With the series pilot and its long checklist of character introductions and background-setting behind us, we turn to “Parallax,” the first regular Voyager episode. Let’s dive right in.
Plot synposis: Voyager begins its long journey back home. Right away, tension is evident between the ship’s uptight Starfleet crew and the relatively undisciplined Maquis crew who have joined them. This tension is most evident in the character of Belana Torres, the half-Klingon Maquis engineer who must learn to fit in with her new Starfleet colleagues. As this and other personal dramas unfold, Voyager runs into a spacial anomaly (the first, I suspect, of a great many) and must find a way to escape a black hole.
If Voyager is to take its “far from home” premise seriously, there are a number of topics it will have to address. Among these are food, fuel, and other resource shortages (since there is no friendly starbase at which to resupply) and the inevitable crew issues that will crop up as people come to grips with their extreme isolation from home. One major crisis-in-the-making is the merger of Voyager‘s crew with that of the Maquis vessel (in “Caretaker”). I’m happy to see Voyager leap right into this subject.
“Parallax” breaks out the familiar A/B plot structure to which most Star Trek episodes adhere: two concurrent plotlines, one usually revolving around a threat or challenge to the ship as a whole, and the other around personal drama among the crew. In “Parallax,” the personal drama plotline is solid but the threat-to-the-ship plotline is intensely forgettable.
As the episode begins, Torres (half-Klingon, former Maquis) has lost her temper and gotten violent with the redshirts (actually yellowshirts) in engineering. I figured Torres for the token Feisty Female, but was pleasantly surprised at how feisty she gets; she really lets Janeway have it at points. Former Maquis commander Chakotay also has at it with Janeway as they negotiate a balance of authority on Voyager. By the end of the episode, everybody has learned a Very Important Lesson about respect; Torres and Janeway have done some girly giggling and bonding; Torres has (with astounding speed) mastered her Klingon rage and become chief engineer; and the immediate crisis of mutiny is past.
I was pretty pleased by this plotline, despite its overly neat conclusion. Crew tension is something I want to be periodically reminded about; but I don’t want it to dominate the series. As this episode ends, the two crews are getting along well enough that the show can continue, but there are certainly Federation-vs-Maquis plot seeds that can be exploited in future episodes. There are a few additional scenes involving the other main characters, notably the Doctor, who is featured in a running gag (his holographic form keeps shrinking) that is less funny than the show’s writers think it is.
Janeway has a chance to distinguish her character from both Picard and Sisko here; it turns out she’s downright excitable, almost giddy, when she’s in problem-solving mode. I like it.
Neelix, alas, is quite firmly ensconced in Very Annoying territory. Time will tell if he ever clambers his way out of that black pit of judgment.
Unfortunately, the other plotline—Voyager‘s encounter with a singularity—is less thrilling. It’s your bog-standard situation in which a Space Danger must be escaped through the clever employment of a techno-gibberish deus ex machina. It works like this: the ship is trapped by the spatial anomaly, and the crew sits around brainstorming technical solutions until they finally hit on one that works. The working solution is always something like “Wait—maybe I could recalibrate the warp field emitters to compensate for the gravimetric pulse!” followed by feverish typing at a data console and the swelling of dramatic music.
So when did it start becoming cool to call black holes singularities?
Voyager ultimately escapes the black hole’s gravity pull by, like, punching through a crack in the event horizon or something. I’m a liberal arts major whose only knowledge of black holes is derived from the 1979 documentary, and this sounds ludicrous even to me. Nonetheless, what is irksome about this (and other technobabble solutions) is that it undercuts the enjoyment you normally experience when the heroes solve a challenging puzzle. When a show puts its heroes in danger, it challenges you, the viewer, to imagine how they might escape from it—and when the heroes do escape, they hopefully do so in a clever but believable way that makes you say “Of course, why didn’t I think of that!” But instead of employing conventional problem-solving tactics that would let the viewer play along, Voyager here just asks you to wait until one of the crew comes up with the correct meaningless techno-phrase. I don’t know how you would escape from a black hole, but whatever you’re thinking would be more dramatically compelling than the Voyager strategy of flooding the event horizon with tachyon particles or self-replicating arglebargles or something.
Voyager shoots some stuff at the thing. Hooray, we're saved!
But hey, this is Star Trek, and I promise I’m not going to complain every time somebody saves the ship at the last minute by rerouting power through the auxiliary phase-array capacitors. I’ll just get that off my chest right here at the beginning and get back to enjoying the episode…
…which, despite my grousing, is not half bad. The cheesy technobabble plot is outweighed by the decent acting and interpersonal tension on display in the Torres/Maquis plot.
A few other miscellaneous notes: Voyager looks very prim and proper, with nary a scratch—so they’ve obviously been able to repair the damage they sustained in “Caretaker.” Fair enough, but one wonders how long they can keep up the ship repair and maintenance as the years grind on. I hope this topic is dealt with realistically and not just handwaved away. Likewise, “Parallax” hints at fuel and food shortages (the replicators are said to be not functioning, although I don’t know if that’s a permanent or temporary situation). Do warp engines eventually run out of fuel? Do replicators ever run out of raw material from which to fashion objects? We shall see.
Final verdict: a decent episode that favorably showcases Torres, Janeway, and Chakotay. The spatial anomaly plot is dull and everything still feels awfully casual for a ship that is supposed to be lost 75 years from home and running out of food; but the good outweighs the bad.
Grade: B