S7 E25/26: Endgame

In the future, Admiral Janeway is wracked with guilt over not getting her crew home faster - they have arrived at Earth in this future, but after 23 years of travel. She goes back in time and gives her past self a quick route home through a Borg transwarp hub, but present Janeway feels bad about passing up an opportunity to deal a devastating blow to the Borg. Fortunately, the crew finds a way to use the hub and still blow it up, and Admiral Janeway stays behind to kill all the Borg forever.

It is fairly clear to me that the goal of this episode was to recreate All Good Things..., the very successful TNG finale. We've got a look forward towards where the crew could end up in the future, a captain who knows both the past and the present, the return of the series' biggest villain, and a bizarre romance that has been lightly foreshadowed earlier in the season. So they hit the major plot points, but how did the episode do?

They spent a lot of time on the Admiral Janeway future in order to establish Janeway's survivor guilt. Personally, I think they could have dropped this whole part of the episode, giving more time at the end for post-arrival fallout. I thought the parts with Tuvok's dementia (good to see that old theme resurface) were well-handled, but the reunion, the Borg classroom exercise, the whole incident with the Klingons, and Janeway's debate with Kim about altering the timeline took up more time than their overall effect upon the story could justify. Admiral Janeway even recaps all the future events for the present crew anyways, so starting with the rift opening would have been perfectly fine.

Janeway's dilemma was also very unsatisfying for me. Much of Admiral Janeway's remorse seems to be built off missed opportunities to return home, but she travels back to a missed opportunity that they didn't even really know they had. If past Janeway had found the hub and shied away from it on her own, that would have put a lot more fuel into the debate between herself and her future self. She could have had a reference point from which she could understand or identify with her future self's guilt if she'd actively chosen not to take the hub, and only afterward came to know what would become Seven, Chakotay, and Tuvok as a result of her actions. Sure, she did turn down an opportunity to explore the nebula that contained the hub, but that's no where near as potent since you can't really feel guilty about not exploring every nebula.

Remember Shattered, where I applauded the episode for looking back without patting itself on the back too much? Well, probably the best way to describe the episode (after Admiral Janeway's appearance in the present) is self-congratulatory. Maybe the admiral just knows that the best way to convince herself to listen to anyone is through flattery, but boy does she lay it on thick. "You know, I was pretty awesome." "Yup, I sure am!" "How does it feel to be so awesome?" "I've gotta tell you, it is pretty awesome being awesome."

The Borg Queen is much more effective here, and only part of it is because of the actress switch (they used the First Contact actress instead of the one they had been using for Voyager). In general, she's much more Borg in her behavior than even in First Contact. Instead of getting riled up by Janeway's antics, she maintains an unflappable exterior, even through the part where her interior gets gobbled up by some virus. She takes a calm, Borg approach to things, seeing problems and trying to solve them in a step-wise process (where most of the steps are assimilation).

In terms of temporal mechanics, it is par for the course for Trek for a person from the future to be able to alter the past in such a way that it becomes no longer necessary for that person to make that same trip again. Time loops don't need to be closed in Trek, I'm okay with that. What's really strange is how the Borg Queen implies to Admiral Janeway that if past Janeway is unsuccessful in blowing up the hub, somehow that will Back to the Future (used as a verb) Admiral Janeway out of existence and and prevent the destruction of the Borg. Well, if that's how it works, won't Voyager's shortcut home also destroy the world of Admiral Janeway? You'd think that the physical manifestation of the Borg hive mind would understand Trek temporal mechanics better.

I suppose I should also touch on the issue of "Did Admiral Janeway destroy all the Borg forever?" To that, I give a resounding 'meh.' I mean, I doubt they're all dead - we've killed queens before, both in First Contact and in Best of Both Worlds (though the awesome power of retcon!), and that had no widespread effect. I suppose this is a little different, since (A) the FC queen was temporally separated from the hive, and (B) the BoBW queen was geographically separated from the hive, and (C) There's also the issue of Janeway's virus thing, but I just think the Borg are too a-centralized to be destroyed like that. But the real reason that I'm apathetic about this question is I honestly haven't been very happy with Voyager's uses of the Borg in general; they've been so neutered at this point that I wonder if maybe it is time to put them out to pasture. Truly, the only time the Borg even approached their FC and prior scariness is in the fake future from Living Witness, when storm trooper Seven goes nuts on the aliens of the week.

So what were the rest of the crew up to? At the beginning of this review, I drew the comparison between Seven and Chakotay's relationship and the one between Worf and Troi. Both Troi and Chakotay have back-burner relationships with crew members that seem to have been cast aside, but All Good Things actually addresses that. In the TNG false-future, Worf and Riker have a feud going over Troi, but Janeway never even remarks on her relationship with Chakotay, and the Doctor doesn't make a peep about Seven. The real problem though is how central the Chakotay/Seven romance is to this plot. It appears out of nowhere in the second half of this season, and suddenly Chakotay is emotionally crippled by Seven's (future) death while no one else is. It's just very ineffective at affecting the audience's emotional connection to the story, considering all the time spent on other relationships in the body of the series.

Torres is also giving birth throughout this episode, and it gives rise to some of the best material in these two hours. Sure, it takes the Doctor and Torres out of much of the action of this episode, but they're doing what they do best: the Doctor is being wry and Torres is being angry. This plot is mostly played for comedy, but the actors do it so well that I enjoyed every bit of it. I loved the false-alarm labor wake up with Torres and Paris, and every scene with them in sickbay.

Kim looked tired. I watched this with a friend who'd never seen an episode of Voyager, and one of the things he remarked on is how old Kim seemed to be. He tried to play his usual enthusiasm angle, but it fell flat due to how exhausted he looked throughout the show. However, he does have a good scene with Paris - no, not just good, the best scene of the episode, and the best excuse the writers could give for not spending any time on the post-arrival reactions. Kim is all excited about a risky plan to explore the nebula, and tries to get Paris excited about it too. The thing is, Paris is less than a day away from becoming a father, and just can't be bothered. Why? Because he doesn't need to risk his life or Kim's life in order to get home; he's already there, and says as much.

As I've remarked before, part of the problem with the show is that half the characters have no reason to be excited about returning to Earth. Here, in this scene with Kim and Paris, I've come to terms with that arrangement, and that's why I'd honestly have been okay with an episode like Shattered as the series finale. Voyager is the home that this crew has been looking for, and it has been with them all along. If that had been the message of this episode, I'd have embraced it with open arms.

Watchability: 3/5

Bottom Line: This episode tried very hard to be an Epic Series Finale for a show that didn't really need one. While I didn't necessarily want them to pull a full-on Angel series finale cliffhanger (though, for the record, I liked that approach there), something more understated that used the theme of "Voyager is the home we've been trying to reach" could ultimately have been more powerful.