“Timeless”
Written by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga & Joe Menosky
Directed by LeVar Burton
Season 5, Episode 6
Production episode 200
Original air date: November 18, 1998
Stardate: 52143.6
Captain’s log. It’s 2390, and two people beam down to an ice-covered planet, covered in protective gear. They find Voyager buried under a sheet of ice. We soon learn that the two people are Chakotay and Kim, both fifteen years older.
In 2375, Voyager attempted to get home using a quantum slipstream drive. While Chakotay and Kim made it, the rest of the crew crashed. It’s taken fifteen years for them to figure out where Voyager crashed and to actually get there—both of them have long since resigned from Starfleet.
Voyager is completely depowered, mangled, and the bioneural gelpacks are frozen solid. Kim goes to sickbay to try to reactivate the EMH while Chakotay goes to the bridge. They both encounter frozen corpses of their comrades. When Chakotay finds Seven on the bridge, he has their third, Tessa—who’s on the Delta Flyer—beam her back.
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Kim activates the EMH, and then sticks the mobile emitter on him. The EMH asks for an explanation of how fifteen years have passed and the ship is frozen, but all Kim will say is that they’re here to change history.
We cut back to 2375: there’s a celebration in Voyager’s engine room. They’ve manufactured enough benamite to construct a new quantum slipstream drive. They plan to activate it the following day, hence the celebration tonight.
Paris, though, isn’t partying hearty. He thinks there’s a phase variance that will screw up the drive. So he and Kim go to the holodeck to test it out, and sure enough, the phase variance is enough to wipe out Voyager. This happens twenty-two times.
They bring this to the senior staff, and it seems they’ll have to cancel the test run. But Kim has a suggestion: the Delta Flyer goes ahead and “rides the rapids,” as it were, mapping the slipstream threshold and send the phase variance coordinates back to Voyager. The benamite has a shelf life, and the crystals they manufactured are starting to decay. It will take years to resynthesize them. Their window is now.
Janeway and Chakotay discuss it over dinner, and ultimately decide to give it a shot.
In 2390, Kim and Chakotay explain to the EMH what happened. Kim sent back corrections that increased the phase variance and caused Voyager to careen out of slipstream and crash to an icy death. Chakotay and Kim made it back to the Alpha Quadrant intact, and were given a hero’s welcome. They’ve spent the last fifteen years trying to find Voyager—six as part of Starfleet, then for the last nine on their own after Starfleet called off the search and they resigned.
They finally found the ship in the Takara sector, just outside the Alpha Quadrant, stole the Flyer, and headed out, along with Tessa, who is Chakotay’s lover. Their plan is to change history by sending the right corrections back directly into Seven’s cortical node, using something else they stole: a Borg temporal transmitter, salvaged off the wreck of a Borg cube. They need the cortical implant off Seven’s corpse in order to determine the exact time that she expired, subtract a few minutes and then send the information.
They’re also on the clock, because the U.S.S. Challenger is looking for them and will track them down eventually. The EMH realizes that his former shipmates are now fugitives. They’ve already stolen technology, and are about to violate the Temporal Prime Directive. Kim gives the EMH a chance to back out, but he decides to go ahead with it in the hopes of saving his crewmates in the past.
Chakotay is having second thoughts of his own, as his relationship with Tessa will cease to exist if they’re successful, but Tessa knows that this is too important to him. She’s willing to take the risk.
Kim tells the EMH about the reception the pair of them received on Earth: parades, antimatter fireworks, a Vulcan children’s choir. It was a huge celebration, and Kim hated every moment of it. He attended endless therapy sessions to deal with his survivor’s guilt, but he never got over it, and when Starfleet gave up the search for Voyager, he and Chakotay went rogue to continue it.
The EMH finds the right timestamp for Seven’s death, and provides it to Kim, who enters it into the Borg device. The EMH also expresses concern over the fact that they might create an even worse timeline, but Kim doesn’t see how it could be any worse—he was directly responsible for the death of the entire crew.
In 2375, Janeway records a final log entry before going into slipstream (a log entry that Chakotay will listen to fifteen years hence on a frozen bridge). Chakotay and Kim are in the Delta Flyer, leading the way. They go into slipstream.
In 2390, the Challenger contacts the Flyer. Captain Geordi La Forge tells Chakotay that the Federation Council has an offer for them: they’ll drop the conspiracy charge if they turn themselves in and return the Flyer and the Borg temporal transmitter. Chakotay refuses. Because he used to be a main character in a TV once, La Forge admits to Chakotay that he would probably be doing the exact same thing were he in Chakotay’s position. But instead, he’s in the position of being a starship captain, and he has to bring them in. Chakotay tells him he’s welcome to try.
In 2375, the first communication from the Flyer to Voyager enables Seven to fix the phase variance, but the variance returns in fairly short order, and Kim is unable to provide the compensatory data. The commlink between Voyager and the Flyer then goes down.
In 2390, while the Flyer is under fire, Kim sends the corrections back to Seven’s cortical implant. In 2375, Seven is confused by the receipt of them, but Janeway assumes that Kim found a way to send information to her cortical implant, and orders Seven to make the corrections.
They don’t work. Voyager comes careening out of the slipstream and crash lands on an ice planet. The Flyer continues on course toward Earth, unable to go back.
In 2390, Kim is livid—it should have worked. He loses it completely, and it’s left to the EMH to (metaphorically) slap him and yell, “SNAP OUT OF IT!”
Challenger puts the Flyer in a tractor beam. Chakotay gets out of it, but it destabilizes their warp core. They’ve only got a few minutes. Kim can’t understand why it didn’t work. The EMH then suggests that, if he can’t get them through the slipstream, have them never enter it. Stop the test flight from happening. Kim is able to send different calculations to Seven, which will cause the slipstream to harmlessly dissipate.
Kim sends it just as the Flyer’s warp core goes boom.
Seven receives the corrections, enters them, and Voyager and the Flyer drop into normal space. Eventually, Seven determines that the message came from some time in the future, from Kim—who also recorded a message for his younger self.
Voyager is now ten years closer to home. Janeway orders the slipstream drive dismantled until they can perfect it.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The slipstream drive only works with benamite, a plot-conveniently difficult-to-manufacture element that enables the writers to put the toothpaste back in the proverbial tube.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway decides that it’s totally worth risking destroying the ship for an attempt to get home that’s already been proven not to work. Sure.
