiians) to head through the rift? Yes, it would mean those people would have a duplicate working alongside them, but Voyager needs bodies, plus why shouldn’t those duplicates have the option to live if they want? (I mean, if Will Riker can live with it…)
Having said all that, the episode in between those two bits is fantastic. Sure, the technobabble flies fast and furious, but it works, and actually makes sense within the already-established logic of Trek science. (Well, okay, most of it—not really sure why the Vidiians couldn’t detect Voyager #1, nor why that ship was left unaffected by Voyager #2 going boom.)
The tension in the first few acts is powerful, as Voyager is falling apart around everyone, and nobody has any idea why. We even get tragedy, and for all that we know that neither Kim nor the Wildman baby are going to stay dead, because it’s television, the stakes are still upped by those two characters dying.
And then there’s the brilliant transition as Janeway abandons the bridge, and we cut to another, intact Voyager. The sudden jump to another Voyager that’s in the middle of its own story is beautifully realized, as effective as similar transitions in one of Brannon Braga’s best scripts, “Parallels” on TNG.
The pacing is superb, with the action moving quickly and efficiently by the always-reliable David Livingston. (Apparently, his scenes were so quick and efficient that the episode ran short and they had to quickly write and shoot extra scenes so it would fit in the 42-minute timeframe.)
But, once again, we get no consequences. For the second episode in a row, Voyager suffers near-catastrophic damage, yet there will be no sign of it by the time the next episode starts. And no attempts are even made to make the restoration of the status quo subtle, as Janeway #2 just sends Kim #2 and the baby over because it’s “only fair,” which is so forced…
Still, it’s a fun, strong action episode with a fun and wacky science fiction premise that gives Kate Mulgrew a chance to act opposite herself to delightful effect.
Warp factor rating: 7
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be attending KAG Kon 2020: Home Invasion, an online event focusing on Klingon related stuff next weekend. Keith will be doing a reading, which will be available throughout the weekend, and also doing panel discussions on his Klingon fiction and Klingon religion. Here’s his schedule.
Too many nagging things kept me from really enjoying an otherwise intense episode. Just like the last episode, there are way too many plotholes, like the fact that the two ships share the same antimatter but #2 could still blow itself up somehow? Also, Keith, the reason why the duplicates were not sent over is explained in the episode. It would cause some kind of…er, matter imbalance or something. Which is conveniently forgotten when Janeway suggests sending over her security personnel to take care of the Vidiians (another plot hole).
Also, the duplicate Janeways talking side by side was badly done. Not only did it look like they were looking at something else, but they were weirdly close. Like I kept thinking they were about to kiss or something because their faces were that close. And then I didn’t like the ending, where Janeway pretty much just shrugs away the experience with a little joke to Kim, who is understandably freaked out by being a duplicate.
God this sounds confusing! I love the idea of surviving duplicates arriving on Voyager, but as we know status quo is God.
The review doesn’t mention it, but I’m assuming that Kes #1 made it back to Voyager #1?
@3 – Yes. Only Kim and the baby ended up on the other side. Janeway #2 made the decision to self-destruct, which kind of sucks for all of the crew she made that decision for…
Wouldn’t it have made more sense for Janeway #2 to give a general order for anyone who doesn’t want to die (and hadn’t already been killed by the Vidiians) to head through the rift?
This is somewhat, although inadequately, addressed:
JANEWAY: Let’s try a different tact. Instead of trying to merge the two ships, let’s try to separate them. Maybe we could divide the antimatter between us.
JANEWAY 2: I’m afraid not. We’ve been studying that theory. B’Elanna tells me that any attempt to disrupt the antimatter supply will destroy us all. What about evacuating your crew to my ship? It might get a little crowded, but we could manage.
JANEWAY: We’ve been studying that theory. And my B’Elanna tells me that sending any more than five to ten people through the rift would radically alter the atomic balance of the two Voyagers. We’d both be destroyed.
That being said, there’s no reason to cap the headcount at 2, and if atomic balance is supposed to be a mass concept then presumably the baby barely counts. Very quickly figuring out the fiveish most valuable crew members and sending the copies would have made more sense. A bit awkward to make the rankings public like that, but hey, that’s why she’s the captain.
@1: I find it hard watching any older show handling an actor acting against themself. Orphan Black set that bar incredibly high and I find it harder to go back to another show without the seams being incredibly visible.
@6 Q talking to Q looked pretty dated, too.
This is an imaginative episode, but it frustrates me that everyone assumes the other Voyager came from an alternate timeline, that Kim and Wildman were somehow not the “real” ones. The whole point of the premise was that both duplicates came into being at the exact same moment from the same single original, so neither one was any less real than the other and there was no way to choose between them. Hell, even the Doctor made that mistake within the story, asking his double if he’d chosen a name even though they’d been the same single individual until just an hour or two before.
(That said, the novel Echoes actually does a decent job rationalizing its retcon that it was “actually” from a parallel timeline. Although it took me two or three reads to get over my pet peeve about people making that mistake and come to appreciate the novel’s reasons for making that change.)
“(Why a xenobiologist is fixing tech in the mess hall is left as an exercise for the viewer.)”
Why wouldn’t she? I would imagine that cross-training is a routine practice in military life, since you never know who might be needed to help in an emergency. I expect that you can’t graduate Starfleet Academy without being rated in the basic operation of every ship system, which is how Uhura could fill in at navigation, for example. And Voyager in particular would have an even greater need for personnel to double up on specialties, since so many of its assigned personnel were killed. We’ve seen that with Tom doubling as a medic and Kim frequently helping out in engineering.
It would have been interesting to do a follow-up to this episode where Naomi Wildman finds out what happened, freaks out that her mother isn’t really her mother, and runs to Harry Kim as the only other person from her Voyager.
Keith, if you actually plan on watching all of VGR, get used to the “reset button.” Noting it every time will only become tedious and repetitious for you. The reset button became practically a dictum from Berman and Braga.
@8
“(Why a xenobiologist is fixing tech in the mess hall is left as an exercise for the viewer.)”
Further to CLB’s point on cross-training, why wouldn’t a xenobiologist work closely with the ship’s cook? She’d certainly be the most qualified to interpret nutritional issues with Neelix, so may very well be the crewmember on hand who just happened to know how to perform this minor repair.
@9/Theodore: Of course Samantha is really her mother. As I said, this wasn’t an alternate timeline. Both duplicates were created from the same original at the same instant and only existed separately from one another for an hour or two, starting just around the time the baby was born.
@10/SethC: I wish people wouldn’t keep talking about “Berman and Braga” like they were joined at the hip. It was only on Enterprise that the two of them were more or less equal partners as a writing/producing team. On VGR, Braga worked for Berman as showrunner on seasons 5-6, just as Jeri Taylor had before him and Ken Biller would after him. And at this point, in season 2, Braga was only a supervising producer, working underneath Taylor, who answered to Michael Piller and Berman.
@12:
I think part of why the Berman-Braga stigma endures is because by the time Enterprise premiered, they were the last of the old TNG-era guard still in place. Moore, Piller, Behr, and everyone else had either exited the franchise with VOY or were long gone by the time it wrapped.
So Berman and Braga were left as the public faces of the franchise and when things imploded, they got holding the bag and got tarred and feathered as the whipping boys during the long, bitter decade between ENT and DSC.
