Paris and B’Elanna get married in the mess hall; all of the crew is there; it’s a surprise and a great celebration. But soon afterward, the crew begins to get sick and develop lesions, and the ship is demolecularizing rapidly. Chakotay and Tuvok trace back to find the incident that started the degradation and tie it to Voyager’s interaction with the demon planet in the episode ‘demon’. Scans of a few crewmembers reveal that they are not who they think they are; they are the identical copies that were created at the end of the episode and are seen standing on the planet. The ship also is a copy, and the attempt to get away from the planet is going to be unsuccessful; their physiology requires a demon class planet environment. But, as identical copies, they were trapped in the same thinking patterns as the original crew. With this new knowledge, ‘Janeway’ attempts to find another demon class planet, but the one they find holds hostile aliens that attack and turn them away. Janeway turns the ship around and heads back toward the demon planet, but before they can get there, the entire ship and crew dematerialise and vanish, just a few scant seconds before encountering the real Voyager and crew – and so their existence and attempted escape remains a secret.
This is a very clever episode, a sneaky, hard-to-solve mystery, with a few big unfortunate nits.
Nit#1: It was sneaky not to show the alternative Voyager at the end of the original ‘demon’ episode – where did they exact replica of the ship come from?
Nit#2: In ‘demon’, when the real Voyager and crew left the planet, the copies were watching and waving. Why did they forget this memory and seemingly lose all knowledge that there were copies and that there was another Voyager?
Nit#3: Shouldn’t a routine medical examination of one or more crewpersons have revealed their unusual physiology not long into their flight?
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