“Endgame”
Written by Rick Berman & Kenneth Biller & Brannon Braga and Robert Doherty
Directed by Allan Kroeker
Season 7, Episode 25/26
Production episode 271
Original air date: May 23, 2001
Stardate: 54973.4
Captain’s log. In 2404, Voyager is celebrating the tenth anniversary of her return home after twenty-three years in the Delta Quadrant. Admiral Janeway attends a party that also includes Captain Kim (CO of the U.S.S. Rhode Island), Commander Barclay (a teacher at the Academy), Torres (a Federation-Klingon Empire liaison), Paris (a holonovelist), the EMH (now married and having chosen the name Joe), and Naomi and her daughter, at the very least.
Not present is Tuvok, who is institutionalized thanks to a brain disorder that can only be cured by a mind-meld with a biologically compatible Vulcan. There was no such Vulcan on Voyager, unfortunately. Also not present are two who died: Chakotay and Seven. And another absence is Ensign Miral Paris, the daughter of Paris and Torres, who is on a special mission for Janeway.
Torres also informs Janeway that she has arranged for a Klingon named Korath to get a seat on the High Council.
Barclay teaches a class on the Borg at the Academy, and Janeway comes as a guest lecturer. One cadet asks about the Unimatrix Zero rebellion, and another asks about Seven—Janeway shuts the latter down quickly. A call from Miral interrupts the class—she’s arranged a meeting with Korath, and he insists on meeting Janeway personally.
Janeway then surprises Joe by requesting her annual physical ahead of time—usually the doctor has to put her in a headlock to get her to get an exam. She also asks Joe for two thousand milligrams of an experimental drug that protects one from tachyon radiation.
She also visits Tuvok in the institution—he is not well, scribbling notes on pieces of paper by candelight, even though his hospital room has safer light sources he can use. Janeway indicates that she’s taking a trip she doesn’t plan to come back from. Then she visits Chakotay’s grave.
Finally, Barclay provides her with a shuttle and some information on a padd. He also offers to go with her, but she refuses.
In 2377, Torres has the latest in a series of false labors, to the chagrin of both her and Paris. Meanwhile, Kim has started a pool for when the kid will be born. Voyager detects a nebula that is filled with wormholes. They go to investigate, but stumble across a Borg Cube—which turns out to be one of many. They seem to escape without attracting the Borg’s notice, but it’s a near thing. Despite the pleadings of Kim, they move on from the nebula.
Icheb plays a game of kal-toh against Tuvok and wins. This indicates to Tuvok that his condition is worsening, and the EMH ups his medication. Tuvok also refuses to discuss this with the captain until such time as it affects his on-duty performance.
Meanwhile, Chakotay and Seven have started dating. They have a picnic lunch in the cargo bay, which we learn is their third date.
In 2404, Joe’s presence is requested in Tuvok’s room at the hospital: he’s agitated, constantly reciting a stream of numbers and saying that Janeway’s disappearance remains a mystery. Joe then confronts Barclay, who finally admits that Janeway has gone off on an unauthorized mission. Joe gets in touch with Kim.
Janeway arrives at a planet and beams down to a cave. She dismisses Miral, who objects—she’s been working on this for six months—but Janeway insists she go see her parents who miss her. Janeway then meets with Korath, who has a time-travel device for her as promised—but now he wants her shield generator as additional payment. Janeway initially refuses, then pretends to give in, contriving to steal the device.
In 2377, Chakotay and Seven have another date, and then Seven goes to the EMH to ask him to fix her cortical node so it won’t render her unconscious if she gets too emotional. The EMH thinks that he’s in, there, but she gently rebuffs him, saying she’s involved with someone else.
In 2404, the Rhode Island shows up, with Kim intending to arrest Janeway. However, she instead manages to talk him into helping her with her plan. She hooks up the device and prepares to use it. However, Korath shows up and fires on her. The Rhode Island provides cover, while the shuttle goes through a temporal rift.
The shuttle winds up in 2377 and in the Delta Quadrant. Admiral Janeway instructs her younger self to close the rift before the Klingons get through, which she does.
Admiral Janeway explains that she’s here to get Voyager home sooner, but doesn’t explain why for Temporal Prime Directive reasons. The EMH confirms that it is indeed an older Kathryn Janeway, and Seven confirms that the shuttle is Starfleet, but more advanced, with weaponry and defenses that might well be effective against the Borg.
Janeway agrees to make the modifications to the ship to defend better against the Borg and then return to the nebula.
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Seven goes to regenerate, at which point the Borg Queen contacts her. She says that she knows full well that Voyager entered the nebula, but she left them alone as a kindness to Seven. But if they return, there will be no such kindness.
Admiral Janeway dismisses the threat, because the fancy-shmancy new weapons will enable them to stand fast against the Borg.
They go into the nebula and the new armor defends against all Borg weapons and the transphasic torpedoes destroy a Cube. The Borg Queen backs off, not willing to sacrifice so many drones to stop one ship.
Voyager arrives at the center of the nebula, which reveals one of the Borg’s six transwarp hubs.
Janeway immediately orders Paris to fly out of the nebula. This is a major tactical advantage the Borg have, and now they can cripple them. Admiral Janeway is livid, but Janeway insists that they find a way to destroy the hub.
In private, Admiral Janeway finally tells the whole story: Seven will die if they don’t get home now, and so will twenty-two other people, though they’re just an afterthought, what with not being opening-credits regulars and all. Plus Tuvok’s condition will deteriorate—a condition that Janeway doesn’t even know about yet.
Tuvok insists that his condition is a worthy sacrifice to make in order to save all the lives that would go unassimilated if they destroy the hub. Admiral Janeway then breaks the Temporal Prime Directive even further by telling Seven the truth about what will happen to her, but she also feels that her life is worth sacrificing to destroy the Borg hub. Having said that, she also breaks things off with Chakotay to spare him the heartbreak of losing her.
Tuvok and Seven come up with a plan to detonate multiple transphasic torpedoes, which will have a cascade effect and destroy the hub. Voyager will have all of ten seconds to get away. Janeway, remembering that they were stranded in the Delta Quadrant in the first place to save the Ocampa, says that she won’t order the crew to do it, she’ll only give the order if they all agree. They all do, with Kim of all people giving a rousing speech about how it’s the journey that matters rather than the destination.
The two Janeways then have a conversation, with Admiral Janeway appreciating the reminder of how close the crew was and how loyal they were to her. (Given that she got Barclay and Kim to help her out knowing what she was doing, I don’t see how she could possibly forget that, but whatever…) They also come up with a plan to eat their cake and have it too: destroy the hub but not until after they get home.
Admiral Janeway gets an injection of something that will probably be important later, then goes off in her shuttle. Voyager heads into the nebula, just as Torres finally goes into labor. Paris reluctantly leaves his wife’s side, with her blessing, as they need their best pilot if they’re going to survive.
The Borg Queen sees that Voyager is entering the nebula, but then Admiral Janeway appears before her: it’s a neural projection, using fancy-shmancy twenty-fifth-century technology. Admiral Janeway offers to provide the Queen with information on how to defeat the futuristic defenses if the Queen allows Voyager to go home. The hub will then remain intact. The Queen asks for the admiral’s shuttle, also, which she reluctantly agrees to—but then the Queen announces that they’ve traced her signal. The Borg beam Admiral Janeway into the Queen’s chamber and the Queen assimilates her.
Just as Voyager is about to enter the hub, the Queen orders Cubes to go after them and assimilate them—but then she collapses. The injection the admiral got earlier was a pathogen that infects the Collective. It eventually destroys all the Cubes in the nebula, which destroys the hub.
However, the Queen did manage to divert one sphere that was already in the hub to Voyager. It chases them to the Alpha Quadrant, where Owen, Barclay, an admiral, and some other ships watch in fear, a fleet of ships sent to defend Earth against what looks like a Borg attack.
But Janeway had Paris maneuver inside the sphere and then Tuvok detonates a transphasic torpedo. Voyager triumphantly flies out of the exploding sphere, and are welcomed home by a shocked Owen.
Meanwhile, down in sickbay, Torres gives birth to a bouncing baby girl.
And Voyager heads toward Earth.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently transphasic torpedoes are even more super-duper than photon and quantum torpedoes.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway, not satisfied with getting her crew home in twenty-three years, is determined to risk the space-time continuum by getting them home in seven, mostly so her surrogate daughter won’t die.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok has been dealing with a degenerative neurological condition, one that resulted in his being institutionalized in 2404, but which presumably was taken care of by a family member once they got home in 2377.
Half and half. Torres is not happy about all the false labors, nor the EMH’s comment that Klingon labors can sometimes go on for days. She is also hilariously cranky when Paris realizes that he might win the baby pool.
Forever an ensign. In 2404, Kim finally got promoted, all the way to captain! In 2377, he goes from whining about not checking out the nebula—even trying to inveigle Paris to go with him in the Delta Flyer to investigate more covertly—to giving a speech how it doesn’t matter when they get home, as long as the family stays together.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix is still in touch with the ship. He and Seven are playing a long-distance game of kadis-kot, and Neelix is aware of Seven and Chakotay’s burgeoning relationship.
Chell is vying for the job of replacing Neelix as ship’s chef, and his dishes include Plasma Leek Soup, Chicken Warp Core-don Bleu, and Red Alert Chili.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. In 2404, the EMH has a name and an organic wife. He’s also the one who figures out what Janeway is up to and tries to stop her. In 2377, he tries to get the admiral to tell him about his future self’s accomplishments, before the captain shuts his inquiry down.
Resistance is futile. Seven is on her way to becoming more human, and also is the one whom the Queen contacts to make them aware that they’re in bigger trouble than they think, and also helps devise the plan to destroy the hub.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. In 2377, Chakotay and Seven have started dating, which was vaguely hinted as a possibility in “Human Error.” In the alternate future, they got married, and Seven’s death devastated Chakotay.
Neelix says that he’s thinking of asking Dexa to marry him.
Do it.
“It took you thirty-three years to come up with ‘Joe’?”
–Paris expressing shock at the EMH’s very slow road to picking a name.
Welcome aboard. Alice Krige returns to the role of the Borg Queen; she last played the role in First Contact, but Susanna Thompson had played her on her prior Voyager appearances (“Dark Frontier” and the “Unimatrix Zero” two-parter). Krige will next appear in the role in Lower Decks’ “I, Excretus,” where the Borg Queen is part of a holodeck exercise.
Lisa LoCicero plays Miral; she’ll return to voice the character in Star Trek Online.
Miguel Perez plays Tuvok’s doctor, Grant Garrison and Iris Bahr play two of Barclay’s cadets, Amy Lindsay plays the EMH’s wife Lana, Matthew James Williamson plays the obnoxious Klingon, Ashley Sierra Hughes plays Naomi’s daughter Sabrina, and Richard Sarstedt plays the admiral with Owen and Barclay on Earth.
Vaughn Armstrong makes his fifth appearance on Voyager as Korath, having previously played a Romulan (“Eye of the Needle”), an ex-Borg (“Survival Instinct”), a Vidiian (“Fury”), and a Hirogen (“Flesh and Blood”). He’ll be back in multiple roles on Enterprise, most notably the recurring role of Admiral Forrest.
We get recurring regulars Dwight Schultz (Barclay), Richard Herd (Owen), and Manu Intiraymi (Icheb).
Finally, one of Barclay’s cadets was played by a young man named Jessie, who had cystic fibrosis. He appeared on Voyager thanks to the Make-a-Wish Foundation.
Trivial matters: This episode is inexplicably listed on Paramount+ and other streaming services as “Endgame Parts 1 and 2,” even though it was initially aired as a single two-hour episode, and only has one production number, and it shows as a single episode (just like “Caretaker,” “Dark Frontier,” and “Flesh and Blood”).
Allan Kroeker also directed DS9’s series finale, “What You Leave Behind,” and he will direct Enterprise’s series finale, “These are the Voyages…” as well.
This is the first real appearance of Miral, after the computer-generated image of her seen in “Lineage.” Her first name is not spoken in dialogue (she’s only referred to by rank or last name, or “my daughter” by Torres), but her first name comes from the script, which follows what was established in “Author, Author,” where Torres said they were thinking of naming their daughter after Torres’ mother (whom we saw, sort of, in “Barge of the Dead”).
The 2404 segments include future Starfleet uniforms that were also seen in alternate futures in TNG‘s “All Good Things…” and DS9’s “The Visitor.”
In 2404, Paris has a career as a holonovelist, and he jokes with the EMH that he’ll run his next program by the doctor before sending it to his publisher, an in-joke regarding the events of “Author, Author.”
The EMH mentions a mission in which Janeway was kidnapped by the Kellidians, which he thinks the mentally unstable Tuvok is referring to. That adventure has never been chronicled.
Seven asks the EMH to adjust her cortical node so she can feel a full range of emotions, as the EMH offered at the end of “Human Error.”
Admiral Janeway jokes that she could be a member of Species 8472 in disguise, referring to the events of “In the Flesh.”
We see both games that Voyager provided for the Trek universe in this episode: kadis-kot, established in “Infinite Regress,” and kal-toh, established in “Alter Ego.”
Klingons having time-travel technology will also be seen in the twenty-third century in Discovery’s “Through the Valley of Shadows.”
Janeway will next appear in Star Trek Nemesis, where it’ll be established that she was promoted to admiral shortly after getting Voyager home. Seven will next appear in Picard’s “Absolute Candor.” Icheb will next appear in Picard’s “Stardust City Rag.” Paris will next appear in Lower Decks’ “We’ll Always Have Tom Paris.” This is, thus far, the last onscreen appearance of everyone else in the episode, though Robert Beltran is reported to be appearing as Chakotay in Prodigy, and there’s every possibility that someone else will show up on either Picard, Lower Decks, and/or Prodigy.
This episode was novelized by Diane Carey, and that novel also included an excerpt from Christie Golden’s post-finale novel Homecoming, which was released two years later.
Golden would write the first four novels after “Endgame”—the others were The Farther Shore, Old Wounds, and Enemy of My Enemy. With Nemesis confirming Janeway’s promotion, she had Chakotay become captain of Voyager, and dealt with several outstanding plot threads, including Paris and Torres’s daughter, holographic rights, and just general readjustment back to life in the Alpha Quadrant.
In 2007, Peter David’s TNG novel Before Dishonor saw Janeway and Seven aiding in a fight against the Borg, a fight in which Janeway was killed.
In 2009, Kirsten Beyer took over the reins with Full Circle, which set up a new status quo for Voyager: using the slipstream drive that they brought back, as established in “Hope and Fear,” and which Starfleet eventually was able to reverse-engineer, to send an entire fleet to the Delta Quadrant, to reestablish some of the relationships Voyager made during its sojourn. Several species from the series have been revisited, and also Janeway was resurrected, thanks to Q and Kes. Other novels in that series included Unworthy, Children of the Storm, The Eternal Tide, Protectors, Acts of Contrition, Atonement, A Pocket Full of Lies, Architects of Infinity, and To Lose the Earth.
While most of the crew remains on or at least involved with Voyager in the tie-in fiction, Tuvok becomes second officer on the U.S.S. Titan under Captain Riker, starting in Taking Wing by Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels, and continuing through all the novels featuring that ship.
Korath also appears in the Department of Temporal Investigations novel Watching the Clock by regular commenter Christopher L. Bennett, where he’s also implied to be the one who supplied the older Alexander with time travel technology in TNG‘s “Firstborn.”
Set a course for home. “You sure I can’t talk you out of this?” I loathed this episode when I watched it in May of 2001, and two decades later, I loathe it even more.
