It's midday aboard Voyager, and Neelix is serving tea to a very pregnant Ensign Wildman. He ropes her into doing some tech support around the galley, until she suddenly goes into labor and is rushed off to Sickbay.
With nothing else to do, the bridge crew is waiting with bated breath for news about the ship's first baby, until Tuvok reports that they are approaching a heavily trafficked Vidiian system. Voyager redirects into a nearby plasma drift to avoid what would certainly be a fatal confrontation.
A complication with Wildman's delivery, caused by the baby's forehead ridges, forces the Doctor to perform a fetal transport. Apart from an easily treated hemocythemic imbalance, the delivery is a complete success.
A jolt to the ship immediately follows, and Voyager begins to lose antimatter — and thus main power — for no apparent reason. Janeway suggests a sequence of proton bursts might work as a stop gap, but before Torres can prepare, the ship starts being hit repeatedly... by proton bursts?
Coming seemingly from nowhere, the bursts wreak havoc on the ship. Casualties flood into Sickbay as the brutal pounding tears at the hull and internals alike. Torres has no explanation for the source of the proton bursts, since she never had time to start them, though she sees something rather unexpected when Kes, rushing to help a wounded Hogan, suddenly disappears through an unseen barrier.
The Bridge finally manages to stem the damage by magnetizing the hull, but whatever relief this buys them is small comfort next to the enormous litany of damage Tuvok has to report. Severe hull damage, no power, inoperable warp coils, failing environmentals, tens of casualties, and two deaths... Harry Kim, and Ensign Wildman's newborn child.
The reprieve doesn't last. Before Janeway can finish giving out new orders, the hull magnetization fails and the furious assault resumes. The Bridge itself becomes the next victim, forcing the command crew to evacuate to Engineering. As Janeway is leaving, she sees ghostly images of herself and the crew, sitting in their usual places. Then, from another bridge, another Janeway looks back at a similar, but much more haggard silhouette.
The Janeway from the pristine, undamaged Bridge immediately reports what she saw and orders a not-dead Ensign Kim to scan for anomalies. She then goes to Sickbay to check on Wildman's equally not-dead daughter, and the unconscious figure of the Kes who disappeared from the damaged ship.
When the duplicate Kes regains consciousness and recounts her story, things start to make sense. Voyager hit a divergence field in the nebula that caused all matter — but not antimatter — to be duplicated. Meaning there are now two ships and two crews, linked by the spatial rift on Deck 15 that Kes fell through, but with only one source of energy to sustain them.
Janeway's first order of business is to stop the proton bursts that are tearing their twin apart, but now it's a race against time with their power rapidly hemorrhaging. The two ships establish communication to coordinate a solution to their predicament. When their first attempt to merge the ships back together fails, the two captains meet in person to brainstorm alternatives. They can't merge the ships without both blowing up. They can't separate the ships without both blowing up. They can't move the crew of one ship to the other without both blowing up. The captain of the damaged ship tells her counterpart to return so they can try the merge again, but the latter sees through her: she's going to destroy her ship to save the other.
The healthy Janeway convinces her partner to give her 15 more minutes to work the problem back on her ship. Before they can come up with anything, a massive Vidiian warship discovers them, eager to find their prey so helpless.
It seems only the intact Voyager is visible to the attackers, but without power or weapons, it is defenseless against such a huge opponent. The Vidiians board their ship with overwhelming numbers, cutting through the crew with impunity. With no hope of repelling them, Janeway orders Kim to find Wildman's baby and take her to the other Voyager, then initiates the self-destruct sequence.
The Doctor has been hiding the child from the Vidiians in a corner of Sickbay, just long enough to be rescued by a dramatic ambush from Kim. He takes her with him to Deck 15 and crosses over to the other Voyager. Moments later, the Vidiians reach the Bridge of his former ship just in time to see the final seconds of the countdown.
The ship explodes, taking the Vidiians with them and leaving the remaining ship behind — still damaged, but alive, with its crew intact, and enough power to recover and continue on its way.
This episode provides examples of:
- Action Survivor: When Harry praises the Doctor for saving the baby he comments dryly, "I am programmed to be heroic when the need arises."
- Bait-and-Switch: It looks like the damaged duplicate Voyager will be sacrificed, but then Vidiian soldiers swarm the other, intact Voyager.
- Battle Discretion Shot: The Vidiians break into Sickbay. After cutting to what's happening on the bridge, we cut back to an unconscious DamagedVoyager!Kes laid out on a biobed.
- Big "NO!": IntactVoyager!Harry when he encounters the empty maturation chamber, thinking the Vidiians have taken the baby. Fortunately that lets the Doctor, who's hiding with the baby, know he's there.
- Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Tuvok of course has to one-up the humans when he says his wife was in labor for four days. No wonder Vulcans only have sex every seven years!
- Boarding Party: The Vidiian boarding party outnumbers the crew of the Intact Voyager by at least 2-to-1, making it quite clear that defeat is inevitable.
