Deadlock
- FIRST SHOWN (US)
- 18 March 1996
- ON
- UPN
- STARDATE
- 49548.7
- DIRECTED BY
- David Livingston
- PRODUCTION NO.
- 137
WRITTEN BYWritten by Brannon Braga
Slipping through a plasma drift to avoid the Vidiians, Voyager is battered by proton bursts from nowhere, crew members start dying, and Janeway glimpses something impossible on her own bridge.
Red alert: the full plot, ending included. Haven't watched yet?REVEAL SYNOPSIS
To avoid Vidiian territory, Voyager crosses a plasma drift just as Ensign Samantha Wildman goes into a difficult labour. The ship is soon hammered by proton bursts from an unknown source. Hull breaches kill crew members, Harry Kim among them, Kes vanishes through a strange rift, and the newborn Wildman baby dies when sickbay loses power. The cause proves stranger than any attack: a spatial scission has duplicated the ship and its crew, and the two Voyagers are drawing on the same antimatter supply. One ship is crippled, the other almost untouched, and they cannot be merged. The two Janeways compare notes and debate which ship should be sacrificed. Then Vidiians board the intact Voyager to harvest organs. Its Janeway sends her Harry Kim through the rift with the healthy baby, then sets the self-destruct, destroying her ship and the boarders, and leaving the damaged Voyager to carry on.
- 01David Livingston's brisk pacing left the episode several minutes short, so around another day and a half of extra scenes had to be filmed.
- 02Kate Mulgrew described acting opposite herself in split-screen as some of the hardest, and most satisfying, technical work she had ever done.
- 03References to Kent State University are an in-joke: it was Brannon Braga's old university. The Wildman baby is not named Naomi until “Basics, Part II”.