“Year of Hell, Part II”
Written by Brannon Braga & Joe Menosky
Directed by Mike Vejar
Season 4, Episode 9
Production episode 177
Original air date: November 12, 1997
Stardate: 51425.4
Captain’s log. After we get a summary of Part I, we see that Voyager—which is now down to a skeleton crew consisting only of the people in the opening credits (minus the still-kidnapped Chakotay and Paris), which strains credulity approximately 100%—hiding in a nebula while Torres struggles to effect repairs.
Kim and Janeway have to manually vent gas from one deck, which causes damage to their lungs. Janeway refuses to sit still long enough to be properly treated.
Annorax has had Chakotay and Paris prisoner for two months, poking, prodding, and interrogating them. Now, he cleans them both up, gives them Krenim clothing, and invites them for a feast. All the food is from civilizations that Annorax has wiped from the timeline. He calls his ship a museum of lost histories. (Pointedly, Paris stops eating once he realizes that his dish is the last remnant of a civilization.)
Annorax makes the two an offer: He will try to restore the timeline and also spare Voyager. He might even be able to get them closer to home. But he needs detailed information about their travels.
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Paris calls him out, saying he’s only taking this step because he’s lost track of Voyager. He also says they won’t help him wipe out civilizations. But when he gets up to walk out, Chakotay tells him to sit back down, and offers to help Annorax if he can find a way to fix the timeline without wiping out any more civilizations. Annorax agrees.
Over the next several weeks, Chakotay learns how the timeship works, and how to make a temporal incursion. He tests his first notion, getting rid of a comet that Voyager had to avoid, which changed their course. Without it, they likely would never have encountered the Krenim. However, when he runs a simulation, he discovers that bits of that comet making planetfall was responsible for creating plant species that was a major step in the evolution of civilizations on those worlds—which, in the simulation, are now gone from history. Chakotay is now starting to understand the enormity of what Annorax is trying to do.
At last, Annorax gives his origin story: he used the ship to wipe out the Rilnar after the Rilnar supplanted the Krenim as the major power in this region. But the unintended consequence was that a plague killed millions of Krenim in a year. Annorax has spent the last two centuries trying to fix that mistake.
A month-and-a-half later, Voyager has left the nebula, but is now stuck in a micrometeor shower. Janeway goes to deflector control, which is on fire, to restore the navigational deflector. She is successful, but she suffers burns over much of her body. The EMH is able to heal her, but he no longer has a working dermal regenerator, so she is still scarred. The doctor also tries to relieve her of duty, as she refuses to rest from her injuries, but while the chief medical officer has that authority, he also has no means of enforcing it, given that the brigs are long-destroyed, and security consists of a blind Vulcan and an unqualified Talaxian. Janeway agrees to be court-martialed when they get home, mostly because that will mean they got home…
A month later, Janeway and Neelix are touring the ship to assess damage, and she finds, in what’s left of Chakotay’s quarters, the pocket watch he’d replicated for her birthday. Overwhelmed by his disobeying orders, Janeway fastens the watch to her pants and continues onward.
Paris has been making friends among Annorax’s crew, especially Obrist, playing games with him, and learning that the crew is getting seriously fed up with Annorax’s obsession. Chakotay, however, is unwilling to support a mutiny just yet—he wants to try Annorax’s plan to restore the Krenim and save Voyager without bloodshed.
This lasts right up until Annorax engages another incursion, which wipes out the Ram Izad, to Chakotay’s horror. Chakotay confronts Annorax, who insists that a civilization is meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but Chakotay insists that one civilization, that one life, is significant.
That calls Annorax’s bluff, as he reveals that it really is one life he’s trying to save here. His first incursion that wiped out the Rilnar also removed the Kyana Prime colony from the timeline, taking with it Annorax’s wife and children and grandchildren. He has spent the last two centuries trying to restore them, but no matter what he does, Kyana Prime never comes back.
Now that it’s clear that Annorax had no intention of stopping his genocidal ways, Chakotay tells Paris to go ahead with his mutiny plan. Obrist can contact Voyager and give them their location, and Paris will sabotage the temporal core, which will leave Annorax’s ship vulnerable to conventional weapons, because it will no longer be out of the space-time continuum.
Over the next month, Voyager has gathered allies against the Krenim: the Mawasi and the Nihydrons. A fleet of five ships—Voyager and two each from the other two nations—is going to the coordinates provided by Paris’ clandestine communication. Voyager has shared the temporal shielding with their new allies. Janeway sends Kim and Torres to the lead Nihydron ship, while Tuvok, Seven, Neelix, and the EMH are to report to the lead Mawasi ship. Janeway insists on staying on the tattered remains of Voyager.
Annorax is unconcerned with the fleet’s approach at first, but Chakotay assures him that Janeway wouldn’t be attacking if she didn’t think she had a shot at success. Obrist signals Paris to start his sabotage of the temporal core. However, he is unsuccessful, and Krenim erases the Nihydron from history.
Obrist has had enough, and takes the temporal core offline himself. Annorax is furious, and relieves Obrist, but the damage is done and the ship is now in regular space-time and is vulnerable. Annorax had counted on his being temporally out of sync to defend himself, so his shields are comparatively weak. As soon as the temporal core is offline, he has to revert to conventional weapons and is vulnerable to fire.
However, his ship still isn’t a pushover, and he makes short work of the Mawasi, with one vessel crashing into Voyager. Left with no other option, Janeway does a kamikaze run at Annorax’s ship, destroying it and Voyager both—
—and then the timeline resets. Voyager is heading toward Krenim space, having just finished the astrometrics lab. Janeway and Chakotay discuss the possibility of a ceremony to officially open it. They’re hailed by the same Krenim commandant, who politely urges them to go around Krenim space. Janeway agrees.
