Chakotay is lobbying for B'Elanna to take over as chief engineer of Voyager, but her fiery temper may keep her out of the running in the eyes of a captain who expects Starfleet protocol. B'Elanna gets a chance to prove herself when the ship becomes trapped in a quantum singularity, and she might have the idea for how to escape.
Parts of this episode feel like a confident step forward for this new series, while other parts feel like just as big a step backward. The character work is a clear improvement. Where Chakotay and Tom Paris were too easily dropped into the mix, short-circuiting interesting friction they might have generated over a few episodes, B'Elanna's period of adjustment is given a lot of space here. She professes not to even want the job, but we get to dig deeper and learn that she has a Starfleet Academy background that's the source of unhappy memories. We also see her recalibrate upon learning that her Academy professors thought more highly of her than she realized. Simply put, there's a nice arc here.
What's more, B'Elanna's story here is a stone tossed in the pond, making interesting ripples for the other characters. In defending his engineer, Chakotay comes into conflict with Janeway and Tuvok -- while also taking heat from Maquis crewmembers. In finding common ground with B'Elanna, Janeway again gets to show her own science and engineering chops; where previous Star Trek series had characters like Spock and Data and Dax to throw to for this sort of stuff, Janeway could hold her own with them.
It's natural that the backdrop in which all this is explored is a science/engineering "problem of the week." But it's not a very engaging one. It repackages any number of "we're trapped and can't leave" ideas from multiple Next Generation episodes, without any new angle to distinguish it. We're all but drowned into technobabble as they work toward a solution, with the script using Paris and Kes as dummies to allow characters to explain things for the audience. Paris is shorted again when, after being set up to show his expert piloting chops, Janeway instead just has him "punch through" the hole back to normal space.
Of course, no character is "shorted" more than the Doctor, whose subplot in this episode revolves around a malfunctioning holoprojector that causes him to shrink. Although there's a nice moment when Kes shows him the courtesy of deactivating him when she leaves, the rest is pretty awkward. Is the Doctor supposed to be "stretching" as he's shrinking? That's what it looks like, and yet no one mentions this. And it's an oddly cheap visual effect. (Stretch a 4:3 picture to fill your 16:9 television, and it look pretty much exactly like this.)
Other observations:
- This episode mentions that holodecks run on a different power system from the rest of the ship. This is clearly justification for why power scarcity on the ship won't stop us from having holodeck episodes in the future. It's a little weird, though, to bring this up for the first time when it isn't a holodeck episode.
- The guy who "loses" the chief engineer job, Carey, has the kind of wholesome, Starfleety reaction that Star Trek: Lower Decks lovingly mocked in one of its episodes.
- This is arguably Star Trek's most feminist episode to this point. It's directed by a woman (Kim Friedman), and the two most important characters in the plot are women (B'Elanna and Janeway).
Better in some ways than the first episode but worse in others, I'd give "Parallax" the same mark: a B-.
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