Every other time prior to this that the people on a Star Trek show have gone back in time to change or fix something, it’s almost always been to prevent something horrible, or to reverse a change to something horrible. In the original series’ “The City on the Edge of Forever,” Kirk and Spock had to stop McCoy from saving Edith Keeler so the Nazis wouldn’t win World War II. In First Contact, the Enterprise had to stop the Borg from assimilating twenty-first-century Earth. In DS9’s “Past Tense,” O’Brien and Kira had to go back and rescue Sisko, Bashir, and Dax, after the three of them restored the events of the Bell Riots, so that Earth would still become united. In this very show’s “Timeless,” Kim and Chakotay go back to stop Voyager from being destroyed with all hands lost (save the EMH).
In this episode, though, the future that we see at the top of the episode is not that bad. In fact, it’s pretty good, for the most part. To make matters worse, the script goes ahead and cops to that, as Janeway is confused as to why Admiral Janeway is going to all this trouble to erase a good future.
Worse, somehow Janeway convinced Barclay and Kim to go along with this, and I cannot for the life of me understand how she managed that. When Kim was arguing with her on the shuttle, I was on his side, and yet he goes along with it anyhow, because—I dunno, he’s a doofus or something.
Throughout, the episode is trying to convince us that what’s happening here is a good thing, but in order to do that, it requires the crew to be selfish—an instinct they initially go against, to their credit. But we’re in Admiral Janeway’s POV for so much of the story, and we’re supposed to believe that Seven’s death, Chakotay’s heartbreak, and Tuvok’s deterioration are enough to be worth changing history.
Well, okay, there are also twenty-two other people who will die, but as usual the writers can’t be arsed to give a good goddamn about anyone not in the opening credits. As it is, there is absolutely no mention of the twenty-odd people who’ve died since Voyager left Ocampa. Hell, couldn’t Admiral Janeway have gone back a few weeks earlier, to, say, right before “Friendship One“? Then she would have had more time to convince Janeway and the rest of the efficacy of her plan, plus she could have saved Carey. I mean, c’mon, Chakotay’s heartbreak is important enough to go back in time for, but Carey’s family? Fuck them…
Here’s the thing: this is Star Trek, which at its heart is supposed to be heroic fiction. Our heroes do what’s right, even when their own lives are at risk. Tuvok and Seven make absolutely the right decisions when they agree to go ahead with destroying the hub, and risk life and sanity to do so.
And then the script maddeningly takes another turn to give the crew everything they want without sacrificing any morals, because they do destroy the hub and they do get home, and as usual there are no consequences. Reportedly, they had talked about having someone die in the finale, so that the trip home would have more resonance, but they chickened out there. Not only does nobody die, but it ends with a new life—which is great, in the abstract, and ending the show with Miral’s birth is lovely. But it’s all just too damn easy for everyone.
There’s a time-travel story I didn’t mention above, and it’s worth comparing to this: DS9’s “Children of Time.” Odo in that episode is just like Admiral Janeway, manipulating events for his own selfish reasons, as he wants Kira to live. But in that episode, Odo’s choice was appalling and horrible and one that it took Kira a long time to get past. In this episode, Admiral Janeway is the hero, kind of, and it just leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.
Even if you ignore the very un-Trek-like message of this misbegotten finale, it’s still a big ol’ mess. Bringing the Borg back again was probably as inevitable to the writing staff as bringing back Q was for TNG’s “All Good Things…” But all having the Borg here does is remind us how ineffectual the Borg have become as bad guys, starting very early on when Voyager flies within ten meters of a Borg Cube and the Queen just lets them go for no compellingly good reason. Once again, the Queen is a mustache-twirling villain, this time actively disobeying the Evil Overlord Rules as Admiral Janeway is able to run rings around her in a manner that is totally unconvincing. (“I can beat you because I’m from the future” is extremely weak when we’re talking about the Borg.)
Just as DS9’s “What You Leave Behind” mistook the end of the war for the end of the series, “Endgame” mistakes getting home for the end of the show. There are so many questions that the show either doesn’t answer or pretends to answer by presenting them at the top of the episode, but that’s a future that the show goes out of its way to declare as moot and being erased. How does Starfleet deal with the Maquis, especially in light of the events of the Dominion War? What is the Alpha Quadrant’s response to Seven and Icheb as ex-Borg? (That, at least, is getting some play in Picard, but it took two decades for that to happen…) What is the Alpha Quadrant’s response to the EMH? Does Naomi finally get to meet her father? What’s it like for Tuvok and Kim to be reunited with their families? What is Paris’s reunion with his Dad like?
That last one is particularly frustrating, because Owen is right there on the viewscreen when they fly through the hub, and there’s no dialogue between father and son, not even an acknowledgment that the admiral is about to be a grandfather. Given how fraught the Paris family relationships have been, something that got very specific play in several places (particularly “Persistence of Vision,” “Thirty Days,” and “Pathfinder”), the inability to address this stands out as a particularly big failure in a finale full of them.
One of the other failures that this episode is often dinged for is one that I was actually more predisposed toward this time around: the Chakotay-Seven relationship. While it could’ve been set up better, it was at least a little bit set up in “Human Error.” I like the very meticulous, orderly manner in which Seven approaches dating, and I love what Chakotay says to her when she tried to break up with him.
Ultimately, this finale feels like a rehash of other episodes, whether it’s the gaze into an alternate future (TNG’s “All Good Things…”), going back in time to save people after getting home (“Timeless”), a character giving birth (TNG’s “Disaster”), or the ship surviving an encounter with the Borg completely unscathed against all common sense (“Dark Frontier,” “Unimatrix Zero”).
The only thing “Endgame” got right was to get Voyager home. But contrary to the toast made in 2404 by Barclay and in 2377 by Kim, while the destination was right, the journey there was a total disaster.
Warp factor rating: 1
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be doing a seventh-season overview on Monday, then taking a brief pause before kicking off the Enterprise Rewatch in November.
I used to love this episode. Now I hate it. But for a different reason (even though I agree with all your well-made points.) I personally saw no character growth in Captain Janeway on display in this episode (given her inconsistencies in other episodes), and for me, it all comes down to a single scene:
That one scene in the briefing room where she says “we’re not going to destroy the hub unless we all agree.”
It could have been an easy fix.
She could have showed everyone, especially Harry Kim, a genuine smile to express the following: “We’ve been out here too long. Since you’re my family, I care about you, and so if you want to go home, I’m all for it.” Instead, she looks at Harry Kim with hesitaion, and her reaction when saying “Go ahead, Harry” is disappointment, thinking she won’t be able to destroy the hub after all.
Even better, everyone could have said unanimously “let’s go home,” Janeway could sit in her chair, smiling as she says “set a course for home,” someone could suggest “Wait, maybe we could have our cake and eat it too,” Janeway could respond with “If we do that, we’re risking not getting back home,” and everyone says “We’re willing to take that risk.”
Especially since destroying only one of 6 transwarp hubs is like a 10-year-old boy being in a boxing match with a champion. The champion may be weaker if he has one hand tied behind his back, but I hardly say that’s a “crippling” handicap. Is destroying a transwarp hub important? Sure! Do I feel it justifies Janeway not showing any change in character since the “Caretaker” episode? No.
What drives me nuts is that all the factors are in play for making this work. So you want to do them getting home, time travel, and the Borg. Ok, so have them get home– and have the Borg follow them. Have them completely assimilate Earth, except for small, scattered groups of survivors. Have Janeway working to get back to the past to prevent *that*- so at least going through all this effort actually makes sense. As one of my favorite video reviewers said of Janeway (in her review of “Tuvix”) “As the season finale shows, there is nothing extremely unethical I won’t do to save two guys.” And that is all this feels like. Sure, they mention a couple dozen other people, but we as an audience don’t know who they are, and frankly Janeway doesn’t really seem to, either. She undoes *decades* of people’s lives (most of which seem to be relatively healthy and happy) because two of her friends died and one is sick? Come on.
And why are these people helping her? Why is Miral Paris, of all people, committed to a mission that is going to completely erase her entire life? I don’t dislike Janeway as much as some others do, but the show has frequently acted like she is the most charismatic and loyalty-inspiring Captain ever to Captain, and that her people would do anything for her, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why. This story relies on people blindly following her on an extremely dangerous, unethical, and frankly, crazy-sounding mission just because she says so, and it doesn’t feel earned at all.
wildfyrewarning: I don’t think Miral knew what, precisely, Janeway was planning. She’s an ensign, Janeway’s an admiral, she’s just doing what she was told. Supporting this is the fact Janeway dismisses Miral once they get into the nitty-gritty. For that matter, Janeway didn’t tell Torres or the EMH or Kim what she was doing. The only one she took into her confidence was Barclay, and given his obsession with Voyager, I can see his being willing to go along with it.
Where it loses me is when Kim finds out and winds up helping her, which makes nothing like sense.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@krad That’s fair, but even without that, Janeway is clearly doing something extremely sketchy, and yea, she way outranks Miral, but it doesn’t really seem to bother Miral that she is doing something this off-the-books just because Janeway said so. I mean, for all she knows she is committing treason. Maybe her admiration for Janeway is that strong, but if some General was asking me to do stuff like this, I’d be reporting it, not helping them out, unless I had some real solid idea that whatever we were doing really was the last best option. Everyone just goes along with this way to easily for me.
Long-time lurker, first-time commenter here. All the points made above are well-taken, but I want to say some positive things about this episode:
1. It’s FUN. From seeing (almost) everyone older to the action to the good jokes throughout, I always have a good time watching this episode.
2. Deployable armor is super cool. It looks awesome enough to buy me a huge suspension of disbelief. I wish they had used it in Nemesis on the Enterprise-E; it would have explained how that ship took so much more punishment than the brand-new Valdore-class warbirds.
3. I feel like a lot of the falling action was front-loaded in the future scenes. Except for Chakotay, Tuvok, and Seven being saved, there’s no reason (in this episode, at least) to assume that anyone else’s future wouldn’t be substantially similar to what we’re shown. So I headcannon that they are.
4. I love that the Borg Queen can assimilate people herself. In addition, this episode answers the question of WHY Voyager was able to survive so many encounters with the Borg: Seven is the Queen’s personal experiment. The Collective’s been holding back this entire time to see what happens with her. It’s not an experiment they’d ever run on their own, but the results could be unique enough to be worth delaying the assimilation of 150 or so drones and one ship. Or at least that’s the subtext I infer here. This leaves the Borg free to reclaim their big villain status again in the future.
So by no means a perfect episode, but not irredeemable either, at least to me.
A note for Trivial Matters: I featured Korath in Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock as the scientist who would finally invent controllable time travel (as opposed to accidents, alien portals, etc.), and implied that he was the “man in the Cambra system” that the future Alexander in TNG: “Firstborn” had gotten a time machine from, since that was c. 2410 and in the same time frame as this.
I’ve been mentioning lately how little memory I had of my reaction to season 7’s episodes, but this time, I can be very specific. After I saw “Endgame,” I wrote a lengthy review and series post-mortem to post on my online bulletin board at the time, long enough that I wrote it in my word processor rather than composing it on the BBS. So I still have the complete article today. Here’s a lightly edited version of my reaction to “Endgame” which I wrote back in May 2001, and which I still stand by today:
—
When Voyager’s premise was first announced, many Trek fans complained. Star Trek, they said, should be about boldly going into the unknown, not retreating from it. Don’t worry, said Rick Berman, Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor. We don’t intend to do a show about the search for a way home. We just want to cut them off from Starfleet, to bring back the frontier feel of the original series. Before long, the crew will forget their homesickness as they get caught up in the wonders of the Delta Quadrant.
It was two years before the producers even began trying to keep this promise. The third season was refreshingly free of quest-for-home stories. But then, in the third season finale, Captain Janeway made an insane alliance with the Borg, putting her crew in horrible danger in the hopes of bringing them closer to the Alpha Quadrant. A Rubicon had been crossed. From now on, the quest for home would be the overriding priority of the crew and the series. Instead of embracing the frontier, VOY had chosen to run away from it.
“Endgame” is the culmination of this theme, and a reflection of the conflicting potentials that marked the early seasons. It begins with a future in which Voyager finally got home after 23 years, and the crew has gone on to lead fairly successful lives, with a few exceptions. Seven of Nine had died years before…; her husband Chakotay had pined away in grief; and Tuvok had succumbed to a neurological disorder due to the unavailability of a cure in the Delta Quadrant. Another 21 of the crew had died along the way — fewer fatalities in the final sixteen years than in the first seven. Overall, it could’ve been far worse. But that wasn’t good enough for Admiral Janeway. She steals a time machine from some Klingons (why Klingons?) and travels back to rectify a missed opportunity — to help Voyager fight off the Borg long enough to use their version of Grand Central Station to get home. (Why not travel back sooner? Why not go back to “Caretaker,” help the ship return through the Caretaker’s array, and then stay behind to destroy it? Maybe she wanted to wait until after Seven’s liberation, but there were still earlier opportunities than this.) Captain Janeway rebelled — the transwarp hub should be destroyed instead, crippling the Borg. But the Admiral was willing to place her desire to get her crew home over the survival of billions.
Obviously this plan was totally selfish and immoral. I was proud of the crew when they rejected it, when they unanimously recognized that there were higher priorities than returning to home and hearth. It seemed they’d finally come to their senses. Adm. Janeway was a fanatic, a petulant child willing to violate the Federation’s highest laws and extinguish a whole timeline to make things more convenient for her crew. Capt. Janeway saw her future, the extremes to which her obsessive nature had finally taken her, and she rejected it. Her crew finally seemed to learn what they should’ve learned years ago: that Voyager is the only home they need.
But then Capt. Janeway started talking about how they could “have our cake and eat it too,” and I knew it was unravelling. Surprise, surprise, they managed to get home after all. The specifics of the plan were obscure; it was hard to see what had changed so that now they could pass through before destroying the hub, when previously they couldn’t. Presumably it had to do with Adm. Janeway’s Trojan-Horse sabotage of the Borg Queen, but this was not made clear. But the point is that the lesson the crew seemed to have learned was simply unmade. Despite their realization that the Admiral was wrong, they went ahead and did what she wanted anyway, validating her obsession, condoning her grossly unethical conduct. Janeway looked her fanatical streak in the eye, saw it for what it was — then shrugged and listened to it anyway.
Overall, “Endgame” was a better episode than most, with some character growth and a couple of continuity touches — not enough, though. Why did Seven change her mind about romance? Her attraction to Chakotay was previously established, but his reciprocation was out of the blue. This and Tuvok’s disease were simply tacked on to provide Adm. Janeway with some kind of justification for her actions. Ultimately, neither they nor their consequences rang true. The episode seemed to have some emotional substance, but typically there was little below the surface, and the whole thing was rather artificial, contrived for the exigencies of the plot rather than arising organically from any precedent.
The homecoming itself was very weak. DS9’s finale suffered from too much denouement, but “Endgame” suffered from a total lack of it. Seven years of hope and hype about getting home, and now they just pop them into the AQ and end the show. No follow-through, no happy reunions, no “what do we do now?” The pursuit of this moment has dominated, and held back, the entire series. Yet when the moment finally comes there’s almost nothing there.
But maybe that’s fitting. All the previous Star Trek casts were driven by something greater than their own interests, putting themselves in harm’s way to expand humanity’s knowledge or preserve the peace. Voyager’s crew was fundamentally driven by self-interest, and thus the series was always spiritually hollow in comparison. It makes sense, therefore, that the ultimate achievement of this superficial goal was such a hollow moment.
On the upside, at least now it’s a lot easier to replay the excellent Star Trek Elite Force II and it’s opening level set during the events of this episode, thanks to the folks over at GOG.
Otherwise though yeah, this episode is total gash. And it’s so frustrating as the novels set in the immediate aftermath pf the show were pretty damn good at exploring all the stuff that the show should have done (would it really have been that hard to get Voyager home earlier in the season and spend the back half exploring all those narratively juicy stories? Apparently so…).
