Suddenly, we’re on the bridge, only it’s pristine. As they evacuate, Janeway sees ghostly images of they crew calmly manning their stations. Just then, Chakotay’s magnetic field collapses. To make a long story short, the ship is all but crippled. At least for the moment, they can breath a bit easier. Chakotay manages to scrape up enough power to magnetize the hull, minimizing the effects of the proton bursts. Janeway orders the deck evacuated as the hull breach widens. Torres scans Kes’s last location and finds a spatial rift with a breathable atmosphere on the other side. But as she runs down the corridor toward them, she simply… disappears. Torres emerges from the tube just as Kes arrives. Torres tried to pull him up the ladder, but he loses his grip and is blown into space. As the hull breach widens, Kim continues to work, keeping at it until the floor literally falls out from under him. They just lost the baby, and Kes gently excuses herself to help Hogan. Hogan, an engineer who accompanied Kim and Torres, is injured and calls for medical assistance. Kim and Torres head into a Jeffries tube to seal the breach. In sickbay, a proton burst disrupts the holoemitters, nearly taking the Doctor offline. When the hull is breached, Kim heads below decks to try and seal it using some experimental force field enhancements he’s been working on. Power fluctuations to the incubator make it difficult to keep the baby stable, to say nothing of the steady stream of medical emergencies walking through the door. These mysterious proton bursts continue to bombard Voyager. Wounded crewmen begin to pour into sickbay. Suddenly, the ship is rocked by proton bursts – not of Torres’s doing. Janeway suggest that Torres try bombarding the warp core with regular proton bursts to keep it online. This knocks the warp drive offline, depleting their antimatter supply and draining power in the process. Less fortunately, Voyager hits a patch of subspace turbulence on the way out of the plasma field. While there are still some minor complications to deal with, both Wildmans should be fine. Meanwhile in sickbay, the delivery gets complicated fortunately, the Doctor is able to beam a baby girl out of Samantha’s womb and into an incubator. Realizing that Voyager is approaching Vidiian territory, Paris looks for alternate routes and suggests they sneak by using the interference from a plasma field to disguise their presence. The mood changes on a dime when long range sensors pick up a mass of Vidiian comm chatter and lifesigns. Seven hours later, Janeway paces nervously as the rest of the bridge crew sits in tense silence. She’s happy to help, but goes into labor as she does so. In the mess hall, Neelix asks an extremely pregnant Ensign Samantha Wildman to take a look at some malfunctioning kitchen equipment. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s see how it turned out! That last element in particular lead Kate Mulgrew to recall the episode as among “the most arduous and possibly the most satisfying work” of her career. Thus, you end up with a dead Kim (for the second time), an unconscious Kes, and two Janeways in the spotlight. The big one, according to Taylor, was to focus the story on specific characters rather than the entire cast. They did, however, take some lessons from that failed ‘Next Generation’ script. Nevertheless, they proceeded with the episode in part because the staff felt the show needed more high concept sci-fi stories at the time. The ‘Voyager’ staff was somewhat hesitant in their initial approach to the story, in part because of their experience with a ‘Next Generation’ episode that similarly dealt with the ship and crew being duplicated (that script was ultimately scrapped). Braga’s initial idea was born of his noted fondness for using sci-fi plot devices to toy with narrative structure (as Jeri Taylor described it, the script was one of Braga’s “intricate little puzzles”). ‘Deadlock’ is a Brannon Braga script, which when you stop to think about it is really the least surprising thing I could have said here. This week we’ll be looking at ‘Deadlock’, a late second season installment of ‘Star Trek: Voyager’. It’s that time again, folks! Yep, another ‘Final Frontier Friday’! Welcome as always to our bi-weekly look back at the finest (and sometimes not-so-finest) hours that ‘Star Trek’ has to offer.
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