Parallax (S1E03)
Airdate: 23 January 1995
Written by: Brannon Braga Directed by: Kim Friedman
Running Time: 46 minutes
Caretaker, Voyager's feature-length pilot, had accomplished the necessary heavy lifting of premise and setup—stranding a Federation starship in the Delta Quadrant, seventy-five years from home, with a crew of uneasy allies comprising Starfleet officers and Maquis rebels. Yet pilots are invariably granted a certain latitude; they may be flashy, expensive affairs that throw everything at the screen to capture attention. The genuine test of a series' viability arrives with its first regular instalment, when the production must demonstrate what the next seven years will actually feel like week-to-week. Parallax, the third episode overall and the first standard-format outing following the opening double-header, carried the considerable weight of expectation upon its shoulders. It served as an important introduction, beginning to more firmly establish character and giving audiences some concrete idea of what they were likely to see during the remainder of the series' run.
Brannon Braga's script wastes no time establishing that the Maquis-Starfleet merger remains decidedly uncomfortable. As the long journey home from the Delta Quadrant begins, two segments of Voyager's crew—the original Starfleet personnel and the Maquis—still have a considerable distance to travel in working out their differences. Within minutes we see the aftermath of physical altercation between B'Elanna Torres and the acting chief engineer Carey (Josh Clark). Tuvok, serving as security officer, demands that she be placed in the brig. Chakotay refuses, naturally, but the episode briefly toys with something more sinister when he is subsequently approached by former Maquis comrades—Crewman Jarvin (played by Justin Williams) and Ensign Seska (the latter portrayed with delicious ambiguity by Martha Hackett)—who suggest an armed takeover of the vessel. Chakotay dismisses such mutinous suggestions outright, opting instead to speak with Janeway and make the case that Torres—despite her temper and having left Starfleet Academy as a cadet—represents the most qualified candidate for Chief Engineer. Janeway is hesitant to make such a drastic move, and her hesitation feels entirely authentic; she finds herself weighing Starfleet protocol against practical necessity in a situation where neither offers clear guidance.
The anomaly plot is textbook Braga—high-concept, slightly cavalier regarding established science, but undeniably gripping in execution. As Voyager passes near a quantum singularity, the crew notices another ship trapped within the singularity's event horizon. Unable to establish contact, they attempt to move closer and engage it with tractor beams, but as a result, Voyager sustains damage. Janeway orders the ship to instead travel to Ilidaria, a planet which, according to Neelix, is technologically advanced enough to provide possible repairs and assistance for the stranded vessel. Yet instead of reaching this destination, Voyager finds itself back within the singularity, obviously having become trapped itself, with the singularity beginning to affect its systems—including the Doctor, whose holographic projection commences shrinking in a rather disconcerting fashion.
The Voyager crew, however, manages to locate the precise point of space where the ship entered the singularity, which would theoretically provide a means of escape. Yet this point has shrunk considerably, and Voyager will not be able to pass through. The solution is offered by Torres, who possesses specific knowledge of singularities, and who volunteers to accompany Janeway in a shuttlecraft whose shields might expand the passage sufficiently. They succeed in expanding the passage, but on the return journey they encounter two Voyagers, of which only one is real, whilst the other is merely a product of the anomaly. Janeway correctly identifies the genuine vessel. Voyager escapes the singularity and the crew commence repairs. Janeway decides to accept Chakotay's suggestion and promotes Torres, who apologises to Lieutenant Carey, who graciously wishes her the best in her new position. The episode concludes with Tom Paris observing the grotesquely shrunken hologram of the Doctor and being visibly amused.
Written by Brannon Braga, a writer known for employing high concepts involving time and space anomalies in Star Trek, Parallax functions predominantly as a "bottle show" that utilises the template of a somewhat generic plot—Voyager getting into trouble—as an opportunity to build upon characters that were not properly established in the pilot. The biggest beneficiary of this approach is undoubtedly B'Elanna, to whom most of the scientific exposition is addressed, but she also serves as an effective illustration for the tensions between Starfleet and Maquis factions, which would continue to serve as a motivating element in early episodes.
The episode also seizes the opportunity to explore how Voyager and its crew would begin adapting to their unenviable situation. Stuck a lifetime away from home, and lacking any infrastructure and support from Starfleet, Janeway and her crew must now improvise, ration energy and supplies, and introduce Kes as an agricultural expert, which transforms one of the cargo bays into a miniature hydroponic farm. Kes appears as the Doctor's assistant, although the script initially proposes Tom Paris as chief medical officer on the somewhat flimsy basis of his having taken two biology courses at the Academy. This particular avenue of plot development is, however, largely abandoned for much of the early seasons.
Kim Friedman directs the episode with competence, and the special effects hold up reasonably well for mid-1990s television standards, but here the biggest asset proves to be the cast—particularly the excellent interaction between Kate Mulgrew and Roxann Dawson during the shuttlecraft scenes. On the other hand, Torres's physical altercation with Carey represents something of a miscalculation, a little too much overkill that renders her character somewhat one-dimensional. The shrinking Doctor, meanwhile, constitutes a little too obvious an attempt at comic relief.
The episode was also criticised for its extensive deployment of technobabble and Brannon Braga's somewhat cavalier attitude to established scientific principles, an issue that the author himself later acknowledged. The technobabble flows freely throughout, occasionally threatening to drown the human drama beneath a torrent of quantum-this and subspace-that.
Nevertheless, it is a solid episode that demonstrated Voyager at the very start possessed a promising future. As a statement of intent—using a bottle-show premise to explore character dynamics rather than simply filling forty-five minutes with jeopardy—it works rather well. It suggested that Voyager understood its best asset was not the anomaly of the week, but the people trapped together attempting to make sense of it all.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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