And the rub is that, yes, Berman (from the horror stories I’ve heard) was a piece of work. But everybody forgets that he ultimately answered to the UPN and Paramount suits and he had to accede to their dictates and orders. He bears his share of culpability for the franchise’s 2000s creative decline, but he’s not solely responsible.
There’s a line at the end of this that bugs me, and I think it was a holdover from an earlier version of the script or something:
KIM: You’re welcome. But you should also thank the Doctor. It was his counterpart who saved her from the Vidiians.
EMH: I’m not surprised. I am programmed to be heroic when the need arises. By the way, Ensign, this other Doctor, did he have a name?
KIM: I really didn’t have time to ask.
Wait, what? This Kim came from the other ship. Up until about ten minutes ago, the “other” Doctor was his Doctor. So of course this is information the refugee version of Harry would have. And the answer is presumably no, because this is a Ship of Theseus situation– as Christopher correctly points out, they’re both the original, or at least from the same original. I’m guessing this exchange made sense in an earlier version and nobody caught it when the script changed, or something. Or I’m just *really* confused.
@13/Mr. Magic: Yeah, people having short memories and forgetting that Braga was just an intern and story editor in later seasons of TNG, and never had anything at all to do with DS9 or the last two TNG movies.
Although honestly I think a lot of it is just alliteration.
At the time, though, a lot of people blamed Braga more than Berman for the weaknesses of later VGR and ENT. But if you look at Braga’s overall career post-Trek — Threshold, 24, Terra Nova, Cosmos, Salem, The Orville — the only thing they have in common is that they’re either someone else’s creation that he was brought in to run, or something he co-created with someone else. He’s always been a collaborator more than an auteur, and I’ve heard it said that his real weakness as showrunner on VGR and ENT was that he wasn’t as effective at standing up to Berman as Piller, Taylor, and especially Behr were.
@14 – He said it with a wry smile because there was a life and death situation going on.
Keeping duplicates of regular characters around is rare on TV. I think the only example is Farscape. I’ve just been watching Doctor Who, and Moffat duplicates a regular and conveniently kills them off at the end of the episode twice in a single season. I guess Voyager could have kept duplicates of some of the minor characters.
Christopher: I’d be more willing to accept the mutlidiscipline possiblity for Widlman but for the fact that Star Trek in general and Brannon Braga scripts in particular tend to not understand that “science” isn’t a monolithic thing and that different people have different specialties. This was at its worst on the original series, of course, with Spock doing all the science regardless of whether or not it made sense, but even Discovery is sometimes guilty of it with Saru and Tilly.
And even if I do accept that, it doesn’t address that Neelix is basically hounding a woman who has been pregnant for the better part of a year (if not more) and who is about to give birth for repairs that a) involve a lot of squatting and such and b) isn’t actually her job, even if she does know how to do it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’d say Neelix did Wildman a favor. I mean, a year pregnant?! Any longer and that kid was going to have to start paying rent.
@18/krad: Except what Neelix is asking Wildman to do isn’t even science, it’s engineering. Maybe Wildman did a rotation in engineering before moving into sciences, like how Sulu went from astrophysics to flight control, Riley from engineering to navigation, Chekov from science to navigation to security, La Forge from flight control to engineering, Worf from command track to security and then back to command, Janeway from science to command track, etc. Really, a lot of Trek characters have changed disciplines, so there’s no reason Wildman couldn’t have.
As for your other point, I recall hypothesizing that the reason Starfleet chief science officers seem so all-knowing is that when they work their science consoles, they’re actually receiving reports from all the junior science officers down below, the various different specialists who are doing the actual grunt work of figuring out the problem and then passing their results up to the bridge. So the science officer is really the coordinator for the entire science department, rather than someone doing it all singlehandedly while the hundreds of scientists supposedly on board the ship just sit around playing cat’s cradle all day. That’s probably even more the case with someone like Harry Kim, who’s actually the operations officer but tends to act as a de facto science officer (although that also describes Data).
I just keep wondering how everyone survived going from the intact deck 15 on V2 to the hull breached/abandoned deck 15 on V1…
I like that this one at least somewhat acknowledges that there is the potential for things to go really, really sideways during this voyage. Honestly, I think it would stand up better if more of the rest of the episodes were like “Year of Hell” or “Equinox,” because in hindsight it suffers from the “hit the reset button” problem that plagued Voyager throughout it’s run, but if the whole series had been a little more willing to lean into it’s premise there is so much potential.
I looooove this episode so much so that I forgive its faults and would give it a 9. I think it’s one of the best episodes of Voyager and a shining example of one of Braga’s high-concept stories that are executed damn well, as opposed to say, Threshold.
My favorite part, and which I still remember vividly to this day the first time I experienced it and still still delights me to this day, is the clever twist/misdirection towards the end of the episode: you think it’s the battered and beat-to-shit that is going to be attacked by the Vidiians because they just seemed to draw the shorter stick of the two Voyagers and is destined to be destroyed or everyone killed. But no, it’s the relatively well-off Voyager that doesn’t make it! So I really did love the surprise. I also thought it was very thoughtful of Janeway #2 to send Kim #2 and Wildman baby #2 to Voyager #1 because “it only seems fair” even though I suppose she could have send over a few more people. But then, how do you choose who and in such limited time. The sense of despair in this episode was palpable. Tuvok and his team as usual suck at security when dealing with the boarding Vidiians.
One of my bigger complaints about this episode is that a stronger score would have truly made it epic. It’s just more of that unfortunate wallpaper sound unfortunately. Where’s Ron Jones when you need him?
Kim #2 remarking at the end about how this isn’t his Voyager reminded me of a similar scene the DS9 episode “Visionary” when a time-jumping O’Brien jumps to and remains in a few hours displaced timeline where the native O’Brien had already died and the surviving O’Brien remarks that he’s not in the proper timeline or something.
Regarding the baby incubator, you’d think those things could have their own source of power like maybe batteries in case the ship itself loses power?
I also agree that Wildman, as a Starfleet Academy graduate, is probably cross-trained in different fields so that she would still have a rudiments understanding of engineering. But yes, I also agree that it was completely inappropriate that Neelix would hound her about it and it just further assassinates the former’s character.
Count me as surprised that the episode ran short on time originally because I don’t see anything that seems like filler except maybe that same opening scene of Neelix harassing Wildman. Perhaps originally Wildman’s scenes began already in sickbay.
Oh, and another thing I didn’t like, which has nothing to do with the episode itself, but by the following episode the Voyager is back to being brand spanking new! It’s pretty ridiculous and yes, I know it happened often on this series but it’s also why I felt there was so much missed opportunity here in terms of serialization and of making the show more realistic where the ship should be falling apart week to week and more of a sense of despair.
@9/TJM: Lol!
@12/CLB: I suspect @9 was joking.
@7: Agreed. I don’t think that effect was very convincing.
@6: I agree that it did seem a bit off. However, you can go all the way back to TNG in ‘87 or ‘88 for the episode Datalore where you have Brent Spiner talking to himself in split-screen as both Data and Lore and it looks completely realistic and seamless! So it’s actually pretty shocking that years after that the same type of effect couldn’t be pulled off nearly as well.