- Call-Back: IntactVoyager!Harry wondering whether he is "really" Harry at the end parallels Future!O'Brien's musings at the end of DS9's "Visionary".
- Casting a Shadow: A much larger Vidiian warship casts a menacing shadow over Voyager as it moves into position above them. It's a shadow IN SPACE!
- Character Development: As the attack continues, Samantha asks the Doctor if her baby is going to die. Instead of the unemotional response he would have given earlier in his life, he tells her, "Not if I can help it!"
- Chekhov's Gun: Voyager detects a Vidiian system nearby and changes course to avoid it. Guess who shows up for the climax...
- Cold Equation: Two Voyager's, one severely damaged. Attempting to fully separate them would destroy both vessels. Trying to evacuate the crew through the rift joining them would destabilize it to the same result. So when DamagedVoyager!Janeway, tells her counterpart to go back to her own vessel, they both realise she intends to blow up her own ship to preserve the other.
- Cut the Juice: Both Voyager's are sharing the same anti-matter supply. This leaves them helpless when the Vidiian warship turns up, as they've no power for weapons or shields.
- Cuteness Proximity: Everyone reacts as expected to the baby, even the Doctor.
- Dead Alternate Counterpart: Ensign Wildman's daughter and Harry, both of whom had their DamagedVoyager selves killed off while their selves from the intact Voyager take their places on the damaged Voyager. The scene of Harry going to Sickbay to rescue baby Wildman seems to indicate that IntactVoyager!Samantha may have already been killed by the Vidiians.
- Death Is Cheap: DamagedVoyager!Harry dies by being cast out into space, then DamagedVoyager!Samantha's baby dies. Then the entire IntactVoyager crew dies, except for IntactVoyager!Harry and IntactVoyager!Baby Girl Wildman who are carried to the damaged Voyager.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: Deck 15 in this episode is portrayed as just another standard looking deck with standard doors, carpet, and Jefferies Tubes, even though it is at the bottom of the ship. In the later episode "Good Shepherd", Deck 15 is a utility deck that looks less comfortable and more mechanical in design (though it's possible those are just two separate areas of Deck 15 shown in either episode).
- Escort Mission: Harry is ordered to haul a baby through 10 decks, while avoiding hundreds of Vidiian invaders, in 5 minutes before the ship explodes.
- Expendable Alternate Universe: Apparent both In-Universe and out.
- In-Universe, though both Janeways obviously want to save both crews, it becomes apparent that there is no such solution, so the Janeway of the damaged Voyager pragmatically decides to make the Heroic Sacrifice. The ironic twist is that her ship turns out to be the lucky one when the unstoppable Vidiian warship comes for the other.
- Out-of-universe, the duplication of Voyager did not include the crew's Plot Armor. Several main characters die, though only one of each, and the surviving ship's losses (Harry and Naomi) are replaced by their counterparts from the doomed ship before it is destroyed.
- Explosive Decompression: Poor Harry.
- Explosive Instrumentation: All over the place.
- Face Death with Dignity: Janeway and the rest of the doomed Voyager crew face their imminent explosion with supreme stoicism.
- Generation Ship: Nope — this is the first baby born on Voyager, and the last until the final episode.Janeway: Voyager isn't exactly anyone's idea of a nursery, and the Delta Quadrant isn't much of a playground.
Chakotay: My father had a saying, Captain. Home is wherever you happen to be. - Heroic Sacrifice:
- When Kim and Torres are working to repair the hull breach on Deck 15, Torres realizes they don't have enough time to both repair it and get out alive. She orders Kim to get away from the ever-widening breach, but he ignores her, saying he just needs a little bit more time — then the ship is hit with a large jolt, causing him to lose his footing and be killed as he is blown out into space.
- Due to there being two Voyagers drawing from the same power source, one needs to be destroyed for either to make it out in one piece. The doomed Voyager also takes out the Vidiians with it, self-destructing while they're ransacking the place.
- Hollywood Tactics: The crew shows remarkably poor discipline when defending the ship from the Vidiians. Even Tuvok gets taken out, because he and his backup both check the same direction coming out of a turbolift instead of them each looking one way.
- Hologram Projection Imperfection: The Doctor has an Oh, Crap! moment when a power loss causes him to flicker and drop his tricorder just as he's trying to cope with a flood of casualties into Sickbay.
- Infinite Supplies: Averted; the ship's matter has been duplicated, but its anti-matter has not, which means two ships are draining power from a single warp drive.
- Improbable Infant Survival: Subverted with the death of the newborn Naomi on the damaged Voyager, but then Double Subverted (in a sense) when her IntactVoyager counterpart is rescued.
- In the Back: How Tom Paris gets shot, during a running battle in the corridors.
- Internal Homage: To Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. A Vidiian boarding party reaches the duplicate Voyager's bridge only to be greeted by the last seconds of a self-destruct countdown, although unlike Kirk and company, Janeway and the bridge crew had stayed aboard.
