OVEG: Deadlock

Description: Deadlock is another Brannon Braga script, and thus it's going to be around a lot of technobabble and something weird. I'm fine with weird; I like weird. What I don't like is weird without thought, which sums up many of Braga's scripts. Threshold is the most notorious, but so was Non Sequitur, and to a degree Projections. As we established with Projections, that's why his stories work best when someone's mind is being messed with, because you can ignore inconsistencies and illogic as a part of the game.

With Deadlock, we see this again, and because it's not a dream, programming glitch, mind meltdown, or whatever, it's another one that'll leave you scratching your head and wonder why no one saw the obvious issues with this. From start to finish, it's peppered with them. I'm guessing all the special effects were supposed to distract us.

The episode begins with Ens. Wildman in Sickbay, and quickly devolves into the Stupid Neelix moment, when Neelix decides that a pregnant science officer is the person he should pester to come fix his stove. First off, there's a bunch of blue-shirted people in the background, and since we know none of them are in medical, they have to be science too, so are just as able to help. Second, isn't this a matter for an engineer? When my central air malfunctioned, I called a mechanic with ductwork experience to fix it. The last thing I would have said was, "My God, quick, someone call a zoologist!" Third, Neelix shows he has some high-level engineering connections in the last episode (which he used to peer through people's logs and probably dig through Torres' panty drawer); surely he could use his connections rather than hassling some woman who's stomach has swollen to a size that surpassed the late James Doohan.

Well, guess what, pestering her to fix his stove and the replicator drives Wildman into labor, and soon she's down in Sickbay. If you've ever seen a labor scene on television, then you obviously have seen this one, complete with the irritability and all that. There's no doubt that the birthing process is a painful one, but all this does is just raise more questions. It was just last episode that Carth Onasi wasn't even so much as grimacing and was pretty much coherent, yet there's nothing being done for Ens. Wildman? She's having uteral contractions, he had second degree burns on his f*cking face! Doc, are you holding out or something?

Up on the bridge, everyone is silent while Janeway literally paces in anticipation of the birth. There's some comments on how long it's gone on (seven hours) and Chakotay soon remarks, "You know, I didn't expect to be this nervous. It's not even my child." So you keep insisting, and yet, it sure is fishy that's she's supposedly been pregnant for more than a year, huh? I guess if she has a big waffle-iron burn on her face, we'll know the truth. "In a way, this child belongs to all of us," Janeway says, already hard at work on a teeny-tiny commbadge. She laments the situation of raising a baby on Voyager, but Chakotay has something for every situation. "My father had a saying, Captain. 'Home is wherever you happen to be.'" And that, of course, inspired Chakotay to defend his land with a forty-plus gigaton warhead.

Well, before any more homey platitudes can be issued by our Maquis warlord, they pick up Vidiian signals which indicates Voyager is definitely in their territory. Tom sends Voyager into a plasma drift (you'd think the Vidiian's space snowplows would have taken care of that) to hide from them and pass the Vidiians by. Because this is an undefined phenomenon it can do whatever the script requires.

Back in the nursery, Ens. Wildman's in a lot of pain. At first I figured it was just because the baby's in the fourteenth trimester, or whatever, but it turns out the baby's forehead horns are digging into the uteral wall, risking internal bleeding. Thus the Doctor orders a fetal transport. This is something I'd wondered about ever since Troi got knocked up by an alien, so no surprise there that it exists. I just wonder why it isn't the standard - in Caesarean versus natural child birth, there's disadvantages to both, but the former's are all due to the actual act of surgery, not that the baby wasn't delivered the old fashioned way. None of that would apply to a transporter that literally beams the infant out, which is exactly what the Doctor does. "The transport caused a slight hemocythemic imbalance," the Doctor says, which answers the question by, of course, not answering it. I'm surprised they went even that far: "We can't do that because of, um, quantum." Anyway, the baby's out and judging by the size ready to start preschool.