Forever an ensign. Kim is utterly devastated by Voyager’s crashing, and becomes quite the embittered older person in the 2390 sequences.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix gives Torres a Talaxian furfly as a good-luck charm. He used to keep it in his engine room. It’s not clear if it’s a stuffed animal or a taxidermy furfly corpse…
Resistance is futile. Seven gets drunk on one glass of champagne.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH is a huge help to Chakotay and Kim, as they need him to dig into Seven’s cortical implant, giving the doctor a chance to go all Hamlet-and-Horatio with Seven’s skull.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Chakotay has found his one true love in Tessa, and he gives her up (and she does likewise) to save everyone. What a guy…
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. Paris and Kim test the slipstream drive on the holodeck and it crashes and burns twenty-two times. Yeesh.
Do it.
“Hello, Harry. I don’t have much time, so listen to me. Fifteen years ago, I made a mistake and 150 people died. I’ve spent every day since then regretting that mistake. But if you’re watching this right now, that means all of that has changed. You owe me one.”
–Kim’s words of wisdom to himself.
Welcome aboard. In addition to directing the episode, LeVar Burton reprises his TNG role of Geordi La Forge. Christine Harnos plays Tessa.
Trivial matters: This is the 100th episode of Voyager. LeVar Burton had already been hired to direct this landmark episode, when he was asked if he’d be willing to put a Starfleet uniform back on, as part of the commemoration of the milestone. The captain of the Challenger was rewritten to be La Forge when he agreed to do so. The character was last seen in First Contact, and will next be seen in Insurrection.
The U.S.S. Challenger is a tribute to the space shuttle Challenger, which was lost with all hands in 1986. The starship’s registry number, NCC-71099, is also a tribute, as Challenger’s registry was OV-099. The ship will be seen again in “Endgame” as one of the ships that meets Voyager when she arrives home.
La Forge is also seen in command of the Challenger in the novel Indistinguishable from Magic by David A. McIntee and the game Star Trek Online.
The quantum slipstream drive was first seen in “Hope and Fear.” This episode establishes the need for benamite, a rare element, apparently, to make the slipstream work. A paucity of benamite is why slipstream doesn’t become a thing even during the thirty-second century dilithium shortage chronicled in season three of Discovery.
The drive won’t be seen again, though Janeway will mention their inability to perfect it in “Think Tank.”
Janeway plays Brahms’s Intermezzo op. 117 no. 1 over her dinner with Chakotay.
This is the fourth shortcut Voyager has been able to make use of. Kes sent them 10,000 light-years ahead in “The Gift,” they used the vortex to shorten the distance through the Void at the end of “Night,” and they have now twice used the slipstream drive to get closer to home, once here, and once in “Hope and Fear.”
Several times in the episode people state that there are 150 people on Voyager, which is inconsistent with what’s been shown on screen—just two episodes ago, it was stated to be 128 (which is more compatible with the crew’s original complement and the number given by Janeway in “The 37’s”).
Set a course for home. “If we can’t get the crew home, at least we can save their lives.” Let’s start with what’s really excellent about this episode, which is Garrett Wang’s superlative job playing Crankypants Older Kim. This is a Kim who has utterly run out of fucks to give, and won’t rest until he fixes the mistake and ameliorates the guilt that has plagued him for a decade and a half. It’s an amusing contrast with Robert Beltran’s Chakotay, who is much calmer and more pragmatic—but also more outwardly emotional. Kim’s anguish is directed entirely inward, focused only on his own distress over what he did.
It’s shown particularly expertly in the differing reactions of the two when they first board the crashed, frozen Voyager. Every time Chakotay sees a corpse, it obviously pierces his heart—particularly when he finds Janeway. But Kim doesn’t even acknowledge the frozen dead bodies he comes across, just brushes past them without a thought.
The opening, with Voyager under a sheet of ice, with the dead bodies of all but two of the crew, and with the older Chakotay and Kim trying to fix the past and reactivate the EMH, is really powerful, but once the plot kicks in, the whole thing falls apart.
Where the episode particularly lost me is when Paris and Kim go to the holodeck to test the slipstream drive, and WHY THE HELL DIDN’T THEY DO THIS ALREADY??????? Why are they even considering the possibility of a practical test if they haven’t even done a simulation on the holodeck? It makes absolutely no sense that it wouldn’t even occur to anyone to do such a test before they decided to go ahead with a field test, and it especially makes no sense that they go ahead anyhow. Kim’s argument as to why they should try it is, frankly, imbecilic. The whole stalking-horse thing with the Delta Flyer is incredibly risky, and it makes no sense, none, that they would go ahead with so crazy a notion.
Trek has done tons of time-travel stories where the characters must go into the past in order to fix a screwed-up present, and they’ve dipped into this well so many times before that it’s hard to get too terribly excited about it. It’s what happened in “The City on the Edge of Forever,” in “Yesteryear,” in “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” in First Contact, in “Past Tense,” and now here.
Having said that, the episode is fun to watch in the moment, with some spectacular visuals—Voyager under the ice, the celebration in engineering, Voyager crashing into the ice, the frozen interiors of Voyager, and so on—and truly the best work Wang has done on the show to date. Robert Picardo’s acid commentary is a nice balm to contrast with Kim’s angst. La Forge’s cameo is pretty pointless—he really could be any Starfleet captain, and there’s nothing there that requires it to be La Forge—but what the heck, LeVar Burton was already there…
The episode is a triumph of style over substance, and at least it’s a decent style. It’ll do for the hundredth episode, I suppose.
Warp factor rating: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido wrote a short story for the forthcoming charity anthology Turning the Tied, which features stories about existing characters in the public domain by some of the best tie-in writers in the business, including fellow Trek scribes Greg Cox, Robert Greenberger, Jeff Mariotte, David McIntee, Robert Vardeman, Aaron Rosenberg, Scott Pearson, Kelli Fitzpatrick, Derek Tyler Attico, and Rigel Ailur. Keith’s story is about Ayesha, the title character in She by H. Rider Haggard. You can preorder the book now from Amazon.
Yep, typical of VGR at this stage — high-concept, cinematic plots and impressive spectacle (the ship crash on the ice planet was really something to see), not a lot of thought or logic. They should’ve started out small — sent an uncrewed shuttle back to the Federation as a test vehicle, worked with Starfleet to refine it with further tests, then started sending shuttles back and forth — maybe a rotation giving people a chance to visit home a few at a time, or to stay home if they wanted and get replaced by new volunteers.
Well, I guess the scarcity of benamite was meant to make this a now-or-never sort of thing, but still, just finding a way to renew contact with Starfleet would’ve been a more measured step forward.
There’s also kind of a double standard here — how many times have we seen stories where it was the villains trying to change history for personal gain and the heroes stopping them? But when it’s the heroes’ own self-interest, suddenly we’re supposed to root for it.
