Voyager Flashback: Deadlock

Most episodes of Star Trek focus on a specific character. But some are just intriguing "sci-fi problems" that the whole crew gets caught up in. The Voyager episode "Deadlock" is one of the latter.

Hoping to avoid a Vidiian fleet, Voyager passes through an odd space phenomenon and is duplicated. Two copies of the ship and everyone on it now exist in the same space. But they draw upon the same antimatter in their warp engine, and that stress threatens to destroy one of the ships if they can't find a way to re-merge.

Star Trek isn't generally "hard science fiction," but I don't mind when it brings us a high concept like this. But I do wish that this "two ships" story had gotten into the philosophical material that's so obviously right there. There's no talk of "which ship is the 'real' one?" There's hardly any talk of the responsibility any of these people might bear for their duplicates, or what having a duplicate really means for their own identity. The closest we come to any of that is at the very end when Harry Kim (the one adult from one reality who survives and ends up in the other) tries to broach the deeper subject here... only to get a "that's Star Trek, kid" slide whistle from the captain.

Still, set aside the wish for deeper meaning here, and this is a pretty good bit of action-packed fun. Watching one Voyager get the stuffing beaten out of it before we even realize there's a second Voyager is a nice way to kick things off. We see waves of extras pour into Sickbay, damage that threatens to take the Emergency Medical Hologram offline, and the death of Ensign Wildman's baby -- all of which makes this feel like a very real and dire situation. Only when Harry Kim is blown out into space do you truly begin to suspect some shenanigans that will be "bought back" somehow by the end of the episode.

Director David Livingston does a great job differentiating the ships and crews through Dutch angles and other visual language (with excellent work from the set crew, realizing the wrecked Voyager). There's clever camera work to minimize the need for split-screen visual effects (watch for a moment where Jennifer Lien sneaks behind the panning camera to appear as two different Keses in a single shot).

The Vidiians feel extra menacing this episode -- as I think they should have been all along. Their wild new "grappling" ship here is a neat idea. The reversal it brings into the story is quite clever: the version of Voyager we thought was going to survive turns out to be the one that has to be sacrificed.

Other observations:

• More "not a good look for Neelix," as he badgers a very pregnant woman with so much work that she goes into labor.

• If "fetal transport" is a thing, one wonders why it isn't employed more often.

• The shot of the two Janeways talking to each other in Engineering isn't great. They're so unnaturally close together to fit into the "pre-widescreen television" frame that it looks like they're about to kiss.

• The Doctor's "our baby" running joke doesn't seem cute to me.
  

Overall, "Deadlock" is a reasonably fun sci-fi take on a "disaster movie" (if not as good as similarly themed episodes of The Next Generation). I give it a B.