However, before anything more can be done with that, the ship drops out of warp and the lights flicker. Anti-matter is being drained, but there's no idea from where. Janeway suggest using repeated proton burst to keep the warp core going. "Hogan!" Torres shouts, since there's always time to do a Col. Klink reference. "These proton bursts are going to cause a lot of stress on the hull." From protons? Are we to believe that the ship can survive intense pressures, high temperatures, and colissions, but can be taken out by a spray of hydrogen? And if so, why isn't proton weaponry in use; as we're about to see, it seems to seriously kick Voyager's ass.

There's a proton burst that starts blowing crap up in Engineering and makes the whole ship shake. On top of everything else, the stuff in Sickbay shuts down, because apparently no one thought of putting a back-up power supply for Sickbay. The wounded come in and we finally go to opening credits. Seriously, we don't enter the episode proper until just shy of nine minutes into the show, which is about twenty percent of the entire episode! That's not a teaser, that's the entire first act!

Anyway, as the Doctor tries tending to the wounded, Kes shouts that the osmotic treatment isn't working, that the baby's cell membranes are losing cohesion. What?! So I guess we see why the transporter isn't use to deliver babies: there's a chance the infant can collapse into a puddle of organic soup. That seems like a pretty big negative for the marketing department at Infant Transport Incubators Inc to try to overcome. Compounding the problem is a major coolant leak in the mess hall, since it makes sense to run coolant past the captain's private dining room instead of in engineering where the warp core actually is. To compound matters, the Doctor's imaging array starts to malfunction, so he sometimes fades out and starts dropping delicate medical instruments on the rubble-strewn floor. Eventually, because of the idiotic design of the incubator, the baby dies. Fortunately, they cover the infant rather than just letting the flesh melt off the bones right in plain view.

To deal with the larger problem of these bursts coming out of thin air, Janeway sends Harry down to use a special new forcefield generator. This is, after all, a potentially fatal job, which means it's Harry's duty. He doesn't wear that gold shirt for nothing. There's another burst that takes out Hogan, who along with Torres is assisting Harry. But there are bigger problems, as the floor gives out and Harry gets sucked out into the vacuum of space and dies. Damn! That's way too quick an ending for Janeway.

Kes comes running up the hall to help Hogan while Torres watches, leaning against the wall and silently envying Harry his escape from this ship. As she comes running, she vanishes, complete with a little sci-fi whish sound. Torres picks up a spatial rift with her tricorder, and decides to toss a piece of conduit through it, because what are spatial rifts for if not a place to dispose of your garbage? Things keep getting worse, until finally the bridge catches fire and they're forced to evacuate to engineering.

Incidentally, Tuvok issues the following: "Damage reports are coming in. The hull breach on deck fifteen has widened to include deck fourteen, section twelve. And there are six hundred thirty two micro-fractures along the hull's infrastructure. All primary systems are off-line. We are running on emergency power only. The antimatter supply has dropped to eighteen percent and is continuing to fall. Warp coils in both nacelles have fused and are inoperative. The environmental control systems are failing. 15 crew members have been seriously wounded with plasma burns, twenty seven experienced other injuries. The Doctor is setting up triage facilities in Sickbay and Holodeck two. I must also regretfully report that Ensign Wildman's baby did not survive." Now, I include this because this is a big point both for and against Voyager. For because this is the kind of tension-building stuff we should have: serious damage to the ship, people dead or dying, the bridge in flames, the place a wreck, and help is seventy-five thousand light-years away. Like the opening of Alliances this gives us a glimpse of what life should be like for Voyager out here, instead of the sterility we normally have. But like Alliances, it's going to all be pushed aside at the end of the episode, because Voyager fears upsetting the status quo.

Before Janeway leaves the bridge, she sees ghost images of the crew on the bridge among the flames, acting like nothing is wrong. Thus we learn the truth: they're already dead and in hell. Too good for 'em, I say! The other Janeway on a bridge that's fine sees the other as a ghost image as she runs off the bridge.