I love so much about this episode. LaVar Burton deserves tons of props for making it dramatic, tense, and exciting throughout, to the extent that I’m willing to forgive the plot-convenient technobabble (although, seriously, you would think that one of the main reasons even to *have* holodecks on ships would be to use them as labs). Kim and Chakotay prove once again that they could have been super interesting characters if anything in the writing room had bothered to try to do anything with them on a consistent basis. That said- Voyager only ever seems to take risks when the end result won’t matter to the status quo in any way. “Before and After,” “Timeless,” and “Shattered,” are all great episodes right up until the point when the reset button gets slammed and everything we just spent 45 minutes watching becomes irrelevant in the blink of an eye. Even “Living Witness” asks super interesting questions about Voyager’s impact…. about a millennia after they’re all dead. It’s a little frustrating.
Also, *this* is the kind of outcome they should have gone for in “Endgame,” IMO. Instead of “Janeway is upset that Tuvok is sick and so changes the timeline” something like this- where neither Voyager nor most of her crew ever make it, makes for a much more compelling reason to justify potentially screwing up the whole universe for the chance to put things “right.” The use of Chakotay and Kim is great, too- we are used to seeing them just kind of milling around, and don’t really expect them to have either the passion nor the ability to pull something like this off, and it helps highlight just how driven and devastated they both are.
As always, I believe my thoughts on VOY’s 100th episode are best summed up by this classic gem from Chuck Sonnenburg and SF Debris. :D
@1 CLB: “There’s also kind of a double standard here — how many times have we seen stories where it was the villains trying to change history for personal gain and the heroes stopping them? But when it’s the heroes’ own self-interest, suddenly we’re supposed to root for it.”
I think this is right and is a massive conceptual flaw in this episode. Even Voyager already did this plot, except last time the lunatic obsessed with rewriting time was called Annorax and it was the Year of Hell duology. If somebody tried this sort of nonsense every time 150 (or more) people died in an accident, then… geez, the timeline would never be set, the future would be nothing but time travelers rewriting it to fix everything, and obviously the Temporal Prime Directive exists to prevent that sort of behavior for a reason.
Geordi trying to stop them is the only hero in this story, and the only ding on his performance is that he’s far too reluctant to use his ship’s weapons to try and disable (or if necessary destroy) the Flyer.
Coupled with the excellent points KRAD raises, what we have here is these three acting in a reckless manner to save a crew from a mistake it shouldn’t have made in the first place, with the payoff being a completely meaningless “ten years closer.”
This episode works pretty well on a first viewing based on the strengths of the performances, but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny or a second viewing. It just has such effective performances and moves so fast it’s easy to get caught up in the moment, so I guess as a 100th episode it did its job.
As far as it being the 100th milestone episode, Timeless is obviously not on the level of DS9’s The Ship, but I’d say it’s more or less on the same level as TNG’s Redemption. It’s a great spectacle of a high concept episode held back by some subpar plotting issues.
My one complaint is pretty much the one @krad brought it up. I could not understand how they threw a party celebrating the inauguration of the quantum slipstream drive without having done at least one holodeck simulation beforehand.
Putting that glaring flaw aside, I’m partial to this episode. This is – for all intents and purposes – the best Harry Kim episode in the show’s seven year run. The one time they got the character right, and the one time Garrett Wang truly rose to the challenge. Kim’s self-loathing is a great story motivator, and every scene in 2390 lands solid (plus, having a LaForge cameo is always a plus). Future Chakotay also gets a good workout. And plotwise, I understand the necessity of adding a rare component in order to make the slipstream choice a now or never proposition, and I find using Seven’s cortical node a plausible plot method for conducting the course corrections. It’s not Trek’s best time travel story ever done, but it’s still a good one.
And for 1998, this was groundbreaking CGI, on both a metaphorical and literal sense. It still looks good today, and is one of the reasons both VOY and DS9 deserve an HD remaster for Blu-Ray or streaming re-releases.
Setting aside the ethics of time-travel… is it kind of odd that the ship named in honor of the Challenger is tasked with essentially ensuring the catastrophic crash of a spaceship and loss of all aboard?
cuttlefishbenjamin: Yeeep. Never really thought about that, but it’s a good point………
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
“We got home, Doc, and all it took was killing everyone we cared about.”
This is one of those episodes where you just have to accept the Protagonist Centred Morality whereby wiping out fifteen years of history so all the main title characters survived is a happy ending. Ah well, the Federation doesn’t seem to have been wiped out by the Dominion or the Borg either way, although no word on whether Romulus survived in that future. And if you believe the Picard novels, the changes to history probably didn’t do much for LaForge’s career. The episode does at least avoid any goodies and baddies stuff: LaForge has valid reasons for trying to stop the protagonists, while it’s hard not to sympathise with Chakotay and Kim wanting to save their friends. Interesting that, even though they can’t resist having the Doctor in a major role, it’s two of the lesser focus characters who were chosen to lead a landmark episode. The result is a very bitter older Harry Kim, although a less formal one in some ways: There’s a running gag about his newly acquired habit of slapping the Doctor on his shoulder.
Interesting to have the normally reckless and frivolous Paris be the one to note the flaw in the design while everyone else is busy partying, although he’s convinced to back off from his warnings a bit too quickly. Kim manages to get everyone killed by behaving like an arrogant asshat but to be fair, he’s taking his cue from the top. Janeway has often ploughed ahead with a plan to get home quicker regardless of the danger but this time the cards don’t fall in her favour, at least not without a bit of help from a guardian angel from the future. From an emotionally satisfying standpoint, it’s good that the episode ends with Voyager having at least some idea of what happened: It’s a bit of a slap in the face for Kim to be presented with the sight of what he’d have become if they’d stuck with his original plan. Seven getting drunk is hilarious.
If you count “Caretaker” as one episode, this was the 99th episode broadcast but the 100th produced (“Nothing Human” was made before it but broadcast afterwards). Hilariously, The Star Trek Encylopedia managed to get both wrong, calling “Caretaker” two episodes, listing the episodes in production order and calling this Episode 101. Geordi is still wearing the First Contact-style grey uniform in 2390, whereas in the future seen in Picard, the Starfleet uniform seems to have been redesigned at least once, possibly twice by then. (At this point, the earliest known uniform change was the future seen in “All Good Things”, circa 2395. LeVar Burton of course was one of the first to wear that uniform in First Contact, albeit with engineering colours rather than command as here.) Despite not getting back to the Alpha Quadrant, Voyager is ten years closer to home at the end: After the jumps in “The Gift”, “Hope and Fear” and “Night”, shouldn’t they be less than 50 years away by now?
So, in the 20-odd years since this was made, has anyone ever written a story explaining what happened to Tessa in the new timeline..?
“I hate temporal mechanics!” –Chief Engineer Miles O’Brien, STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE
I 100% agree as a reader and watcher.
Huh. This is the second episode that I have absolutely no memory of, although I must have watched it originally.