@21 – Yes! I should have taken notes because that was the most egregious plot hole. They diverted all life support to Engineering but let’s walk around and talk in this other deck…
@22: Totally agree with you as I remarked myself but I think the creative forces in charge of the series and the network, UPN, wouldn’t ever allow this to happen, so damage as we see it here and Year of Hell are basically one-off or reset button events.
@13: Yes, Berman was a piece of work but for all that he did wrong, he still did a lot right and kept at least TNG formula going strong for that series so that it kept to the dictates of what Roddenberry wanted while still improving in quality over those first couple of rocky seasons. Also, for as bad as ENT was, it could have been worse, since UPN was really trying to meddle in the series and wanted a current pop artist of the week to perform on the series and Berman/Braga rejected that notion.
@21: Good catch!
@25,
Yeah, that’s true. Braga and Berman have both acknowledge the post-VOY tensions with UPN and the fears of going back to the well again:
Braga: “Star Trek was wearing out its welcome. Rick Berman didn’t want to make a show so soon but Paramount did. I think it was too soon for another show. It was a quality show, but the ratings weren’t really what they should be. And I don’t think the network – the new regime [at UPN] – I don’t think they treated the show with the tender loving care that it needed to thrive.”
Berman: “Our relationship with the network was distant. And it wasn’t embracing and warm and…a sense of working together that had existed in all the years before.
With VOY and ENT, it really does sound like a self-fulfilling prophecy: UPN was desperate to bring in TNG-level ratings, which is understandable given they were a fledgling network, but their meddling instead decimated the ratings and killed the golden space goose.
@15,
CLB, I also wonder how much of the enduring stigma is partly coming from the TOS segment of the audience and how the show (at least prior to Manny Coto’s tenure in the final Season) under B and B’s custodianship was playing fast and loose with classic continuity.
I’m specifically reminded of an observation Ronald D. Moore made after leaving the franchise when the rumors of a post-VOY prequel series first started surfacing:
“The STAR TREK past, it’s challenging; it sounds like it’s fun on one level, and I thought that was an interesting way to go for a long time. But it has a lot of pitfalls to it. You have a very complex future mapped out. If you are going to go into STAR TREK’s past, say, pre-Kirk, you better have an iron-clad commitment to maintaining the continuity that’s been established, or I think you are just going to lose everybody. Because if you go back before Kirk, and you start screwing around, and you just don’t care what NEXT GEN or DS9 or VOYAGER established, or the movies, or even the original series, you just try to make it up as you go along, I think you just lost everyone. The whole franchise will just collapse, because it will have no validity whatsoever. If you are going to go there, you really better be prepared to truly put on the STAR TREK mantle and be the keeper of the flame.”
“I think that is really hard for Rick and Brannon. It’s hard for them to do that, because they don’t like the original show. Let’s not mince words. They don’t like the original show. They have never liked the original show. They’ll bob and weave a bit here and there in public. But they don’t like it; they don’t want to have anything to do with it. If you are going to go before the original series and do something, you better have a change of attitude. You better have an epiphany about how much you love the original series. It’s all going to be about leading up to that.”
Does this mean that Kim will be permanently referred to as Kim 2 for the rest of this rewatch? One can dream. This reminds me of DS9’s Visionary, where we ended up getting a slightly older O’Brien for the rest of the show’s run, since the original one perished. Not much of a change in the status quo, but still a change nonetheless.
Deadlock is a chilling, tense and effective high concept of an episode. That opening teaser and first act are amongst the best Voyager’s done in terms of direction. Some of Livingston’s best Trek work at that point. And for this episode we get motivated Brannon Braga rather than Threshold Braga. Tightly plotted, always in motion and it never fails to keep everyone on their toes. I certainly appreciated the twist ending that the battered Voyager ended up being the surviving one. I for one was expecting Voyager 2 to be the one coming out unscathed.
My only real complaint is the ending. Getting a Captain’s Log with the line “repairs are continuing” is a slap in the face. Voyager’s running on auxiliary power. Several hull breaches. Injured people across all decks.
This isn’t a criticism of the episode itself, but of the show refusing to acknowledge long term events. I can only imagine Braga’s frustration at writing that line. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Year of Hell came about because of this episode. He wouldn’t get to fulfill the promise of a storyline about a broken down lone starship with real consequences for another eight years. It’s not until we get to Azati Prime in the midst of the Xindi arc on Enterprise that we finally deal with the long term fallout of a starship suffering fatal damage, far away from home.
But any episode that has Kim being blown out to space is a highlight.
@23/GarretH: “My favorite part, and which I still remember vividly to this day the first time I experienced it and still still delights me to this day, is the clever twist/misdirection towards the end of the episode: you think it’s the battered and beat-to-shit that is going to be attacked by the Vidiians because they just seemed to draw the shorter stick of the two Voyagers and is destined to be destroyed or everyone killed. But no, it’s the relatively well-off Voyager that doesn’t make it! So I really did love the surprise.”
I was going to say the same thing, but I forgot by the time I wrote my replies. It was a bold choice to sacrifice the one we thought was more “entitled” to survive and leave the more damaged one intact. Sure, the lack of consequences after this is too bad, but that doesn’t hurt this one as a self-contained story, any more than the lack of Kirk’s continued grieving about Edith Keeler hurts “The City on the Edge of Forever.”
@28/Mr. Magc: “CLB, I also wonder how much of the enduring stigma is partly coming from the TOS segment of the audience and how the show (at least prior to Manny Coto’s tenure in the final Season) under B and B’s custodianship was playing fast and loose with classic continuity.”
That’s not true at all. I heard a ton of “It’s violating cannnnnnon!!!” complaints back in the day, but if you really paid attention, it wasn’t contradicting anything that had actually been stated onscreen (except for NCC-1701 being the first Enterprise), just things that fandom had assumed were true but had never officially been established (like the bizarre myth that Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet, a notion whose origin is a mystery to me and is pretty easily disproven by the existence of the Intrepid in “The Immunity Syndrome”). They were really quite careful to thread the needle, to bend and expand established continuity without actually breaking it.
And really, speaking as someone who was a history major during ENT’s first season, I’ll tell you what I told people at the time: it would have been far more unrealistic and creatively lazy if the actual history of the 22nd century had not differed from our expectations of it based on what we saw in the 23rd and 24th centuries. History is not that simplistic. The way later generations tell the story of the past is always simplified, misremembered, reinterpreted to fit later agendas and assumptions, and so forth. So the fact that ENT’s 22nd century differed from our expectations was not a weakness, but one of its greatest strengths.
Watching this in first run, the “death” of Harry Kim actually worked very well. After all, it wasn’t that many years before that Denise Crosby taught us that just because they were in the credits, it didn’t mean they wouldn’t leave the show mid-season.
Of course, today that would never work. We would know weeks or months in advance that the actor was leaving the show.
@31 Cloric And in the event that the showrunners manage to keep a departure secret, you can’t read anything about the show online, because sleuthing fans will happily unveil spoilers laterally– by saying that “(ACTOR NAME) vanished from the behind the scenes photos on instagram starting in episode 17, so they must die or depart in episode 16,” something that has happened numerous times in the Arrowverse. Netflix shows that drop the entire season in one go still have a shot.
@31/Cloric: “Of course, today that would never work. We would know weeks or months in advance that the actor was leaving the show.”
