In order to avoid the Vidiians, Voyager takes a side trip through a plasma drift. Upon leaving, its warp engines cut out, and the ship starts being bombarded with energy from an unknown source. Heavy damage is taken, multiple hull breaches, Wildman's new child dies, and Kim is sucked into the vacuum of space. Kes steps through a spatial rift... and wakes up on a bright, shiny, clean Voyager. In the space phenomena, Voyager had been duplicated atom by atom (though slightly out of phase), and now there are two ships draining one source of antimatter. Vidiians board and overwhelm the healthy Voyager, forcing them to self-destruct (after sending Kim & baby to the first copy), destroying the Vidiians, and freeing Voyager from its tether.
The first act of this episode is very high-energy, lots going on, with good attention to detail - particularly in the sickbay scenes. It is all very cool, but as soon as the baby dies (followed shortly by Kim), it's obvious that they're going to slam on the reset button somehow. It really detracts from what could have been more powerful scenes to know that there's no way events will remain that way at the end. Yet, at the same time, I was kept entertained enough not to care. The duplication of the ship presents an interesting puzzle, and the antimatter's failure to duplicate is a clever twist. Even though we start exclusively with the damaged Voyager, we end up spending enough time with both crews to not be sure who exactly to root for.
Best of all, it isn't even really a reset button episode - sure, Kim and the baby still are essentially resurrected, but the crew of damaged Voyager retain all the memories of their hardships: losing the baby (Wildman), being helpless to resuscitate the baby (the Doctor/Kes), watching a friend get sucked into space (Torres). Damaged Janeway even planned on blowing her ship up to save the other ship - it can't be easy to have been so hopeless, and then have a second chance because someone else made the same sacrifice for you. It does feel a little cheap to get Kim and the baby back, but I'd miss Kim, so I'm just glad he didn't die. Of note: his scenes at the end are very reminiscent of O'Brien in Visionary (DS9, season 3), wherein the O'Brien that we focus on for most of the episode dies and is replaced by a functionally identical but slightly temporally displaced copy.
The Vidiians are back to just being a stock villain again. They could easily be replaced with any aggressive and high-technology Trek faction. The way Voyager seems to flip back and forth between Kazon and Vidiian territory (with other planets in between), presuming the ship is going in a relatively straight line, gives the impression that this part of the delta quadrant is quite fractured in terms of ownership. At first glance, it seems sloppy, but thinking about it more, I kinda like it: the Vidiians, due to the nature of their existence, are probably overall a pretty low-population species. To make up for it, they've got the most powerful technology we've seen so far, so presumably they can just go wherever they please, and the other delta natives try to stay out of their way. Kazon, being low-tech but high population raiders (with lots of different sub-factions), are spread out and nomadic, accounting for their sporadic presence that way. Now, I've seen no evidence that the writers thought the set-up out that much (and I've been reading their collected comments on memory alpha religiously), but I think that the above is a pretty reasonable explanation.
Watchability: 4/5
Bottom Line: Good action, interesting puzzle, solid show. It isn't a good Vidiian episode, but it is a good episode with Vidiians in it.
Yeah, as soon as Kim gets sucked out into space, I got all pissed off because I knew he couldn't die, but it's only five minutes later when you realize there's another Voyager, so I could see the solution so I stopped caring. In fact, it was enough to get me to be near sure they would eventually blow up the damaged Voyager, and it wasn't until they said there were 500 Vidiians on board until I realized they might just blow up the other one.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I will never forget Skin of Evil, and it will always make me think that maybe, just maybe, they really did just kill off a main cast without fanfare. It wasn't until the end of that episode until I said: "Oh, crap! She's really dead!"
I also wondered if Voyager was trying to take the border between Vidiian and Kazon space, and that's why we keep seeing them. I recall going to my first ever Star Trek convention about the time this episoded aired. The writers were talking about how difficult it was to have recurring enemies while making it seem like they've made any progress toward home.