Time and Again (VOY)

            “It was all just a dream” is one of my least favorite endings ever for an installment in a serialized work. It means all the character development, everything we learn about these people over the course of the episode, is completely irrelevant. “It was all just an alternate Timeline”, i.e. the “Temporal Reset Button” is Voyager’s version of this trope, and “Time and Again” is its first victim. Which is a real shame, because other than that it’s a very solid episode, way more watchable and entertaining than anything in TNG’s first season.

            The episode opens with Tom and Harry discussing Voyager’s extremely limited pool of eligible young women, when Voyager is hit by a shockwave. At the same time, Kes feels a great disturbance in the force, as if a thousand voices cried out and were suddenly silenced. When they take a detour to investigate, they find a Polaric energy discharge has destroyed an entire prewarp civilization in a few minutes. Unfortunately, it’s also fractured the space-time continuum, leaving little time-travel pockets, one of which sucks Janeway and Tom into the past. About a day and a half in the past, to be precise.

Tom wants to try and prevent the disaster, while Janeway considers that a violation of the Prime Directive and just wants to try and get out before everything goes up in flames. Janeway doesn’t really have a good answer for Tom’s assertion that nothing they could do could screw things up more than the destruction of the entire planet, and honestly she comes off as kind of a cold-hearted bitch, especially when a cute little kid starts tailing them.

Alderaan! No!

Meanwhile, back on the ship, B’Elanna and Harry devise a method of opening the space-time fractures, but only for a few seconds at a time. They, along with Chakotay, Tuvok, and Kes, whose telepathic powers have been flaring up, go down to the planet to try and mount a rescue. You’d think they would leave one senior officer on the ship, but apparently not. Guess Neelix is in command.

It turns out this planet uses Polaric energy as a power-source, and many of the locals are aware of how dangerous it is and have been staging protests about it for years. Some are more extreme about this view than others, and Janeway and Tom are soon kidnapped by terrorists with a plot which Janeway thinks is what leads to the accident. They also kidnap the little kid.

Janeway changes her mind and decides to try and stop the explosion after all, and after some heroics where in Tom gets shot, she ends up in a standoff with the terrorists. The twist is that what really causes the explosion is Torres and Kim’s rescue attempt. Fortunately, Janeway manages to stop in by firing a disrupter into the fracture, and the entire timeline ceases to exist. There is no shockwave, so Voyager never comes to investigate, so the only part of the episode that’s canon is Tom and Harry talking about hitting on the Delaney sisters. The only one who has any inkling that this episode happened is Kes, because of her weird telepathic powers.

I sense great plot holes...

When I watch ensemble-based, episodic TV, I want to watch a group of characters overcoming adversity together and growing and developing in the process. Episodes that get aborted at the end don’t contribute to that feeling at all. I guess under the right circumstances it can be a cool twist ending for a sci-fi story. But in this case it just made the entire episode feel thoroughly pointless. 

Random Observations:

That Tom. Such a playa.

The opening exchange between Tom and Harry is hilarious –

            “I’ve got a girl back home!”

            “I’ve got five, who cares?”

The scene where the EMH gets upset because the proper paperwork wasn’t filled out when Kes was brought on board is also precious, but it seems kind of a strange oversight. Surely someone on the crew should have realized that having medical scans on file for Neelix and Kes is a good idea? I mean, what if they get injured and the doctor has to operate on them? Hopefully this gets addressed off-camera soon in the main timeline.

“Everyone should drink plenty of fluids.” 

Tom continues to be really dense about how Time Travel works.

Tom and Janeway are both really good at rolling with the punches and blending in with this totally unfamiliar civilization though. Almost unbelievably so.

It seems weird that Tuvok would be the most skeptical about Kes’s powers, given that Vulcans are also telepaths.

Recurring Character Watch: First mention of the Delaney sisters.

No shuttlecraft lost.

No fatalities.