Cut to the Kyana Prime colony two centuries ago, where Annorax’s wife urges him to stop working and enjoy the day. He sets aside his calculations for temporal incursions and goes off with his wife.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Annorax’s weapon can erase anything it fires on from history, but there are always ripple effects. It also keeps the ship out of the space-time continuum, making it difficult to fire on it. However, that means its actual shields are pretty lame…
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway refuses to rest, refuses to heal, refuses to give up, refuses to surrender. And, of course, like any good captain, she goes down with the sinking ship.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok tries to convince Janeway not to go down with the sinking ship, and also expresses disdain for the human concept of anthropomorphizing ships.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. It makes zero sense that Neelix stays on Voyager, since his most useful skill at this point is as an ambassador, and he should be out in a shuttle trying to scrounge up allies, not staying on Voyager being useless.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH tries and fails to relieve Janeway of duty. His frustration is surprisingly subdued, especially given how cranky he was in Part 1.
Resistance is futile. Seven questions Janeway’s orders in a staff meeting, earning her a gentle rebuke from Tuvok. Though even Tuvok admits that the captain isn’t really always right…
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Chakotay never recycled the pocket watch he replicated for Janeway, and once she finds it, Janeway wears it for the rest of the episode as a remembrance/totem. It’s rather sweet.
Do it.
“If that ship is destroyed, all of history might be restored. And this is one year I’d like to forget.”
–Janeway providing spoilers for the ending.
Welcome aboard. Back from Part 1 are John Loprieno at Obrist, Peter Slutsker as the Krenim commandant, and the great Kurtwood Smith as Annorax. Lise Simms also appears as Annorax’s wife.
Trivial matters: Annorax’s story has echoes of Captain Nemo from Jules Verne’s Vingt Mille Lieues Sous les Mers: Tour du Monde Sous-Marin, and Paris even refers to Annorax as “Captain Nemo” at one point. The name Annorax is likely a tribute to that novel’s narrator, Professor Aronnax.
Paris also references the mutiny against Captain Bligh of HMS Bounty when discussing Annorax’s crew’s disaffection.
While the Krenim, the Mawasi, and the Nihydrons are never seen or mentioned again, they are seen again in the future of Star Trek Online, all as part of the Krenim Coalition, an alliance of species in this region of the Delta Quadrant. In addition, the novel A Pocket Full of Lies by Kirsten Beyer shows Voyager’s first contact with the Nihydrons in the mainline timeline.
Set a course for home. “Time’s up.” Parts of this second installment are brilliant, and most of those parts are on Annorax’s ship. Kurtwood Smith is even more spectacular here than he was in Part 1 because his psychopathy is given an explanation that almost makes him sympathetic: he’s trying to rescue his family from oblivion. The pyramid with the lock of hair that he was staring at last time is all he’s got left of his wife, and everything he has done, all the appalling acts of mass murder he’s committed, have all been in the service of correcting that one arrogant mistake he made, thinking he could save his people from the Rilnar, and instead condemning his wife to oblivion.
On top of that, both Chakotay and Paris are well used here. Chakotay, ever the anthropologist, wants to try to find a way to accomplish Annorax’s goal without any further bloodless bloodshed. He doesn’t want to see anyone else wiped out, and he believes that he might be able to use Annorax’s ship to make things better for everyone. His mistake is one you can’t really fault him for: he believed that Annorax was sincere in his desire to do no more harm, that there was still a shred of decency left in him. Once he realizes that Annorax was just humoring him (or maybe he was serious, but got tired of waiting for Chakotay to find a less harmful incursion), he goes along with Paris’s mutiny plan. As for Paris, I like the role he plays here, as he’s very much the McCoy to Chakotay’s Kirk, and it works. Plus, Chakotay makes it clear that the final decision is his, and he will take Paris down if he disobeys. It’s to the credit of both characters that Paris takes Chakotay seriously and follows those orders.
The stuff on Voyager is less effective. Janeway being a macho idiot is, well, boring. Worse, though, is the decision as to who would remain on board: the people who have billing. This makes absolutely no sense. Neelix should be off with the escape pods and shuttlecraft trying to drum up allies. Torres should have more help than Seven and Kim to make the extensive repairs that are needed. (It probably wouldn’t take her three weeks to repair a nacelle if she had at least a minimal staff present.)
And then Voyager shows up with two allies out of nowhere. Instead of endless scenes of Janeway being stubborn and continuing to work when she’s not physically capable, why didn’t we see the process by which she made these allies? Better yet, why didn’t one of the escape pods or shuttlecraft come back with those allies, given that that’s what Janeway charged them with when they left? Oh, right, they’re not in the opening credits, so they don’t matter…
One of the things I’ve admired about Janeway is that she usually doesn’t succumb to the macho idiocy of her male predecessors (and successors). Yet here she is pushing herself to the limit for no compellingly good reason and having moronic conversations with the EMH about being fit for duty.
Mind you, this doesn’t apply to the climax. Her staying on board Voyager while everyone else goes to greener pastures makes perfect sense. The fact that she does it while wearing Chakotay’s pocket watch is just a perfect touch. And her last-minute desperate kamikaze run also makes sense, given how few options are left.
Which leads us nicely to the worst thing about the episode, which is the inevitable reset button. But its inevitability doesn’t make it any easier to take. This isn’t like “Yesterday’s Enterprise” where the reset button has to be hit because history has been so radically altered, or “Children of Time” where hitting the reset button was an awful choice with nasty consequences. This was hitting the reset button because they were so in love with utterly kicking the shit out of Voyager that they wrote themselves into a corner that could only be gotten out of by resetting everything.