I dunno, we didn’t hear about Ruby Rose leaving Batwoman until after the (de facto) finale aired. And I think there was a recent case where a show killed off a character and it came as a total surprise, though I’m blanking on which show it was. Although on second thought, I remember now that whatever it was, I was taken totally by surprise but others told me they’d heard rumors it was coming. (What was that?)
I like this episode. I like it a lot. But I’m never entirely sure it makes sense. So some McGuffin creates two Voyagers, slightly out of phase with each other and sharing the same anti-matter source. And when one ship starts proton bursts, they take place on the other Voyager too and damage it. But…then one Voyager blows up without damaging the other one. And the Vidiians fire on one Voyager, suggesting that’s the one in phase with the rest of the universe, but the other one is able to fly off without any difficulty?
With two Voyagers, the temptation is obviously going to be to trash one of them. This episode does it twice. We see Voyager being wrecked, and taking casualties, including the moment where, against all expectations, Kim, Torres and Hogan go into a dangerous area and it’s one of the characters on the main titles who dies. And then, with the ship on the verge of collapse, we get Janeway’s little existential moment on the bridge and cut to an undamaged ship, in a way that really does pull the rug out from under the audience.
So, it seems the stage is set for one Voyager to sacrifice itself for the other, but there’s a twist as it isn’t the one we might expect, as we get to see the Vidiians storm the other Voyager, killing and harvesting Tuvok, Paris, Kes and Wildman. There’s a nice subtle moment where the Doctor’s left alone in Sickbay to wait for the end (Kim doesn’t try and gloss it, just adding a blunt “Goodbye”). And then, as Janeway and Chakotay face down the Vidiians, it all ends. Simple but effective.
One Janeway getting a cut face is a rather cheeky way to help us tell them apart when they finally meet. Wildman finally gives birth after being pregnant for a season and a half, although I believe her daughter doesn’t actually get a name until “Mortal Coil” in Season 4 and is still being referred to as “the baby” in “Basics”: She’s nearly as bad as the Doctor at choosing a name! Neelix seems close to Wildman here, which ties in with him being Naomi’s godfather, although he disappears about halfway through the episode. (I don’t think we even see his counterpart on the other Voyager? Maybe having two Keses on board made him shut himself away to avoid saying the wrong thing…) I take the points about cross-department trainings but I still find Neelix asking a biologist to fix the mess hall equipment weird. The Vidiians are back to being faceless bad guys but that’s all that’s really needed here. Paris is told to assist the Doctor when Kes disappears but it’s not clear if he actually does, since he’s in Engineering with the rest of the bridge crew when we next see him. One of the injured engineers in Sickbay is clearly one of the guys injured in the last episode: He’s having a bad month.
And yes, I did cringe a bit at the episode’s events being dismissed with Tuvok’s casual “Repairs are ongoing.” Status Quo is indeed God.
Several other people have already pointed out the episode’s answer to why Janeway only sends two people over. I guess technically she could have saved 3-8 others, but it’s clearly not an exact science and the ship is full of hundreds of Vidiians who are killing everyone in sight at the time: I’m not sure there’s even 3-8 other people left by the time the ship blows up, it might only be Janeway, Chakotay and the Doctor still standing.
@30/CLB: It might not be the first instance, but the old Pocket Books Young Adult TOS novels start with a timeline stating Spock was the first Vulcan student at Starfleet Academy and claiming the information comes from The Star Trek Chronology, which it doesn’t. The actual novels retcon the Intrepid as a Vulcan ship on loan to Starfleet. That may have been enough for it to enter into fanon without anyone being sure where they got the information from.
@34/cap-mjb: No, I’m pretty sure the “first Vulcan in Starfleet” myth was around in fandom long, long before those YA novels. It’s one of those things I always took for granted myself before I questioned it and realized there was no basis for it. I suspect it could be that people read The Making of Star Trek‘s statement that Spock was the only Vulcan on the Enterprise and inflated it in their memories.
@31/Cloric: Never say never! If you count the year 2013 as still in the realm of “today”, I, and apparently millions of others were caught unawares of several major/regular characters on Game of Thrones kicking the bucket in the infamous “Red Wedding” episode. I literally had a sit up straight in my chair WTF! moment because I didn’t see it coming it all. And this was a TV series based on novels that had already been out for years so that it made all the more astounding it wasn’t common knowledge and a spoiler by the time the TV version aired. So that’s why I say never say never. There’s also the modern day trick of filming multiple endings so that in case of leaks, the general public still doesn’t know the actual outcome of the storyline until airdate.
@28, Yeah, it’s not unlike the same situation as with the Star Wars Prequels, i.e. Decades of expectations and built-up imagination about the pre-Kirk years and backlash ensuing once the canonical reality failed to meet and match those expectations.
And the irony there is that even if a TOS fan like Moore had been running ENT from the beginning, they’d still have been complaining about those same expectations meeting reality (not to mention Moore would’ve been in open conflict with UPN over their meddling).
I see what you did there.
The only egregious violation of canon I recall on Enterprise is in the episode Bounty, when T’Pol goes through Pon Farr, contradicting Saavik’s own statement that it was a process that only Vulcan males went through. That, plus the NCC-1701 not being the first Enterprise are the only ones really. Otherwise, the show went through and charted four seasons worth of stories without really contradicting anything (even the Ferengi and Borg episodes mostly fit).
The Xindi arc easily fits into canon. Prior to that, there was no reason to assume the founding of the Federation would have been a painless process. Same with the Vulcan Awakening/Kir’Shara story arc. It shows us how Vulcans of that era would eventually mature and evolve. At the same time, I actually think season 4 tries a little too hard to reconcile the show with TOS. For instance, it didn’t need a two parter explaining how the Klingons lost their forehead ridges (Worf’s we do not discuss it with outsiders was the perfect punch line).
TNG arguably had a more egregious violation of continuity when it established the Federation as being at war with the Cardassians less than two years before the events of The Wounded, which would mean there would have been an actual war going on during those first two seasons while the Enterprise was off healing Farpoint, dealing with Q, or doing a foreign exchange student program with the Klingons.
The NCC 1701 was the first Enterprise — in the Federation. The NX-01 was part of a completely different service (the United Earth Starfleet) in a completely different nation, and so no more counts than the American aircraft carrier or the NASA space shuttle or the British sloop….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I liked this episode overall. The only thing that annoyed me, was that with all the super-advanced medicine, taking birth is still shown as a painful, messy, long experience. I’m OK with there being complications, because this was neccessary for the plot. But showing Wildman suffering for hours? And Tuvok sharing that this is normal for Vulcans as well? I find it hard to believe that will all advancements in medicine nothing was done to make labor easier.
This was enjoyable. The premise of the ship being duplicated is a particularly stupid bit of technobabble, even by Star Trek standards, and the reveal of Voyager #2 makes it obvious the reset button is going to be pushed – though, like many of the other commenters, I was surprised it was Voyager #1 that ultimately survives. Once the set-up for the episode is established, the whole thing moves along at a good pace, there’s nothing that feels like filler. It’s also good seeing the actors switching up their performances between the weary and beaten down version on Voyager #1 and the less stressed versions on Voyager #2, and I really enjoyed seeing the two Janeways playing off each other, I thought that worked really well.
One thing that’s not explained in the episode is why Janeway #2 doesn’t order her crew to use the escape pods and abandon ship before Voyager #2 self-destructs. We saw her do it in Dreadnought, so I don’t think there’s a good reason for her not to have done so here.