I think that a few changes could have fixed some of the more egregious parts of the episode for me:
1. As others have noted, the timeline that future Janeway is attempting to undo needs to be abysmal, not just “kind of a bummer for a couple of people.” Cut most of the scenes set in the future and have future Janeway be escaping from the Borg, who have just assimilated most of the Federation.
2. Have future Janeway’s goal be to destroy the transwarp hub, not use it. Have the Borg be on the cusp of extending it to reach Earth (which also explains away one of my biggest issues with the episode, which is that apparently the Borg have had this backdoor right to Earth for an indeterminate amount of time and just haven’t used it or, based on the future scenes, will ever use it). Also would have made her seem less insane/selfish.
3. Again, as others have said, use the time saved by cutting the future scenes to, you know, have some closure for the characters by showing them arriving on Earth. Maybe even do a “one year later” epilogue or something.
It should also be noted that Tim Russ also appeared as Tuvok as part of the Titan’s crew in the short film that was part of the Star Trek The Exhibition tour.
It seems to me that a fairly easy fix to the low stakes of Janeway going back in time is have the Borg assimilate the Federation and that’s why she’s doing it, ok that’s copying First Contact but it’s still better then what they did.
Yeah, there’s not much else I can add to this that Keith, CLB, or others haven’t already said.
Hell, to put it in perspective, there aren’t even any SF Debris jokes from Chuck’s review of “Endgame” worth quoting.
This was, and still easily is, my least favorite of the pre-Picard 24th Century-era series finales. What a waste.
Well, it’s not the worst Star Trek series finale, but it was pretty appalling.
It does have a lot of similarities to TNG’s “All Good Things.” One character in the future is a writer, one is a professor, one is a diplomat, and another is a captain. A female character is dead and the first officer is broken-hearted over it. One character has a degenerative mental disease. Just call it “All Bad Things.”
The old-age makeup for Barclay, Tom, and Kim looked terrible.
The Borg have a transwarp hub that literally opens on Earth’s doorstep, yet has failed multiple times to assimilate Earth. The Queen wants Admiral Janeway’s future technology, but the Borg have the capability to travel through time and can just go into the future to steal whatever technology they want.
An absolutely rushed, unsatisfying ending. But what else should we have expected from Voyager other than time travel hijinks, the Borg, and a ridiculous number of F/X explosions, followed by the Borg Sphere belching up Voyager in the episode’s last thirty seconds.
I think this episode couldve been pulled off WITHOUT any time travel. Voyager finds the Transwarp hub, escape, then Janeway and crew science the crap out of things to come up with a way to elude the Borg, use the hub and destroy it. You could even have the silly Borg Sphere chase scene still. Have them make it too Earth with the last ten to fifteen minutes of the show for a decent (though still Rushed) denouement.
I think the crew at its best, working a problem, instead of being deus ex machina’d home. It would also make sense given the multiple times in which the crew has tried to find shortcuts home.
The Borg ignoring Voyager when all it does is fly in an look around make sense with how they’re supposed to act. Especially since any Borg is in transit to somewhere else. What doesn’t make sense, but is par for the course with Voyager’s Borg, is the Queen showing up to tell Seven about it.
This episode was very disappointing. Instead of some contrivef
@7L
On the upside, at least now it’s a lot easier to replay the excellent Star Trek Elite Force II and it’s opening level set during the events of this episode, thanks to the folks over at GOG.
Yeah, that was always a nice way to kick off the sequel (and to set up the necessary setting transition from VOY to TNG with Munro and company coming home).
I think I said this back in “The Void” talkback, but the basic idea of the Hazard Team is one the show could easily have done on-screen.
Similarly to the Flyer, the ship should have had something like this in place when standard Away Teams and security teams just weren’t cutting it in the DQ (much in the same way ENT would utilize the MACOs during the Xindi arc).
“But it’s all just too damn easy for everyone.”
Star Trek: Voyager in a nutshell.
While watching this last night, I had a real sense that they were trying to recreate “All Good Things…” – which was really quite good (KRAD gave it a 9). There’s the back-and-forth with present and future, trying to right a wrong, etc. They just did it spectacularly worse than TNG did. I love just about every episode of Trek ever, but this one is messy. So many threads of what should be a wrap-up are just left dangling all over the place, for the sake of Admiral Janeway’s plot. We go screeching through the transwarp hub and plop right into the Alpha Quadrant, where instead of Paris saying “Hey Dad, how you been, gotta go, your granddaughter is taking her first breaths!” we just have a five-second “ta-da, we’re done now” from Barclay and Co. Talk about anti-climactic.
Now, I can get that over the past 20+ years, Janeway has racked up a lot of trauma, the kind of things that might drive her to go back and rewrite history. But we don’t see her as a traumatized leader clinging to sanity, we see a decorated admiral who is an honored speaker at a Starfleet Academy class and is clearly widely respected and trusted. I can’t buy that Janeway going back and undoing time, she’d have too much integrity for that. I’d rather have seen her emotionally battered, just a bit off-kilter, casting caution to the wind because she needed to fix things, she couldn’t keep living this way. Alas, that is not what the writers gave us.
One final note for KRAD – “lame” is an ableist word, try “extremely unlikely” or “extremely silly” in that sentence. :)
Christopher and Meredith: I’ve requested that the bit about Korath be added to the Trivial Matters section and that “lame” be changed to “weak.”
Thanks!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I remember finding this episode to be a bit of a disappointing finale when it came out, but I still enjoyed it. Of course, I was 12 at the time, so the special effects were flashy and I didn’t think too deeply about most of it.
Looking back… it was definitely worse than I remembered. Admiral Janeway being obsessive over a non-catastrophic future. The sudden Seven + Chakotay romance (which, as I said in the Human Error comments, was a pairing I never liked). The use of Miral Paris to do Admiral Janeway’s busywork (I accept that “Janeway is an Admiral just ordering around an Ensign who can’t ask questions” but why did it have to be her besides, again, pretending that no one but the main characters of the show actually exist). The list continues.
In the end, though, the part that nags me the most is just how similar in concept the situation is to how the whole show started. There is a big technological transportation mechanism that can get the crew home that will be used for Bad Stuff if left intact. I’m completely on-board with the crew deciding to destroy it, as it fits the selflessness of Star Trek and is consistent with the decisions that were made seven years prior. I would even be okay if there was some sort of acknowledgment of mistake or regret in that decision, where the crew decided to use the transwarp hub to go home, leaving it intact, reversing their previous decision and leaving ambiguity for future shows. Bringing time travel back again in order to accomplish both just feels like such a cop-out.
And, for sure, the episode (and series) could have used some finishing touches. A call from Barclay, a few words between Tom Paris and his dad… even a surprise security team beaming aboard to arrest the Maquis crew. Something. Similarly, and this has been said in the comments many times this season, I really wish that this episode had been set up somehow, that it felt like they had a way home, that the series was ending.
Oh, and I agree with Paris – it took 30 years to come up with “Joe”?!
Janeway and Chakotay forever! Chakotay and Seven, boo!
Well, there is so much to say about this finale and to criticize. It definitely seems to be the modus operandi for Voyager, that is, action and spectacle, to the sacrifice of logic and character growth/resolution. Let’s see, we’ve got time travel, a glimpse at a future timeline with gee whiz technology, the Borg, the Borg Queen (featuring the original actress), Klingons, Barclay, Torres giving birth, two Janeways, and Voyager finally getting home! So much to stuff into the running time with less than two hours and so there’s no way it’s all going to be pulled off. This feel’s like the producers’ attempt to top or at least do as well as “All Good Things” which it fails at, nor as good as “Timeless” which this finale seems like a rehash of.
After seven years, we’ve become (somewhat) endeared to these characters and want to know what happens to them when they reach their destination. Reaching Earth in the very last seconds and then fading to the end credits is such an underwhelming, frustrating, lackluster ending to the series. Voyager, in my opinion should have reached home in the first hour and then spent the second showing all of the emotional reunions of the characters with their families and friends, find out if the Maquis will be pardoned or not by the Federation, a Starfleet debriefing with Janeway and if and how long she’ll stay in command of Voyager and see her reunite with Molly (her dog she shared with her ex-fiance), and what Seven will do with her life among other things. The episode could have even flash forwarded a bit in this non-wiped out timeline to show what becomes of these characters. Does Torres reunite with her father? Does she confirm her mother is actually dead?
I agree, the altered timeline of the Voyager crew really didn’t seem all that bad. At least in “Timeless” Chakotay and Harry were trying to save the entire crew but here, Admiral Janeway just cares only about Seven, Chakotay, and Tuvok. Everyone else? Carey? Jetal? Ballard? I guess, “fuck ’em!” I’m much more fascinated about this 23 year journey that the ship did. That’s much more of a generational ship with the crew only becoming that much more of a close-knit community. Of course, the show would never go on for 23 seasons (can you imagine if it just recently ended in 2017?!) but maybe a few more seasons and flash forward a bit in their lives. Hindsight is 20/20 but I would have much preferred to keep watching Voyager than Enterprise. I also think it would have been a wise decision to keep Voyager on the air because if the TNG films ever failed, which they eventually did, the Voyager crew could make the transition to the big screen. An arc of several films as they have adventures trying to get home seems like a great way to pull in general audiences beyond core fans. Oh well.
So after much promise and a great premise, Voyager ultimately fizzled out. It’s frustrating to watch in totality recognizing all of the potential that was squandered but if you take stand out episodes in isolation, then there is still plenty of enjoyment that can come with viewing in that fashion. And no doubt the series produced at least a few standout characters and of which continue to live on in spin-offs.
Isn’t “lame” in the physical sense only ableist towards… horses? Sorry, I’ve never heard anyone use it for human beings, other than someone with poor tastes in music, movies, and the ability to write a satisfying TV show finale.
@19,
In the end, though, the part that nags me the most is just how similar in concept the situation is to how the whole show started. There is a big technological transportation mechanism that can get the crew home that will be used for Bad Stuff if left intact. I’m completely on-board with the crew deciding to destroy it, as it fits the selflessness of Star Trek and is consistent with the decisions that were made seven years prior.
I mean…I actually like the basic idea of coming full circle (Caretaker’s Array / Transwarp Hub) and the VOY crew begin right back in the same position/scenario they were in 7 years earlier.
There’s nothing wrong with going a bookend route in a series finale. TNG did it with Q and the Trial of Humanity. DS9 had Cardassia exit the spinoff in the exact same position they’d left Bajor in (a devastated world recovering from a brutal occupation and dependent on the charity and mercy of the Federation).
It’s just, as with so much of VOY, ah, the executed…well, sucks.
On the subject of bookends, I do like how Jay Chattaway got to score both the Series Finale and the Pilot (in the same way Dennis McCarthy did for TNG and DS9).
I also wonder if the framing of the final shot (Voyager inbound to Earth) was deliberate.
Specifically, I’m talking about the placement of the escorts with the Galaxy-class and Defiant-class ships in the foreground.
Maybe I’m reading into it too much, but since those ships are essentially the ships of TNG and DS9…it almost symbolically feels like VOY’s two older siblings welcoming it back home.
I suppose you could also argue that shot’s a visual sendoff for the 24th Century. “Endgame” was the end of a 14 year consecutive run for the 24th Century that had begun in 1987 with the TNG Pilot.
Even with Nemesis in development and about to film, it was still as far as anyone knew then the last hurrah for the 24th Century on TV. So there’s something fitting about the three ship classes representing TNG, DS9, and VOY all together in that final shot.
A weak finale that probably doesn’t get as much criticism as it should only because These Are the Voyages… is so, so much worse.
I do wish that they’d gotten home when DS9 ended and then spent 2 seasons dealing with issues like re-acclimating to life in the Federation and what happens to the crew afterwards, and maybe done an arc where they have to go back to the Delta Quadrant (but on purpose this time) or faced an impending Borg or Hirogen attack because of their actions. Just continuing to phone in one-off filler until the very last episode was dull as dishwasher, and then this episode didn’t make any sense even by Voyager‘s abysmal standards of plot logic. A hugely missed opportunity.
If Krad gave this series finale a 1, then I can only imagine how “These are the Voyages” will be rated which was an insult to the series, its cast, its fans, and wasn’t really even an episode of Enterprise. So I predict that one will get a 0. “Endgame” is at least watchable and has some entertainment value but leaves you feeling empty at the end of it.
@krad: Maybe future Harry goes along with Admiral Janeway’s devious plan because she’s his space mom, or maybe because he recalls the events of “Timeless”, at least through the message that his future self sent him at the end of that episode. So maybe knowing that he’s changed past events to save the Voyager crew, why not allow the admiral to do the same?
So Voyager returns to Earth with the ship armor and weaponry technology from a future that now won’t be the same. Is that not a paradox, and does anyone ever deal with that?
@25,
“Endgame” is at least watchable and has some entertainment value but leaves you feeling empty at the end of it.
Not unlike a Big Mac or a Twinkie no? :D ;)
@21 It originally referred to people who couldn’t walk, most notably in the Bible (“The blind and the lame came to him at the temple, and he healed them.”), but for those with slightly lower-brow tastes, it is also used in this context in Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (“Where the lame can walk/And the blind can see”). It is also pretty common to see in post-war literature (especially WW1 and WW2) people referred to as “lamed” from their injuries.
@27: Exactly! I’ve previously described the series with a food analogy: Voyager is like the McDonald’s of the Star Trek franchise, initially tasty but ultimately empty in nutritional content and leaving you with a stomach ache; where as DS9 was like feasting on a complex and flavorful gourmet meal! Ha!
@26,
So Voyager returns to Earth with the ship armor and weaponry technology from a future that now won’t be the same. Is that not a paradox, and does anyone ever deal with that?
Not to mention the Doctor’s Mobile Emitter and the accompanying temporal contamination it presents.
The early VOY Relaunch and the first DTI book dealt with those threads. IIRC, all the weapons tech got Raiders of the Lost Ark’d until SF pulled it out in desperation for the Destiny Trilogy (well, not the armor as the Borg had already assimilated it).
But it’s been a while since I’ve reread those books. As we have the DTI author participating in the talkback, heh, Mr. Bennett’s recollections are better than mine.
@29,
“…where as DS9 was like feasting on a complex and flavorful gourmet meal! Ha!”
Well, that show’s lead protagonist was raised by a New Orleans chef and regularly cooked for his senior staff.
So, heh, one could argue DS9 was always naturally positioned to become a Sci-Fi epicurean’s tasy treat. :D XD
I think this was a good ending because its easy to understand why Janeway would not pick the Caretaker array from the beginning. You assume that, out of universe, everything is downhill from here. The bonds they made among the crew, the good deeds they did, and so on had a cut off point and that was Season 7. After all, if Janeway prevented the Voyager mission then not only would Miral cease to exist but presumably Species 8472 wipe out all life in the universe. “In the Flesh” be damned, I fully believe they will return in their full life exterminated fluidic space glory.
But maybe the next 16 years is just cruising along with no adventures. That would be an interesting twist. They went practically mad just from two months of no ports in “Night.” How the hell would it be if they found no new species or adventure for a decade and a half? Mind you, this is all supposition but I like the idea Future Janeway just goes, “Yep. This can go. We can do away with this part of our history.”
I also took this episode as an apology for the somewhat Godmode way that Jeri Taylor wrote her (in an interview saying that she couldn’t think of any flaws that Janeway had as a person). This is different from being a Mary Sue. It’s instead that Janeway was always portrayed as in the right even when the narrative….well, showed she wasn’t. Future Janeway has regrets. SERIOUS regrets and is doing something monumentally selfish and arguably stupid. It made her more humanizing than almost the entirety of the previous six seasons.
The moment where she decides, “I must make an apology that is boneheaded and all too human.”