Reportedly, writers Brannon Braga and Joe Menosky tried and failed to come up with a way for the characters to actually remember the year of hell so it could mean something to them. On the one hand, I wish they had come up with a way, as the events of this two-parter should have been consequential, dammit. On the other hand, who were they kidding? Consequences just aren’t a thing Voyager does, so even if they did remember it, it would be consigned to the same dustbin as the EMH’s memory loss, all the prior catastrophic damage that magically got fixed between episodes, Kes’s report on the Krenim, and Tuvix.
“Year of Hell” remains, in isolation, a great example of what Voyager could have been. True, it probably wouldn’t have been sustainable to be this heavy and nasty all the time, but there should’ve been a middle ground between this and the good-parts version of being stranded halfway across the galaxy that we mostly got.
Warp factor rating: 6
Keith R.A. DeCandido talks about Star Trek: Voyager on the 397th episode of The Sci-Fi Diner Podcast, which has been going through each Star Trek pilot one by one. Check out their talk on Voyager in general and “Caretaker” in particular…
My thoughts on this episode are basically no different than the prior one: lots of great stuff all ultimately rendered moot by the reset button.
I really do love though Janeway wearing Chakotay’s gift and then also when Janeway and Tuvok part ways for the last time (at least in this timeline): it really is so beautiful and sad it makes me cry, and it’s one of those rare times the musical score also provides an emotional punch instead of being bland.
Maybe someone can explain to me how the Krenim on Annorax’s ship are immune to aging after two centuries or are they just long lived and are slow to age?
It really is bizarre how adverse they were to having any kind of continuity. Heck, TNG had more, since “Family” specifically occurred while the Enterprise was in dry-dock after battling the Borg. Really, there is no reason why the next episode (which takes place mostly on an alien planet) couldn’t have taken place with Voyager being in the repair process. Instead of “Random Thoughts” being about B’Elanna’s general Klingon angst, it could have specifically addressed what she went through during the Krenim attack. Heck “Concerning Flight” would likely have worked *even better* if it had also taken place while things were still being pieced back together. Between Da Vinci’s attempts to get his flying machine to work, and Janeway’s recovery from what she endured in “Year of Hell,” there was plenty to work with to take that episode from ‘alright’ to ‘outstanding.’
On a show so laden with technobabble, I find it hard to believe they couldn’t come up with some hand-wave explanation to leave one, some, or all of the crew with the memories of the Year of Hell.
Why? It’s not like she has ever had any problem with forcing her way through people’s space regardless of them not wanting her to before, so what has changed in the reset that she is suddenly willing to do it now when she didn’t at the beginning of the first part of Year of Hell?
The bit with the comet didn’t make sense. Okay, so erasing the entire existence of the comet would disrupt evolution on those worlds? Fine, just alter its course slightly just before Voyager encounters it. Nothing else is changed.
“All the food is from civilizations that Annorax has wiped from the timeline. He calls his ship a museum of lost histories. (Pointedly, Paris stops eating once he realizes that his dish is the last remnant of a civilization.)”
They did practically that same scene in a She-Ra and the Princesses of Power episode this past season, with Horde Prime and Glimmer.
As a Voyager two-parter, everything krad says is pretty gosh darn on-point. I enjoyed the story much more when I refocused so that Voyager and her crew is a mere plot device. My tweet-sized summary of this one:
“Time, in one of her many moods, decided to offer forgiveness and grace to Annorax by bringing Voyager to him.”
Stargate SG1 took this idea and ran with it in my favorite episode, “Window of Opportunity”. It ended up being far less traumatic physically, than this episode, but the episode was sweet with just enough anger to spice the feel-good.
Christopher: geez, I forgot about that She-Ra scene…….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Chakotay’s concept of bring back the Krenim empire In full without eliminating any other civilizations makes no sense. To bring it back fully you would HAVE to eliminate any civilizations that now occupy the space it once inhabited.
The old Trek pattern of part two never quite living up to part one. Year of Hell was never going to overcome this. The reset button is baked into Voyager’s premise. The stakes were too high for the powers that be to let that be a lasting consequence.
Still, I don’t think the timeship’s destruction undoing every timeline is as egregious as Janeway’s handwave of the catastrophic damage in season 2’s Deadlock. It’s probably the most practical solution to undo the events. And it’s not as if Braga hadn’t done this before. The climax on TNG’s All Good Things hinges on all three Enterprises being blown to pieces on that spatial rift, resetting the whole thing.
And there’s enough of a good story in part 2 to justify what came before. Annorax’s obsession remains the main drive behind this two parter, brilliantly played by Smith, and the episode capitalizes on that by putting Chakotay on his shoes, as he discovers just how detail-oriented and prone to error the task of repairing a timeline with millions of variables can be.
I don’t mind Janeway’s stubborn attitude in this, but I do feel the Voyager sections of the episode can’t quite replicate part 1’s tension for a couple of reasons. One: we’ve seen this played out on the previous part; and two: without the rest of the crew, there isn’t much in the way of stakes involved. With only the regulars, there’s no sense of danger that we’ll lose anyone in this mission.
It may not be as strong as part 1, but it’s still superbly directed. It’s interesting that Michael Vejar’s first Voyager episode happens to be such a big-scale blockbuster entry. You would think Rick Berman would assign a smaller episode to a first-time director. Then again, Vejar had just done DS9’s superlative Rocks and Shoals (not counting his stellar Babylon 5 work). A trial by fire if there ever was one, with high stakes and complex location shooting and action set pieces.
It’s indicative of how DS9 still served as a proving ground for writers and directors who would eventually become part of Voyager’s roster, same as Allan Kroeker, Victor Lobl, Bryan Fuller, Lisa Klink, Michael Taylor, and so on.