This Janeway is confused at what's going on, and obviously she's not the only one. This Voyager's been emitting the proton bursts and its power problems are mostly solved. The baby (for simplicity I'll call her Naomi from now on) is fine, and Janeway coos over it a little before she prepares for her next killing spree. They then check on the unconscious Kes, who's identical to their Kes in practically every way if not for the phase shift in the DNA (let's just leave that, there's plenty more silliness to get through). There's also the piece of conduit that backs up Kes' story once she wakes up, leading Janeway to conclude that there's another Voyager connected through the spatial rift. "If you're right," the Doctor asks, "where is the other ship? A parallel universe? Another dimension? Another point in time?" No, no, nothing so humdrum, that would be too simple.

To look into it, Chakotay, Harry, and Torres take turns spouting technobabble, concluding with the revelation: that there's another Voyager occupying the exact same point in space and time. The two don't interact, except for the rift on deck 15, which is never explained why it's in that spot of all places. Then again, the two interact through proton bursts, which is also never explained. That's the problem - why some things do and not others. Then again, what they do explain is pretty silly. Janeway refers to a Kent State experiment that caused matter to duplicate using a spatial scission, so the plasma drift must have done that and duplicated Voyager. Um, okay, so 700,000 tons of matter literally appeared out of nowhere, with no origin and no energy input? Eat that, thermodynamics!

Apparently, however, there's a limit even to the power of the almighty plasma drift: it can't affect antimatter, which was why it was being drained. Yes, except, that just further emphasizes the silliness of the situation. If the ships are duplicated, shouldn't the antimatter have been split rather than "draining" in between them? The plan then is to contact the other ship and find a way to send Kes back without harming her. Fortunately, Harry has a way to do that, and hey, his last idea only resulted in his own death, so why not let him try?

Torres, meanwhile, is unable to contact the other ship. Why? They're out of phase with each other. Yeah, isn't that always just the way it is? There's a way to get them to communicate if the other ship synchronized their system with Voyager, but to do that they'd need to contact the other ship. Now, the simple and obvious way to do this is to just put the message on something and throw it through the hole (the number of low-tech ways this would work is obvious, like recording an audio message and having a commbadge broadcast it five seconds after it's released). However, why settle for an obvious low-tech solution when we can be less direct? So, Janeway decides to send out a signal on all subspace bands; sure, it'll only sound like a "shrill whistle," but anything she can do to make their counterparts more miserable on their failing ship is a win for her. They use this to eventually be able to communicate, and we soon see Janeway briefing the other senior officers on the situation. There's some suspicion, but Janeway says their counterparts' knowledge seemed too specific. "And her explanation of how the ships were duplicated is certainly plausible," Torres says, reminding us once again of the bredth of her scientific knowledge: that she can't identify crap without a tricorder.

Anyway, they work on a technobabble solution to merge the two ships back together again. That doesn't sound remotely like a good idea. How does the matter link up with its counterpart, and what happens when it does? When a broken conduit and an undamaged one combine, what will happen? Whose experiences will a crewman have, their own or their counterpart's? What happens to Naomi, is she some kind of tiny zombie? What about Harry, whose counterpart is long gone? Well, I'm sure we don't have to worry about any of that because of, um, quantum.

Anyway, this stuff all happens, and we see two blurring Voyagers pass over each other. At first I thought it was the heavy quantitites of liquor I need to consume to get through many episodes, but I realized that wasn't the case (the absence of Gary Coleman's laughing ghost form perched on the table was the first clue, as I knew Gary wouldn't abandon me in my hour of need). There's the usual ship shaking that means "something bad is happening," but instead of merging them it widens the phasing and they lose contact. So, with the power of magic armbands (Braga seems to love magic armbands) Janeway and displaced Kes use those to head back without being knocked out, so Janeway and other Janeway decide to work out what to do. The problem: a breakdown of quantum cohesion. I told you quantum was going to be to blame.

