Star Trek: Voyager: Delta Flyers argue that Harry Kim was an original in Deadlock

The Delta Flyers podcast tackled the Star Trek: Voyager episode Deadlock and argued that every member of Voyager died but Harry Kim.

Star Trek: Voyager had some really great episodes, something the Delta Flyer podcast tries to remind us of every week. On this week’s version of the Delta Flyers, Robert Duncan McNeill and Garrett Wang talked about the episode “Deadlock”, the 21st episode of season two. McNeill and Wang, who played Tom Paris and Harry Kim respectively, watched “Deadlock” for their weekly Delta Flyers podcast and talked about which version of Voyager was the reason version.

For those who haven’t seen this episode, it explores a phenomenon where Voyager is seemingly split into two different ships. One that’s besieged by the Vidiians and one that’s not. They’re seemingly held together by proton bursts that are subsequently binding the two ships and damaging each other at the same time. After several attempts to solve the issue, the two ships further fall out of phase, and the subsequent phase separation threatens to destroy both ships. Hinting that one needs to be destroyed to save the other.

Ultimately, one ship of Voyager crew gets killed, making the decision as to which one easy. The only ones left from that ship is Harry Kim and the infant Naomi Wildman. On the other ship, Harry Kim gets sucked into space and the infant Naomi Wildman dies after being born.

This is where the debate begins and gets truly tricky. The question of “which ship was the real one” is asked and it leads into some interesting thought process. Both ships are “real”, that’s not in doubt but which ship has the series been following for two years, if there is just one?

McNeill argues that both ships are the “real/true” one and that they were split at a certain point in the episode, so they’re both the same yet are experiencing different versions of events. McNeill though theorizes that because both Voyagers were trying feeding off of the same energy in the engine, that the one that had the engine working could be presumed to be the “original”, while the “copy” is the one that can’t pull the energy and whose ship is falling apart.

In this hypothesis, that would mean the second ship is the “real” ship and the first ship is the “copy”.

The more pristine ship or ship #2 eventually gets bordered by the Vidiians, and everyone but Harry Kim and the infant Naomi Wildman is killed. Yet on the first ship, the one that’s wrecked, Harry Kim and Naomi Wildman both died. So the end of the episode sees Janeway sending Kim over with the infant Wildman from the second ship to the first ship.

If McNeill’s belief is true, that would mean that every character from the pilot but Harry Kim died in this episode. Even Wang is wanting to support the idea, claiming that he always gets told by fans at conventions that his character was the duplicate from this point on, but now he can cite this argument in defense of Kim being the original, and everyone else is the copy.

Ultimately though, McNeill believes both the ships were real.