How about if they’d reversed it? In the original timeline, Voyager found a shortcut home, and it enabled the Borg, Hirogen, or somebody to invade and conquer the Federation. Now, decades later, the surviving Janeway manages to find her way back to Voyager just before they go through the shortcut and tells them, “No, you have to destroy it, even though it means you won’t get home.” And in the end, they choose to give up getting home in order to save the Federation, and then we jump forward a few years to see them comfortably settled on a world in the Delta Quadrant, in regular subspace contact with the Federation, but no longer desperate to get back there, since they’ve found they have everything they need in their new home. And the series ends with their colony being admitted as the newest member of the Federation, so in that sense they have gotten home… and then they go out in Voyager in search of new allies to invite into their new Federation annex.
Hi, KRAD. I have been enjoying your reviews of the various STAR TREK shows.
While I don’t agree with numerous points on many episodes, you have made a lot of fantastic ones that I agreed with, as well as come up with some points that I never considered… even after watching all these episodes many times since September of 1987 when TNG premiered.
I just wanted to say thank you for all the reviews and the time and care you take in writing them.
(Side note regarding “ENDGAME”… I totally agree with the 1 rating, but there is one thing I must give credit to. Richard Herd… despite not having any dialogue about his son coming home, you can see him looking directly at Tom several times in that last scene. I think that was a nice touch, and good on him for taking that moment and squeezing in something that the writers obviously didn’t care to do.)
I acknowledge that I’m way too fond of the overlong dénouement in general, but I was really disappointed not to see any aftermath here. Just as I’d have watched a whole season of Voyager chasing the Maquis around before getting Caretakered, I’d have watched a whole season of them trying to put the pieces back together after returning.
I did think Janeway sparring with herself was pretty fun and more interesting than it had to be, but yeah, the Borg aren’t particularly menacing, and it did feel a lot like an attempt to translate ‘All Good Things’ into Voyagerese.
You’d think the writers would find a way to include Neelix in the future timeline reunion party scene. He already had to get into makeup for his short scene over the monitor with Seven early in the episode (unless that was filmed a long time in advance of production of this episode). It just would have been nice to find out what his future status was and actually see him having set foot in the Alpha Quadrant.
I agree with everyone who said this finale was weak. I thought so 20 years ago and it’s still true.
However, regarding Admiral Janeway changing the past. Yes, it’s selfish but I really thing things on Voyager must’ve been a lot worse then she told us. She lost over 20 crew members and also lost her three closest friends on that ship (I’m sorry. I’m a J/C shipper and I fully believe she was devastated when Chakotay shut down after Seven’s death). I just have to believe that the last leg of their journey was so horrible compared to the first seen years. That’s the only reason Kim would’ve agreed to help her. Because no matter how great their lives are now in 2304, it’s worth erasing to ensure what happened in the last 15 years doesn’t happen. It’d be a sad act of desperation–a way of saying the past was so awful, we’d do whatever it took so it didn’t happen. Unfortunately, the show didn’t make a very good argument for this terrible future.
I also agree it would’ve been nice to see a little of what happened when they got home. The writers were too stuck on the “it’s the journey that’s important. Not the destination.” which, I’m sorry, I feel is a cop-out. This crew was stranded thousands and thousands of light years–when the show began, they were 70 years away from home. There was a chance that they’d never see their families again. So, in this instance, the destination is VERY important. (Note–I agree with Keith about the Parises. That is a pretty glaring oversight. Yes, they had to cover a lot of ground, there wasn’t SOMETHING they could’ve taken out so we’d get some kind of moment between Owen and Tom?)
However, given that Berman & co. were considering having Voyager stay lost in the DQ, we should consider ourselves lucky that they did make it home.
Not gonna chip in on Endgame in particular, just wanted to say thanks to krad for this incredible series.
As a credulous teenager and huge fan of TNG, I was pumped when VOY premiered…and was already finding myself disappointed by the missed opportunities before the credits even rolled on Caretaker. Somewhere around Scorpion I had decided the whole show was just rejected TNG scripts, and all but stopped watching.
This rewatch led me to go back and check out a handful of episodes (some new to me, some old), and while I still feel VOY is just reheated TNG, I now appreciate it a little more for what it is: Star Trek comfort food. Sure, it’s unambitious and derivative, but there’s lots of fun in there, and some enjoyable character moments
Again, I mostly just want to express my appreciation for krad’s dedication. I loved following along over the last two years.
So I just rewatched this, perhaps in the vain hope that it would somehow magically change. Alas…what really perplexed me then and still perplexes me now, is that the series finale of a show that became all about getting home basically just re-did the episode where Kim comes back from a much bleaker future? That was the grand finale? Doing an episode they already did?! And what a cheat, by the way. Time travel, really? Ugh, I have to go watch something good now to get this bad taste out of my mouth.
@33 That would have been a worthy ending. It’s exactly why that production team could not have conceived of it, alas.
I’d pay good money for that “alt history” novel though.
@28 – Originally being the operative word there. Similarly, the words “hysterical” and “hysteria” originally had a sexist meaning, but I don’t know anyone who still uses them in that context.
On the topic of Admiral Janeway’s death…
It’s accepted that VOY’s creative failings and potential influenced Ron Moore’s development of BSG and I find myself wondering if Laura Roslin’s final fate in “Daybreak” is how RDM would’ve pitched the end of Janeway’s arc.
It would’ve been dramatically fitting and tragic: Janeway gets her crew home, but dies in the process.
@25 I’m of the opinion that “These Are the Voyages” could have been a decent episode, but was an appalling series finale. Some of Voyager’s best episodes were ones that took unique approaches to storytelling, like “Pathfinder,” “Course: Oblivion,” and “Living Witness.” Aside from “These Are the Voyages,” the only time Enterprise really went outside the box with its storytelling was the “In a Mirror, Darkly” two-parter, which was very well received. As a prequel series, Enterprise was in a unique position to have an episode framed as a holodeck recreation for one of the “modern” series. If it had just been another episode (and not included Trip Tucker dying in a throwaway scene), it would have been fine. But as the series finale, it was appalling. I could see Krad assigning “These Are the Voyages” two scores (like he did, if I recall correctly, with “Death Wish”) – one score as an Enterprise episode, and one score (0) as the Enterprise finale.
@39 – Time travel, the Borg and the Mirror Universe. Three Trek tropes that have overstayed their welcome.
@33
I think it depends on what you think the show is about, really. Theoretically, the audience should be invested in the journeyTM not the destinationTM but a lot of us were actually very angry every time Janeway skipped over a chance to get home because of the Prime Directive or whatnot. I think a lot of us would have felt cheated if they ended up settling rather than pushing on to the Alpha Quadrant no matter what.
Mind you, I’m also someone who doesn’t understand why I would want to leave a air conditioned, toilet and replicator-equipped starship to live on a planet. Forget the whole back to technology thing on Battlestar Galactica, there’s no way you could get me to leave for a dirty planet versus staying on the ship until it breaks down or we got to Earth.
@42 – I like that idea. Tragic but fitting.
Isn’t that also what happens at the end of (SPOILER)…
…Das Boot? I may be misremembering it, though.
You know, I was just struck by a thought. It’s been 20 years since this episode aired. The actors who played their future selves (minus Picardo) were aged up 26 years. They could, more or less, play that part now…
@37/Mary: “She lost over 20 crew members and also lost her three closest friends on that ship… I just have to believe that the last leg of their journey was so horrible compared to the first seen years.”
Except that at least 40 crew members were killed during Voyager‘s 7-year run, versus 21 or so in the subsequent 16 years. So that’s less than a quarter of the annual fatality rate. That seems a lot less horrible. The only thing worse is that main-title regulars were lost instead of guest stars, and Keith has complained plenty about the show’s attitude that the main characters’ lives were the only ones that really mattered.
This was always so baffling to me– obviously if someone wants this it doesn’t take too much to infer that they’re interested in changing the past, therefore the timeline is going to be changed and whatever payment you collect won’t matter because the transaction will never happen. Surely Korath can put the pieces together on that one. So I take it that this is just creating another timeline and the original one keeps marching on as well. So Tuvok is still crazy and Chakotay/Seven are still dead, new versions of now just have different fates. Meanwhile Miral scored brownie points with an Admiral that’s not around any more. Possibly.
@48/Chris – But I think it has to be more than quantity of deaths. Its probably related to quality of life. Imagine Year of Hell. Something like that. We don’t know how damaged the ship was at the end or how horribly the survivors had suffered.
Mary: the ship was completely undamaged — at the very least completely repaired. The opening scene has them coming home 23 years later intact and doing a flyby of the Golden Gate Bridge.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@50/Mary: Far from a “Year of Hell” scenario, what the writers gave us is a future that actually turned out relatively well for most of the crew except a couple of main-title regulars. And so Admiral Janeway’s actions seemed reckless, unnecessary, and fanatical.And really, I think that was the intent. For the majority of the story, Admiral Janeway is the villain. Her actions are clearly wrong, and the present-day crew’s moral triumph is to reject her selfish, petty, irrational desire to change things for countless trillions of people so that a tiny handful of her acquaintances will be better off.
It’s only in the last quarter or so of the story that they hypocritically toss that moral calculus out the window in order to contrive an excuse to get the crew home after all, repudiating everything good about the story before that point. And all for a complete and utter lack of payoff once they did get home, so why even bother? This could’ve been a good finale if they’d gone the opposite way and had the crew stick to their guns, rather than going for the ineptly written, totally unjustified copout ending where the outcome that was both logistically impossible and morally objectionable before was suddenly, inexplicably both achievable and acceptable. It just doesn’t make sense as an ending to the story they’d been telling up to that point. It’s like they wrote the story with one ending in mind, then threw up their hands, said “What the hell,” and did the opposite even though it made no sense.
I mean, I’m on Admiral Janeways side as a storytelling point. The story is more interesting with the compromise of their principles and doing something selfish. It was one of the rare times that it felt like DS9. It’s why “Children of Time” is so good because Admiral Janeway and Future Odo make a choice that is profoundly human even if wrong.
@51 We saw the exterior, not the interior but yeah, that’s a good point.
I guess I’m saying we don’t know what happened in that 15 years. Yes, they lost less people but what are the psychological scars? My guess is there must’ve been some HUGE things that made those extra fifteen years worth erasing.
But again, that’s just how I justify her actions since the writers dropped the ball on explaining any of it. (Note–I’m not saying my justifications makes erasing the past any less selfish. I’m just saying it’s more understandable)
@52 – from a storytelling/morality play stand point, your ending would’ve worked. However as a viewer, I would’ve been angry that I watched seven years and they never made it home. It would’ve been a lack of payoff (I know we didn’t really get any anyway but I least we know they’re home)
“I’ve come to bring Voyager home.”
You know, my memory of this one is that I rather enjoyed it. Maybe 20 years (and most of this rewatch) of hearing it dissected has made me less generous, because it wasn’t until the last twenty minutes or so that it really seemed to kick into gear. Because, yes, it has two major faults.
Firstly, why now? Why does Admiral Janeway choose this moment in time to go back and bring Voyager home, other than “because that’s when the series finale takes place”? Okay, it’s also when Voyager’s near a Borg transwarp hub, but there have been plenty of opportunities for them to get home quickly in the past. Even if Seven of bleeding Nine is the most important person on the ship, the one death among dozens that supposedly put Janeway and Chakotay into a twenty-year funk (we do eventually get told there were 22 further casualties, but the rest are just an after-thought), and getting her back is more important to her than saving the people killed when Voyager was first lost or all the people like Hogan and Durst killed before she came on board (plus maybe bringing Kes back with them instead of her turning into an angry fairy, something Janeway already had a chance to prevent in “Fury” but didn’t because status quo), why not nip back to Season 4 and help them perfect the slipstream drive so she can get the likes of Joe Carey and Lindsay Ballard “home to their families” too? (This becomes even more of a farce in the Relaunch novels, when only about two years later Starfleet has technology that lets them travel back and forth between the Alpha and Delta Quadrants at will, although I guess that’s not canon.) Conversely, as early as “Eye of the Needle”, and as recent as “Shattered”, the crew have balked at the idea of changing time to avoid being trapped because of the impact they’ve had on the Delta Quadrant. So they don’t do anything of significance in the next 16-26 years that’s worth preserving?
Secondly…Chakotay and Seven of bleeding Nine? Where did that come from? Okay, Seven was shown to find Chakotay attractive in “Human Error”, but he’s shown no sign of seeing her that way. (I read recently that while filming “Natural Law” the actors asked if that relationship was going to be revisited and they should play the scenes that way, and were told no. If that’s true, then it’s a very last minute decision.) Now, suddenly, she’s the great love of his life whose loss will leave him a broken man and a good proportion of the present day sequences are handed over to a relationship that we’ve never seen before and never will again. (Both the Relaunch novels and Picard showed that it didn’t work out.) Chakotay turning down dinner with Janeway to meet Seven is possibly designed to echo Troi choosing Worf’s company over Riker’s in “All Good Things”…another relationship we never saw again!
But okay, the positives. The ending is a bit abrupt, but this really is the end of the story. The show is about Voyager’s journey home, not what they do when they get back. Maybe we could have actually seen them reunited with their loved ones, but the important relationships are the ones on the ship. Voyager emerging from the debris of the Borg sphere and going “We’re here” is a terrific visual. (On first viewing, I assumed the Starfleet flotilla destroyed the sphere, but I’ve often seen the scene interpreted as Voyager destroying it, as with this recap. To be honest, the visuals don’t seem to match either explanation. Maybe it self-destructed with the Unicomplex?)
And if we run with the idea of Janeway and the Borg Queen as arch-enemies, we get one final kick-ass showdown between them, even if it is a future Janeway and not “our” version. Alice Krige returns to the role for the first time since First Contact, in the process nixing a theory that “Borg Queen” was a title rather than an individual and Susanna Thompson’s Borg Queen was a different character. We’ve seen her die before so it’s hard to say if this is her final end, although I’m not sure if there’s anything to say for sure that it isn’t?
The episode tries to give everyone their moment with, mixed results. We get to see two Janeways showing that coffee gives them superpowers. (Not sure what tea addict Picard would say about that!) The Doctor gets his usual comedy moments. Neelix seems to get on better with Seven from several light years away. Paris’ transformation from washout to family man gets completed (his being woken by a false labour is both funny and sweet): He and Torres were portrayed in the early seasons as the ones with the least to get back to, so it makes sense they see Voyager as their home. (Miral is probably better off not being shot at every week though!) Tuvok and Seven both set aside warnings of dire future to support Captain Janeway’s plan. Less generously, Kim suddenly making a big speech about being with the crew being more important than getting home rings hollow (especially when they got home anyway). And apparently Robert Beltran hated that the last we see of Chakotay is him doing the grunt work flying them home: Just look at that scowl!
Our first look at the 25th century! Again with the “All Good Things” parallel, we see an interesting if flawed future. Things haven’t turned out too badly for Paris, Torres, Kim and the Doctor, and indeed Janeway herself if she’d just get over her martyr complex, which makes it hard to see as a bad future to be avoided. And Barclay’s a commander! Seriously, never mind all the griping about Harry Kim being an ensign for seven years, poor old Reg has been stuck as a lieutenant for at least eleven years! Even the Relaunch novels, which gave a promotion to every main titles character that had a rank, had him still a lieutenant sixteen years after we first met him, although I think he’d finally made commander in one of the Titan novels. An unseen Naomi is at the reunion with her daughter. Curiously, while Kim asks Dana to help find her mother, he doesn’t seem to think her grandmother being there is a possibility. Was she one of the 22?
The Doctor says that Paris eloped: Admittedly, we didn’t actually see the wedding in “Drive”, but that’s the first we’ve heard of it. The complex surgery needed to help Seven feel emotions in “Human Error” has turned into something that can be done between shifts. Early in the future sequence, Kim apologises to Janeway for not attending a funeral: Later dialogue suggests he’s talking about Chakotay, but if his death’s meant to be recent (and Janeway’s dialogue implies it is) then the date on his tombstone is way off.
