What’s it about: Our first temporal anomaly! And its written by Brannon Braga! Hepburn-a-Like: I’m not sure if Janeway is a bit too officious to be likable as a representative for what Starfleet stands for at this point in the series. Whilst she makes some good points about the need for cohesion and loyalty on the ship she has hardly earned the right to expect it yet and without giving the Marquis members a chance to prove themselves it hardly seems fair to criticise them on past mistakes. Nice to see she got some balls (if you’ll pardon the phrase) and orders them to punch through the anomaly.
Tattoo: Chakotay chews out B’lanna for misbehaving and then informs her she will be Chief Engineer. As written this is a great scene but Robert Beltran doesn’t quite have the authority to pull it off convincingly.
Brilliant B’lanna: I love Torres’ way of handling a difference of opinion – giving Carey a bloody nose! When she tells Janeway her problem at the Academy was a system that didn’t give her the chance to breathe I could have kissed her. Its great to see Janeway and Torres breaking ground and getting excited as they work through a mountain of technobabble together but surely there was a more exciting way to make this work than defeating an anomaly. It’s great for the audience and the character to hear how many people supported Torres at the academy especially considering how much of a chip on her shoulder she has about it. B’lanna is surprisingly magnanimous in her success at earning the Chief Engineer role, if it had been me who was spoken to so rudely by Carey I would have rubbed his (preferably bloody) nose in it.
EMH: He is made up of 200 memories and 47 individuals so if there’s anybody you want around in a medical crisis it’s the EMH. However his bedside manner leaves a lot to be desired. Crusher would bore you to death, Bashir will try and shag you and the EMH will insult you – great choice of Doctors! They never thought the Doctor would be around long enough to warrant a name and it takes him seven years to think of one.
Sparkling Dialogue: ‘I’ll try not to break any of their noses.’
The Good: Tuvok mentions the Captain having the authority to put people on trial for misconduct which is an interesting angle to have to take when so far away from the nearest Federation court. Rumours of the Marquis being thrown in the brig and talk of mutiny…this is more like it! Talk of growing their own food and assigning crew members to certain jobs is very healthy, nice to see some thought going into their situation.
There’s a fascinating conversation between Janeway and Chakotay about integrating the Marquis into the crew. The Marquis don’t have the training and haven’t earned the right to be in senior positions but they have the ability to get them out of tight spots whereas the Federation officers have worked their butts off to get where they are and might find it hard accepting orders from terrorists. Really interesting stuff and soon to be forgotten. Martha Hackett already stands out more than most of the crew as Seska. Torres tells Janeway that if she picks the wrong Voyager then they will have a long time to debate it. Imagine that? Just Janeway and Torres in a shuttlecraft exploring the Delta Quadrant! Jettisoning Chakotay, Neelix, Harry Kim and the flying toilet lid in one swoop! If only… The Bad: Voyager doesn’t trust itself enough to give this episode over to the growing tension amongst the crew and so shoves in a technobabble strewn subplot that goes nowhere and chews up time that could be better spent exploring the characters some more. The Doctor turning into a dwarf and Harry Kim’s headaches are hardly the most gripping of side effects for the anomaly of the week. The singularity turns out to be a mirror through time – how dull. Our first encounter with another species after the pilot turns out to be…Voyager! B’lanna makes Chakotay’s name sound like a Chinese town. What the hell is up with that horrible scene at the end with the midget Doctor standing on a chair? Its pulled off again to far better comic effect in Persistance of Vision.
Result: Nice to see that the Marquis repatriation is given some consideration and it’s a relief that Parallax spends half of its running time focussing on Torres because she takes our mind off the debut of the Voyager cliché, the temporal anomaly. You’ve got a tale of two halves here that splits its time between character and technobabble with the former providing a great deal of interest (especially the Janeway/Chakotay scenes which were rarely better) and the latter seeing agonising scenes of nonsensical gobbledegook. Why Neelix and Kes make an appearance is unclear, its clearly a contractual rather than a narrative necessity and exposes a flaw in Star trek that sees extraneous regular characters having to be shoehorned into episodes where they don’t belong. Parallax sees the show running on the spot storytelling wise but at least continues to explore its cast with some interest: 6/10
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