Heck, TNG had more, since “Family” specifically occurred while the Enterprise was in dry-dock after battling the Borg.
@2: Truth be told, Rick Berman was vehemently opposed to doing that episode, and even tried to include a science subplot as a monster of the week to keep things episodic. It took a strong campaign from Michael Piller to convince him otherwise.
I give Voyager credit a ship that erases things from time is a unique concept but it also really strains belief that they could be that advanced but not invent actual time travel. Also it’s said that they have been doing this for two centuries now they might not age during this time but time is still passing right? so if he did bring his wife back would’t she have died like 100 plus years earlier?
@9/John: That’s a good point, the thing about them not aging because they were “outside of time.” That’s totally dumb. If they can move and talk and eat, then time is passing for them subjectively, no matter what their relationship is to the outside universe. If their metabolisms function as normal, then their aging should proceed as normal.
As has been the case repeatedly throughout the entire Rewatch, I think my thoughts on this entire two-parter can best be summed up by Chuck Sonnenburg of SF Debris.
“Captain Bligh of the HMS Bounty” – No, Captain Bligh of HMS Bounty (technically HMAV Bounty, but either way “the” is ungrammatical here).
@12: Updated to remove the “the”!
@12/Muswell: Good point. “The His Majesty’s Ship Bounty” doesn’t work (whereas “The United States Ship Enterprise” would).
@@@@@ CuttlefishBenjamin- Just repeat to yourself “It won’t have consequences, that’s not what this show’s about.”
That said, the Nemo comparison is an interesting one. Sure, he’s a genius from a defeated power who’s invented a ship that lets him evade and strike at the ships of other powers. But Nemo was never genocidal, and for all that he was vengeful towards the imperialists of the surface world, he wasn’t focused on righting the wrongs of his past. It’s hard to image this Annorax stopping to save a pearl diver, or fund some rebels simply because he believes in their cause.
Despite their flaws, I really enjoy this two-parter because it shows what could have been.
Side note: I’ve always pictured the Time War between the Daleks and Timelords as being similar to this episode. Fighting with such weapons that it affects all of history/future. It makes what we finally saw in Day of the Doctor rather dull by comparison.
“This guy thinks that Time has a personal grudge against him.”
If there was any doubt that most of Part I was irrelevant to the main plot, nearly everything in the recap comes from the last ten minutes. Still, that might not be a bad thing. I actually found that the scenes on Voyager became more compelling when the conflict is coming from internal disagreements, tricks of nature and Janeway going nuts rather than a bunch of anonymous bad guys shooting at them. It is a bit unsatisfying though that Janeway suffers even less consequences than usual for disobeying orders, as she gets herself erased from history and replaced with a happy smiling well-groomed version.
The episode’s other conflict takes place on the weapon-ship. I don’t think we’ve seen Chakotay and Paris this antagonistic towards each other since Season 2. On the surface, Chakotay seems like the reasonable one but ultimately he’s forced to accept Paris is right: For all his apparent fairness, Annorax is too much of a fanatic to change his ways. The final battle is tense and dramatic but it’s hard to keep track of where everyone is: We hear Tuvok checking in with Janeway, but I’m not sure which ship Kim and Torres were meant to be on and whether or not it got blown up. (It feels like Obrist suddenly has a line saying there are three Mawasi ships even though we only see two in order to cover the lack of reaction.)
And then the reset button gets pressed and we’ve back in the real timeline, but Janeway and crew still don’t react to the Krenim in the way you’d expect them to if “Before and After” happened: No “Phew, those were the people Kes warned us about, good job we avoided that”, just a simple “Can we go through your space?”/“We’d rather you didn’t”/“Okay, bye.” So, yes, it’s still a continuity screw-up. As an aside, those Voyager Relaunch novels went with “Year of Hell”’s version of events and portrayed Janeway as having no knowledge of the Krenim beyond their fleeting encounter in the new timeline.
One guide book insisted that the end scene, with Annorax working on the schematics of the weapon-ship, means that he built it anyway and, I quote, “Basically, he’s caught in a time loop, which Voyager went through once and then came out the other side.” I’ve no idea what that even means, so I prefer to believe that he came up with the idea but never got around to building it.
It does feel at times as though someone came up with the title first and then stuck in a bunch of “two months ago” lines to justify it, because the story doesn’t really feel as though it covers a year. (Honestly, given how quickly Voyager’s repaired damage up until now, the long periods of downtime don’t really fit.) Janeway appears to be controlling the entire ship from her command chair during the climax: Has she really routed all systems through that couple of buttons on the chair arm?
It’s funny (in a way): I know I’ve seen most of Voyager at one time or another, but the only scene I can readily bring to mind and replay is the final scene in Annorax’s study, with his wife. It’s so lovely in its simplicity. Don’t know why it should have stuck with me over the past twenty years, but there you go!
Question: would the reset button at the end of this episode be quite as frustrating if that button hadn’t been mashed so hard and so repeatedly up to this point in Voyager?
I kind of feel that the reset was pretty much the only way to conclude this story (and I have to admit, I love the way it was done here) and I like that basically everyone got their happy ending. I don’t even mind the lack of memories of the events in this case…although the character development would have been nice to retain.
It strikes me that the Krenim weapon is similar to Balefire in the Wheel of Time series.
@19:
It strikes me that the Krenim weapon is similar to Balefire in the Wheel of Time series.
Huh. I’d never thought of it that way.
Yeah, that’s actually a good comparison.