@55/Mary: The difference is, I never thought “getting home” was a worthy goal for a Star Trek series. It’s too self-centered and too insular. Starfleet officers are supposed to be eager to seek out the new, not retreat from it. And they do their jobs to make things better for other people, not just for themselves.
Like I said in my reprinted review, the creators of the show claimed at the start, when the premise was first announced, that the quest for home would never be the sole focus of the series, that stranding the ship was just an opportunity to get back to TOS-style frontier adventure by cutting the ship off from the constant Starfleet Command oversight and Federation politics that had come to dominate TNG. A lot of fans didn’t want the show to be Lost in Space or Gilligan’s Island with a constant fixation on getting home. Enough fans feared that would be a mistake that the producers overtly assured the fanbase that it wouldn’t happen, that the show would quickly grow beyond that focus and become more about exploration. And then they went and fixated on getting home anyway, exactly what they promised from the start they wouldn’t do. And to this day, I still consider that a mistake and a betrayal of their promise.
I wish they’d done something more like Stargate Atlantis. In that show, the characters chose to risk being cut off from home, because they wanted to explore the new galaxy. And while they were stranded at first, they regained contact with Earth at the end of season 1 and then moved on to other story drivers.
@56/cap-mjb: “The show is about Voyager’s journey home, not what they do when they get back.”
I think that’s a false dichotomy. Just saying the goal is to get home means nothing if you don’t show what getting home means, what they actually achieve from it.
” in the process nixing a theory that “Borg Queen” was a title rather than an individual”
It’s neither of those, because the Collective isn’t a nation. It’s one single being made up of trillions of humanoid “cells.” The so-called “Queen” is the drone that serves as a central processing and coordinating node for the whole, like the frontal lobe of the brain. Naturally the specific drone performing that function within the overall architecture of the hive mind is replaceable, because it’s the function that matters. But apparently the Queen drones are sometimes cloned, because both Krige and Thompson played two different iterations of the Queen; Krige’s first Queen was killed in First Contact and Thompson’s in “Dark Frontier,” but both returned later. Or we can assume they’re all identical clones in-story but are just played by different actresses, like how the two Saaviks or the three Ziyals were meant to be a single individual in-story.
@57 / CLB
I wish they’d done something more like Stargate Atlantis. In that show, the characters chose to risk being cut off from home, because they wanted to explore the new galaxy. And while they were stranded at first, they regained contact with Earth at the end of season 1 and then moved on to other story drivers.
Yeah, plus the benefits and possibilities of finding Atlantis at
I’m trying to remember… I think it was Joseph Mallozzi or Martin Gero who stated they wished the Expedition had been cut off from Earth for a while longer.
But for my money, ending their isolation with the “The Siege” was probably the right move (and not just because they’d written themselves into a comer with the Wraith converging on the Lost City). I’m not sure how much more mileage they could’ve gotten out it.
Re-establishing contact, as you stated, opened new storytelling avenues (Caldwell, the Daedalus) and gave SGA the benefit of playing off and referencing SG-1‘s final two Seasons.
Opening sentence got cut off. My bad.
Meant to write: Yeah, plus the benefits and possibilities of finding Atlantis intact and exploring an Ancient-colonized Galaxy was also worth the risk for the Expedition and the SGC.
@57 – I guess I never liked the idea of a starship being cut off from family and friends but deciding “oh, the exploration is important.” For me, they should have their cake and eat it too– explore but don’t give up trying to get home. Janeway had her mother and sister, the crew had families and I just didn’t like the idea of them just being separated. Now, if they were told from the start that they’d be going on a long range mission and would be out of contact for years, that’d make sense.
Even the TOS-crew had contact with people. So, to me, getting home was the primary goal. (then again, I enjoyed the political stuff on TNG)
In addition, to the political stuff on TNG, I also really enjoyed the Starfleet oversight stories and especially loved meeting people from the crew’s past.
As for Voyager, I think they did a good job balancing. Yes, home was always on they’re mind, as I felt it should be, but exploration was always there.
Even going back home they were still exploring. You wake up on a stranger’s sofa two towns over, you’re probably going to see something new on the way home. ;-) That’s right, folks, this was Star Trek: Hangover all along!
Keith– While I actually do agree with the “1” that you gave this episode and the “10” that you gave Deep Space Nine’s “The Visitor” (simply what are the finest hours of Star Trek ever produced), didn’t Jake essentially do the same thing there? As you yourself pointed out in that review, elderly Jake’s actions resulted in Jadzia dying decades sooner than she would have if he hadn’t interfered with time. Surely there would have been other consequences as well. Is elderly Jake as selfish as elderly Janeway?
@64: Jake was so single-minded and obsessive in his quest that he was self-destructive and not even considerate of changing the timeline for better or worse. So yes, it was selfish on his part but that is part of the tragedy of that particular story. But I don’t think he could have been aware that saving his father would kill Jadzia.
KRAD, thank you for overcoming your initial reluctance and doing the Voyager Rewatch. I, for one, have enjoyed it immensely.
Overall I think I kinda like this episode. I remember 20 years ago the ending felt far too abrupt, and the reasons for Admiral Janeway going back kinda trivial, as others had mentioned. But I’ve softened my opinion watching it now. (I can’t recall if I’d seen it between when it first aired and now…)
I think Admiral Janeway is a fascinating character, and I’d love to read more about the extra 16 years she had to endure. To have such a complete reversal of morals — to go from selflessly destroying the caretaker’s array to selfishly changing the timeline!?! I too am picturing some kind of Year-of-Hell scenario. But come to think of it, it doesn’t even need to be that. Maybe main-character-itis is a real thing. Janeway’s only human, and it’s only natural that over 7 years (23 years?) working with the same bridge crew day in day out, she’d develop a tighter bind with them than anyone else on ship. Yeah, Carey’s death sucks but maybe to Janeway she can compartmentalize it in a way she couldn’t with a bridge crew?
Seven died 3 years later — Tuvok’s mental state was quickly declining. Maybe 3 years is enough time for it to compromise him. Heck, I like to imagine that Tuvok’s stubbornness caused him to keep his decline secret until it was too late, and he commits a grievous tactical mistake that causes Seven to get killed (maybe a dozen others?). Chakotay is so distraught at losing Seven (I still hate that pairing) and he blames Tuvok, that he becomes … I dunno, cold, joyless. Tuvok is too far gone now for anything but confinement to quarters and constant care by the only person he trusts — Janeway. Janeway has now lost the three closest members of her surrogate family … Seven, Tuvok, Chakotay. Two of which are still constant reminders to her of what she’s lost, unable to grieve for them. I’ve seen first hand the toll that you take being primary caregiver for somebody suffering from dementia… a toll you don’t always realize because it’s so gradual.
And this family bond between the bridge crew members helps rationalize for me why Captain Kim acquiesced so readily to Admiral Janeway. They’re all damaged individuals, in non-surface level ways.
As a hypothetical, it may not close all the problems with Endgame, but it is the story I wish I could read.
@43: There’s also arguably Enterprise’s best episode, “Twilight”. Grant you the reset button got mashed hard, but beyond that I thought it was excellent.
@25 Agreed. Based on Krad’s quote from his “All Good Things” review:
Deep Space Nine’s “What You Leave Behind” was a noble failure, Voyager’s “Endgame” was an ignoble failure, and Enterprise’s “These are the Voyages…” was an embarrassment.
I, too, am predicting that “These are the Voyages” will get a “0” or maybe even a “negative 1!” (Looking forward to the “Enterprise” re-watch, by the way!) But then, I thought the same about Threshold and was caught off-guard to see it was given a “1,” so I’m not betting any real money!
@61/Mary: “I guess I never liked the idea of a starship being cut off from family and friends but deciding “oh, the exploration is important.””
That’s why many of us thought the premise of Voyager was fatally flawed for a Star Trek series to begin with. It was hobbled by the intrinsically un-Trekkish premise of running away from the frontier rather than actively seeking it out.
Although really, what they should’ve done was admitted up front that getting home was never realistically on the table. The 70-year estimate for getting home would’ve been beyond much of the crew’s life expectancy, and it was a best-case estimate, ignoring delays and breakdowns and diversions. So it was always delusional to pretend they could get home in their lifetimes (discounting the story cheats they later came up with to give the crew shortcuts). That always struck me as intrinsically dishonest, another reason the fundamental premise for the show was simply a bad idea.
Instead of hedging, they should’ve established that getting home was never on the table, that the crew just needed to adapt to their new situation and make the best of it. They should’ve renewed contact with the UFP much earlier on, using the holodeck to communicate and physically interact with their loved ones back home, so that they could’ve set that goal aside and moved on to the exploration that we were promised.
@64/Steven: “didn’t Jake essentially do the same thing [in “The Visitor”]?”
Perhaps, but the difference is that “The Visitor” was told much better.
As I said above, the problem wasn’t so much that Admiral Janeway wanted to do this. After all, for most of the story, she was essentially the antagonist, offering a contrasting position from the one Captain Janeway took. The problem is the bad writing of Captain Janeway, who arbitrarily reverses her own moral stance in the last quarter of the story just so they can contrive to get the crew home after all. It isn’t earned or justified, but is just random and arbitrary. None of that is true of “The Visitor.” Whatever you may objectively argue about the morality of Jake’s actions, his motivation as a character is clearly defined, consistent, and understandable within the story. The issue about “Endgame” isn’t one of morality, it’s one of the fundamental incompetence — or hypocrisy — of its narrative construction.
Looking forward to the Enterprise rewatch. Haven’t commented in this rewatch in a while because I gave up on Voyager after the 3rd season. And then Enterprise during the 3rd as the whole “Temporal Cold War” plot seemed to be breaking the established future of Star Trek, which would have to be fixed, rendering the whole series pointless… I heard that they later dropped that plotline for the 4th season, and I did catch the Mirror Universe episodes and Augments episodes later. Got the whole series DVRd to watch Someday…
@64 Yea, I agree completely with Mr. Bennett on this one.
One of the things DS9 was really, really good at was letting it’s characters do something that might not be morally right- but have it be both understandable and consistent with their character. Jake saving his dad in “The Visitor,” Odo saving Kira at the expense of the colony, Sisko saving the Alpha quadrant by selling his soul, Jadzia helping to kill the Albino Klingon, Kira re-joining her terrorist buddies. The show is always pretty clear that these aren’t exactly the “right” choices, but they are in line with each character’s well-established motivations and often with their own sense of morality (especially in Kira and Dax’s case). None of it ever feels like it is coming out of left field. Voyager, frankly, just didn’t do as good of a job with their characterization, and so a lot of decisions that were clearly supposed to be a big deal just felt random and out of place.
Steven McMullan: yes, Jake did do the same thing, and for that matter so did Odo in “Children of Time,” as I said in the rewatch entry. But those actions made sense in context and in character, as others upstream have said. Janeway’s, not so much….
Plus, “The Visitor” and “Children of Time” were portrayed as tragedies. “Endgame” tried desperately to present itself as a grand end to their journey and it utterly failed in that regard.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’m surprised the episode merited a full-on Warp 1…it was at least nice to see Alice Krige back…but it’s hard to argue the point.
I feel it would have been poetic justice if Janeway’s actions here had actually led to a worse timeline than the one we see at the beginning of the episode. The decision is just so selfish and shows so little regard for so many people.
Another point that bothers me, and that I’m not sure has been adequately touched on…regardless of how many people Voyager would have eventually lost, how much good did they do during the remainder of their journey that has now been preempted? We know in just seven years they saved countless lives…how many people will now die because Voyager wasn’t there to make a difference? Or are we supposed to believe that the rest of the journey was essentially uneventful?
Yeah … is it too much to hope that they could have ended the show without turning the entire cast into moral monsters? Apparently not. Just a horrible, horrible premise.
S
The Seven/Chakotay pairing was the cherry on top of the Nope sundae for me. The EMH is right there. Two people figuring out life together, in both senses of the word. Even if they later realized that the people they had grown to be were not compatible, watching them grow to that point together could have been such bittersweet and tender romance.
I remember watching this series in real time and feeling very betrayed by this episode like the rest of you. Time travel to get home just seemed like a cheat and out of character for Janeway. And I am sorry but I still feel like the chakotay seven ship was out of the blue.
I kind of don’t see the big problem. Yes it was a selfish choice to try and choose getting home over destroying the Borg hub. Admiral Janeway got overruled and they didn’t go along with her plan, and in time, she came around and understood she’d lost herself and they were right not to go along with it. It was decreed by the show and all of Star Trek’s morals to be wrong. That was the story they were telling. Janeway could be prone to his sort of thinking sometimes, like when she isolated herself and got depressed in the vacant expanse and questioned her choice to strand everybody. The coffee was a great little metaphor.
And also in Star Trek fashion, when faced with 2 bad choices, you just get clever, pull up your sleeves and find a 3rd option that gets you your cake and eating it too. You cheat at the Kobayashi Maru test if you have to. It happens all the time on all the series’s. Why is it too easy when Voyager does it?
I don’t understand why the temporal prime directive police don’t show up to stop things. But they didn’t in Timeless either. The trojan horse solution is also pretty underwhelming, they don’t explain why this works so well and why numerous other cultures haven’t done a lot of this already. Icheb’s family spread a virus that seemed to work, but didn’t bring down the whole borg. There was some other species that were able to bring down cubes also by spreading something into the Vinculum. The general idea behind the Trojan Horse just doesn’t seem original enough to be the super anti-borg weapon it ends up being, and who dreamed it up in a couple of hours while the ship prepares it’s offense?
Those are my only complaints about the episode really. It has a lot of nice moments. Tuvok and Janeway’s friendship is still one of the anchor relationships of the series. Doc doesn’t seem like he ever completely got over Seven’s rejection. I feel like the Doctor and Janeway’s relationship grew a lot over the season and it shows by the end. It was a nice touch that they might have to abandon their escape using a conduit that goes right back to the Delta quadrant.
I wasn’t expecting Voyager to spend its last 10 episodes wrapping every loose end the way DS9 did. But there are ways to do a two hour finale that concludes the story with dignity. Endgame was the opposite. A toothless and empty two hour spectacle that tries hopelessly to piggyback on Brannon Braga’s far superior All Good Things…. (and missing the point of that finale entirely). Even Kroeker’s top notch direction can’t salvage such a sorry script. Kenneth Biller and Robert Doherty let late season fatigue plague an event episode that deserved time or at least some attention and real passion (hell, Braga and Moore wrote All Good Things…. in only three weeks with more passion and far better results).
Endgame then proceeds to render any juicy moral conflict meaningless by simply having the crew destroy the Borg transwarp hub while also managing to get home. If it was that easy, why didn’t Admiral Janeway think of it in the first place?
They could have made the crew reject Admiral Janeway’s offer and stay in the Delta Quadrant for good, which would have been far more dramatically interesting, and far more satisfying. It would be a direct twist on the show’s original premise.
But if the goal was to get home, then show it! Don’t just do a ship flyby towards Earth and cut to credits! There was a ton of potential in doing a prolonged epilogue. We needed to spend time with Seven and Icheb on Earth. We needed Janeway meeting Mark. We needed Paris and Torres meeting Owen. A lot of shows do epilogues in their finales. Even DS9‘s finale was smart enough to do the Battle of Cardassia during its first hour, allowing for a lot of closure and goodbyes in the show’s second half.
It’s not even worth going into the minefield that is Admiral Janeway’s morality. It’s not as if the show is challenging her POV. That’s thrown aside for the sake of yet another time travel story with a Borg faceoff shoehorned in for no compellingly good reason.
