| Chakotay and Kim find Voyager, buried beneath a glacier - in the future. A series of flashbacks reveal that Voyager had installed a slipstream drive, one that Paris had found some last minute problems with. Kim formulates a plan to ride ahead of Voyager (with Chakotay instead of Paris) and send them data to solve the problem, but he fails and Voyager suffers the fate we see in the first minutes of the episode. The new plan is to find the Doctor's emitter, and use a piece of Borg technology (that they've stolen from the Federation) to send a message through Seven and time to save the ship. Their first attempt is a failure, and they've run out of time and have come under fire from a federation ship under the command of Geordi LaForge. Kim and the Doctor come up with a last minute plan change that will prevent Voyage from getting home using the drive, but also prevent them from dieing. Everything is reset to normal, but Kim at least receives a message from his future self telling him he owes him one. |
Years ago, when I made my first attempt to give Voyager a second chance by cherry-picking episodes from "best of Voyager" lists, I made it through two episodes: Year of Hell and this one. I was so disgusted that two of the top ranked episodes both contained complete reset buttons that I never watched any more. I liked Year of Hell better this time around, so I had hoped that my supposition had been correct - that my lack of investment in the characters was the reason that I hadn't enjoyed these episodes. I did not find that to be the case this time.
Sal mentioned in his comment on my Deadlock review that Kim's death midway through the episode ruined the episode for him because it made it clear that it would be a reset. That episode was saved for me because its reset had a nice twist to it at least. Here, we see popsicle Janeway in the first scene following the trailer, even before it is definitively revealed that Kim and Chakotay are from the future. That starts a long sequence of Kim-angst that culminates in an entirely unsurprising reset. A note to the Voyager writers: when your reset has Kim successfully getting Voyager home to Earth, your viewers are going to know that something will go wrong to maintain the status quo, ruining any attempt at suspense. What worked so well for me in Deadlock is that my expectations of a complete reset were so effectively subverted.
The "Kim's enthusiasm for getting home as a tragic flaw" elements are compelling, at least. That part is good writing: it is a perfectly natural way to set up the plot of the show. It flows naturally from established elements of Kim's character. I don't think Garrett Wang played bitterKim particularly well or subtly, but the part was written appropriately. The dryness, the frustration, and the snarkiness are all good; "They're having sex" as he rolls his eyes was quite amusing.
Ah, yes, I didn't mention it in the recap, but there's kind of an odd subplot with Chakotay and this woman who he has fallen in love with. She's helping Kim and Chakotay on their crime-spree-Voyager-resurrection, even though it means she'll probably never meet Chakotay. I guess the idea was to give something for Chakotay to do while Kim carries most of the weight of the episode. But in this very same episode there's another awkward Janeway/Chakotay romantic dinner (in the flashbacks). Jeri Taylor is the couple's strongest champion, and I know that resigned as an executive producer at the end of the fourth season, so I didn't expect to see any more of these.
One last note of frustration: in the epilogue, Janeway engages in some particularly annoying lampshade hanging. When Kim asks her how the temporal mechanics of this episode work, she just says "My advice in making sense of temporal paradoxes is simple: Don't even try." Really? Thanks Voyager writers, thanks for telling me to just shut off my brain when watching your creations. Well too bad, I refuse. And here, I'll even take
Time travel doesn't have to follow the Back to the Future model; no one's done it before (aside from moving forward through time at a rate of one second per second), and there are no real models of how it might be done, so you're free to come up with your own magical explanation. In the BttF model, all time flows in one stream. When you alter the course of the stream, the parts of the stream further down its path that no longer have water (henceforth shorthand for objects in the time stream) in it disappear, even if they have already been transported (using magical time travel) into a part of the stream where the water is still there. This leads to dramatic vanishing moments, but is problematic since any time something needs to happen to the past of Michael J Fox, the rules need to be thrown out so that he doesn't just disappear for the rest of the movie.
Trek, fairly consistently, uses different model. If, through magical time travel, an object or person alters the time stream just that he/she/it will no longer exist, they are just added to the water in the new time stream. They continue to exist because they are simply another object in the time stream, moving forward at 1s/1s. The line between parallel universes and altered time streams is very blurred in Trek, and I think, if the writers wanted to, it would be easy(ish) to tie the two together in a manner that would explain the Trek time travel model. If your sci-fi universe accepts the conceit that there is a separate universe for each different possible outcome - which Trek appears to based on episodes like Parallels - you could make the statement that time travel creates a new set of parallel universes. That way, the old universe will continue to exist, supplying the (now out of place) person or object that does the time travel and the altering. Again, this is all magical to start out with, but this model is at least internally consistent with episodes like Yesterday's Enterprise or Children of Time.
Of course, the Trek writers haven't made that statement. Up until now, they've left it to the imagination of their viewers. That's cool, but I want more than just what I can dream up in my own head. I like to hear other people's ideas. But now, in Voyager (and this is not the first time that Janeway has made a statement like this), the writers are asking us not to even try to think about it. Phooey.
Watchability: 3/5
Bottom Line: I know this is a fan favorite, but, personally, I really can't go any higher than a three.
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