4x20 Vis à Vis

[4.5/10] I appreciate what “Vis à Vis" is trying to do here. You could tell a compelling story about the typically rebellious and freewheeling Tom Paris realizing he’s settled into a normal, respectable life and bristling at that a little bit. There’s something interesting about the idea of someone having a good life, but engaging in self-sabotage because they’re used to a certain stray dog freedom and worry about losing that. And realizing the value of that “normal” life when someone tries to steal it from you could be a good way to dramatize Tom’s epiphany that what he has is more than worth holding onto.

But there’s two big problems with the episode’s approach. The first is that “Vis à Vis" does a terrible job of depicting Tom’s anxieties about settling down. The second is that the whole body swap/body theft angle they use to explore it is dull and near-nonsensical.

To the first point, it’s appropriate that the episode begins with Tom in his “Grease Monkey” program working on a classic car, because his predicament plays at about the level of Home Improvement. It’s like the writers picked the biggest “manchild frets over settling down” cliches and deploys them in sequence.

He’d rather work on cars than do his job! He’s effectively quiet quitting at work, with Chakotay commenting on him not putting the same effort in. He’s missing appointments with his colleagues and his girlfriend! He’s sniping at B’Elanna for expressing concern over him! He’s griping at anyone and everyone because he just can’t be a part of your system, man.

It’s superficial and exhausting. This isn’t something the Voyager writers made up. Plenty of rule-breaking, lone wolf teenagers and twenty-somethings find themselves accepting a more traditional life, while worrying about what they might be losing in the process. (Hello Big Chill fans!) There’s real life analogues this episode could easily have pulled from. But nothing about it feels real. Everything is surface-level and overblown, to where Tom feels less like a person and more like a cardboard cut out that this particular idea is stapled onto.

But hey, sometimes a cheap setup can still succeed with a brilliant concept, and there’s merit in the plotting of Steth, the alien visitor who, unbeknownst to the Voyager crew, can effectively swap bodies with compatible hosts. Thematically, there’s an interesting hook with Steth being so envious of the comparatively charmed, comfortable life that Tom leads that Steth (or whatever his actual name may be) is willing to try to steal it from him.

From there, though, things practically fall off a cliff. Let’s start with the easy criticism -- none of this seems plausible. I don’t mean Steth’s body-swapping abilities. That’s a little convenient, but well within acceptable tolerances for Star Trek’s brand of science fiction. What’s implausible is that Steth could slip into Tom’s life without anybody realizing for this long.

You can try to make excuses for it. Maybe since Steth has done this before, he knows the tricks to convince people he is who he says he is. Except when we see him interacting with Janeway, or B’Elanna, or the Doctor, he never seems particularly convincing as someone pulling a con. If anything, he’s conspicuously off, which I assume is meant to signal to the audience that Steth is in charge, but also makes Tom’s friends and surrogate family seem like dopes for not catching on sooner. (Lest we forget, they already dealt with this sort of thing in season 1’s “Cathexis”!)

It doesn’t help that Robert McDuncan McNeill isn’t very good in the role. I want to cut him some slack. It’s tricky playing someone else trying to play your usual character. But his attempt at portraying Dan Butley portraying Steth portraying Tom Paris is cheesy and unconvincing the whole way through, which breaks the illusion of the body swap and only makes it seem like more of a head-scratcher that the crew doesn’t see through the fake Tom’s act.

Even if you could set that aside, the creative team seems to want this one to be creepy, even scary, and it just doesn’t work. There’s plenty to be chilled by on the page. Steth commits rape by what’s implied to be him sleeping with B’Elanna under false pretenses. He gets threatening and physical with her, Seven, and Janeway. The script provides plenty of fodder to make this an unnerving outing if nothing else.

But again, McNeill can’t pull it off. His efforts at menace and intimidation are unavailing, almost laughable in places. He overdoes it, and in an episode that puts a ton on his shoulders, he can’t carry the weight. I’m reminded for Alexander Siddig’s performance in Deep Space Nine’s “The Passenger”, where Dr. Bashir was possessed by a criminal mastermind, but Siddig’s overmatched acting made the whole thing feel like a joke. Not everybody can pull off menace, especially when they have to pretend to be someone else pretending to be them. That’s no sin, but it weakens everything “Vis à Vis" is trying to do.

The episode deserves some credit for its closing twist. The reveal that Steth had jumped from Paris to Janeway after the Captain ordered Tom to report to sick bay over his odd behavior is a clever turn in the narrative that caught me by surprise, in a good way. It’s still remarkably easy for someone to steal a shuttle without authorization, but nonetheless, the extra switch plays with the audience’s expectations. And Tom-as-Steth making contact with the person who Steth stole his last body from is a solid way to get him back into fray.

Still, Tom seems like a dope for not trying to provide better proof of who he is immediately to the Voyager crew. Rather than saying, “I know I look like Steth, but I’m really Tom Paris. Captain, when you first recruited me to Voyager, you told me you’d help me at my next parole hearing. Chakotay, I saved you when you broke your leg escaping from the Caretaker!”, he just references one recent conversation, and even then, only after a while. Everyone feels like an idiot in this thing.

Everything's set right in the end, because of course it is. Tom’s returned to his body, He makes up with B’Elanna. He theoretically learns an important lesson about appreciating how lucky he is to have what he has, even if has some anxieties about what he’s giving up for it. But the path to get there is so boring, so unconvincing, so downright stupid, that it doesn’t land with any impact. Voyager has improved notably in season 4, but in “Vis à Vis” it return to an unfortunate trope of the series’ early years -- a good idea done poorly.