I’d argue even Enterprise‘s These are the Voyages was better than this. Sure, that episode had its own issues, but at least it said something about the show’s mission statement and had some actual onscreen consequence (even if Trip’s death had issues of its own). I much prefer a show taking chances in its ending that a show that plays it this safe. Moore’s BSG may have had a divisive ending, but I applaud any show willing to do a 150.000 year time jump plot twist, showing that it all took place in the distant past.
Endgame is very much a product of season 7 Kenneth Biller-era Voyager. Safe, toothless, not willing to take chances. And at the same time, lazy and uninspired to the point where it assassinates the main character’s credibility.
I don’t want to end this in full negativity mode, so I’ll say this: the VFX work on the Borg Transwarp hub was spectacular. A sign of maturity for the team that would deliver some superb work on Enterprise.
@@@@@ 69 – “Although really, what they should’ve done was admitted up front that getting home was never realistically on the table. The 70-year estimate for getting home would’ve been beyond much of the crew’s life expectancy, and it was a best-case estimate, ignoring delays and breakdowns and diversions. So it was always delusional to pretend they could get home in their lifetimes (discounting the story cheats they later came up with to give the crew shortcuts). That always struck me as intrinsically dishonest, another reason the fundamental premise for the show was simply a bad idea.
Instead of hedging, they should’ve established that getting home was never on the table, that the crew just needed to adapt to their new situation and make the best of it. They should’ve renewed contact with the UFP much earlier on, using the holodeck to communicate and physically interact with their loved ones back home, so that they could’ve set that goal aside and moved on to the exploration that we were promised.”
Just as delusional as the Enterprise escaping the Delta Triangle in Time Trap? Or getting back from wherever they ended up in Is There in Truth no Beauty? Or M-33 that the Enterprise-D visited in Where No One Has Gone Before? LaForge estimated 300 years to get home from there. So Picard should have just thrown his hands in the air and told the crew “Forget everyone you ever knew. We’re in a new galaxy and we’re going to explore it and you don’t get any say in the matter.”
Sorry, but spending the rest of their lives cut off from their friends and families is not what people join Starfleet for. Perhaps they should crew ships with people that are willing to do that and have them explore every anomaly they can find in hopes of finding one that will take them across the universe. But having the captain declare that just because something took them 70,000 light years away from home, that doesn’t mean that there’s some way to get back is hardly exploring. Besides, how many new races did Voyager make along the way? How many new phenomenon did they examine? Claiming that there’s no exploration to be done along a 70,000 light year road home seems rather strange to me.
I’ve also always thought that Janeway should have died in the finale as part of the ultimate sacrifice to get her crew home. It would have had a lot of emotional resonance. And I’ve read that Kate Mulgrew would have been totally up for that ending to her character. Also, it wouldn’t even preclude the character from showing up on other films and series such as Prodigy as Janeway is coming back as a hologram.
@80,
Yeah, it just felt like a fitting, if tragic potential end for her character arc.
Then again, I’ll concede it may have been too similar to Sisko’s fate at the end of DS9 (or rather the original intended fate before Avery Brooks lobbied for them to put in that trapdoor).
@79 – Exactly. Just because they’re in Starfleet doesn’t mean they want to devote their entire lives to exploring and surviving in hostile environs. Some have families. Some have career plans. Some are going to pull a Danny Glover and get too old for this $#@* and want to buy a boat. And quite a few would want to be near their parents in their twilight years. And I mean actually near, not over subspace.
It’s not selfish to want to do more than one thing with one’s life. Driving ever outward into the heavens and helping others along the way smacks more of angelic pursuits than practical and variable human interests.
And just on a marketing level, this is when Paramount was trying to hook as many viewers as possible with its brand new network. Of course they were going to go for the high concept survival/getting home series to draw interest. Somehow I doubt transplanting the TOS and TNG mission statement to the Delta Quadrant wasn’t going to do the trick.
*was going to do the trick.
@82/terry: “Of course they were going to go for the high concept survival/getting home series to draw interest.”
If that concept were really such a draw, I don’t think the producers would’ve had to do damage control and reassure the fans that getting home would not be the exclusive focus of the series (a promise they ended up breaking). My recollection is that fandom was skeptical of the idea of focusing on a lost ship trying to get home. Because at the time, that sounded way too reminiscent of Lost in Space, Space: 1999, or maybe Battlestar Galactica, all of which had reputations as dumb, cheesy shows that couldn’t hold a candle to Star Trek. So that was not a concept that appealed to the sci-fi audience of the day, though I don’t know about the general audience.
“Somehow I doubt transplanting the TOS and TNG mission statement to the Delta Quadrant [was] going to do the trick.”
But what motivated their thinking was that TNG was different from TOS. TOS had been about an isolated ship on the frontier, far from the home worlds or internal affairs of the Federation. But TNG gave us a ship that was routinely overseen by Starfleet Command and constantly involved in Federation politics and diplomacy. The original idea behind stranding Voyager far from home was not to do a show about getting home, but to do a show that got back to the remote frontier feel that TOS had but TNG lost. They wanted a captain and crew that were entirely on their own, not answerable to anyone and not supported by anyone. They could’ve had that even if getting home hadn’t been a prospect at all — if, say, the ship had been thrown into another galaxy entirely and been centuries away from the UFP. If anything, I think that’s what they should’ve done.
@84 But that’s the thing, TOS *wasn’t* cut off out on the frontier. We saw Spock’s father, Kirk’s nephew and some other starship captains. So, TOS wasn’t isolated for its five year mission at all.
@84 Also, if they wanted to do a out on the frontier series, they should’ve done what someone here suggested–have it about a crew that purposely went out into the unknown. Leaving it yanked out and stranded is just cruel.
@85,
True. But the thing is, the core context between Kirk and Picard’s vessels was also completely different.
The 1701, while a capital ship, was still just one of many UFP ships operating in the field and on the frontier’s edge. Even retroactively taking into account the NX-01, it was simply the POV-vessel. It wasn’t special (at least not until by the end of the Five Year Mission).
By contrast, the 1701-D was intentionally launched (and differentiated) as the Federation Flagship and heir to the Enterprise legacy. Command had much more direct oversight and investment in its missions.
@85/Mary: “But that’s the thing, TOS *wasn’t* cut off out on the frontier.”
Not cut off, no, but usually on its own, far enough out that it would take hours, days, or even weeks before Starfleet Command could send orders, so that Kirk would be the highest available authority, the one who had the ultimate responsibility for making any decision, as we saw in a case like “Balance of Terror.” There were some episodes where flag officers did call Kirk and issue orders, but they were the exceptions. The idea that Kirk would be the ultimate decision-maker in the absence of anyone else was literally written into the series bible as part of what defined the character and the show. The idea was to evoke the warship captains of the British Age of Sail, commanders who were far from port and out of touch with their home government so that they were the sole, independent agents of state power, burdened with the ultimate responsibility for any decision, at least until they could get home and answer for their actions.
But TNG came along in an era when instantaneous communication anywhere in the world was much more the norm than it had been in the ’60s, so it was written with a different mentality, an assumption that Starfleet Command would always be readily available to consult on any decision. And overall, the storytelling came to be focused less on exploring new worlds on the frontier and more about diplomatic and political missions involving known worlds, as I already mentioned.
The point is that you couldn’t have a TOS-style isolated captain and crew in the 24th century if it were just a normal Starfleet mission, because the communications and propulsion tech were a century more advanced so that it was easier to contact home. Just as it’s much harder today to find anywhere on Earth that you can be out of contact than it was in the 1960s, so it’s harder in the 24th century to be out of contact than it was in the 23rd. So the only way to do a TOS-style series in the 24th century was to send the ship somewhere more remote, someplace where it wouldn’t have the option of the instant contact that TNG and DS9 regularly featured.
@86/Mary: “Leaving it yanked out and stranded is just cruel.”
I don’t understand why that’s an objection. Fiction is not about being kind and gentle to your characters. Many stories are about characters faced with cruel hardships and having to overcome them. You don’t think the Borg killing Ben Sisko’s wife was cruel? What about The Fugitive, where Richard Kimble not only lost his wife but was wrongly convicted of murdering her? What about Battlestar Galactica, where the characters’ entire civilization was destroyed and the only home they hoped for was nothing more than a myth?
Very long time reader, first time posting
It took me the rewatch of both Voyager and DS9 to figure out the ultimate problem with this series, where DS9 succeeded.
TNG was about the flagship of the Federation, staffed with the best of the best, basically always (or damn near always), doing the right thing, and the show presenting it as them doing the morally right thing. Which worked (sometimes), because you can believe (most of the time), that everyone on the Enterprise is a paragon of Starfleet values.
DS9 had flawed, sometimes deeply damaged characters. It was originally supposed to be a backwater outpost, so Starfleet sent competent, if hardly perfect personnel. Sisko was a commander who Starfleet could easily assume was at worst halfway out the door. Dax, it’s implied, is only there because Sisko is. Bashir may have been second in his class, but he had his choice of assignments, and asked to go to the backwater, and O’Brien, though very good at his job, and a former Enterprise crewmember, was enlisted personnel, not a high ranking officer of any sort. They weren’t “the best in Starfleet”, we’re never told they’re the best, and when they fail, it’s perfectly believable that they did. It also makes it a lot more satisfying when they finally overcome failures, which can sometimes take seasons to occur, or, alternatively, they really do just fail to do the right thing, *because these are flawed characters*, who are allowed to be flawed.
Voyager, on the other hand, through both subtext and text, tries to tell us that the crew is the best of the best again. Why would they be? They’re a fresh crew on a random ship in the fleet! Sure, it’s a nice ship, some impressive new systems, but it’s just a random ship in the fleet none the less. Hell, if Harry being a bridge officer is any indication, it seems like a decent amount of the crew may well be fresh out of the academy, and this is before we take into account that a good chunk of the crew ends up being random Maquis. There is no reason for them to be anything more than generically competent at their jobs, qualified enough to get through the academy and posted to a starship officers.
Unfortunately, since the status quo reset button has to be jumped up and down on every episode, there’s no time to let them be flawed, or fail, or at least acknowledge that what they’re doing is wrong (see Tuvix, Admiral Janeway, the alliance with the Borg, etc, etc, etc). We get no complexity to their decisions, and we’re just told by the show over and over again “they’re the heroes, just go with it”. So when Admiral Janeway proposes wiping out the future, Harry goes with it because “she’s the hero, supporting her is the default position, because she’s a great captain. And you know she’s a great captain, because we told you she is”. There’s no time for show, only tell, because we have 48 minutes to tell an entire self contained story. We get no growth, because there’s no time for growth. Character flaws go unrecognized, because that eats times.
Honestly, the fact they kept diverting from their mission to get home was something I often hated. If I was on that ship, I’d be like, “Warp 9 except for any chance to find new supplies and investigate space wedgies or species that might have a faster warp drive.” I’d be pretty damned obsessed to be honest. Mind you, I feel like Captain Ransom and his crew had the more realistic reaction to being in the Delta Quadrant. They crossed every ethical line to get home and I fully believed that they would do it.
Mind you, part of the problem according to Ron Moore was the fact that so many of the writers HATED the Delta Quadrant concept and had a bunch of leftover script ideas from TNG like Ferengi, Klingons, and so on. They hated the fact it was hard for them to use and there was no chance of involving Starfleet. Apparently, the writer culture onboard was, “We’ve been doing this stuff for a decade and this premise makes it harder.” UPN also apparently just wanted their own TNG and was take it or leave it with the premise.
@69/CLB: Agreed, at 70 years minimum travel time back to the Alpha Quadrant/Earth, the mission and attitude of the crew, at least of the Starfleet compliment, should have been to “embrace the adventure.” Seeing family and romantic partners again in their lifetimes was very unlikely. They’re explorers after all! Go explore! Now if this directive is opposed by some of the crew, like a bunch of the Maquis, then integrate that into the series’ arc so you have internal conflict. Ya know, the occasional mutiny or superior officer assassination or such. Now, if the writers really wanted the crew to be intent on going “home” then they should have written Voyager as being thrown to a distance of like 15-20 years or so away at maximum warp so that they still had some hope of seeing loved ones again while continuing to doing a little exploring along the way.
Maybe one day we’ll get a series where the hero ship is tossed so far away from home base so that they do just focus on exploring and not concern themselves with getting home. This would be like what happened to the Enterprise-D briefly in “Where No One Has Gone Before” where they warped to another galaxy. It would be fascinating to follow the lives and psychology of this crew. Not only will they never see home in their lifetimes but communication with headquarters while they’re still alive is also extremely unlikely. One may wonder what the point of exploring is if there’s no one to report and share your findings to.
On a related tangent, something that’s always nagged me about TOS and TNG, is that for starships being out on the frontier and pushing further and further out to unexplored space, that these ships got back to Earth far too often. It just made it seem that these ships weren’t really going out that far if they could get back to Earth so fast. In Star Trek: First Contact you had the Enterprise-D get from the Neutral Zone to Earth in what seemed like a matter of minutes to engage the Borg in battle. The universe of Star Trek doesn’t at all feel like these crews are working in isolation at the edge of known space. That’s something that was initially so intriguing about Voyager but that was soon dashed by running into familiar Alpha Quadrant characters and species.
@@@@@ 84 – Literally, the first spoken line of TBG. “Our destination is planet Deneb Four, beyond which lies the great unexplored mass of the galaxy.”
Sounds to me like the original idea was to go exploring. We even get it in the opening credits “To body go where no one has gone before”
“Fiction is not about being kind and gentle to your characters.”
No, but Star Trek is not about treating your crew as your playings just because you think it’s tickety-boo to decide that they should never see their friends and families again. Besides, this was supposed to be a short mission to locate the Maquis. In Caretaker, Janeway says to Mark:
JANEWAY: See you in a few weeks.
So once they get stranded in the Delta Quadrant, Janeway is just supposed to say “Screw ’em. I want to go exploring and you all have to come with me.
If you want a new to give up their entire lives to go exploring, ask for volunteers. Apparently, to your thinking, most of them would gladly sign up.
@@@@@91 – Trek has always suffered from Small Universe Syndrome. At times it seems like the Federation consists of about 500 people and a bunch of automatons in the background. Been like that since TOS. Not going to get better.
@88 / CLB:
But TNG came along in an era when instantaneous communication anywhere in the world was much more the norm than it had been in the ’60s, so it was written with a different mentality, an assumption that Starfleet Command would always be readily available to consult on any decision. And overall, the storytelling came to be focused less on exploring new worlds on the frontier and more about diplomatic and political missions involving known worlds, as I already mentioned.
Yeah, it’s the problem of stories turning in tandem with technological evolution and development.
With TOS, look at “Conscience of the King” and Starfleet not doing DNA testing on the body of ‘Kodos’…because such forensic science/technology was still in its infancy.
(And I can appreciate the headaches Dayton Ward had on his DSC tie-in novel and trying to reconcile it.)
I’ve also been finally reading Asimov’s Foundation novels for the first time because of the Apple TV show. And I can see where the original Trilogy has the exact same problem: Asimov didn’t use or have access to real-world or literary technologies that hadn’t been invented or conceived during Asimov’s era (whereas his later sequel and prequels tried to retroactively incorporate new technological developments. into the narrative).
The TV show’s doing it too (with stuff like Trantor’s Space Bridge).
@91 / Garreth:
On a related tangent, something that’s always nagged me about TOS and TNG, is that for starships being out on the frontier and pushing further and further out to unexplored space, that these ships got back to Earth far too often.
Or Gowron traveling from the heart of the Klingon Empire to DS9 in the final episodes — a journey that should’ve taken months, not days.
TV Tropes calls this ‘Traveling at the Speed of Plot’. Apt metaphor.
I always liked how Stargate avoided this particular problem: With the Gate networks all across Pegasus and the Milky Way, they could easily and believably do instantaneous non-ship travel (while splitting the difference with fleets being forced to rely on traditional FTL since Supergates weren’t on the drawing board until late in SG-1).
