| The decrepit Voyager (and her crew) struggles to rebuild and find allies for an assault on Annorax's ship, while Chakotay tries to reason with him. Annorax reveals that he is driven even now by an early failure; his lack of foresight caused him to wipe out his wife with his very first temporal incursion. Chakotay is moved by Annorax's motivation, but ultimately agrees with Paris that he must be stopped. They send a signal to Voyager, encouraging them to attack, then, with the help of disgruntled members of Annorax's crew, sabotages the ship in the middle of the attack. Janeway takes that opportunity to ram Voyager into the ship, setting off a temporal incursion that removes the ship from the timeline. Her actions restore Voyager to its pre-Year of Hell status. |
While part I was an ensemble show, part II focuses more on Annorax and his quest. I'm not sure Chakotay was the best choice of characters for someone to be seduced by the goal of restoring the timeline, but the writers do develop a compelling arc as he begins to lose his faith in Annorax. The ship's second in command, Obrist, also adds depth to the proceedings with his own misgivings about Annorax's intentions. Paris' moral backbone is somewhat surprising here; I'd expect his dialogue to be more natural coming from Chakotay, but I guess they needed to have the higher-ranking officer be the one to want to try to reason with him. With those restrictions, I can't really think of a better pair from the crew, especially considering that the Chakotay role required a mix of compassion and moral relativity.
Janeway remains much more tolerable when she's angry. Not even necessarily angry, but purposeful. Even when she's telling the Doctor that he'd have to take a phaser to her to strip her of her command, her dialogue lacks the condescention I've come to expect of her. It's much more matter-of-fact, "I don' need you to agree with me, just do what I say" than her norm. I'm hoping that the writers retain some of this new-Janeway, which, while it is a change in character direction, develops naturally out of the hardship she and her crew experience in this episode. Experiences which, due to the reset button, never happened.
So, yes, the reset button. While the mechanics of the reset fit the episode perfectly, it is still extremely frustrating. Yeah, it's another good episode, but it is good in large part due to the chances the writers took in character development. I can't even blame Brannon Braga for this one, he was fighting to not reset. Well, let us hope that the lesson the writers took from this episode is that taking chances can reap great rewards, not that you can take chances as long as you reset everything by the end. In the final scene, the reset version of Annorax (he, for some reason, did not get wiped along with his ship) is seen, with his wife, taking a break from working on altering time-streams - he apparently didn't learn anything after his reset.
Watchability: 4/5
Bottom Line: Because of the reset, this one isn't a 5, and I went back and forth on how much to demote it for the ending. But if I'm not going to promote the bad episodes with good endings too much, I shouldn't overly punish good episodes with bad endings.
This arc is one of my favorite set of Voyager episodes...mainly because of the concept of the time weapon. I also really like Janeway here (honestly, this is how I chose to remember her, so I like her more than most people do.)
ReplyDeleteI don't mind the ending with Annorax at the end. The idea that he could have had his wife back if he had just blown up his own ship...there's a certain irony there that I like. That the one thing that needed to be erased from the timeline was the timeship and he was so blinded by his quest to think of the answer within arm's reach.