The thing that I find so interesting about this episode and the reset button is that I feel the inverse of everyone else here.I loved THIS specific reset button because of how logical it was. Annorax’s mistake erased his family from history. Everything that he did after that was to undo that mistake and none of it ever worked. But in the end the only thing that worked was the only thing that he never tried, never could try, never would try. The only Temporal Incursion that was 100% Guaranteed to work, the Incursion that would actually erase his original mistake. Erase the Temporal Weapon Ship itself. If the ship never existed, then it could never fire the shot that wiped away the Kyana Prime Colony. I thought that was brilliant, a real Monkey’s Paw. Annorax could’ve gotten everything he wanted, all he had to do was let go of power. I do believe that power reveals, rather than corrupts, but I do acknowledge that power can change. And that final scene of Annorax at home shows that without that much power he doesn’t change into that man.
If Voyager had been the 2003 BSG style series that it was conceptualized as, then a large scale two parter with a reset button end would’ve been perfect. Then the Voyager crew would’ve gone through all of these trials and tribulations and suffering, before getting to the Krenim who just beat them like Doomsday beat Kal-El, but this time, just this once, they don’t have to suffer this, this time they can just forget this, they can leave this behind and start fresh. That would’ve been a very happy ending.
But as it is, I still enjoyed it greatly. Annorax is one of the great Star Trek Villains, and honestly if there would ever have been a Voyager movie, this would’ve been the villain and story to use.
An Star Trek Online aside and spoiler, the Annorax-class Temporal Science Dreadnought is a key strategic asset in the Delta Quadrant Arc and the following Iconian War. The Iconians had the Krenim Imperium destroyed with the exception of a time displaced stealth colony and facility, at Kyana Prime. Apparently in the timeline that is created here, Annorax actually still creates his designs and his research is in fact utilized by the Krenim. The Krenim had implemented temporal technology that the Iconians feared, so the Delta Alliance needed to make contact with them. After they brought the Krenim in, we ended up constructing the Annorax, the Temporal Weapon Ship and it is key to resolving the war (also starting the war), though not the way its use was originally intended. After that, a Krenim with very similar motivations to Annorax, but a vastly worse temperament steals the Annorax and that action ended up triggering the Temporal Cold War. The moral I took away from it is NO GOOD ever comes from building that ship.
Have to admit I choked up at the farewell between Janeway and Tuvok on first viewing. Not quite on the level of Kirk and Spock’s farewell in TWOK, but it’s close for me. A really well played scene.
One of the things I’ve admired about Janeway is that she usually doesn’t succumb to the macho idiocy of her male predecessors (and successors). Yet here she is pushing herself to the limit for no compellingly good reason and having moronic conversations with the EMH about being fit for duty.
I disagree that Janeway didn’t have a compelling reason. Her crew is gone, her ship is being held together by duct tape, and Chakotay isn’t there to keep her on the rails. She has failed at the only goal she’s had since landing in the Delta Quadrant. She couldn’t protect her crew and she couldn’t get them back to Earth. She has lost everything. She was pushed beyond her limits to cope and ended up behaving irrationally. She blames herself and pushing herself to the limit was her way of punishing herself for her failure. It was incredibly sad to watch her spiral and ultimately end up alone on the bridge of Voyager.
@Llyan > I totally agree, that was the feature that made the Voyager half of part 2 compelling. Janeway was cracking under the strain, and I can’t blame her for a second. It was also part of what necessitated the reset button at the end, because Janeway was a broken woman and going back to the morally righteous and supremely confident captain after that would be beyond credulity I think. But watching her slowly come apart and desperately hold herself together at the same time is tragic and fascinating, it’s an aspect of Janeway we never saw elsewhere but was completely believable.
If I had to pick a favorite Voyager episode, I think it would be a toss-up between “Latent Image” and “Year of Hell.” As most people have pointed out it’s an extreme example of what Voyager could have been but never was. The trials and trauma they go through is super interesting because it’s something we so rarely so in the show, or in Trek in general. The action is good, the story is as typically shaky as most temporal shenanigans shows are but it feels grave and intense, the performances are all good (especially Kurtwood Smith), it’s got a really cool concept with the Krenim temporal technology, and Annorax is easily one of Voyager’s best guest characters and probably its best villain.
The reset at the end is of course a point of contention. I think that in the context of the story it works but in the context of the show it’s frustrating. 3 and a half years of almost nothing carrying over between episodes, no consequences anywhere, and we finally get a story that would be impossible to ignore the week after but it all gets erased from history. I get that would gall some people. But I think it doesn’t bother me. “Year of Hell” is like Voyager’s hidden feature film. It’s a story that would work perfectly as a movie, down to the epic ending that puts you back at status quo, like most of the Trek movies did, but doesn’t feel wrong because you the viewer remembers the exciting ride you just took.
Voyager often did well with the action and spectacle episodes, and occasionally did well with the personal tragedy episodes, but I think this one is by far the best melding of the two.
I think this two-parter would have made for an amazing series finale if in the end Janeway still sacrifices herself but in doing so gets her crew home and everyone still remembers everything. So maybe the temporal displacement part of the story wouldn’t work but I just like the visual of Janeway alone on the bridge doing a kamikaze run on the enemy ship thus ensuring her crew’s survival perhaps on their way through a transwarp hub leading back to the Alpha Quadrant.
@25,
Funny enough, that was always my ideal ending for VOY as a whole as well: They make it home, but Janeway doesn’t survive to see salvation and the promised land.
It’s ironically now unlike how Laura Roslin exited Battlestar Galacitca — and given how critical Ronald D. Moore was critical of VOY and how that criticism (seemingly) influenced the reboot’s development, I’ve always wondered if Laura’s fate was inspired by the narrative failures of “Endgame”.
One of Amazon’s trivia bits for this episode is that they didn’t want to damage any existing sets, so they dressed them with overlays to make them them look battered. They only did this to some of the sets, which explains why we only see 2 or 3 locations. The result was that the set dressing made the walls look wrinkled. Once you know this, it’s hard not to see it, even in the darkened lighting.
