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| Tom Paris is behaving very strangely... |
Tom Paris is at loose ends. He seems suddenly (inexplicably suddenly) disconnected from his life and responsibilities, spending most of his free time in the holodeck and dodging his studies with the Doctor and his relationship with B'Elanna. He only becomes engaged when Voyager encounters a ship on the verge of destroying itself due to a faulty coaxial warp drive. Tom improvises a solution that allows Voyager to save this ship.
He befriends the pilot, Steth (Dan Butler), and gets permission to help the alien repair the ship. But once the repairs are complete, Steth springs a surprise: He is actually a lifeform that switches bodies with his victims. He knocks Tom out, switches bodies with him, then sends his ship away with Tom-as-Steth aboard, with no way to access the ship's systems to get back.
Steth now has full run of Voyager, and of Tom Paris' life. And if that proves not to be all he wants, then he has his pick of Voyager crew members with whom he can switch - including Captain Janeway!
CHARACTERS
Capt. Janeway: She recognizes that "Tom's" behavior has changed drastically, and she orders him to submit to a physical to make sure there is no physical cause for it. This provokes the Third Act Crisis when, to the surprise of no one who has ever watched a television show before, she ends up becoming the next to be body-snatched... A potentially entertaining idea that is thrown away completely, with not even a single amusing line. Kate Mulgrew, who is usually able to carry even the weakest episodes, just looks bored - likely because she read the script.
Tom Paris: There is no good reason for Tom's listlessness in the first half, and no real reason for him to be suddenly cured of that at the end. Tom is the one person who has consistently championed the better life he has aboard Voyager than in his old life, so the suggestion that he somehow misses a life he has consistently rejected feels untrue - A manufactured emotional crisis to try to pretend that a gimmick episode is somehow a character piece. I'd say that at least it wasn't a Harry Kim episode, except the crisis of listlessness would actually have made more emotional sense for Harry... And it's a sad day when I'm seriously considering that an episode might have been better had it focused on Harry Kim!
Torres: While in Tom's form, the alien sleeps with B'Elanna. When she realizes this, does she feel violated? Enraged? Guilty for enjoying it, or for not somehow realizing that the man she was with was not actually Tom? No. The script wastes gobs of screen time on Tom's fake crisis. But B'Elanna being genuinely violated? That doesn't even merit a reaction, either because it might be too uncomfortable for an episode this bland or (more likely) because writer Robert J. Dougherty never even thought about it.
THOUGHTS
Vis a Vis is two episodes in one, both of them bad. The first half wants to be a character piece, but instead of examining the character of Tom Paris as he has been consistently portrayed it insists on creating a fake crisis to make him suddenly (completely out of nowhere) dissatisfied with his new life. The second half wants to be a fun body swap piece, but with half the episode already gone by the time this story starts, it's too rushed to have any fun with the notion.
Had the body-switching alien been revealed by the end of the First Act, with its nature revealed to the crew by the midpoint or so, then we at least could have had some fun with the regulars all playing an alien mimic of themselves. The episode could have even have ventured into The Thing territory, with the various regulars unable to be certain at any given moment that their friends are actually still themselves.
With no genuine emotion, no real suspense, and not even any sense of fun, what we're left with is a tedious filler episode, further weighed down by Voyager's propensity for Technobabble. In Season Two or Season Three, I'd have just labeled this "more of the same." In the much better Season Four, an episode this bad stands out all the more.
Overall Rating: 2/10.
Previous Episode: The Killing Game
Next Episode: The Omega Directive
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