@39/Eduardo: “The only egregious violation of canon I recall on Enterprise is in the episode Bounty, when T’Pol goes through Pon Farr, contradicting Saavik’s own statement that it was a process that only Vulcan males went through.”
I wouldn’t say ignoring a single word counts as “egregious,” not compared to the far greater inconsistencies that exist within TOS or TNG alone, never mind between series. (What about Morrow’s “The Enterprise is 20 years old” in that same movie?) Indeed, Spock specifically said in “Amok Time” that his bond to T’Pring ensured that “we would both be drawn” to mate, and he spoke of it as something that happened to “Vulcans,” not Vulcan men. So if anything, it’s Saavik’s line that’s the inconsistency.
In fact, the DC Comics Star Trek storyline that led directly into The Search for Spock actually had Saavik undergoing pon farr, yet apparently nobody in the Paramount licensing department had a problem with that contradiction.
@40/krad: And yet the observation lounge wall on the Enterprise-D had a model of the aircraft carrier Enterprise but not NX-01…
I rather liked this episode and found it quite affecting – I’m also not surprised they never talked about it afterwards; as “there but for the Grace of God go I” stories go, it’s definitely one of the more eerie (thinking about an identical ship with an identical crew dying where you survived … well, some things it’s better not to think too much about).
Am I the only person who has noticed that they can TRANSPORT A BABY OUT OF THE WOMB!!!????? Why is this never mentioned again? This technology needs to be invented stat!
@44 – “(thinking about an identical ship with an identical crew dying where you survived … well, some things it’s better not to think too much about).”
And this is one of my main beefs with the episode. As CLB noted above, it wasn’t intended to be a parallel universe. This was an exact duplication down to the last molecule. There is no “original” Voyager! BOTH of the Voyagers are the real deal. And that means the entire crew of Voyager died. And it’s no big deal. The show just moves on. These were living, breathing human beings. Of course, this is Star Trek, where deaths of lesser crewmen are routinely ignored.
I don’t find Neelix asking Wildman to do repairs particularly odd, he might well be vague about specializations, but Wildman agreeing to do so rather than answering, Neelix I’m a xenobiologist, is very odd indeed.
@45 I don’t think we see anyone having a rough labor again. Given that the transport cause complications which were fatal without treatment, I can see why it’s not standard practice.
@45: See Julian May’s Pliocene Exile books for a similar birthing technique.
@46 This is my main beef with the episode too, especially how they wrap up Wildman and her baby. I remember watching this episode as a kid and being really disturbed. The last shot of Wildman is just her happy with baby#2 and I remember asking my parents, “Why isn’t she still sad about her baby dying?” They told me that they “saved” her baby and that her baby was fine, but I knew that that wasn’t true at all! Baby#1 was in a morgue drawer somewhere!
When I watched it as an adult, I was still bothered by this! Did they have a memorial for dead baby#1 or Kim#1? Or for all of Voyager#2 for that matter? I find Janeway’s last line too dismissive and jokey for this episode. I would’ve far preferred something like the last scene of The Mind’s Eye, which would have let them show a little of the consequences of this episode while preserving their reset button.
The rest of the episode is fantastic. I’m predisposed to episodes with copies of the crew, whether they’re caused by time shifts, phase distortions, or transporter accidents. I also love episodes where the ship takes a beating, and it seems like VOY did that more than any of the other series.
You know what would have been interesting? If both Voyagers had managed to fight their way free. There would have been one badly damaged Voyager and one more or less intact. There would be crew dead on both ships. Crew who’d survived on one ship and finally crew who had survived on both ships making duplicates.
The near destroyed ship could be mined for replacement parts to repair the other and the two crews consolidated. There would be hugely interesting stories about the dupes coming to terms with each other. Suppose the duplicates aren’t like identical twins with identical memories to a point but literally one person in two bodies, what one knows the other knows, what one experiences the other remembers, when they are together they think in tandem, not telepathy but literally the same mind, and speak in chorus? How weird! Yet how useful!
@51: That is an interesting idea and it makes me wonder on a personal level how I would feel if I suddenly had a “twin” thrust upon me. I consider myself a friendly person but would I be so unnerved by an exact duplicate of myself that I would find myself avoiding this person? Would it bring out my insecurities such as fixating on my physical “flaws” now that I’d be able to see them from a different perspective? For instance, I’ve been balding in the back of my head for the last several years. Of course when I look in a mirror head on it’s not something I readily notice and I like to think this is the physical perspective most people view me at. But seeing my “twin” where I can now basically view myself and this “flaw” from a different angle, I could imagine being even more disturbed by this and become even more insecure. And then there’s the perspective that Riker shared in the episode “Up the Long Ladder” where he is abhorred by being cloned because as he explains it, he loses his uniqueness (which is ironic because he later learns he was “cloned” all along in “Second Chances”). I think I actually share that perspective that I would feel less unique if I were duplicated and so seeing my “twin” would remind me of that and so I’d feel disturbed.
@51 That would have been a wicked two-parter. You could get some conflict out of figuring out which duplicate stays on the busted ship and who goes on the intact ship. Or if people should stay on “their” ship or if they should go replace their duplicate. One of the Voyagers could be destroyed in a firefight rather than just blowing itself up.
@43/Christopher: Good point. I’d forgotten about Spock’s exact line on Amok Time and that T’Pring was just as likely to be drawn to mate as he was.
@41, 45
I am not surprised that, with advanced medical procedures, they haven’t managed to make labor easier or better. The human body is designed for labor; all our medical procedures do a lot to mess it up. I’m not saying that it’s not necessary on some occasions, or that it’s not nice to have a way of dealing with the pain, but the way labor is supposed to work is really incredible, hormonally and physically. Personally, I’d hope that in a medically advanced future, they’d have found a way to aid the body in its process instead of hinder it.
The use of the transporter was an extreme measure, and I do like it better than a C-section. But again, it would disrupt the natural process, so the Doctor would likely prefer to assist Wildman in some other way if possible. I do agree with whoever mentioned that the incubator should have its own power source, though!
@55/KYS: I’ve read that a lot of the reason behind labor pains is cultural — women raised in cultures with more sexual shame have more painful labor because they’re tenser about that part of their bodies, and also because more frequent sexual activity helps strengthen the pelvic floor and makes labor relatively easier/quicker. So reducing cultural stigmas about the body and sexuality could do more to ease labor than any kind of medical or technological advance.
I agree that transporter-based childbirth is kind of an extreme, but there are other respects in which it’s a failure of imagination not to use transporters for medical purposes. I mean, we’ve seen a few cases where stored transporter patterns were used to restore a character to their natural age (“The Lorelei Signal,” “Unnatural Selection,” “Rascals”), so why couldn’t a transporter restore an injured body to its intact configuration? Even if there are reasons not to do that, transporters would make sense as a way to take things out of the body or put things in without cutting, or to lock onto toxins or infectious organisms and beam them out of the body.
@CLB (33): ” . . . a recent case where a show killed off a character and it came as a total surprise, though I’m blanking on which show it was.”
Maybe House? Although it’s not that recent. but Kal Penn left midseason to take a job with the Obama administration, and the episode where he died came as a shock.”
