S5 E24: Relativity

We flash back to Voyager in dry dock at Utopia Planetia, and Janeway is touring this ship with an Admiral, but what's this? Seven's on the ship, in a blue Starfleet uniform, without her implants. She finds a bomb implanted in a jeffries tube, but cannot remove it - she is discovered by internal sensors, and future Starfleet pulls her back to the futureTM, which kills her. Jumping back to the present, a temporal bomb (I almost wrote time bomb, but I guess that has another meaning) is detonating on Voyager, and more future Starfleet personnel abduct another Seven just before the bomb goes off. This is actually the third Seven they've abducted, and they need her help finding the saboteur - she is particularly useful since her implants make her the only one capable of seeing the bomb. Each trip through time increases the risk of debilitating temporal narcosis, so they've been trying to pinpoint the exact time that the temporal bomb was placed (it seems that the only way to remove it is to prevent its placement). The next best guess is that it occurred during a period of heavy Kazon attacks, so Seven goes back to that time. This time, she finds that the bomb is no longer there, so she stands ready to engage the saboteur, but this time Janeway recalls the internal sensor readings from dry dock, and captures Seven. Making a quick decision, Seven lets Janeway in on what's going on, and they capture the culprit: none other than the future version of the leader of the people trying to stop himself, Captain Braxton, the same guy who was in Future's End. He leads Seven on a chase through time, eventually causing her to get temporal narcosis, but present-Seven eventually captures him for real. In order to fix the timeline for real though, captured-future-Braxton reveals the moment that he appeared on Voyager, so that present-Janeway can stop him before it becomes necessary to do all these other temporal incursions.

That was one of my longer recaps in a while because this episode is convoluted. It is as if the writers wanted to see what the maximum possible number of inconsistencies they could cram into one episode was. Well, a time travel story is a good choice for that kind of challenge: Star Trek in general doesn't always handle time-travel's effects the same way, but just think what you could do if you put all those different ways into one episode, and then made up some new ways. It got to be such a fun experiment that I ended up having a lot of fun with this episode, so I'll tell you now that it gets a 4/5. I'm saying that now, because I want you to know that before I go through each of the inconsistencies one by one - while I noticed these, and I'm sure I missed some, I still had a good time.

1. The goal of this bomb is to erase Voyager from the timeline. If it detonates, as we see happen at one point in the episode, Voyager should be gone at any point that the future guys time travel to. This clearly doesn't happen, and Voyager only blows up at one point in time, so whoever sold that bomb to Braxton ripped him off.

2. Speaking of Braxton, who, even if you saw Future's End, you wouldn't recognize because he's being played by a new guy, his motivations don't make sense. He mentions being angry at Voyager for getting stuck on 20th century Earth, but Voyager undid that! At the end of part 2 he shows up all fixed and happily takes them back to where they were.

3. So the bomb, since it can be seen before it was placed, is clearly made out of the same anti-time stuff that we heard about in All Good Things.... However, for some reason, even though Seven can see it in dry dock, years before it gets placed, she can't see it mere minutes before it gets placed during the Kazon attack.

4. Catching multiple Sevens: this idea actually lends credence to the theory of Trek time travel that I put forth in the Timeless review - under the combination of time-travel with a multiple parallel universe situation, I suppose you could keep going back to pick up new Sevens without causing paradoxes by leaving no Sevens around for your past selves to get.

5. Here's what makes #4 an inconsistency: it doesn't mesh at all with the whole solution of sending Janeway back to "fix" the timeline by catching Braxton earlier. This is probably the most headache-causing part of the episode, and I don't even feel like it was very necessary. As we've already seen from this episode, there are absolutely no adverse consequences whatsoever for causing temporal paradoxes in this episode's universe, so why fix it?

6. Speaking of the futility of fixing time, why police it if it doesn't matter? Why have temporal prime-directives if you can go back in time and erase your grandparents and it doesn't change anything? Just having them around causes a problem I have with Future's End: where were they all those other times when time was getting mangled in other series, only worse?

Anyways, I know there are more than six, but I have seriously lost my train of thought. Six will have to do.

Watchability: 4/5

Bottom Line: While I would always prefer a mind-bender that is mentally-challenging because it is genuinely written more intelligently than I can wrap my head around, this one provided reasonable amounts of entertainment.