This episode is always a favorite of mine to watch, if I don’t think too closely, with great direction and a fun concept. I’m 100% in agreement about the premise falling apart though. I’m not sure what’s worse: the failure to test at all or deciding to go through with it after a 100% failure rate. It’s also another example of Voyager leaning a little too hard on sketchy temporal mechanics and Borg technology that always seems to do exactly what they need it to.
I’m curious, from a production standpoint, how the icy look was achieved. The visual of the ship and the crewmates frozen in ice was chilling *ba dum tisss.* Seriously, though, awesome visuals there.
Total agree with @9.
Time travel episodes usually give me a headache.
Just here to comment about how much I love the Moonstruck reference.
I could go on forever about how much I love this episode. I think too many points are being subtracted for a couple of plot holes. Yes they’re there, but not egregiously more than in most episodes or on which most of star trek is based on. I can even think of a few more. Its not clear to me why Braxton’s 29th century crew isn’t intervening, isn’t that what they would do here?
Its not at all surprising that they took the risk of making the flight. The fact that there are serious negative consequences is the unusual and refreshing aspect of the episode. Trek captains take arguably greater risks all the time, but because it’s trek and its tv, they luck out, make it through and get celebrated as heroes for having the “courage” to take the risk. All because their gamble paid off. This time we get to experience the flipside, what can really happen when being as reckless as they behave usually every other episode.
I like that they just said to hell with the temporal prime directive, and won. Whose to say which timeline is the morally correct timeline to preserve?
Okay, wow. I’m surprised by the “meh” review and rating of this episode when I thought it was going to be raving. This is my favorite episode of Voyager. It just screams epic. I wouldn’t be surprised if the episode began in the mind of Braga or Berman as just the visual of Voyager buried beneath a sheet of ice and then building a story around that image. It’s just so powerful and striking.
This is for sure Harry Kim’s best episode and Garrett Wang’s best acting performance. Harry’s guilt is palpable. It shows once again on those rare actions where Harry is allowed to have a range of emotions that Wang can act. I think it’s actually pretty cool that such a monumental episode, the 100th, is a Harry story. That’s putting a lot of faith in the character and the actor.
Robert Beltran also does a good job of being haunted, but even having the love of his life in the present, is willing to give it all up to do what he feels is right.
The sequence of Voyager crashing on the planet is spectacular and shows how far CGI had advanced to read as real. Captain LaForge’s appearance as captain of a Galaxy Class starship was icing on the cake. And I like that things weren’t a total reset at the end because Harry still gets that message from his future self. Powerful stuff.
I am of the opinion that Kim and Chakotay and girlfriend aren’t right to change the past for the former character’s mistake because that is fate and they’re erasing history for the uncountable number of people who have prospered and done just fine. Going into the past to “fix” things is a cheat and yet I don’t blame them for trying and can’t be mad that they succeeded. It means our heroes get to live. But I wasn’t rooting for them either because I also supported LaForge’s (and my own) view on the matter.
Even given the legitimate nitpicks on this episode, I still have it as my favorite and give it a 10. I will say however in advance of Endgame that I very much dislike that series finale for among other things, copying the premise of this vastly superior episode.
garreth: In fact, the starting point of the episode was, indeed, the visual of Voyager buried in a sheet of ice, according to an article on the making of the episode that appeared in a 2000 issue of Cinefantastique.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@16/krad: That doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. I don’t know if the actual idea originated with Braga, but I can see him being infatuated with an image that’s “cool” and building an episode around that rather than constructing a story where what happens to Voyager happens organically. But at least in this case, and in my humble opinion, it all worked out for the best.
I loved all the emotional notes in this, so the Voyager crew doing something risky without any forethought thing doesn’t faze me a single bit. Honestly it’s in character at this point. The good Kim episode right here. Even reading this rewatch I teared up because when KRAD wrote, “Kim sends it just as the Flyer’s core goes boom” I just read, “YES!!”
Kim was enduring more than survivor’s guilt. Survivor’s guilt is when the people around you don’t survive when you do and you don’t feel you should’ve made it and can’t rationalize why you’re still alive. To Kim, it’s not that he survived, it’s that he killed them. In his mind there’s a one to one cause an effect. Kim’s Failure=Crew’s death. If it hadn’t been his fault he may have been able to move on, or find some semblance of happiness in his new life. But it was Kim’s calculations, Kim’s idea, Kim’s failure that killed his crew. It cuts, and Wang played it beautifully.
I’m a massive Geordi LaForge homer, so seeing him as the Captain of the Challenger was a treat.
The denouement scene is magnificent. Because we see the beginning of Kim’s guilt, the guilt that would consume his counterpart. He’s mulling over what went wrong, and how much worse everything could’ve gone. Then Mama Kathy comes in with the healing balm. “Somewhere, Some how, some time, you (Harry Kim) come through for us“.
@14/karey: “Trek captains take arguably greater risks all the time, but because it’s trek and its tv, they luck out, make it through and get celebrated as heroes for having the “courage” to take the risk. All because their gamble paid off.”
The difference is that those are necessary risks, as a last resort in the absence of safer alternatives. “Timeless” did not convincingly sell the idea that this was a necessary or responsible risk, or that the crew adequately prepared for it in advance. There’s a difference between courage and recklessness.
“Whose to say which timeline is the morally correct timeline to preserve?”
Erasing 15 years’ worth of the timeline means that countless babies will never be born. Countless personal victories will be undone. Countless great achievements will be unmade. Sure, some deaths will be averted, some failures will get a do-over and result in success, and different people will be born who wouldn’t have existed before. But it’s still disrupting or erasing a lot of positive achievements. I don’t think it can be called morally correct to kick over the chessboard for billions of people just to save 150 people. That’s the sort of thing that can only be justified to prevent a far greater cataclysm. If it’s just for personal gain, it’s monstrously selfish.
@15/garreth: “I am of the opinion that Kim and Chakotay and girlfriend aren’t right to change the past for the former character’s mistake because that is fate and they’re erasing history for the uncountable number of people who have prospered and done just fine. Going into the past to “fix” things is a cheat and yet I don’t blame them for trying and can’t be mad that they succeeded. It means our heroes get to live. But I wasn’t rooting for them either because I also supported LaForge’s (and my own) view on the matter.”
That’s a good point. I think that, despite my critique, the episode deserves credit for not really saying that Harry and Chakotay are doing the right thing. It admits that what they’re doing is selfish and unethical, and that’s kind of the point — that stalwart, loyal, true, honest Harry Kim has become so embittered that he no longer cares about law or abstract morality and is solely driven by the need to fix his mistake and absolve his guilt. So he’s doing the wrong thing, but for reasons we can sympathize with. (Still, it’s convenient that the sympathetic wrongdoer succeeds when it’s our guy but fails when it’s Annorax or Soran or whoever.)