Since Keith mentioned STO (not that I need much prompting): the game did a redux of this plotline, this time casting it in the context of the Iconian War. The Iconians have returned after 200,000 years, and they are unstoppable. Turns out they are very very mad at Romulans for Sela’s role in the past during the attack on the Iconian homeworld that wiped out their civilization. So they arrange for the destruction of the Romulan homeworld.
Sela’s time travel is made possible by Krenim research at the Kyana system research station mentioned in this episode. One of the main researchers is a man named Noye, who hates Voyager and its crew (and possibly humans in a bigoted way) for interfering in Delta quadrant affairs (which is a bit rich given Annorax’s story).
By this point in 2410, the Federation, New Romulan Republic, and Klingon Empire/Defense Force are united in an Alliance. They are trying to use Krenim research (as Time Lords Lite), to see if any incursion can bring the Iconian crisis to an end. After trying various scenarios in a holodeck (which is more interesting than staring at lines on a tablet), the team chooses what they regard as the best option, which is basically the same option as removing a comet from Voyager’s path in the screen story. The result and unintended consequence is that the Romulan homeworld is completely assimilated by the Borg. It’s a brief mission, but effective as you see the Borg infested space and planetary surface.
It takes two time incursions to try to reset the status quo. They store what they’ve learned in a temporally shielded data core, which looks a lot like the case holding the lock of hair. It turns out that the reset wipes out Noye’s wife, Clauda, and her entire species. She was also pregnant at the time. Noye learns this from the core and the knowledge of what he’s lost drives him mad. He uses the experimental timeship, the Annorax, which looks just like the one in these 2 episodes and functions the same, to set out on a raging rampage across the centuries.
Along the way he gains allies like the Na’kuhl, the Sphere Builders, and Admiral Leeta from the Terran Empire. After trying to sabotage the signing of the Temporal Accords on New Khitomer in 2769, the story culminates with a battle at Procyon V in the 26th century. The mission involves Captain Pavel Chekov, now a temporal agent who’s worked with Daniels, and a time-displaced Scotty, who looks like he did in the TNG episode (though voiced by Doohan’s son, Chris (very convincingly)). Your crew helps these two old friends board the Enterprise J to install the Tox Uthat in order to destroy the Spheres and their Expanse once again. Scotty can somehow still access the software protocols on the J because he wrote the originals. “How quaint…”
That is a lot… and apparently the game removed some of the connective tissue from the story, so as a returning player it feels jerky as it makes it’s various plot jumps. After normal space is restored, you chase Noye, board his ship and arrest him.
In a more recent story, the Excalbians create a Burnham construct and you’re forced to relive your “career” in the game, along with Seven as an ally. You once again face Noye, with Burnham and Seven advising your moral choices. You have the option to kill him this time, ending his threat more permanently. My first run through, I arrested him again (Burnham’s soft option). Subsequent runs I followed Seven’s advice… kill, end the threat. Enough already with the incessant obsession with a wife you never knew. It’s like Annorax’s obliviousness in the screen story, destroying thousands of civilizations for the sake of a personal mania. It’s not a scientific poll, but many (most?) players get to a point with him that Noye starts to sound like Annoying and they just say “Ahh, shaddup already.”
Somewhere in there, Noye’s Tuterian wife shows up. She distracts him from setting off his time bomb, then stabs him. Turns out she’s really the Female Changeling… I don’t remember where this fits in… (time travel story headache setting in)
But it doesn’t functionally matter what moral choices you make. The Excalbians object to whatever you decide. It all results in Seven becoming the Borg Queen and you make a last stand till… every Enterprise in screen history shows up to help you! with originally recorded dialogue from each captain. It’s gigantic fan service.
Forgot to mention: Noye is voiced by James Horan, who played “Future Shadowy Guy” directing Silik and the Suliban on Enterprise. Noye appears as a shadowy figure called the Envoy in game and also becomes increasingly disfigured, just as Daniels does on the show when an adjustment to a timeline has negative or unforeseen consequences.
Pretty sure that’s supposed to be “offline,” right?
As I think I saw mentioned above, having Angora figuring out that the missing component from his calculations was himself, could’ve been a nice character arc, and a good way to redeem himself.
Then some kind of technobabble handwave that has the Voyager crew retain some memory of events, and… there you go. A year’s worth of character growth in two episodes.
. As soon as the temporal core is online, he has to revert to conventional weapons and is vulnerable to fire.
I think you meant offline here.
Re: “…the temporal core is offline”–the post has been updated, thanks.
@14 – USS is “United Space Ship“, not “Unites States Ship”.
@34/tracet: I was referring to ships named Enterprise that have existed in real life, not the fictional one named after them.
I wonder if Star Fleet personnel just assume they’ve experienced different timelines…
One of the things I’ve admired about Janeway is that she usually doesn’t succumb to the macho idiocy of her male predecessors (and successors). Yet here she is pushing herself to the limit for no compellingly good reason and having moronic conversations with the EMH about being fit for duty.
This may be because I watched VOY as a kid, but I distinctly remember Janeway getting criticism for actually taking a vacation. I think this mostly came from “Persistence of Vision” and I remember the reaction was a general “Kirk and Picard never wanted vacation, but she does because she is overwhelmed by being a captain.” I don’t know if this criticism was widespread at the time or it just made an impression on my kid-brain, but I always thought that this episode, “Macrocosm”, and other endurance trials Janeway went through was a reaction to those people.
I like the ending and this particular reset button, but I do think it would have been fun to have a few episodes chronicling Voyager as they make repairs and track down all of the missing crew. On the other hand, I adore Janeway’s collision course scene. It’s on par with some of the visuals and dramatic moments in Scorpion. Plus, I care about these characters and I’m a big softie, so I prefer that Tuvok isn’t blind and those two crewmembers weren’t vaporized because the EMH couldn’t hold the door open any longer and so on.
