![]() “I mean, this isn’t really my ship, and you’re not really my captain, and yet you are, and there’s no difference,” Harry states in the closing scene. Although Deadlock has a handy reset button that minimises the impact of anything that happened over the course of the episode, this is a ship that lost two of its youngest crew members Harry Kim has always represented the show’s innocence and idealism, and Naomi Wildman is obviously a child of Voyager. Sure, everything is neatly repaired by the start of Innocence, but this ship has been through the wars. There is something quite telling that the Voyager that survives at the end of Deadlock is the broken and damaged version of the ship. Not only do the two Voyagers come into contact with one another, one sacrifices itself so that the other might live. Deadlock seems to allow these internal conflicts to come to a head. “There’s another Voyager out there, and I intend to find it,” Janeway informs her crew Voyager has had a great deal of trouble finding itself over the past two seasons. Indeed, Deadlock makes much of the idea of Voyager searching for itself, of both versions of the ship intersecting and trying to communicate with one another. It is no wonder that Endgame closes the series with an act of erasure. (Even alternate narratives of Voyager in episodes like Worst Case Scenario or Author, Author.) Voyager seems obsessed with alternate versions of itself what might have been in some other life. That is to say nothing of all the alternate timelines and possible futures that span the series. There is the duplicate Doctor in Living Witness, the duplication of the entire crew in Demon, the con artists from Live Fast and Prosper. Many of those versions seem fated to be destroyed, flawed copies that could not survive for more than the briefest of moments. Since Janeway and Torres found themselves confronted by two versions of Voyager in Brannon Braga’s Parallax, the ship has been haunted by ghost versions of itself. ![]() The idea of a duplicate ship or a duplicate self is something of a recurring motif in Voyager, making it remarkable that the show never produced a mirror universe episode. This is, perhaps, why Voyager is so fond of duplicates and copies. Neither can truly coexist with one another. ![]() The other continues the old-school Star Trek analogy, “Like Siamese twins linked at the chest, with only one heart.” It encapsulates a lot of what Voyager feels like at this point in the second season there is one version of the show pushing towards trying new things, and another that is desperately clinging to the familiar. “Both engines have been trying to draw power from a single source of antimatter,” one states. The two versions of Janeway discuss their predicament. Now imagine that one of these shows had to be destroyed so that the other might live, that the ship could never be quite whole again that the version of the ship riding off into the sunset would turn out to be nothing more than an echo, a copy, a duplicate. They are functionally identical, right down to the smallest molecule. Imagine, for a moment, two versions of Voyager coexisting perfectly they look the same, they occupy the same space. It is easy to see why that production team opted for safe and generic ahead of ambitious and experimental.ĭeadlock seems to lend itself to this reading. In contrast, the production team managed to construct a fantastic episode around a generic premise in Deadlock, perhaps indicating that the future of the show lay in that direction. The production team had tried to tell an experimental story specific to Voyager with Investigations, only to fail spectacularly it would be the last time that the show attempted anything so bold. It seems that the end of the second season set the course for the next five years of Voyager. Due to the nature of the high-concept premise, there is little room for detail specific to Voyager. More than that, the episode feels somewhat generic. The trick works very well once it loses any real impact when it is repeated several times over the course of the show’s run. It is, perhaps, the ultimate “reset” button episode it provides a clear template for later “blow up Voyager and kill Janeway” episodes like Year of Hell or Timeless. At the same time, it is hard not to look at Deadlock in retrospect and see the shape of things to come.
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