It’s certainly a much better handling of this kind of story beat for Harry than “Non Sequitur,” which failed to adequately convey why it was so important to him to leave the idyllic alternate timeline and get back to the one where he was stranded on Voyager. The stakes are much higher here, both the life-and-death stakes for the crew and the emotional stakes for Harry.
FWIW, it could entirely be possible that they *have* simulated this before, but a simulation of an unknown phenomenon is inherently vulnerable to incorrect or poor knowledge about what you’re doing. GI, GO, you know? So maybe Paris was focusing in on a specific kind of possibility that hadn’t been checked in earlier testing, or fiddled with the initial parameters, or whatever else, leading to a difference in result between the sims shown and whatever exploratory work was done prior.
@19 It may be a safer alternative to take 70 years to get home, but they’d be missing out on almost their entire lives back in the AQ. And given the death rate on Voyager, its not even a very safe option to take the long route home. It may not be as black-and-white as a “we have to try this or everyone dies” scenario, but it’s close. The cost of safety is almost too much. They did sell that the benonite-decay issue made it a now-or-never chance to take. Like choosing between the death penalty with a high chance of getting away scot free, or the certainty of a life in prison sentence. Perhaps the episode didn’t make that point, but most of the series already does, that they are reckoning with having their lives ripped away and decided for them by that fateful stranding, and that they are trying to get home first and foremost. By year 5 their desperation and “hey we usually win” experiences led to some poor but understandable choices here.
I also think their choice to take the flight is being judged as outrageously bad because we know the outcome from the start. But really, this is a possibility every time they take chances deemed worth the risk. A formulaic episode has some kind of crisis, a dangerous plan is formed that solves everything, an advisor points out the danger they’re facing, and the captain or somebody speechifies about the greater good and having a little faith or whatever. Then they almost die but have an incredible bout of luck and make it through and they’re declared winners for being lucky. It’s completely in trek-verse character to try the flight, we usually just see the lucky chain of events and that’s it.
In choosing the “Voyager dies” timeline over the “Voyager is saved” timeline, you disrupt and erase the positive achievements and existences of the people in the Voyager saved timeline as much as in the vice versa scenario. It’s merely the prerogative of the people within each one to try to save what they’ve known, but I don’t see one being morally superior to the other. Crimes are committed against whichever timeline loses its existence.
It does seem to me Keith that with a lot of episodes you give a low score because of some logical flaw that bother’s you which is fair enough but i feel you could do this with virtually any episode. Lets take the die is cast on DS9 why didn’t Tain simply try to destroy the wormhole much safer plan surely that’s a major plothole would that be worth giving the epiosde a 5?
@21/karey: “It may be a safer alternative to take 70 years to get home, but they’d be missing out on almost their entire lives back in the AQ.”
I never said that was the only alternative. See my first comment where I suggested other options.
“And given the death rate on Voyager, its not even a very safe option to take the long route home.”
The Enterprise had just as high a death rate in the Alpha/Beta Quadrants. Starfleet is not a safe line of work, period. But again, it comes down to the difference between measured, necessary risk and recklessness.
“I also think their choice to take the flight is being judged as outrageously bad because we know the outcome from the start.”
Did anyone say “outrageous?” Where are you getting that? It’s simply pointing out a conceptual flaw in the setup. Not all criticism is impassioned condemnation.
And no, it’s not because we know the outcome. It’s because they knew the outcome of their simulations was 100% failure, yet they tried it anyway and relied on Harry’s untested fix, which at best was “sound in theory” but had too many potential ways to go wrong. So they knew the likelihood of failure almost as well as we did. And they still gambled the entire crew on it rather than trying a more incremental option like just sending the Flyer.
After all, the Flyer did make it home. So if they’d just sent it with a few people aboard, they could’ve shared their research with Starfleet, and surely with the entire resources of the Federation, it would’ve been possible to synthesize more benamite, perfect the drive, and then send a ship to rescue the rest of the crew maybe a few months or at most a few years later.
“A formulaic episode has some kind of crisis, a dangerous plan is formed that solves everything, an advisor points out the danger they’re facing, and the captain or somebody speechifies about the greater good and having a little faith or whatever.”
Yes, obviously. The difference, as I’ve been trying to explain, is about the degree of risk, and more importantly its credibility. You’re talking about risk in a story as if all risks were identical, and the point is that they aren’t, that some risks are more justified than others. It’s the job of the storyteller to sell the idea that the risk is justified — that it’s believable for the characters to choose to take such an extreme risk. In this case, the believability of the setup fell short.
“It’s merely the prerogative of the people within each one to try to save what they’ve known, but I don’t see one being morally superior to the other. Crimes are committed against whichever timeline loses its existence.”
That’s very solipsistic. The point I was trying to make is that it’s not about individuals. If you change the timeline, you’re altering countless other people’s lives without their consent. You’re forcing your own will upon them and not giving them a say. And yes, that is an objectively immoral thing to do, except in extreme cases where the alternative is even worse. An individual or a small elite does not have the right to place their selfish needs above everyone else’s rights.
If I were going to nit-pick one thing it would be that in the erased timeline where Voyager is about to crash – when that is evident to Janeway that she’s lost all helm control, why does she not order all hands to escape pods and shuttles? There was definitely enough time. Alternatively, there’s always beaming everyone into the pattern buffers for restoration should one day the ship be found and recoverable. It worked for Montgomery Scott! But of course none of this can happen because everyone has to die so Harry has profound guilt.
@22: Because they’d have had to have done it right under the noses of the Deep Space 9 crew, who would probably have stopped them. (And maybe he thought there were other reasons access to the Gamma Quadrant would benefit Cardassia.) Plot hole gone.
@25: Not really it was established in the search part two that a couple of torpedoes can destroy the wormhole they could decloak and fire before ds9 even knows what’s happening, you know Starfleet they won’t attack you unless you attack them first and they give you many warnings . They don’t even need a whole fleet or even use there own ships hire someone else so you can deny involvement . As for wanting to keep the wormhole for your own ends it’s still controlled by Bajor and the federation it’s postives aren’t really worth it that’s why the Romulans tried to destroy ds9 in that O’brien time travel episode.
@24/garreth: “Alternatively, there’s always beaming everyone into the pattern buffers for restoration should one day the ship be found and recoverable. It worked for Montgomery Scott!”
It only halfway worked for Scott, because the other guy in stasis with him didn’t survive. A 50% success rate is hardly a sure thing.