@37/Fry08: I never heard of those criticisms of Janeway when I was watching Voyager in first-run but that doesn’t make sense to me because Kirk and Picard obviously took vacations and leisure time in their off hours too. I’m not that versed in TOS but Picard was often on the holdeck as Dixon Hill or riding horses for instance and of course there’s his “Captain’s Holiday” on Risa. So it’s very unfair to hold Janeway to a different standard because she’s a woman.
@38, She is also in a situation that is- at base level- far more stressful than either Kirk or Picard, what with being lost decades away from home or help.
That guy looks like he’s wearing his ass for a hat.
In story morality terms, since Arronax is going around temporally destroying civilisations and that’s the first thing we see, it has to be undone. It must be. That is to say…Voyager’s presence has catastrophic consequences in some other stories that don’t get reset. Such as enabling the Borg to assimilate more possibly innocent civilisations. But Voyager prevents a lot of disasters as well.
However, the story planning probably decided first that the timeline would reset at the end, and then they could go ahead with wiping out civilisations every ten minutes and also turning Voyager into scrap metal with thrusters on: it would all go away.
Otherwise I think it would have had to be less genocidal… Without a reset at the end, they could have destroyed civilisations a little bit. What I’m considering is, hit a technological centre with the paradox beam, alter its history so that it’s not out of being medieval yet. But it’s television medieval so it is still a good place to live, if your life plan doesn’t include dentistry or medical care or childbirth.
Conversation that would have happened in this episode if Voyager had had any real pragmatists (and/or Chaotic Neutrals) aboard:
“Hey Annorax, what would happen if you erased the Borg from history?”
“It’s impossible to calculate, the Borg is not a separate species but a combination of many species.”
“But there must have been one species that started the whole assimilation thing, right?”
“Right.”
“How about you erase that species and just… see what happens?”
@42: that’s fun to think about as a viewer, but from a writing perspective, there’s basically no option but to make it still have a bad outcome. You don’t have a story if there’s galactic peace absent the Borg.
So then it becomes a question of: what kind of bad outcome? The easiest and simplest is that another species ends up developing similar technology and the Borg basically end up happening again, maybe just with a different name.
That’s not too far-fetched. The concept of self replicating nanobots have been thought up independently many times, even in our own world. A civilisation which treats its individual constituents with the same regard as those nanobots inside one body could conceivably arise many other ways. You could even choose to explore parts of the Borg’s history; make them self-contradictory if you like, if your story is going around erasing civilisations. Come up with a dozen different ways the Borg could get seeded in the galaxy.
Alternatively; absent the Borg, perhaps some other terrible conflict exists instead. There’s a real diversity of options on this side. For instance, you could make it a long, protracted war, such as a crusade between neighbouring superpowers. You could have the planets all fractured and fighting each other endlessly for small resources, in a sort of “Medieval European kingdoms” way. Maybe the Dominion just swanned over and said they’re in charge now, like Rome in various parts of history.
Perhaps they could have united in their own Federation-esque entity. But then, again from a storytelling perspective, you’d have to find conflict somewhere. Maybe it’s corrupt. Maybe it’s still at war with some smaller neighbours. So that option just kind of loops back on the first question again. It also veers into telling a drastically different story about a host of other, hitherto nonexistent, civilisations. That doesn’t exactly feel like “exploring what happens if we go back in time to preemptively kill the Borg”, to me. But you could conceivably go there, if you wanted.
Apologies if that was taking your post far too seriously… lol
@43/kaitlyn: “… from a writing perspective, there’s basically no option but to make it still have a bad outcome.”
Oh, thank you for realizing that. That’s how time travel stories have to work. McCoy saving Edith Keeler meant Hitler won. Barry Allen saving his mother meant Bruce Wayne died and Atlantis and the Amazons wrecked the world in a war. And there are a bunch of time travel stories where saving JFK in Dallas results in some kind of cataclysm. Time-travel writers are disturbingly enamored of the idea that some bad things “need” to happen to prevent far worse things. I guess it’s the only way to justify why the time travelers don’t just undo every bad thing ever.
And I like the idea that the Borg could have multiple origins, that if you erase one, they would still arise through another mechanism. I mean, it makes sense, doesn’t it? Their whole deal is assimilating different cultures into one. So if several different, independently arising predatory cyborg group consciousnesses came into contact with each other, it stands to reason that they would assimilate each other and merge into a larger whole. It might even explain some of the inconsistencies in how the Borg have been portrayed over the years, or allow you to reconcile different Borg origin stories in the tie-in fiction.
@43:
And I like the idea that the Borg could have multiple origins, that if you erase one, they would still arise through another mechanism.
Yeah, it’s not unlike what Tim Miller and Cameron did with Terminator: Dark Fate last year — that with the advance of technological development and AI theory, destroying SkyNet would only ensure a similar program (Legion) would emerge in its place sooner or later.
So I have to agree, I also like the idea of the Borg being inevitable in one form or another.
And speaking of the Borg and time travel, CLB, I still love how your first DTI novel explained what happened to their time travel tech after First Contact and why we never saw it again.
For some reason, this comment box doesn’t allow me to paste in text from Notepad or other program. That’s terrible usability.
@46: Really? It always let me paste in something from Word, although it takes a couple of goes sometimes.
Over the past week, there have been a couple of times when I was unable to paste any copied text into the edit box, though at other times it worked fine. This forum software has always been glitchy and erratic.