Noblehunter, KYS: In DS9, the doctor transported Keiko’s body into Kira because of complications (actually, because Nana Visitor got pregnant, iirc)
@57/JohnC: No, I mean recent as in the past couple of months.
@57/JohnC: Not just pregnant, but the father was Alexander Sidiig
@58 Not sure who you are thinking of, but my big surprise death was Will on The Good Wife. Even the promos gave no hint that it would be anything more than a normal epsiode.
@CLB #56: I’ve read that a lot of the reason behind labor pains is cultural — women raised in cultures with more sexual shame have more painful labor because they’re tenser about that part of their bodies . . .
And just where and when did you read that? Or I should say, how recently were these studies published? Were they done by qualified women? Or is some of this male bias? If it were true, I should have had long, painful labors, and instead I popped out 3 with no complications. In fact the second one, I barely made it to the hospital (and the doctor didn’t!), and even the third, where I was in the hospital, they didn’t call the doctor in time for him to get there (and he only lived like 5-10 minutes away). In any case, these theories annoy me because they seem to ignore the fact that women’s bodies are made to take care of this business (of course there are medical exceptions).
@60/srEDIT: I don’t remember where I learned it, though there’s a good chance it was in Human Sexuality class in college. But of course it’s a generalized assertion about the population as a whole, so a single person’s experience neither confirms nor refutes it, since it’s a given that there’s always individual variation.
But I don’t follow your objection to the notion, because it seems to me to fit perfectly well with what you and KYS appear to be saying — that labor is a natural process that the human body is adapted to handle, and artificial cultural factors can make it harder than it needs to be. That’s exactly what this is saying, that the artificial cultural construct of sexual shame and prudishness, the belief that a natural function of our bodies is evil and should make us uncomfortable, creates tension that can make labor more difficult. That seems logical enough to me; any physical activity tends to be harder, more painful, and more likely to cause injury if you’re tense and nervous rather than relaxed. That’s not a gendered thing, as I know from my longtime experience with tendinitis resulting from tension and stress.
Although the idea that the female body is perfectly “designed” for labor is a misrepresentation. Evolution does not produce perfectly crafted ideals, just adaptations that are adequate to do the job; and it can take thousands of generations to refine an adaptation to perfection, so a relatively young species like us may not have had enough time to complete adaptation to a new circumstance. For instance, the human body isn’t yet perfectly adapted to walking upright, which is why we suffer from things like back pain, fallen arches, and hemorrhoids. And what makes labor difficult is that the human brain is so large compared to the birth canal, a similarly recent change in primate evolution. It’s been compensated for imperfectly by women evolving wider hips, and also by humans adapting to give birth before the fetus’s development is complete, which is why human infants are so helpless compared to other species whose offspring are fully functional without hours of birth. The latter is a particularly imperfect adaptation, a serious tradeoff for our big brains, which belies the fiction of some flawless design. (Although it is partly responsible for our civilization, because having more helpless babies requires closer, more long-term parent-child bonding, which encourages community bonds and time-binding, the passage of knowledge and culture from generation to generation.)
@58 – The Good Doctor maybe?
Is the reset button really such a big deal? I figure they just don’t make episodes out of them tootling to random planets on impulse power and mining for supplies. The episodes don’t come with dates and timelines for the most part, we don’t know if the next episode is the next day or 2 months later. I just take it as a given that going forth with the beat-up Voyager added time on their journey to recover, but no one wants to watch a 10 episode slog about it.
I particularly loved the end where Janeway welcomes the Vidiians to the bridge, just in time for the self destruct. Way to face the end with style.
If I recall correctly Harry and the baby only just barely made it onto the other ship in time, seems impractical to try and organize an evacuation of more or most of the other crew as well.
@63/karey: “The episodes don’t come with dates and timelines for the most part, we don’t know if the next episode is the next day or 2 months later.”
Except that they always tended to treat series time as approximately equivalent to real time — for instance, “Cold Fire” was 10 months after “Caretaker” both in reality and in-story, “False Profits” at the start of season 3 was stated to be 2 years after “Caretaker,” “Scorpion” was 3 years after, “Night” was 4 years after, “Equinox” was 5 years after, “Live Fast and Prosper” was “almost 6 years” after, and “Endgame” was 7 years after. So it was consistently made explicit that every season except the first lasted one year, and with 26 episodes a year, that comes out to an average of 2 weeks per episode. Thus, there isn’t room for a lot of lengthy gaps between episodes.
@64/CLB: There’s not room for a lot but there’s room for some. Especially if you place the four holdover episodes at the end of 2371, meaning there’s only 22 episodes in 2372. An average simply means some are more and some are less: You only need a few episodes set only a week or a few days apart and there’s room for a month to pass getting the ship fixed up for the next episode.
(Of course, the flipside to that is that you then get an episode like “Resolutions”, which, with the gap there must have been since the previous episode and the amount of time covered between the beginning of the pre-credits and the final “Mr Paris, warp eight”, seems to account for about three months.)
@65/cap-mjb: Of course, but I’m saying it’s a well you can’t go to all that often, especially when you throw in the necessary travel time between episodes. As Keith mentioned, we’ve just had two episodes in a row where the ship was essentially crippled at the end yet perfectly intact the following week. If both of them required, say, six weeks’ downtime for repairs, that’s a quarter of the year used up right there, and it crowds the remaining episodes much closer together. Especially since, as you say, the events before and during “Resolutions” alone cover roughly three months.
@61CLB: Well, you do not mention how long ago your reading in college might have been??? Meanwhile, let me assure you that—although when I reread my post, I realized it *sounds* as if I thought my experience “disproved” your point—I do understand that one anecdotal experience does not a scientific proof provide, one way or the other. However, I am more than leery of whatever the current pop psychology/sociology explanations are, and your textbook *sounds* like one of them. And, as I am sure you know, issues pertaining to women’s health has not, in general, been well-served by the medical profession, which up until fairly recently had been dominated by men and men’s attitudes.
61&67, I would suggest that general physical condition and individual pain threshold has more to do with labor pains than generalized cultural attitudes. And the suggestion that frequent sex is necessary for women’s reproductive health strikes me as problematic.
@68/roxana: Not “necessary,” just helpful, in the same way that regular exercise is helpful for performing physical tasks of all sorts. And it’s not about satisfying men, because regular orgasms from any source, including masturbation and lesbian sex, would work just as well (and indeed the freedom to masturbate regularly is a vital part of sexual health, since most people spend more time alone with themselves than with sexual partners). Sexual health is about one’s own well-being and satisfaction, not just other people’s.
@60/srEDIT @61/Christopher: It’s been years and I don’t recall the exact words, but I do remember this particular topic being discussed on anthropology class, back when I was in college. I recall at least one college professor who cited pre-colonization natives as an example of those who didn’t suffer labor pains.
Janeway #2: Captain, I’m not going to let you—
Janeway #1: I’ve made my decision. Please don’t make me call Security and have you escorted off my ship, because…you know I’ll do it.
And that’s why I love Janeway: she won’t even take interference from herself (we’ll see this again in “Endgame”).
And then Janeway #2, knowing she’s about to die, very calmly welcomes the Viidians to the bridge. Another Moment of Badassery for Janeway, and it’s Janeway#2’s last moment.
As I’ve said before, this one is a personal favorite. It’s not perfect, but has fantastic moments. I loved going back and forth to the damaged Voyager and the intact Voyager; the actors really sold the differences of being on either ship.