Incidentally, I don't often make accusations of "rip-off," but from the moment the plot was revealed my mind turned to the Red Dwarf episode "Demons and Angles." That involved a replicator-like experiment that went wrong, destroying the original and leaving two copies that would break down if not re-integrated. The difference is that, because the "triplicator" extracted the best and worst of the original, there was essentially a heaven and hell version of each ship, which were capable of interaction. So, morality lesson and a technical experiment error instead of a spatial anomaly and reverse the polarity solution - it's always amusing when Red Dwarf is more like real Trek than the Trek shows themselves.

So, the ideas are thrown out: try separating the ships? Can't, it'd blow them up. Send all the crew from the crippled Voyager to the other one? Can't it'd blow them up. See the pattern? No more than five to ten people can be transferred. So, crippled-ship Janeway prepares for the return of Janeway Pie to destroy her Voyager so the other could get away. The other Janeway argues with her for a while (as we discover, Janeway will argue with herself whenever there are two of her in the same place, which gives you a bit of insight into her character), and finally convinces her to at least wait fifteen minutes so they can come up with a brilliant last minute plan to save both ships.

Oh, and here's another "turn off your brain" Braga moment: both can't exist, right? They'll break down. So, one blows itself up, and then... well, the other is going to break down anyway. Voyager still exists, it just exists as a cloud of debris now. Of course, that won't matter. A Braga mystery is a contradiction in terms, because logic only applies when it's convenient.

Anyway, before that can even get under way, both ships pick up a Vidiian ship closing in on them, and neither have weapons. For some reason, even though they both can see the other ship, the other ship sees only one Voyager, but that's the least of the problems with what's about to happen. They fire a weapon that only hits the undamaged Voyager, and then board that one. What follows is a ship-defensive effort that makes Nemesis look like 300. Tuvok and a security officer with him come out of the turbolift against hostile forces without the least bit of caution - they don't even have their weapons at the ready! And it only gets worse from there. Tom Paris and numerous nameless extras are running away up a corridor, randomly firing back, but they keep running past obvious points of cover, preferring to be out in the middle of the hall while wearing a bright red shirt, a technique whose ineffectiveness was proven when the British lost to an army led by a Virginian surveyor. Needless to say, Paris is soon being scanned for organs to be pilfered.

Well, the two Janeways speak over the comm, and the Janeway with a crew of hamsters says that she'll send Harry and Naomi through the rift to the other Voyager, and then take out the Vidiians using the almighty Janeway Pie. Apparently this is going to have no effect on the other Voyager - just because protons can cross doesn't mean a massive release of energy would, and it's all thanks to, um, quantum. So Harry overcomes the Vidiians in Sickbay (and really, how pathetic is it that the security detail and former Maquis are outdone by Harry?) and grabs the baby from the Doc. "Tell my counterpart that I've corrected all signs of hemocythemia. He'll know what that means." Good, because I don't. So Harry takes off without the magic armband, but with no negative side effects because of, um, quantum. Anyway, the other Voyager blows up itself and the other Vidiian ship, so the remaining Voyager heads on its way. The ship is a complete wreck, but even with practically no power, no hope of outside support, and dozens of crew members seriously injured, it'll all be fixed before the next episode. Somehow whatever invisibility thing it had from the Vidiians will wear off too, but we only know this because future episodes show Voyager can be seen from the outside, not because of any explanation of how it works. In other words, another Brannon Braga script: if you're hoping to be entertained, first turn off your brain.

Rating: 6

Lazarus of the Week: Harry Kim and Naomi Wildman, who were transferred from one phased reality to another to replace their dead counterparts.

Swiss-army Particle Of The Week: Protons, which for some reason can destroy Voyager and fix a warp core.

Janeway Pie: The self-destruct was initiated and successfully used by one phased reality's Janeway.

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