@45: Some of the recent episodes of Doctor Who have implied that Cybermanification is a generic process that humans will come up with under a fairly wide set of circumstances, so eliminating one possible origin of the Cyberman doesn’t get rid of the problem.
@10. ChristopherLBennett: On a purely scientific level you’re entirely correct, yet in terms of storytelling the classic image of a genius so wrapped up in his Obsession that he completely ignores the passage of time gains a nice Science Fiction twist when the Mad Scientist in question actually fails to age (which I feel adds something unique to Annorax, moving him beyond ‘Captain Nemo … IN SPACE!’).
So I’m prepared to accept this as Bad Science but Good Storytelling.
ALSO: It makes perfect sense that Captain Janeway sinks deep into a deeply uncharacteristic growling machismo during The Year of Hell (culminating in her death-ride at the Enemy vessel) – woman’s had to go without her coffee for MONTHS; I’m mildly astonished she didn’t try to set Voyager on a preprogrammed death ride, then fire herself ahead in an escape capsule (targeted at the biggest holes in the enemy vessels hull) so that she could have a few precious seconds to kick in the enemy’s heads before everything went BOOM.
Captain Kate gets cranky without her coffee, is what I’m saying.
@50,
@49,
Yeah. Jonathan Hickman’s X-Men kickoff last year went down a similar road with the Sentinels, too.
Heh, seems to be a popular storytelling trope across mediums these days.
@6: Jason . . .
That’s what I was thinking throughout. That this was showing us what a villain Time Lord would be, in contrast to the Doctor we all know and love.
Guest actor John Loprieno will always be Cord Roberts from One Life to Live to me.
When I think about the horrors of the “reset button” in pre-streaming, pre-serialization era of TV, I always think of this as the most embarrassing, insulting-to-the-audience example. Despite the fact that there are things to like about Year of Hell, I just can’t get over the ending. Ever!
@55/Weekly: Given that it was a time travel story, I think it was obvious from the start that it would have a reset at the end.
Stargate SG1 took this idea and ran with it in my favorite episode, “Window of Opportunity”. It ended up being far less traumatic physically, than this episode, but the episode was sweet with just enough anger to spice the feel-good.
Speaking of Stargate, in hindsight I kinda wish post-“Year of Hell” VOY had gone the same route SG-1 did after “2010”: Reset the timeline, then have the repercussions of that reset pop up again down the road (i.e. “2001”) with only the audience aware of the full story/dramatic irony.
Needless to say, I greatly enjoyed Kirsten Beyer’s VOY Relaunch novel A Pocket Full of Lies for doing that exact narrative.
Given what we learn later in “Timeless” about the Borg having a kind of sixth sense temporal device in their heads, I wish that had been introduced here instead. It would be a way to hit the reset button but still have Seven learn something about Janeway’s qualities as a leader in the most dire circumstances. I mean, she does openly question her wisdom in one scene. A good button on this story might have been with Seven demonstrating some newfound respect or understanding for Janeway after the big reset.
@58,
Huh.
Good point, I’d never thought of that. Another of VOY’s missed opportunities.
I’m not surprised “Torres struggles to effect repairs” if there’s only a skeleton crew left on board. I assumed Janeway wore the watch because it symbolises the episode’s theme of time travel (like the clock tower at the climax of Back to the Future). When I first saw Year of Hell, I thought that was Amy Brenneman playing Annorax’s wife.
1: Year of Hell would have made an excellent series finale (especially if the ship had stayed destroyed). I think the reason the Krenim never age is because they exist outside of time as long as they stay aboard the weapon ship. 2: Continuity is not one of Red Dwarf’s strong points either. Maybe Janeway agreed to go around Krenim space because the region is “in dispute” rather than it belonging to an unfriendly neighbour.
3: Even slightly altering the course of the comet might have affected the timeline in ways impossible to predict. 4: Very poetic! 5: Very poetic too! 8: I loved Pt II as much as Pt I (except for the ending), and two-parters are one thing VGR does extremely well. 10: Yeah, if Annorax succeeded in restoring his wife to the timeline, how could he be with her 200 years later?
21: Imagine if someone erased Dr Sam Beckett from existence. All the wrongs he had righted would be undone and that should have been Quantum Leap’s true finale – to right such a terrible wrong. 22: I’ve always felt Year of Hell was an alternate series finale and that farewell scene between Janeway and Tuvok was written as if it were VGR’s swan song. 40: Who?
48: ‘“Glitchy and erratic”’? Is that why Tor.com lost my review of Scorpion, Pt II (twice!!!)? 58-59: Would that have allowed Seven to retain some memory of the Year of Hell because it would’ve been nice if someone did.
@54 bgsu98
The women in my family were ALL in the tank for Cord.
Also a bit of Trek trivia; Barbara Luna who played Marlena in “Mirror, Mirror” played his mother in One Life to Live.
I’d watch these two episodes all over again just to see the relationship between 7 and Tuvok.. There was such tenderness, and (from what I’ve seen) the only time that showed such remarkable similarities in their characters. There’s something about these two emotionally inert characters and their bonding without even having to comment on it. It was understated and well played.
That and some astounding visuals for the time. Even now they look amazing.
I still can’t understand why two of the allied ships flew in front of the deadly time weapon after they strafed the ship. It was entirely unnecessary, except so we could experience the loss of life of characters we never saw.
Even though there was a reset, I got the feeling there was some residual memory or echo. That’s why Janeaway decides to alter course and why Annorax has his little Scrooge awakening moment and goes to brunch. But it wasn’t played up or made meaningful. So I’m in agreement with most that the whole experience was wasted.
However, I dig badass stubborn Janeaway at the end. Her own singleminded captain attitude mirrored Annorax’s quite effectively. It’s not always just the evil captain who’s driven a bit mad by loss. I enjoyed that parallel.