I really appreciated that they waited long enough on this episode that I had forgotten about the duplicate Voyager crew they created on the Demon Planet. I did find it a little odd that Janeway talked about the enhanced warp drive rather than the transwarp coils they had two episodes ago, but I kinda glossed over it. Also starting with Tom and B'Elanna getting married seemed a little out of the blue, but also not particularly out of character for the two of them. After they figure out what is really going on it seemed a bit unreasonable for Janeway to still want to head for earth, but then again that has been her driving force for so long that it makes sense that even a copy of her would be so driven. I also like that in the end they leave essentially no trace of having existed. Sure it is a bummer, but it is also more realistic than much of Trek.
We open with the marriage of Paris and Torres but after the wedding when the rice is thrown we see it falling through the bulkhead into a twisted and moving Jeffries tube below. Their new warp drive will get them home in 2 years so the crew are in fine spirits. Torres is working to get Seven up to speed so she and Paris can have a honeymoon when something goes wrong with the engine and Torres opens the panel to find the same twisting distorted space as we saw in the opening. Torres gets to work but starts feeling bad and that night she gets very cold and then collapses in her quarters. Paris finds her and takes her to sickbay but it is too late, she dies with some strange distortions on her face. They start looking for a cause as it seems everything on the ship is suffering from the same distortions but it is the worst for people in engineering. Eventually Tuvok figures it out, they are the copies from the Demon Planet and the radiation from the enhanced warp drive is damaging them since they aren't actually what they appear to be.
The crew takes the news that they are all copies pretty hard but Janeway is still determined to head for home. But the sickness rapidly spreads through the ship and even the ship starts to fall apart. Chakotay passes away but not before talking Janeway into heading back to the Demon Planet. They start that way but it is getting really bad. Eventually it is just Kim and Seven and they work on a plan to leave a time capsule of their logs as evidence they existed. But it all goes to hell and the ship destroys itself just after they detect the real Voyager. Cut to actual Voyager where they detected the distress call but by the time they arrive it is just a cloud of amorphous debris that gets a note in the log before they move on.
Review: About as close to a Philip K. Dick story as we have ever really had in Star Trek other than maybe the DS9 where it turns out O'Brien is the even copy of himself. A bit odd, but in a way I really enjoyed.
8 out of 10
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