I thought it was very clearly said that the two Voyagers were one and the same until the spatial scission, so the parallel or alternate Voyager theories seem odd to me. But then, the episode itself makes the same mistake.
EMH: This other Doctor, did he have a name?
In their podcast, Garrett Wang and Robert Duncan McNeill say the producers were very adamant the actors say the lines exactly as they’re written in the script (it’s why we got the very dumb “It’s the Voyager!”), but this line must have confused the actors, as that Doctor is the same Doctor until a few hours earlier. It’s like in TNG’s “Second Chances”, when Beverly tells Riker, “Up to that moment, you were the same person.”
I always rationed that no one from Voyager #2 went through the rift except Kim#2 and the Wildman baby because…well, at that point, pretty much everyone on Voyager #2 had been killed by the Viidians. Kim#2 said there like 300-odd Viidians on the ship, twice the size of the crew. That line really struck me, and brought home how hopeless everything on Voyager #2 was. As others have already said, quite an unexpected twist, having the damaged Voyager survive while the intact Voyager is sacrificed.
Then there’s that. The entire crew of Voyager dies. That part messes with me. Yes, a Voyager does survive, but…one doesn’t. I always try not to dwell on that part too long.
Finally, I did want to Gibbs-slap Neelix at the beginning. It’s like, dude, she’s like 20 months pregnant, what the hell?!
A rock-solid scifi story.
Chiming in on the “Did your Doctor have a name?” controversy, the only thing that makes it slightly less stupid is that it was just about possible that the other Doctor had chosen a name in those few hours that he was separate from the surviving Doctor. Harry’s response, that he didn’t ask, does actually make more sense in that context, because he knows that if he had, then he couldn’t have been using it for that long. (It’s unlikely that the Doctor would have had a name for days/weeks/months without Kim hearing of it.)
@56 – Rascals also showed us that transporters can be used as immortality machines. Your knowledge and personality come through intact but you have a new, youthful body.
There was a recent virtual reunion of the Voyager cast (you can find it on Youtube), and at one point the Doctor’s name was addressed. Robert Picardo said he thought it was meant as a joke, that a computer medical program could be that indecisive.
I loved Star Trek Voyager. It my fave Star Trek Series. The way they were stuck away from the feration.
I like reading books on amazon, such as Joey Vimsante books.
Star Trek Voyager also had original ideas in each episode.
A few more of my favorite moments from this episode were: Kes’s post-traumatic stress at hearing the living baby’s cries, and her duty to get back to the other ship and to her people. They don’t often dwell on the impact of those moments, that helped give it some weight. Another one was that the hull breach was something you could see, that the crew were trying to deal with, and that Harry got sucked out of. In star trek battle scenes I feel like they just yell damage reports on the bridge and you don’t often see what’s going on. “Hull breach on decks X Y and Z” is a stock phrase. To see a hull breach in action was interesting. Finally, a ship actually self destructing instead of being canceled at the last millisecond. Yes they had a duplicate ship, so it carries about the same weight as when the day is saved at the last second, but it was compelling to watch a captain see that choice through to the end.
I don’t have much to add about this episode that hasn’t already been said, but I will take a stab at guessing the show CLB was referring to – Last fall an opening-credits regular on NCIS: New Orleans was killed off. Speaking for myself, I wasn’t aware it was going to happen until I watched the episode.
@77/JamesP: No, I’m pretty sure I was remembering wrong. I recall now that I had a recent conversation about Avengers: Endgame where I mentioned being totally surprised by the twist in the first act and being told that it had been rumored beforehand, and I guess my mind confused that with the topic of character deaths being kept secret.
At least, if I am remembering something real, it’s not any of the shows mentioned, since I hardly watch any network TV anymore except on The CW, especially since giving up cable.
I absolutely love that everyone on Voyager died, like really died! It’s not parallel people, it’s not time-displaced versions of everyone; up until the moment of the split, there was only one crew and they all died. I’m not trying to trivialize death, it’s just delightfully mindbending. That and it’s a TV show and no one died IRL. I intensely dislike Brannon Braga as a Star Trek decision maker, but damn has he written some fine sci-fi episodes.
Bonus points to Braga for basically swiping one of the best moments from Search for Spock (enemy intruder invades ship, makes it to the bridge, haha starship go boom).
@80/Jason:
Sorry if I’m not sure your praising Braga or criticizing him. He certainly is polarizing. If it’s the former, then I agree! Although the way it’s done in “Deadlock” is far more believable (within the confines of the technobabble, of course). This episode doesn’t make the Viideans look like dullards. The Klingons in TSFS really looked stupid for not cluing in to what the countdown was all about. Even when Kruge is screaming for them to get out, they’re still standing there confused. Not that his pleas would have saved their lives or anything.
I didn’t have a problem with it. After all, the countdown wasn’t invented (or at least popularized) until 1929 in the movie Frau im Mond. Perhaps Klingons don’t use a countdown. Or theirs doesn’t use numbers. I just put it down to them not understanding the countdown or it’s significance.
While it may not have been presented in Klingon, it’s most likely that all the Klingons were speaking the own language. Other than Kruge and Maltz, we don’t know if the others even spoke English.
@82/kkozorriz: I think an advanced civilization would have to have some concept of a countdown. But you’re right that it’s possible none of the boarding party was fluent in Federation languages and didn’t realize what was being said or displayed. After all, none of our heroes could read anything on the Klingon ship either.
@83 – As I sad, we didn’t have a countdown until 91 years ago. Perhaps Klingons use something more akin (in a Klingon way) to “On your mark…”
In the 18th and 19th century, the Russian aristocracy spoke mainly French. Many elite institutions such as Moscow University, among others, actually taught their classes in French. Perhaps the Klingons are doing something similar. Kruge, who Valkris called My Lord, spoke English. Perhaps Maltz was from a noble family as well. The gunner, who destroyed the Grissom, didn’t seem to be.
@84/kkozoriz:
Well I was talking advanced like space age and beyond. There’s no way, “on your mark” would be anywhere near sufficient to launch manned rockets into orbit safely and consistantly.
85. Thierafhal – They can fire phasers and photon torpedoes by simply saying “arm” and “fire”.
Besides, I dodn’t mean that it was literally “On your mark”. In the opening of TMP. the Klingon captain says “Stand by on torpedoes. …Ready. …Fire!”
In the FASA RPG, the Klingons use Battle Language, a condensed version of the standard language. The Klingon dictionary calls it Clipped Klingon. Just goes to show that the Klingons are more informal about language, especially in a battle situation. Besides, the fact that they didn’t recognize the countdown just makes them a little more alien. You can learn a language and take it literally and end up with an erroneous conclusion. Foe example, the French word for bleach is Eau de Javel, the water of Javel. Javel is the region of Paris where bleach was manufactured. Without that bit of knowledge, you may think that they are talking about H2O as opposed to bleach. Languages rarely translate exactly.
@86/kkozoriz:
Sorry, I understand that you were generalizing and didn’t mean that exact phrase. I only used it to keep the debate simplified. But essentially we’re on the same page. My original argument was: “I think an advanced civilization would have to have some concept of a countdown.” It wouldn’t necessarily have to be 5-4-3-2-1. You cite TMP and the FASA RPG Klingon Battle Language. I don’t know the FASA RPG system, but TMP is one of my favorite Star Trek films, so I totally get what your saying.