@68: “I, too, am predicting that “These are the Voyages” will get a “0” or maybe even a ‘negative 1!'”
More like the square root of negative 1, since being a Holodeck episode, it could be thought of as imaginary.
@94: One good thing about the scenes of Archer and Co. in “These are the Voyages” being holographic is that they can be explained away as fictional at best or historically inaccurate at worst and so we can just ignore the events as portrayed. In fact, I’d like to think of even the framing device of Riker and Troi as being holographic as well as or some other recreation from an unseen user. I much prefer believing Riker in “The Pegasus” came to his moral decision by way of his direct interactions with Picard and Admiral Pressman in that episode to whatever retroactively persuaded him in “These are the Voyages.”
garreth: It’s been a while, but my strongest memory from “These are the Voyages…” was that it didn’t even remotely fit with the events of “The Pegasus,” either…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@84 Gilligan’s Island…
@95 / Garreth:
Michael Martin and Andy Mangels actually used the inconsistencies and abnormal characterizations of Archer and co. as a plot point for the ENT Relaunch (basically, without giving too much away, that the ‘historical records’ Riker and Troi saw had been deliberately altered and covered up).
@96 / KRAD
I haven’t watched it in years either, but no, it doesn’t sync up with “Pegasus” at all. It’s Braga being as ‘mindful’ of continuity as he was with “Flashback”.
Okay, chiming in. If you’re going to criticise the whole premise of the show, then that’s “Caretaker”’s problem, not “Endgame”’s. The Season 7 writers room came up with a last episode for the show that existed, not the one that a mostly-departed creative team promised seven years ago. Janeway’s speech at the end of “Caretaker” tells us what the show’s going to be about and they stick to it: They’re a Starfleet crew and they’re going to do what Starfleet does and explore, but they also want to get home. So, yes, it’s a series about them making contact with new species and studying new phenomenon and doing everything that TNG never really did no matter how much Picard insisted “We’re explorers!” (Nope, Jean-Luc, you’re a taxi service.) It’s also a series about them looking for ways to get home. This isn’t a pipe dream. As kkoritz pointed out, this isn’t the first time a crew have been sent far away from Federation space and promptly turned around and come back, it’s just it usually only takes them an episode. This wasn’t an unrealistic pipe drime. The technology to send them there instantaneously existed, so logically there was a way for them to go back, and they found it.
@88: “Many stories are about characters facing cruel hardships and struggling to overcome them.”
Again, you’re getting the beginning of the story mixed up with the end. Ben Sisko finds reasons to live again. Richard Kimble finds his wife’s killer and clears his name. The original Battlestar Galactica didn’t have a definitive end but they built a civilisation of sorts and travelled on in hope. And after seven years of cruel hardships and struggles, Voyager got home.
@98: Yes, but unfortunately Michael Martin and Andy Mangels came up with a “Here’s What Really Happened” that was even more deeply stupid and nonsensical than “These Are the Voyages”, to the point that they largely ignored it in their subsequent books and even contradicted it themselves in one of their other works… And griped about a plot hole that the episode itself acknowledged.
@72/krad: I’d agree with regards the portrayal in “Children of Time”, when the colony being erased from history is presented as a tragedy. “The Visitor”….not so much. The ending’s more bittersweet than happy, but the episode mostly comes down on the side that Jake having his dad in his life is a good thing and glosses over the fact that he erased decades of history and that nice young writer he was talking to no longer exists and possibly never will, which is one reason why I’m not as enamoured with the episode as other people. If it’s a tragedy, it’s The Tragedy of Old Jake, not The Tragedy of the Billions He Screwed Over With His Daddy Issues.
@89/Cameron Hobson: “There is no reason for them to be anything more than generically competent at their jobs, qualified enough to get through the academy and posted to a starship officers.”
The thing is, you could say that about any given TV show, that there’s no reason for its characters to be the best in the world at anything. And yet they routinely are. The main character’s hacker friend will inevitably turn out to be the most gifted hacker ever born, even if they’re just a high school sophomore. Whatever random acquaintances get roped into their adventures will turn out to be highly skilled fighters. And so on. It’s the anthropic principle of fiction: the reason we follow these characters as opposed to anyone else is because they’re the most interesting and capable characters, the ones who succeed where others would fail. If they weren’t good enough to rise to any challenge, they’d fail or die very early on and there’d be no series about them — or at least their experiences would be too ordinary to justify paying much attention to them.
@91/garreth: “Now, if the writers really wanted the crew to be intent on going “home” then they should have written Voyager as being thrown to a distance of like 15-20 years or so away at maximum warp so that they still had some hope of seeing loved ones again while continuing to doing a little exploring along the way.”
Good point. Either make it a genuinely reasonable prospect to get home before their loved ones die off or move on, or make it unambiguously impossible so that there’s no choice but to build a new life. The middle option they chose was the worst of the available options.
“Something that’s always nagged me about TOS and TNG, is that for starships being out on the frontier and pushing further and further out to unexplored space, that these ships got back to Earth far too often.”
That’s inaccurate. TOS’s policy was never to show the Earth of Kirk’s time. The only times they visited Earth were time-travel stories. It was only in the later movies that Earth became a regular setting, but in the movies, the Enterprise was no longer on the same kind of frontier patrol/exploration mission it was on in TOS. So there’s no discrepancy there.
@99/cap-mjb: “If you’re going to criticise the whole premise of the show, then that’s “Caretaker”’s problem, not “Endgame”’s.”
I’d say they’re connected, though. The story of “Endgame” compels us to question the validity of the characters’ quest for home and the way they went about it, both deliberately through the textual questions debated by the characters and unintentionally through the shortcomings of the story and its resolution. So it’s natural for a discussion of “Endgame” to broaden into a critique of the show’s fixation on getting home as its goal in the first place.
Besides, the end of a series is a natural point to look back at the whole and take stock. Maybe we should’ve saved that for the overview column next week, but we didn’t, and it’s too late to say the toothpaste should be put back in the tube.
“Again, you’re getting the beginning of the story mixed up with the end.”
Incorrect. Mary was responding to my hypothetical proposal in comment #84 to do a version of the show where they know from the beginning that getting home is impossible. In that version, the beginning is cruel, yes, but they could find a happy ending by making new friends and allies in the region, finding a new home, and building a new life and a new Federation there. Surely a story about creating a new home is just as worthy as one about getting back to the old one, if not more so. Star Trek is supposed to be a frontier narrative, after all, and what’s more frontiersy than putting down roots in a new place?
@100/cap: The frame story of the DS9 prose anthology Prophecy and Change shows the “Prime timeline” version of Jakes meeting with the young writer from “The Visitor,” proving that she does still exist. After all, as the Mirror Universe proves, the same people tend to be born in different timelines no matter how divergent their histories are.
@100- thank you! I’ve been saying that ever since I first watched The Visitor. I actually found it a rather horrifying episode. Countless lives changed and erased without consent, because some kid loved his daddy. I never liked those two anyway so it made that episode even more offensive to me.
@91
A quibble here, in the original TOS TV series they never returned to their Earth – only its past on one occasion. One of the things I disliked about TMP when it was released is that it showed Star Trek’s Earth for the first time. Indeed I have it in mind – I’m sure ChristopherLBennett can say whether I’m right or wrong – that TOS’s series bible specifically ruled out trips to Earth and wanted to emphasise the ‘Space is big, really big’ thing.
But I totally agree that this became an issue with both TNG and DS9.
@101/ If they weren’t good enough to rise to a challenge, they’d fail or die very early on and there’d be no series about them
Right, but that’s not exactly what I was getting at. What I’m saying is that by telling us they’re perfect at all times, and not giving them room to acknowledge failure, we’re left with an awkward, misplaced TNG clone that never quite thematically syncs up with itself. They pitched a show of a mismatched crew exploring well outside the comfort zone of Federation space, but by not giving any single plot time to breathe, they rob the show both of any dramatic tension that failure can bring, and more importantly, the feeling of cathartic joy when they overcome said failure. The premise falls on it’s face because of that mismatch.
Should the crew be good at their jobs? Sure, eventually. But they should grow into those jobs, organically and over time, and their inability to cope with the situation initially provides the opportunity to actually engage in character growth. Want a badass Captain that the crew will follow through Borg space and back? Fine, but *show me* her becoming that Captain, don’t tell me “she’s great, she only commited a few war crimes this year, and we just ignore that because it happened in last week’s episode, so it doesn’t matter anymore.” It leads to characters following other character’s lead simply because they’re in the main credits, not because they’ve earned it.
@91 – “Now, if the writers really wanted the crew to be intent on going “home” then they should have written Voyager as being thrown to a distance of like 15-20 years or so away at maximum warp so that they still had some hope of seeing loved ones again while continuing to doing a little exploring along the way.”
Voyager was brought 70,000 light years from home by the Caretaker. Four years earlier, the Bajoran wormhole was found to connect with the Gamma Quadrant, 70,000 light years away. That same year, the Cytherians transported the Enterprise-D 30,000 light years to the centre of the galaxy.
So, in the space of just a few years, two different methods of travelling 70,000 light years, along with one that was almost half that distance, are discovered but suddenly, Voyager is supposed to think that such a distance is insurmountable?
One of Trek’s big problems is that we’re supposed to believe it all happens in the same universe but they regularly ignore what has been previously established.
@101/CLB, @103/a-j: Gotcha. That’s great the writers of TOS adhered to their bible of the crew not getting back to contemporary Earth. In my mind I was thinking they were traveling back to the Earth of their present before going into its past.
This is stating the obvious, but Admiral Janeway was successful in saving her favorites Seven (as seen many years later on Picard) and Chakotay (as will be seen on Prodigy as promoted to captain). Tuvok presumably gets the medical treatment he needs. Not as importantly, Chakotay and Seven’s romantic relationship apparently fizzles out. Who knows how long their connection was able to be maintained once all the hubbub of getting home happened. If they didn’t, they could’ve continued for at least a few more years of some lovin’. But one life definitively changed for the worse by Admiral Janeway and Captain Janeway by working with each other was that of Icheb (Picard). One of the nice scenes on “Shattered” was an adult Icheb in Starfleet alongside an adult Naomi, also in Starfleet, doing their duty in Voyager’s astrometrics lab many years in the future when Voyager has truly become a generational ship. It was a nice glimpse into a future that was not to be.
Speaking of “Shattered,” one of the points that episode made, and it was a good one, was that Voyager actually did a lot of good for a lot of people during their journey, starting with saving the Ocampa from the Kazon, and also stuff like saving the telepathic refugees in “Counterpoint” and exposing the conspiracy in “Workforce” and so on. How much good did they do in the subsequent sixteen years that was then erased?
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
And yeah, the original series avoided contemporary Earth like the plague (they also avoided specifically dating the series, on purpose), but the movies changed all that. Of the thirteen Trek movies, eleven of them have scenes on or near Earth. (Insurrecrtion and Beyond are the exceptions.)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@101:CLB: “The frame story of the DS9 prose anthology Prophecy and Change shows the “Prime timeline” version of Jakes meeting with the young writer from “The Visitor,” proving that she does still exist. After all, as the Mirror Universe proves, the same people tend to be born in different timelines no matter how divergent their histories are.”
I think all that “proves” is that a professional writer was so concerned about the implications of the episode that they felt the need to write a Fix Fic saying “Nope, she’s fine. Nothing to see here.” Yes, the Mirror Universe functions on the idea that most people on the main cast will still exist on Bizarro World even though history diverged centuries ago. Jake himself though is a notable exception: He doesn’t exist in the Mirror Universe because his parents separated before he could be conceived (and Sisko also died before he could conceive his Prime timeline self’s other child). In “Parallels”, Worf sees a different timeline where Alexander apparently doesn’t exist and he has two different children. So, not everyone is Saved By Destiny.
@107 I think we’re just supposed to assume that the bad far outweighed any good. That’s the problem with the episode really–the writers don’t fully explain Janeway’s motivations. They just figure the audience will just accept that it’s the right thing and go along. Granted, I’m that type of viewer but most aren’t. The modern audience doesn’t just accept these things at face value. Maybe they did back in day (like during TOS) but now we want more realism and plausibility.
@110/Mary: ” That’s the problem with the episode really–the writers don’t fully explain Janeway’s motivations. They just figure the audience will just accept that it’s the right thing and go along.”
I think the real problem is that for most of the story, we’re supposed to agree that Admiral Janeway is in the wrong, but then suddenly Captain Janeway reverses all her arguments against her older self’s insanely selfish plan and just goes along with it anyway. It’s like they were writing toward one ending and then tacked on a different one.
“The modern audience doesn’t just accept these things at face value. Maybe they did back in day (like during TOS) but now we want more realism and plausibility.”
Now, that’s just condescending. Remember, the scathing review I posted up above was written just days after the episode aired. It was obvious at the time that “Endgame” was a terrible episode.
Today’s viewers are not superior to yesterday’s. There have always been smart, savvy audiences that objected to bad or implausible writing. Indeed, TOS’s entire goal was to be more plausible than its sci-fi contemporaries. The second-season edition of the TOS bible began with a three-page lecture about the urgency of writing the show with the same degree of believable characterization as any drama set in the present. Roddenberry wanted to elevate science fiction TV to the same level of maturity, quality, and character realism as the most acclaimed dramas of the day.
@111 Sorry, that wasn’t supposed to be condescending. It wasn’t even suppose to be a diss on viewers in the 1960’s. If anything, it was the reverse. I think modern viewers should just sit back and go along for the ride. Sometimes I think viewers, well specifically ones who post on-line, are too nit-picky and I wonder, were viewers this nitpicky in the 1960’s?
But that’s just my opinion.
Edit – that should be “I think some viewers, especially those on on-line…” I made it sound like it’s everyone and everywhere and it’s not.
I don’t think viewers were dumber/smarter in the 60s, or 90s, or now, but I do think some our perception of what makes television “good” has changed- both because of changes in the medium itself and changes in culture. In the 60s people were obviously going to accept that most shows were extremely episodic, because it made sense for the medium (after all, if you missed an episode, you were likely going to have a hard time trying to catch up on it, so it made sense to make shows where you could tune in randomly and still get the gist of what was going on), and what made those shows “good” was telling a compelling story in the time allotted. Because of the way TV changed, by the 90s that wasn’t necessarily true anymore, and shows like DS9 (and later BSG) could start incorporating more arcs and continuity, and after a while viewing audiences came to expect that, and a show contradicting what it had earlier said with no explanation became a sign of “bad writing.” On the cultural side, I think you would have a hard time making a show where the deuteragonist was a terrorist with whom you were supposed to sympathize. But DS9 was able to get away with that, because at the time the American public’s opinion on groups like that wasn’t as negative as it is now (see: Rambo III‘s implied support of the Afghanis who became the mujahedeen (also: Red Dawn), and the bars in Boston my grandfather used to take me to where they would pass around the hat to raise money “for the cause”). Obviously some things then happened that changed American’s views on groups that used those kinds of tactics (obviously I am not saying everyone used to support those groups, but the general feeling about them was less negative across the board). I think “this person is awesome, trust us” worked a lot better in earlier television than it does here, because the episodic nature of TV meant that relying on archetypes was just something you had to accept if you wanted to watch the show.
So I don’t think TV or the watching audience is any “smarter” or “dumber,” but that what is generally seen as a “smart” show changes due to cultural shifts and technology advancing the medium. I think Voyager sort of ended up in an awkward place, where they didn’t quite fully commit to the “older” style, but weren’t cutting-edge enough to be pushing the envelope, either. So they ended up with a show that didn’t really succeed by either group’s standards.