Also, it depended on the transporter and the pattern buffers retaining power so that Scott could be continuously cycled through the beam, constantly being dematerialized and rematerialized to get around the fact that a stored pattern can’t survive in the buffer for more than 8 minutes. In this case, Voyager‘s power grid was destroyed, so even if Janeway had tried it, all the patterns would’ve been lost.
The more I think about it, and after reading the comments, the flaw in the plot cancels any good vibes from this episode for me. The fact that they pushed on ahead despite all the failures in the simulation is just beyond stupid—bordering on parody. They didn’t even try to simulate Harry’s idea! Just some really lazy writing there. The easy solution is to simulate Harry’s idea several times, all of which went well, but then some unseen variable messes up the real attempt, forcing Harry to think on his feet, but failing. You get the same angst and the giant plot-hole is adverted.
@19/Christopher: One could argue that Janeway is more prone to taking unnecessary risks compared to other captains. Especially after having already done a questionable deal with the Borg for safe passage, potentially risking other races in the process. Season 1 Janeway might have not done this, but I’d say it’s not out of character for current Janeway.
@23/ChristopherLBennett:
Or heck, just send everyone home, 10-12 at a time, via the Delta Flyer. Build a few rows of seats in there, maybe let them take one carry-on item. Have the last one off Voyager (presumably Janeway) initiate the self-destruct sequence so there isn’t any recoverable technology. The people are more valuable than the ship. If they could get it to work on the small scale but not on the larger one, why not just repeat the small-scale solution a bunch of times?
@28/Austin: “They didn’t even try to simulate Harry’s idea!”
Well, Chakotay did say “I’ve analyzed Harry’s flight plan,” concluding that the theory was sound but there were too many unpredictable variables. That implies that he ran simulations of it. Still, it was left pretty vague.
@29/Eduardo: “One could argue that Janeway is more prone to taking unnecessary risks compared to other captains. Especially after having already done a questionable deal with the Borg for safe passage, potentially risking other races in the process. Season 1 Janeway might have not done this, but I’d say it’s not out of character for current Janeway.”
And that is essentially the problem — that the writers fell too much into the habit of having Janeway take implausibly extreme risks, and that this was a poor storytelling choice. As I said before, it’s basic to adventure fiction to have characters take extreme risks, but it’s important to sell them as justified and unavoidable, as a matter of credibility and good storytelling. If you ramp up the risk factor to an extreme just for the sake of doing it, that’s poor writing. Or at least it’s the school of writing that places thrills and spectacle above credibility, and that’s not the kind of writing Star Trek should ideally have. Roddenberry’s priority was to make ST credible — if not scientifically, then certainly in terms of characterization. The revised TOS writers’ bible opened with a three-page lecture about how important it was for the characters to behave believably and naturally despite the fanciful setting.
If it has become “in character” for Janeway to take insane risks with the lives of her crew, then Janeway is being badly written. That is the point. The fact that it’s consistent with her characterization is a negative, not a positive, because it underlines the flaw in how she’s being characterized. I mean, if her recklessness had been presented as a serious problem that needed to be addressed, if there’d been a story arc about how she’d gone off the rails and needed to be reminded of her priorities, that could’ve been worthwhile. But the show keeps asking us to accept that Janeway is right to take these ludicrous risks, and that is the problem.
@30/James: “Or heck, just send everyone home, 10-12 at a time, via the Delta Flyer.”
Except that they could only do it once because the benamite crystals were decaying and they didn’t think they could make more. That was the reason they took the risk with the whole ship — because it was their only shot. What I’m saying was that if it was their only shot and it was too dangerous, then they should’ve taken a more measured option — get someone (or just a probe) back to Starfleet with the specs for quantum slipstream drive and benamite crystal synthesis, and let them apply themselves to the problem with more resources than Voyager alone can manage.
@20/foamy, that was also how I saw the situation: they have run successful simulations, but Paris noticed some additional factor they have not considered before. After all, a simulation is only as good as the input data.
I liked this episode quite a lot. I always found Harry a bit bland, but in this episode he was great for all the reasons stated in the review and comments. And I am a Chakotay fan, so having him also helped :)
@31 – Speaking of Janeway’s characterization (and her Borg decision), I’m halfway through your Places of Exile (really liking it so far) and I like how you had Janeway change her mind about the Borg alliance thanks to a persuasive argument from Chakotay. That’s really how she needed to be written. Well, the whole show in general actually.
I’ve seen this episode 5 or 6 times, and it is a standout for sure. Harry’s 180 degrees from his normal doe eyed Janeway-pleasing self. Most shocking is his lack of a smile, I mean, he is been hating himself for a looong time, and he’s pissed. He’s so bent on saving everyone…but his determination becomes his validation and success. It also screws up another time line. Oh well, it was fun.
@26: The very fact that the Romulans felt they had to get rid of Deep Space 9 first suggests it might not be as simple as puttering up to the wormhole and firing off a couple of shots while Starfleet send polite messages. The crew knew about the Cardassian/Romulan fleet well before they were in firing range. They may have just stood there and watched them enter the wormhole, but if a ship had come in with weapons charged and targeted the wormhole, they’d probably have been a bit less polite. There’s also the fact that leaving the Founders out there with knowledge of the Alpha Quadrant, even if you’ve just blocked off their shortcut, might have been seen as delaying the inevitable.
@27/CLB: Everyone’s patterns being stored in the transporter pattern buffer was just one idea. But like I also mentioned, evacuating the ship in escape pods and shuttles and the Delta Flyer was never even attempted.
Another nit: When Voyager hit the surface of the ice planet with as much force as it did, most of the crew should have turned into chunky salsa. However when Kim and Chakotay 15 years hence stroll through the downed ship, people’s bodies seemed pretty intact, Seven of Nine for example. Of course it’s network TV so we’re not going to get that gruesome. We won’t get explicit gore until the Kurtzman era of Trek.
Harry’s triumphant “Yes!!” just before the Delta Flyer is destroyed is the entire episode for me, and I always tear up at that moment. This is easily Harry Kim’s and Garrett Wang’s best episode of the entire series. It proved Wang can act.
Yes the plot falls apart when you look at it closely enough, but it’s a story about piercing guilt and regret, which Wang plays beautifully. Robert Beltran is also wonderful here, conveying Chakotay’s quiet determination and doubt with a very subtle performance. I love how Wang and Beltran play the two versions of their characters very differently, yet still at the cores the same.
Another episode that blew me away when I watched this in first run in 1998. The visual of Voyager under the ice, the ship crashing on the surface: I couldn’t believe how real it looked. And icing, so to speak, on the cake was Captain Geordi La Forge.
@36/garreth: “When Voyager hit the surface of the ice planet with as much force as it did, most of the crew should have turned into chunky salsa.”