Ultimately were talking about ways to coordinate things in extremely fast paced and/or dangerous situations. Weather it’s a countdown or some other analogous system, I think we’re talking about the same thing
87. Thierafhal – Exactly. There’s no reason to assume that your average Klgon solder would understand what a countdown was. To them, it would just be a series of numbers if they understood English at all. When Kruge urges them to get out, the surprise is because they literally don’t see any danger and don’t understand what suddenly prompted Kruge to freak out.
Kruge knew what a countdown was. The others didn’t because they had no experience with them.
Voyager detects 20 Vidiian ships but only one launches an assault Krad, and the Caretaker’s race is called the Nacene. I wonder if Neelix’s suggestion was what sent Wildman into labour? Also, by this stage six crew members have died, unless you’re counting Quinn as well Krad.
7: I never bought the effects, even back in 1996. Red Dwarf used to do the same sort of thing much better and on a fraction of the budget. 23: Braga does like the word Threshold, doesn’t he? I kept expecting the undamaged Voyager to survive the episode and it was a brave decision to have it be the one that was destroyed instead. But you do wonder how Voyager manages to stay in such tiptop condition? 24: Didn’t they say the entire crew had to be moved to Deck 11 to divert the sufficient amount of energy? I’m not sure how they were able to pull that off and how big is Deck 11 anyway?
34: The way of telling the two Janeways apart by giving one of them a scratch is like Gwyneth Paltrow’s two different hairdos in Sliding Doors (they could have called this episode Sliding Voyagers). How is Voyager big enough to hold hundreds of boarding Vidiians? 38: I didn’t. 42: What’s to prevent those escape pods being captured or destroyed by the Vidiians? 43: There couldn’t have been a model because there was no ST: Enterprise back then. 57: Keiko’s body? 64: Was False Profits two years or almost two years since Caretaker? 71: 20 months pregnant? 75: VGR is not always original and sometimes you can see examples of The Emperor’s New Clothes.
@89/David Sim: “Braga does like the word Threshold, doesn’t he?”
While Braga was the showrunner of Threshold, its actual creator was Bragi F. Schut, so we can’t assume the title was Braga’s idea. Also, the hope was to change the show’s title each season as the arc advanced, to Foothold in season 2 and Stranglehold in season 3.
“How is Voyager big enough to hold hundreds of boarding Vidiians?”
It’s big enough to hold 150 crew members with plenty of space between them to move around in, so that shouldn’t be a problem. Indeed, it’s comparable in size to Kirk’s Enterprise, so it has more space per person than that ship did (though closer to the Pike era when it had only 203 people aboard).
This is one of those out there episodes that I actually enjoyed with some almost startling moments.
The death of a main character (but in the end not really)
The death of a child (but in the end not really)
And that most overused cliches the self destruct countdown… but then they really go though with it (but in the end not really)
Janeway meets Janeway is entertaining and the Vidians actually make a believable job of taking over a Federation ship. Much more believable than the way Kazon do a few weeks later and way more believable than the Ferengi did in TNGs Rascals. Only problem. They repair the ship very quickly at the end and not a spot of dust remains let alone damage.
Just rewatched this episode again as it was recently covered on the Delta Flyers podcast and it’s just one of my favorite episodes of Voyager ever!
A few more comments on my part to add:
As Robert Duncan McNeill points out in his podcast, I think it was a mistake to include in the dialogue that there are 20 Vidiian ships in the area. I know what the story is going for is that Voyager is in the heart of enemy territory and needs to beat a hasty retreat. But then why would Voyager only be attacked by a sole Vidiian ship when 20 were detected relatively nearby? And why once the attacking Vidiian ship is destroyed do none of the other ships begin pursuing Voyager? At least some dialogue indicating how Voyager was being pursued but they were too fast for the Vidiians would have been appreciated.
I found the SFX of the duplicate Janeway’s interacting with one another believable however they were standing awfully close together. It felt a bit too “intimate.”
I found it personally amusing imagining Jennifer Lien run behind the camera a couple of times in the scenes where the camera is slowly panning across the sickbay set to give her time to be standing as Kes #2 and then plop herself into position as Kes #1 laying on the bio bed. I’m sure that was fun for her too.
This episode was a not a good example of Tuvok nor his security team as being particularly good at their jobs when the ship is boarded by invading forces. Paris didn’t handle himself particularly well either. Only Kim does well against the invaders and pulls off a nifty barrel roll to boot.
I agree that the ending with Janeway being jokey with Kim doesn’t strike the right tone sitting next too the preceding part of the episode considering there is a whole dead Voyager crew but often these Trek episodes have a hard time appropriately addressing the material at the end when they’ve only got 42 minutes or so of runtime to work with.
@92/garreth: I felt it was necessary shorthand to see our heroes getting their butts kicked so thoroughly and it doesn’t bother me too much. Besides, it led to the great scene when Janeway welcomes the Viidians to the bridge just before the ship takes the suckers down with it. The fact our heroes put in such a poor showing, accentuated that scene for me.
As for the ending, ya, definitely a little light hearted considering the circumstances, although the “weird is part of the job” line was great and delivered wonderfully by Kate Mulgrew.
it would have excised a plot point of course, but why isn’t there a medkit on the bridge that could heal Janeway’s facial cut in about two seconds?
honestly, every room should have several instances of a basic medkit with everything including placing a casualty into stasis so they can be transported to sickbay when sickbay has capacity – if in fact the portable medkit wasn’t enough to heal them in the field.
the more I think about this, the more Janeway’s cut should have been resolved in about four seconds.
“captain, you have a minor cut on your face. please hold still for a second”
@94/Bear: They had more urgent problems to deal with, and minor cosmetic damage was a low priority. If she’d broken her leg or something, sure, give her prompt medical attention so she can function in the ongoing crisis. But a superficial cut? It can wait while the medics deal with the people who are seriously hurt.
What I thought odd was when the Vidiian’s technology recognized Tuvok as Vulcan. Human and Klingon, sure. But when did they have a Vulcan to scan to get his biology?
@96/CathWren: I believe in “The Phage” in season one, Tuvok was on an away team in close proximity to the Vidiians and their ship which was cloaked on the planet they landed on. Thus, the aliens had ample opportunity to get good scans of the Vulcan but it was Neelix they grabbed when they found him alone.
97garreth: Thanks. I hadn’t thought about them being close enough to get scans even if he wasn’t actually in their hands.
@97 et al: Actually, thinking about it, it’s even more blatant than that. At the end of the episode, when the two Vidiians come aboard and agree to provide a replacement lung for Neelix, they scan everyone else present, including Tuvok, to see if they’d be compatible donors.
99cap-mjb: Oh yeah! That makes more sense to me.
I headcanon that several other crewmembers also ran through the rift rather than having their organs harvested, and that’s where the various contradictory figures for Voyager‘s crew compliment come from, because the computer can’t always reliably count duplicates.
“The Walking Dead” did a good job of covering the death of a main character when Abraham was killed by Negan: Abraham actor Michael Cudlitz made a point of not shaving his character’s distinctive facial hair until the death episode had been shown, so friends and family wouldn’t realise he was no longer filming for the show.
This has been a once-in-a-blue-moon instance of “The Walking Dead” handling something well.