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| Captain Janeway meets... Captain Janeway. |
THE PLOT
Voyager's course has taken the ship to the edge of a Vidiian system. Not wanting to risk attack, Janeway orders a detour through a plasma drift, to disguise them from Vidiian sensors. The detour works - they are not detected. Howevever, as the ship emerges from the drift, there's turbulence, followed by a loss of power. And when Torres prepares to deal with that situation by using proton bursts to keep the engines going, there's a sudden series of explosions!
As wounded flood sickbay, Torres determines the explosions are the result of proton bursts. "But I never initiated the procedure!" she protests. As the bursts continue, the ship becomes more and more destabilized. There are casualties and hull breaches. Then, when Kes leaves sickbay to retrieve a wounded crew member, she disappears into a spatial rift...
...and reappears - on a completely undamaged, fully functioning Voyager!
CHARACTERS
Capt. Janeway: Her background as a science officer plays a big part in the way this episode unfolds. Whereas other captains would have to rely on their engineers almost entirely in a situation like this, Janeway plays an active part in trying to find a solution. The interplay between Janeway and Torres is almost that of a professor and her star pupil. Both Janeways express willingness to sacrifice their versions of Voyager to save the other, if only one variant of the ship ends up being viable. She also gets a wonderful moment facing down the Vidiians near the end. "Welcome to the bridge," indeed!
Doctor/Kes: Kes' compassion is as evident as ever in her interactions with Wildman. The Doctor actually shows a surprising level of compassion, too, promising Wildman that he will do everything in his power to make sure of her baby's survival, even as he handles an increasing medical emergency, with wounded flooding both sickbay and the holodeck. Though their interactions with each other are minor in this episode, they do get a couple nice moments: one in which the Doctor reassures the Kes from the damaged [I}Voyager,[/I] both about the health of this version of Wildman's baby and that "her" Doctor is doubtless able to keep up with any emergency; and a second when that Kes returns, and the Doctor immediately asks if the other Doctor has a name.
Harry Kim: Dies - and as expected, that makes no difference. Of course, through the magic of spatial anomalies, he's back to life long before the episode ends. OK, it's a Harry from a slightly different reality, but it's a difference that makes no difference (the divergence accounting for all of a few hours' different experiences), so Harry's musing about how "weird" that is will be the sum total impact this will likely ever have. Much like the swapped O'Briens on Deep Space 9, come to think of it.
THOUGHTS
A Brannon Braga script that opens with the ship suffering a catastrophe, before showing us a version of the ship that's perfectly intact and running smoothly? Yes, Braga is mining TNG's excellent Cause and Effect. Still, I suppose if you're going to steal from your own past work, it at least makes sense to steal from arguably your best past work.
Deadlock is techno-babble heavy, with a script full of "proton bursts" and "osmotic pressure" and spatial scissions and phase variance. It's not up there with Time and Again for technobabble overload, but there's definitely more than is strictly needed to make the episode work, while some potential character opportunities are all but ignored. Shouldn't Kes be affected by seeing a second Kes, one who has obviously undergone a traumatic experience? Shouldn't Harry be disturbed at learning that the other Harry died, and died rather pointlessly? There isn't even time for the two Janeways to have any interesting interplay. Character takes a back seat to technobabble - which is itself one of the biggest ongoing problems with Voyager as a show.
Deadlock does work extremely well as a piece of action entertainment. The opening twenty minutes are the best, as the crew grapples with the rising devastation within the ship, explosions wracking the hull with no apparent cause. David Livingston, probably Voyager's best director, milks these scenes for atmosphere. The battered and darkened corridors are so effective that it's actually a disappointment to cut back to the normal, flood-lit Voyager bridge. The Vidiians' attack at the end is also one of the strongest action pieces yet of the series, not least of which because of how easily the Vidiians seem to be winning and how utterly emotionless they are about it.
That said, the Vidiian attack is one reason why this episode is getting a "7" instead of an "8." The episode sets up a dilemma, in that one version of Voyager has to be destroyed for the other to survive. Then, instead of having to let the two Janeways work that out and/or try to act against that, we get the easiest of all possible solutions - an implacable enemy who both outnumbers and outguns the crew attacks one version of the ship (but not the other), making the entire thing a moot point. An external force decides the fates of the two crews for them, making Janeway's decision an easy one instead of a hard one.
Overall Rating: 7/10.
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