Most starship maneuvers would turn the crew into chunky salsa if not for the inertial damper fields cancelling the acceleration. Presumably the dampers were still functioning during the crash.
“We won’t get explicit gore until the Kurtzman era of Trek.”
You’re forgetting TNG: “Conspiracy.”
It’s always fun to speculate on what these Alternate Timeline episodes can tell us about the core personality of the characters depicted – ‘Will Prime Timeline Harry Kim (with all the assorted traumas & frustrations of his career through the Delta Quadrant) resemble the one who appears in this offshoot?’ is an interesting question and one can only wonder how Captain Janeway would get along with Tessa, were they to moot (one thing this rewatch project has taught me is that Mr Chakotay is catnip to the more discerning sort of ladies, he’s just not as loud about it as some).
Also, I’m not afraid to say that combination of the FIRST CONTACT uniform pattern with the ALL GOOD THINGS comm badge is one of my favourite looks in all of STAR TREK (and isn’t it fun to imagine how Captain LaForge runs his very own Galaxy-class and the sort of Weird Science adventures they presumably get caught up in?*).
*Also, just what should the interior of a 2390s Galaxy-class look like? (One hopes that the second season of PICARD will let us catch up with some old favourites, as well as further defining the new kids on the block).
Also, apropos of absolutely nothing, I recently discovered that Mr Robert Beltran rode shotgun on a Chuck Norris movie (LONE WOLF MCQUADE) at one point and for some reason I find this absolutely hilarious (It’s always fun to discoverer a previous role at odds with those elements of an actor’s career with which one is most familiar).
@36/27/CLB: Everyone’s patterns being stored in the transporter pattern buffer was just one idea
Doctor Who did something like that. A computer stored the patterns of everybody aboard to protect them forcing it to the limits of it’s capacity as it also had to create a virtual reality to keep all those consciousnesses sane
@38/CLB: Yes, I suppose the inertial dampers cushioned the impact. But then they could have also used a very low-tech solution to help survive the collision: seat-belts. Yes, there were people on the compacted decks who were crushed to death, but for those on the intact decks, seat-belts would have saved lives. Not to mention leaving the ship in escape pods and shuttlecraft before they even crashed.
Yeah, I hadn’t really remembered “Conspiracy” which was shocking for the time but re-watching that particular scene the effects are pretty cartoony and rather bloodless to me. But still gross too.
@42/garreth: You’re sort of contradicting yourself. If the accelerations were high enough to justify invoking “chunky salsa,” i.e. probably in the thousands of gravities, then seatbelts would be useless. That kind of restraints or acceleration couches would only protect someone from injury up to maybe 40-50g, and anything over 80g is considered inevitably fatal no matter how well you’re secured.
@43/CLB: I meant seat-belts in combination with functioning inertial dampers. Deployable airbags that we already have in this century would be great too.
Interesting that they always seem to go to the Holodeck to test this sort of simulation. One presumes the holodeck isn’t actually duplicating the conditions experienced in slipstream, but just determining and applying the end result, in which case it would probably be more efficient to run the simulation without the illustrations and output the data as a spreadsheet.
But seeing, I suppose, is believing.
@44/garreth: The value of seat restraints was noted as far back as TOS, but with rare exceptions like ST:TMP, the franchise has chosen not to utilize them, out of the belief that it’s more exciting to show people flying out of their chairs. It’s just one of the franchise’s standard breaks from reality and common sense, like the lack of security armor (the movie era again being an exception) and the lack of airlocks (or bathrooms, evidently) on shuttlecraft.
@39: By the year 2390 you probably run the ship from a holobridge. What could possibly go wrong…
Doctor Who’s time machine is frequently redesigned… on the inside. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” remodelled a starship bridge by unprogrammed activation of an Improbability stardrive. I think on television this just meant muzak and large potted plants appeared. In the book series, another starship was constructed that looked from outside like a pleasant small restaurant, but on the inside looked like a pleasant small restaurant. To simplify a little, this is because the mathematical paradoxes of dividing a food bill accurately are useful for cancelling the vast distances that interesting places in space are from each other, without ever using Improbability again.
I’d love to see an episode like this entirely from the perspective of the characters in the present. They’re about to experience some catastrophic event, when suddenly things get fixed and there’s a cryptic message from someone from the future. In this case, it could have served to give Harry (and maybe Janeway) cause to ruminate on their own hubris for the rest of the episode.
Or, I suppose Lower Decks could just use it as a punchline and end the episode.
–Andy
@48/Andy Holman: “Or, I suppose Lower Decks could just use it as a punchline and end the episode.”
They kind of did already. There was that character who alluded to a mission to go back in time to kill the guy who was worse than Hitler — implying that they already succeeded in doing so, which is why we don’t know who that guy was.
What’s weird about the main plothole everyone is talking about is how easily it could have been fixed. Just say that you can’t test it on the holodeck because the conditions aren’t well known enough to simulate, the only way to find out is to try it for real. Most of the episode (IMS) could have been unchanged. (Honestly, whenever I watch it I’ll probably just make that my headcanon. :) ) Sure, there are other plot holes—the inconsistent ethics viz-a-viz time travel (although here, too, you can just think that the title characters were wrong) — and them not doing something halfway, like ChristopherLBennett suggested, like sending a message or a small group. Still, given that the simulation is everyone’s primary beef, it really does seem like it would be easy to fix (writing-wise).
Yeah, where are the temporal police, like Captain Braxton or someone else of that sort, to stop Kim and Chakotay from changing the past? Same goes for in “Endgame.”
garreth: In “Relativity,” Braxton mentioned a temporal incursion in the Takara sector as one of the Voyager-related time travel issues he had to deal with, which is likely a reference to this episode. It’s possible that Braxton facilitated the successful completion of Chakotay and Kim’s mission in some way……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@52/krad: But wouldn’t Braxton have tried to prevent them from changing history? That’s the point. In “Future’s End” he was willing to blow up the whole ship to prevent them from changing history. So why would he help them do it here?
@51,52,53 Unless the timeline where the Voyager crashes is also the timeline where the Temporal Police (or whaatever they’re called) don’t exist. If this is true, we still don’t know if they can access the alternate timeline. Theoretically, they shouldn’t be able to, but Star Trek temporal mechanics are a self-contradictory mess. So either (a) they can’t and Temporal Police weren’t present in that timeline to interfere with the reset because they didn’t exist, or (b) they can but were unwilling to as then their organisation won’t exist. Of course, we can make up an option (c) where Voyager getting home prevents some large scale catastrophe.
@54/mani: In my novel Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock, I established that the future time agencies were obligated to let Voyager‘s temporal shenanigans go uncorrected because they were part of the timeline that (in the novel continuity) led to the ultimate defeat of the Borg, without which the entire galaxy would ultimately have been assimilated. Presumably “Future’s End” Braxton hadn’t gotten that memo.