- I Surrender, Suckers: Apart from Harry Kim escaping with Naomi Wildman, the intact Voyager just sits back and lets the Vidiians come on board their ship...just before it self-destructs.
- Longest Pregnancy Ever: The writers appeared to forget that the first mention of Wildman's pregnancy in "Elogium" wasn't actually when the baby was conceived, which was before the show even started. This was Handwaved in later episodes by the child being a Half-Human Hybrid, which basically doubled the gestation period.
- Match Cut: From Torres entering commands into a console, to the alternate Torres doing the same.
- Maternity Crisis: Averted; things start going to hell the moment after the baby is born.
- The Medic: Kes has to fulfil this role because the Doctor can't leave Sickbay. When she vanishes, Tom has to leave the conn to help out the Doctor (it's not like they're going anywhere).
- Mood Whiplash: Captain Janeway is forced to evacuate the destroyed bridge, but is startled to see a ghostly image of herself and the other Bridge crew calmly sitting in their seats. We then cut to that crew, on an intact bridge, with Janeway staring at a ghostly image of herself "looking like hell". This is our first indication of there being two Voyager's.
- MST3K Mantra: In-Universe by Captain Janeway when Harry suffers an existential crisis about whether he's really Harry Kim or just a copy of him, leading Janeway to tell him that he's real enough, and add the following zinger:Janeway: Mr. Kim, we're Starfleet officers. Weird is part of the job.
- Negative Space Wedgie: The subspace divergence field, aka spatial scission.
- No Time to Explain
- Oh, Crap!:
- The Doctor looks appropriately horrified when a proton burst hits and his program briefly fritzes out.
- By the time the Vidiians realize Janeway has initiated and muted the self-destruct sequence, they've boarded the bridge with mere seconds left.
- Point of Divergence: The duplication was completely unnoticed by either side, and thus both crews were completely normal until they identified the anti-matter leak. Both determined the same action to try and stop it, but one got to it a second faster. The resulting "repairs" is what caused significant damage to the other Voyager.
- Race Against the Clock: Harry Kim is ordered to haul a baby through 10 decks in 5 minutes before the ship explodes.
- Reset Button: In an episode featuring a pristine Voyager and a damaged Voyager, the one beaten to hell is the one that survives. We see repairs consisting of crewmen replacing bulkhead panels in a well-lit corridor with clean carpets, and by the next episode everything is perfectly fine.
- Running Gag: The DamagedVoyager!Doctor asks if his IntactVoyager counterpart had decided on a name.
- Screaming Birth: Justified when you're giving birth to a Half-Human Hybrid with forehead spikes. Even more justified when the baby manages to position herself incorrectly and those spikes dig into your uterus. Somehow, "ouch" doesn't seem to cover it.
- Self-Destruct Mechanism: When it becomes clear that the Vidiians are going to succeed in their takeover, the Janeway on the intact Voyager initiates the self-destruct and destroys the ship (notably marking the only time in an episode of the TV series that a self-destruct isn't aborted).
- Status Quo Is God: Janeway orders Harry and the baby over to the damaged Voyager to replace the ones they've lost, before blowing up the ship. On a vessel crawling with hundreds of Vidiian soldiers, they make it unharmed.
- Stealth in Space: It all comes about because Voyager has strayed into Vidiian space and tries to hide inside a "plasma drift" (whatever that is).
- Suspiciously Small Army: It's a bit confusing as to why small groups of Voyager crew are getting curbstomped by equally small groups of Vidiians in corridor shoot-outs. Then we cut to the bridge, where Chakotay asserts that hundreds of Vidiians are swarming the ship, twice the number of Starfleet crewmen. We'll just have to take his word for it.
- Take My Hand!: Harry has the Jeffries tube blow out to vacuum beneath him, leaving him hanging by a rung. B'Elanna grabs his other hand but he slips out of her grip and out into space.
- Taking You with Me: The Voyager that explodes takes out the Vidiians as well.
- Technobabble: Doubled, what with two Captain Janeway's and Chief Engineer Torres's on screen.
- Textile Work Is Feminine: Captain Janeway mentions that she's been making a blanket for the baby.
- That's an Order!: When IntactVoyager!Harry balks at crossing over to the damaged Voyager, leaving everyone else to die as Janeway sets off the Self-Destruct Mechanism.Janeway: Harry, you've got five minutes. Get the baby.
Harry: But Captain—
Janeway: Move it, Ensign! That's an order! - That's What I Would Do: This trope works better than usual when you're dealing with yourself.Janeway: You're going to self-destruct your ship.
Janeway: What makes you say that?
Janeway: Because that's what I would do if your Voyager were intact and my Voyager were crippled. - Trash the Set: But don't worry, it'll all be fixed by next week.
- Unnecessary Combat Roll: Ensign Kim ducks a phaser blast with a combat roll and comes up shooting.
