'Vis a Vis'

Stardate: Unknown
Written By: Robert J Doherty
Directed By: Nancy Malone
Rating: **1/2 (out of 5)

An alien, experimenting with a new Warp Drive, requests assistant and is helped by Tom to fix his ship.  Liking the sound of Tom�s life, the alien takes control of Tom�s body and assumes his identity.

There�s isn�t much wrong with �Vis a Vis�. It doesn�t serve any purpose or isn�t terribly exciting, but it isn�t offensive and is tolerable as fluff and filler go.

So after all the excessive damage, the holodecks work perfectly, and I noticed sick-bay is perfectly normal.  Oh, how good those Starfleet Engineers are, especially the ones that survived �The Killing Game.�  I guess this took more than a month after those events.  I would�ve liked just a mention.

I actually liked the idea of an alien switching forms, and also an alien taking Tom�s form, and playing around with his life.  I also liked how he ended up hating that life.

There are some nice scenes strewn around as we see Tom;�s life unfold for Steth, or whoever it is, and as he tries to fit in and deal with certain situations.

I also noticed the enhanced CGI.  It looked beautiful, especially the shape-changing effect, and the �darker� Voyager looked great.  The other CGI was great, but some of the alien ships effects looked a bit too �molded� or plastic for it to look very realistic.  But I like seeing the experimenting the CGI artists are doing.

You may have noticed that I am complementing quite a lot on this episode, so what is the problem with it?  Well, the problem is that those are the only things I found appealing.  The rest of the episode was very boring, slow, and obvious. 

Who couldn�t tell that Janeway wasn�t the alien after that Ready Room scene?  And it was also obvious what was going to happen in the story.  You knew that Steth wasn�t who he claimed, is it ever that easy?  We knew that Tom was going to get into trouble with Steth, we knew that everything would work out well and the imposter would be found and we knew that the end was going to have B�Elanna and Tom happy in the car at the end.  Well, I knew anyway.

The episode marched on with B�Elanna and Tom drivel that wasn�t very interesting, nor served any purpose in the long run.  And the end, yes sure that <tech> would do perfectly to disrupt the Warp Drive, good thinking Tom ole� chap!  And talking of good talents, the Doc sure did a good job reversing the process, as Janeways log says, didn�t Janeway-shapeshifter say that she can reverse the process, but the Captains log says the Doc did it?

I liked the guy that played Steth, and he acted Tom Paris, as Steth, out quite well.  I kept imagining Paris talking instead of Steth and the actor did a god job there.

Okay, maybe it wasn�t all that bad, it did have some worthy elements to it.  But at the end of the day �Vis a Vis� is simply an extremely average and typical, episode.