After outsmarting Voyager once, Sterling now has the lowdown on the ship's systems and an emergency medical hologram - which he kindly equips with a mobile holo-emitter. The Voyager crew regroups and attempts to capture him by baiting him with Sarah Silverman, and briefly succeeds before he outsmarts them again. In the attempt, Chakotay and Torres are captured by some militia nuts, but Tuvok and the Doctor rescue them. Paris and Robinson (I guess I should use her character name) have a car chase in a VW bus against a tractor trailer which they believe has the timeship in it, but once again they have been outsmarted by Sterling, who prepares to fulfill his destiny by going to the future to steal more technology (and kill billions by mistake). Voyager destroys his ship at the last minute, thereby somehow restoring the timeline. The timeship pops up again, this time with its original commander, unaware of what has transpired, and transports Voyager back to its own time - and to the delta quadrant.
Well, that's a lot of outsmarting for one paragraph, but hey, the crew was being exceptionally incompetent. Nothing they did seemed to matter, except for the one stray torpedo they fired at the end. But as long as this two-parter seems to be about temporal causality, why did they even fire that shot? It was a direct parallel to the timeship's approach with Voyager in part one: "Hey you, I don't want you to do bad things by time-traveling, so I'm going to blow you up." That tactic is what got them into this whole mess, you'd think they'd have learned something. Oh, right, incompetent. But, because it is Voyager doing the shooting, the problem is solved and everything but Voyager is restored to normal, which also doesn't make sense. The writers had the option in Time and Again for Voyager to be the accidental cause of mass casualties, to teach the crew a lesson about messing with temporal mechanics lightly, but I cut them some slack then because it was only the second episode. The time for that is done.
I was annoyed that they implied that stolen technology is the reason why humans developed computers in the 20th century (for reasons I went into in the Tattoo review), but if there is one good thing about the reset button in this episode, it is that the timeship's presence on earth was (may have been?) erased. With this ending, we revert to computers being a creation of human ingenuity (at what seems to have been the same rate that the stolen technology would have delivered it).
The odd, pointless side-plot with the militia did at least point out something that demands to be explored: why doesn't Chakotay act like (or have any personal beliefs congruent with) a captain of a terrorist ship. When the lead captor delivers his ridiculous rant about the evil government and his fight against it, Chakotay begins saying "I was a freedom fighter like you too, once..." and I'm really curious where he was going with that. Does he not believe in the Maquis fight anymore? Why? Some sort of explanation would certainly be appreciated. Well, a good explanation would be appreciated. And I don't think the writers have one.
Watchability: 1/5
Bottom Line: The panning will continue until my morale improves. At least the Doctor got a mobile holo-emitter out of all this.
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