Lineage

DVD, Voyager S7 (Lineage)

"Anticipate paradox" is Tuvok's parenting advice, and as usual for a Vulcan, he sums it up concisely. The paradox should have been anticipated for the pregnancy also as B'Elanna takes her childhood resentments to new levels. The flashback scenes give us a sight of her father - we'd already seen mother Miral the previous season. It was terribly sad just how much B'Elanna saw herself as the reason he left them, but reassuring that Tom is able to get through her irrationalities. It was also a pleasant moment to have her ask the Doctor, an artificial lifeform, to be the Godfather, and he was clearly touched by the gesture.

The characters in this series have suffered at the hands of too many bland science fiction tales, and it's been rare for it to mix character and story, at least in the last two seasons. Again, the writers aren't proving otherwise, and the purely character-based storyline veers dangerously over into soap opera, but doesn't fall. I wish they could tie the two elements together, but even so, this episode has a good centre to it. I enjoyed the opening scene in which Icheb assumes the baby inside B'Elanna is an alien parasite, the writers playing on our knowledge of previous examples such as the one which attaches itself to her in 'Nothing Human'. Tom's interactions with Tuvok and Kim are also fun. And now we have another crewmember on the way. It's strange that there haven't been more babies born on the journey, but maybe the regs are still strictly observed?

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