@114/wildfyre: You’re quite right. In the early days of TV, the smartest, classiest shows were the anthologies, often written by noted playwrights like Reginald Rose, Paddy Chayefsky, and Rod Serling. Serials existed, but they were daytime soap operas or children’s adventure shows, churned out on a daily basis in haste so they weren’t very good. So the perception was the reverse of today’s, that if you wanted to make intelligent TV, you should make it as much like an anthology as possible, even if it had continuing characters.
People today think serial storytelling is intrinsically smarter or better, but serial fiction can be dumb too. It can be lazy and cliched, or can use serialization as an excuse not to make the individual episodes good enough in themselves or to avoid ever actually thinking of a good ending for a storyline. Or it can have its own dumb formulas, like having every case-of-the-week be astonishingly, coincidentally relevant to whatever the regular characters are dealing with in their ongoing arcs. It also has a tendency to make the protagonists much more self-centered, because most of their energy is devoted to worrying about their own problems or cleaning up messes they created rather than helping other people with their problems. So no, it’s not better or smarter, just different.
Personally I felt the best balance was the way things were done in the ’80s and ’90s, where the plots were episodic but their events had a lasting impact on the characters and their consequences were felt when it was relevant. It struck a healthy balance between episodic storytelling and ongoing continuity, rather than going too far to either extreme. Even Babylon 5, touted today as a pioneer in serialized plotting, still made each individual episode a discrete story with its own beginning and ending, even though they were all pieces of a larger whole. I always preferred that to the pure serial approach where each episode just contains scenes from several parallel ongoing plots at once.
@ ChristopherLBennett I am in total agreement. I think that a lot of shows have gone too far into the idea that a season is basically just a 13-hour long movie, and you have to watch the whole thing or you are completely out of the loop. I appreciate that Lower Decks hasn’t leaned into that, and that you can watch pretty much any episode in any order. Outside Trek, I think The Mandalorian did a good job of that, too, especially in the first season, where there is the over-arching plot of “get the kid home safe,” but most of the episodes are just Din doing the wandering samurai bounty hunter thing and are mostly self-contained.
@116/wildfyre: Yeah, The Mandalorian is good at keeping the old-school episodic approach alive. So is Leverage: Redemption. And ST:LD, of course. There are still some such shows.
Real life is simultaneously both continuous and episodic, so either extreme in fiction just seems kind of unnatural.
@115, CLB: I wonder what you thought of Discovery season 3? To me, at least, it’s found that balance.
@119/SaraB: I feel Discovery relies too much on arc over episodic, even in season 3. The season did have some strong episodic stories, but the arc elements were weaker. Well, the early arc about just getting their bearings and finding the Federation was fine, and I’m on the fence about the Burn arc, but I didn’t care for the Orion arc. And I’m not encouraged that season 4 is apparently about dealing with another overarching existential threat rather than just rebuilding the Federation mission by mission.
So, now that Voyager is over, is Enterprise next?
@121: It was previously stated that Enterprise would be the next rewatch beginning next month.
Yes, Enterprise will be next, though that will only be once a week.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
A thought I’ve had after reading the discussion above:
1. Even with Voyager being 70,000 lightyears from home at the beginning of the series, I don’t think the crew would just right away give up on finding their way back. It doesn’t jibe with what we’ve seen in Trek previously where there’s *always* some metaphorical rabbit the crew ends up pulling out of their hats where they find a way home. And so if Voyager just started with “no way back so let’s go exploring,” that would feel like an attitude forced upon the characters by the story: You can’t get home because we the writers have decreed it, hence you won’t try to get home.
Look at the Inner Light for an example: Picard spent how many “years” on the planet trying to get home before he finally gave in and proceeded to have a family?
What would have worked nicely and provided more drama is where characters would have different attitudes on starting a new life on Voyager versus holding out hope for their old lives. This was demonstrated in Children of Time where some characters take longer (presumably months or years) before abandoning hope and starting new families.
I want to see some characters struggle for multiple seasons, trying to decide whether to give up the Alpha Quadrant, even while others throw themselves completely into their new lives aboard ship.
@124/Sam: “Even with Voyager being 70,000 lightyears from home at the beginning of the series, I don’t think the crew would just right away give up on finding their way back.”
That was never the creators’ intent. The original idea was that they’d initially be focused on trying to get home, but would gradually accept their new reality and focus more on exploration. They wouldn’t overtly give up on it; it would just fade into the background and not be a storytelling priority anymore. In other words, exactly what happened in most of season 3, until “Scorpion” brought the quest for home back to the forefront. Although it was originally intended to kick in sooner than that, or at least that’s the impression I got from early interviews and reports.
@125,
Yeah, not unlike the direction Stargate Universe shifted towards as it got going (i.e. stranded, trying to get hope, resignation, and re-focusing on Destiny‘s original planned mission).
@77/Karey
The Trojan horse worked well in this instance because they infected the Queen instead of just a cube. The difference between a gun shot to the hand and a gun shot to the head. By infecting the Queen it spread to almost the entire collective. The damage more than likely isn’t permanent, but potent enough to disrupt almost all the Borg temporarily.
It’s interesting to think that they tried to reassure fans that Voyager wasn’t going to focus on getting home. I didn’t watch Voyager as much as I wanted as UPN/WB/CW has always and to do this day has the crappiest reception in my area, but by my recollection the series was always going to be Star Trek’s take on “The Odyssey”. It just seems to be the most natural direction.
I’m rather ambivalent on the morality of Janeway trying to change the past here as Star Trek isn’t absolute on the changes of time travel. “Parallels” shows that there is a wide expanse of timelines meaning the multiverse is alive and well, while epsiodes like “The Visitor”, “Timeless”, “Star Trek: First Contact” and somewhat “Endgame” show that you can definitively change the past and alter the present. In theory in order for Future Janeway to alter the present of the crew to a new future, she would need to still exist, therefore her original timeline still exists and she has only done this so she could see a future where all her loved ones survive. This about the part where you need Janeway’s Temporally Induced Headache Remedy. Presumably Black Coffee.
I also hated the Seven and Chakotay surprisingly aggressive and pivotal ship, and that’s all I have to say about that.
I was also thinking that if they were gonna trash the Borg’s Transwarp network they should’ve gone full hog. Shoot transphasic down every path at all the manifolds to collapse the whole thing.
The lack of denouement is quite frankly appalling looking back. I don’t think it hit me as such at the time because the spectacle fresh in my mind. The transwarp hub is easily one of the coolest visuals in all of Star Trek, as was the Batmobile Shielded Voyager. But in the longterm we were shown one more or less happy ending at the start of the episode, but we didn’t get the same at the end, which feels funny in retrospect. Still not as bad as “These Are The Voyages” though.
@127/Mr. D: “It’s interesting to think that they tried to reassure fans that Voyager wasn’t going to focus on getting home. I didn’t watch Voyager as much as I wanted as UPN/WB/CW has always and to do this day has the crappiest reception in my area, but by my recollection the series was always going to be Star Trek’s take on “The Odyssey”. It just seems to be the most natural direction.”
I think the concern was whether it would be an overarching preoccupation to the point that the show became Gilligan’s Island in space, constantly trying and failing to achieve a goal, rather than having the quest for home just be a background element in a show that focused more on discovery and helping people. So not a binary of either trying to get home or not trying, but more a matter of where the show’s emphasis would lie. As I said, season 3 was the one season where they did pretty much live up to that promise (I know this because I pitched for that season and it was explicitly stated in Jeri Taylor’s letter to pitchers). Aside from “False Profits” near the start (produced as part of the season 2 block, IIRC) and “Scorpion” at the end, they didn’t do any episodes about failed attempts to get home. They were still trying to get home, but it wasn’t driving the stories anymore.
“The transwarp hub is easily one of the coolest visuals in all of Star Trek, as was the Batmobile Shielded Voyager.”
Funny, I hated the “Batmobile” armor. It was silly-looking and physically nonsensical. IIRC, dense physical armor could actually be counterproductive for dealing with the kind of high energies a starship would need to deflect, since there’d be secondary radiation cascades in the material that would actually increase the lethal radiation the crew was exposed to rather than reducing it. And enclosing the ship entirely in opaque armor would trap waste heat inside and cook the crew like they were in an oven, as well as cutting off sensors and thruster ports. Not to mention, where does the mass come from? Matter can’t be magically created out of nowhere.
I figure the only reason the Batmobile armor was effective against the Borg was because it was such a bad idea that nobody had used it, so the Borg had never had the opportunity to adapt to it. So it was good for a short period before they adapted (and they did quickly adapt to it in the climactic action), but useless beyond that.
I had the feeling of waiting for something else after the episode ended when I watched this twenty years ago; I had that same feeling when I watched this again a few days ago.
The episode is horribly rushed and incomplete.
That didn’t bother me at first viewing when this originally aired, or even the other 347 times I’ve watched this episode in the intervening twenty years.
This time it finally hit me: this finale is terrible.
We’re gonna fight the Borg, do whiz-bang explosions, and get back to Earth. End of series.
No followups, no checking in on how our crew is adjusting to life back home, no moving personal stories for the final episode. Just…this.
I do hope the upcoming Prodigy can in some way put right what once went wrong.
And on that reference, krad, I’m very much looking forward to your take on Enterprise. This rewatch has been a highlight in what has personally been a dumpster fire of a year for me. Thanks krad, CLB, Eduardo Jencarelli, et al, for making this rewatch a wonderful diversion from the wreckage of the outside world.
It’s a toss of the coin as to whether Voyager or Enterprise had the worse series finale, I think on balance the Enterprise finale was worse, at least this episode is about Voyager, but if you were given a choice of which one to watch it would be like being asked if you wanted some Sh*t flavoured chocolate or some chocolate flavoured sh*t
The good stuff in this episode is thin on the ground, the future scenes before Janeway sets off on her mission are quite good and sweet, Alice Krige back as the Borg queen was a nice touch and of course birth of the Baby …
But.. the rest of it well.. just a horrible premise, poorly executed, and totally unbelievable. That Janeway would even contemplate this let alone get help from people like Barclay and Kim boggles the mind, The Seven and Chakotay thing.. urgghh .. again I don’t believe in it for one second, The Borg are now as easily beatable as a rubbish Doctor Who villain, and then when they get home… it just ends… seven years for that?? Not until Game of Thrones did I ever feel so flat after the finale of a series.
Score seems a bit harsh, but I cannot argue that the finale disappoints. So did DS9’s and so will Enterprise’s. So did TOS’s, for that matter. That means TNG is the only Trek show to have a really good conclusion, and that’s only if you don’t count the films. I guess we’ll have to hope Discovery breaks that curse, whenever that show ends.
#12/@bgsu98: The Borg have a transwarp hub that literally opens on Earth’s doorstep, yet has failed multiple times to assimilate Earth. The Queen wants Admiral Janeway’s future technology, but the Borg have the capability to travel through time and can just go into the future to steal whatever technology they want.
If there’s a bit of Trek mythology that bugs me more than this, I don’t know offhand what it is.
1. Why haven’t the Borg ever tried harder to assimilate Earth/the Federation, if it’s such a prize and it’s so easy for them to get to their space? For that matter, why aren’t their cubes roving all over the Alpha Quadrant (and the other three quadrants, and the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies) all the time, assimilating all the people and cultures we know? It’s not like the Alpha Quadrant cultures have come up with a reliable defense against them.
2. The Borg can time travel. Why didn’t they try their “First Contact” gambit again?
@132/terracinque: The best answer to question 1 is that the galaxy is very, very huge and does not actually revolve around us. From the Borg’s perspective, the Federation is merely one of thousands and thousands of advanced civilizations throughout the galaxy, and a very distant one from their home base. Our own egocentrism aside, there’s no reason to expect us to be high on their priority list. They have many nearer civilizations to subdue before they get around to us. The odd couple of cubes they sent our way were just sort of a pro forma, tentative probe. That we repelled them is a source of concern, but the Borg are methodical; they’ll get to us when they get to us.
This was acknowledged in the Destiny trilogy in the novels, in what’s now been redefined as an alternate timeline. Per the trilogy, once we destroyed the Borg’s transwarp hub and unicomplex in “Endgame,” we were upgraded from a remote curiosity and minor nuisance to a genuine threat to their large-scale operations, and so they came after the Federation with a mass invasion, thousands of cubes at once.
Still, having a transwarp exit so close to Earth makes no sense, and I tend to disregard it as a storytelling shortcut for dramatic effect.
As for question 2, it makes no sense that the Borg have time travel but only used it once. It’s out of character for them to use time travel at all, since their response to a failure is not to regret it and wish to undo it, but simply to adapt and try again, to throw more cubes and drones at the problem until it succumbs. Time travel is way too lateral an approach for them. So in Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock, I posited that they were manipulated into using time travel by an outside party as a move in the Temporal Cold War.
@133,
As for question 2, it makes no sense that the Borg have time travel but only used it once. It’s out of character for them to use time travel at all, since their response to a failure is not to regret it and wish to undo it, but simply to adapt and try again, to throw more cubes and drones at the problem until it succumbs. Time travel is way too lateral an approach for them. So in Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock, I posited that they were manipulated into using time travel by an outside party as a move in the Temporal Cold War.
Yeah, that was a nice fix (and a nice way of tying together TNG and ENT).
Or the Borg use time travel all the time but they keep creating alternate timelines. Then, back in the “main” timeline, they assimilate another race that has discovered time travel, add that knowledge to what they already know and try again but with the same result. The only reason the Enterprise was able to return to the “proper” timeline has something to do with being caught in the temporal wake instead of being the main object that is time travelling.
And the Borg are probably trying to assimilate planets all the time. Most of them can be taken care of with one cube. Others take more than one attempt. If they’re defeated, as they are in the case of Earth, they just keep adding to their knowledge and try again. For some reason though, Earth keeps defeating them. So they keep trying. As Q said, they are relentless. But that doesn’t mean that their next attempt is immediate.We probably just get shuffled back into the stack.
I must say, this episode is even worse now that Picard has shown us that the “actual” version of the early 25th century looks a whole lot grimmer than the timeline that Janeway obliterated.
@136/Iacomina – Yes, the “actual” timeline is more grim but Seven and Chakotay live!!!
I thought Jeri Ryan did a superb job of portraying Seven and how she went from really being Borg and inhuman, to just pretending/acting since she felt more comfortable doing that. It was very nuanced.
Chakotay falling for her makes sense as well, who wouldn’t (she is supposed to be striving to be perfect after all, I’d say she pretty much achieves it of course), but I agree that part was implemented inaptly to say the least! No build up, we just get told.
OMG, i totally hate this episode. First, showing that Admiral Janeway is an essence of the worst traits of Captain Janeway is deeply disappointing. One would expect that she had learned something in that 23 years instead of becoming a selfish moron. I didn’t like her as a captain for the way she treated her crew – either ignoring their inputs and just barking orders or behaving as if she was their mom no matter if they needed/wanted a mother – and for her unpredictable behaviour. Sometimes she cared about Starfleet and ethics and sometimes she just ignored it depending on…i dunno…mood?
I was glad that the ship arrived back home but the way it happened was just dump and annoying for all reasons already mentioned above. And yes, i never understand why we never get a few episodes to deal with “what’s next?” questions in most series…TNG was ended well, DS9 was already ended way too quickly after the war ended and then VOY just arriving home and that’s it??? eh, a total mess.
Unpopular sentiment, but I didn’t think this was so bad. Krad makes valid points, but I still found myself enjoying its movie-like feel. I absolutely turn my brain off for time travel, because once it exists in a universe, you’ve opened up a million contrivances for why people aren’t time traveling all the time and making the whole idea of any plotline moot.
Sure, a lot of unanswered questions. But isn’t that what tie-in novels are for? Anyway, Krad and most of the other commenters have valid points, but I still liked it for the ride it was. At least there were no P’Wraiths (I’m looking at you, DS9).