I don’t think this is a bad episode at all but what would have made it stand it out more would have been if it had been split into a two parter, we could have had the first part actually starting with Chakotay and Kim arriving in the Alpha quadrant and seeing their struggles to live with what had happend, and arriving at the solution to changing the timeline and then gone back in part two to see what we saw in this episode, I think that would have had more of an emotional impact.
@38/CLB: At exactly the 35 minute mark (I just checked on Netflix), Seven says, “Inertial dampers off-line!” This was right after Paris said, “I’m losing attitude control,” and while Voyager was still in the slipstream.
That’s the moment where the entire crew should have instantly, gruesomely died, long before Voyager actually crashed.
What I’m wondering is, why did future Harry and Chakotay have to steal the Delta Flyer, compounding their legal woes and fugitive status? Seems like any old ship would have been good enough, and once they’d procured Seven’s implant and the EMH, they didn’t need to be in a ship and underway. They could have done the whole message-to-the-past thing right there in the wreckage of Voyager, for that matter. Where were they going in the Flyer?
@57/terracinque: “That’s the moment where the entire crew should have instantly, gruesomely died, long before Voyager actually crashed.”
No, I don’t see that. Losing attitude control is like your steering wheel going out, while losing inertial dampers is like losing your seatbelt and airbags. You may swerve out of control, but you can survive until the car actually hits something.
A billion years late on my comment here, but one nitpick I’ve had ever since I saw this is why is Captain LaForge hanging out in his conference room? It really bothers me that he’s not on the bridge. I mean I get the production reason but you couldn’t have found a way to put Geordi in a redressed bridge
@59/MikeKelm: Given the sensitive situation, with a couple of admired Starfleet officers going rogue, Geordi probably preferred to confront them in private. Not to mention that time travel was involved, so a lot of what they discussed might have been classified.
@58/CLB: I always thought of inertial dampers as what’s keeping the bridge crew from being chunky salsa on the back wall of the bridge when the ship is traveling at warp drive and other high velocities. So I get why terracinque also believed internal dampers being offline while Voyager was in the slipstream would have meant the crew’s gruesome deaths.
@61: And I still think that. Any change in the ship’s direction relative to the direction the crew inside it is moving will almost instantaneously fling the crew against a bulkhead at a relative speed of (however fast the slipstream drive is).
The crew really should be strapped into their seats as a safeguard for losing inertial dampers at high velocities as well as battle situations.
@61/garreth: “I always thought of inertial dampers as what’s keeping the bridge crew from being chunky salsa on the back wall of the bridge when the ship is traveling at warp drive and other high velocities. So I get why terracinque also believed internal dampers being offline while Voyager was in the slipstream would have meant the crew’s gruesome deaths.”
It’s not high velocities that matter, but high accelerations. Maintaining a constant velocity, however high, is physically equivalent to standing still. The vessel and its occupants have identical inertia so the difference between them is zero. It’s when the ship suddenly accelerates, decelerates, or changes direction that you have a problem, because then the ship’s inertia changes while the crew’s doesn’t, and it’s that differential that crushes the crew’s bodies against the walls of the ship. (It’s the same reason you feel weight when gravity pulls you against the floor of a stationary elevator, but feel weightless if the elevator starts free-falling at the same rate you are. It’s the differential between occupant and container that matters.)
Hence my point. As long as the ship is traveling at a constant high velocity, the crew is safe even without inertial dampers. It’s only at the moment it crashes, or otherwise sharply changes velocity, that they’d be killed. It’s the same as the physics of falling off a building. It’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end.
Also, of course, a ship in warp is not actually moving in the conventional sense. It’s standing still inside a piece of the universe that’s altering its topological relationship with the rest of the universe. The only way the ship or crew would be subjected to acceleration is if they somehow passed through the warp bubble itself and were torn apart by the severe tidal gradients within it.
@64/CLB: That all makes sense. But they all still should have been wearing seatbelts and had airbags deploy when Voyager crashed into the ice planet. Then there could have been survivors.
@65/garreth: Yeah, and the Starfleet infantry in the Dominion War episodes in DS9 should’ve been wearing body armor or personal force fields, but instead they were wearing nothing but cloth. Safety design sucks in fictional universes.
@66/CLB: True regarding safety design in fictional universes. And I know it was a practical consideration for television audiences, but it always took me out of the story when watching scenes on Game of Thrones that took place in the far north. To protect against subzero temperatures, characters sensibly wore layers of leather and fur all over their bodies everywhere except their heads! The tips of their noses and ears would be turning black from frostbite, snot and tears would be freezing up in place, and we should see steam emanating from their heads but there was none of that. That was the intentional costume design so that audiences would always know what character was which. But I found it distractingly ridiculous.
@64: If what you say about moving at warp speed is true, they wouldn’t/shouldn’t even need inertial dampeners.
It seems like you’re trying to have your cake and throw it against the wall too.
@68/terracinque: Of course they need dampers — at impulse. Obviously vast accelerations do happen in sublight travel and maneuvering. But the physics of warp travel and the physics of sublight travel are profoundly different, despite the tendency of TV writers to treat them as equivalent.
I like this episode, don’t love it, but like it. That said, just a quick note on the “plot hole” everyone is discussing about holodeck testing. Paris tells Kim that he ran a simulation “last night” and discovered a .42 phase variance. Kim responds, verbatim, “Tom, if it’ll make you feel better, we’ll go to the holodeck right now, run a few MORE (emphasis mine) simulations. It’s probably just a sensor glitch.” Seems pretty apparent that the idea is that Voyager has run as least some, likely many simulations on the new engine tech, but none taking into account the .42 phase variance that Paris discovered.
Just bopping by this ep to say I love that Janeway puts her hand to her head when Harry asks her a question about a temporal paradox. She says nothing about her time shenanigans headache, but clearly it’s that. It’s so subtle it’s great.
Unsubtle though was (among many things) the message from future Harry. I think the episode would have been more hauntingly powerful without it, let alone the paradox. But if it had to be included, I wish it had been lower res, fewer frames, otherwise showing degradation. It came through like a paradoxical message from your former self, transmitted through impossible Borg tech through a mostly retired implant, is more reliable and HQ than Facetime. And I feel sure the message to himself could have been more moving, if it had to be there at all.
When I was watching, I thought it was a dumb trope that he sent the new coordinates to the same point in time, when he could have sent a whole long HQ video message explaining everything (and giving stock tips and horse race winners) to his former self weeks in advance. But, then I realized, what he wound up doing was giving the ship a huge boost forward instead, and not have to recalibrate the transmitter, and that was enough brilliance and sweetness to make up for a lot.