Amazon.com
The first post-premiere episode of
Voyager finds Captain Janeway's forced experiment with merging Starfleet personnel and Maquis rebels aboard her starship a rocky affair indeed. Case in point: B'Elanna Torres (Roxann Biggs-Dawson), the fiery half-Klingon and Starfleet dropout-cum-terrorist, is routinely punching out colleagues. Despite that, First Officer Chakotay (Robert Beltran), himself a Maquis leader, presses a dubious Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) into putting Torres in charge of engineering.
Everybody gets behind a common problem, however, when Voyager encounters a black hole and detects the ghostly presence of another vessel trapped within--which turns out to be, rather ominously, a time-warped reflection of Voyager itself. Written by series producer Brannon Braga (from a story by Deep Space Nine contributor Jim Trombetta), "Parallax" makes the most of an inherent tension among the characters in the early days of the show. But there's also comic relief from the holographic doctor (Robert Picardo), whose malfunctioning program is causing him to shrink, and the juicy revelation that Chakotay and his former Maquis comrade Seska (Martha Hackett) were once lovers. Ah, 24th-century gossip. --Tom Keogh
From the Back Cover
As the crew tries to adjust to the merging of Starfleet and Maquis personnel, the ship is suddenly jolted. Voyager has come upon a quantum singularity- a star that has collapsed in upon itself, creating a powerful surrounding energy field. The crew believes another ship to be in jeopardy and tries to save it from destruction, only to trap themselves in the singularity. After several failed attempts to escape, Janeway and B'Elanna discover that the other ship caught in the distortion is just a mirror image of Voyager. The rip in the singularity that they entered through must be found and exited before it collapses, forever trapping them.
