S6 E05: Alice

Voyager encounters a junkyard and trades for supplies with its amiable patron. Paris picks up a used, small shuttle, notable for its neural interface. While working on it, the shuttle exerts its influence on him through the illusion of a woman, causing him to neglect his duties and steal parts for the ship. When he runs off with the ship, Voyager follows (after confirming with its previous owner that the ship is a bit loco), and the Doctor transmits Torres into Paris' mind to help him lower the shields so he can be beamed to safety.

Completely Paris-centric episodes are a fairly rare thing - in five full seasons, there have been just about five of them. And in three of them, Threshold, Investigations, and Vis à Vis, he's not even really responsible for his actions, whether it is due to genetic mutations, following orders that we don't know about, or being swapped out of his body. It happens again here: Paris behaves insubordinately, but really it is because the shuttle is controlling him. It doesn't count as character development if the actual character hardly does anything in the episode! Maybe that's why I responded to Thirty Days so well - he may have gone too far, but at least it was him doing it that time.

Once again, while watching a Paris or Torres episode, my wife and I have turned to each other and said "why are they still together?" He's dismissive of her, she just doesn't seem to be that into him, and they constantly fight whenever the two of them are on screen. I mean, people who care have disagreements, I get that, but when it becomes the whole sum of their interactions I'd expect at least one of them to decide that maybe there's someone else out there. That's perhaps another reason why I liked Thirty Days; that episode has a couple nice scenes with them, and it establishes that Torres admires Paris' strength of convictions, which works because she is established as having few convictions of her own.

I am a big fan of Abaddon and his junkyard - John Fleck, a Trek regular, nails the part, and shows a range that doesn't come out in his other, more dour Trek characters. I have to wonder if his interpretation is not what the authors had in mind though, considering that his name can mean any range of things, from "place of destruction" to "the king of the bottomless pit and of a plague of locusts that resemble war horses with crowned human faces and having women's hair, lions' teeth, locusts' wings, and the tail of a scorpion." I mean, sure, he does sell shoddy merchandise, but again, the shuttle made him do it! I still think he's just a nice guy. His junkyard, while I guess it could be called a "place of destroyed things," is just the kind of thing I'd like to see more of in Voyager. The alpha quadrant is all built-up and stable and sterile, while the delta quadrant, home to the Kazon and the Talaxians, has the opportunity to be a seedier setting, with more locales like Abaddon's junkyard.

Watchability: 2/5

Bottom Line: More lessons on how not to develop a character, care of Thomas Eugene Paris.