“Year of Hell, Part I”
Written by Brannon Braga & Joe Menosky
Directed by Allan Kroeker
Season 4, Episode 8
Production episode 176
Original air date: November 5, 1997
Stardate: 51268.4
Captain’s log. A Krenim vessel piloted by Annorax fires on a technologically advanced planet. The weapon causes all the technology to disappear, leaving the world a verdant space untouched by sentient alterations. This was a Zahl colony, but the temporal incursion Annorax just caused did not alter the target event as expected. So Annorax instead decides to wipe out the Zahl all together, not just their colony.
On Voyager, they inaugurate the new astrometrics lab constructed by Kim and Seven. The EMH gives a rather lengthy benediction that has everyone squirming with awkwardness. Then Ensign Lang on the bridge contacts Janeway, which comes as something of a relief.
A Krenim ship is challenging Voyager, though its armaments are poor and pose no real threat. Seven had informed them that this was Zahl space, but the Krenim commandant insists that it’s in dispute. Voyager ignores them and continues on, though remaining at yellow alert.
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Three days later, they meet with a Zahl delegation, who assure Janeway that Voyager may travel safely through their space. The Krenim ships then return and challenge all of them. In the midst of the confrontation, a temporal shockwave hits them. The Zahl all disappear, the Krenim ship is suddenly much better armed, and Voyager is at red alert and battle stations, with the ship very badly damaged after days of battle. The timeline has been changed, and nobody remembers the previous iteration at all.
The Krenim have chroniton torpedoes that their shields can’t stop, as they are slightly out of phase. Voyager flees, having taken heavy damage.
On Annorax’s ship, Obrist reports that they’ve achieved 98% restoration of history. It’s the greatest percentage of restoration they’ve accomplished after two hundred years of temporal incursions. However, they did not restore the colony at Kyana Prime—while most of the Krenim Imperium’s territory is theirs once more, Kyana Prime is outside their current borders. Annorax stares longingly at a lock of hair in a glass pyramid and orders Obrist to make calculations for another incursion, over Obrist’s objections.
A month later, Voyager is still being pounded by Krenim warships. Tuvok has been unable to defend against the chroniton torpedoes. (Why they aren’t using the intelligence provided by Kes in “Before and After” is left as an exercise for the viewer.) In the latest attack, a power overload takes out all of deck five (which includes sickbay). The EMH leads the abandoning of the deck, and is forced to close the bulkhead even as two people are running toward it, as they would never make it in time. The mess hall becomes the new sickbay.
Since torpedo launchers are offline, Janeway orders Tuvok to deploy torpedoes like mines. This works, and Voyager is victorious, though it’s a pyrrhic victory, given the damage the ship has taken.
Chakotay proposes the notion of abandoning ship, taking escape pods and shuttlecraft to separate and try to get around Krenim space in smaller groups and rendezvous on the other side. Janeway refuses to abandon Voyager, and Chakotay admits he wasn’t thrilled with the notion either, but he had to propose it.
A fortnight later, Torres and Kim are trapped in a turbolift. They play a trivia game to occupy themselves (and keep the badly injured Torres alert) until Seven rescues them. Paris proposes tranverse bulkheads honeycombed through the ship to protect against hull breaches. He got the idea from the Titanic, which gives everyone pause given that ship’s final fate, but Paris insists he’s made improvements. Paris then goes to the mess hall to help the EMH treat the wounded, including Torres.
Seven finds an undetonated torpedo in a Jefferies tube. Tuvok joins here there and they determine that it’s about to detonate. Seven needs to determine its phase variance (1.47 microseconds, which they should already know from Kes’ report in “Before and After“), which she does right before it detonates. Tuvok is able to erect a force field to protect the rest of the ship, but the light from the explosion blinds him.
Eighteen days later, Voyager is a mess. Seven decks are uninhabitable, environmental controls are failing, the replicator system is badly damaged, and it’s also Janeway’s birthday, something the captain herself lost track of. Chakotay had replicated a pocket watch for her long before they encountered the Krenim and gives it to her now. She coldly tells him to recycle it, as they can’t afford luxuries right now. Chakotay looks like someone kicked his puppy.
Seven has taken it upon herself to be Tuvok’s aide in his newly blind state. She has also come up with a way to defend against the chroniton torpedoes, as just changing the phase variance in the shields hasn’t done the trick. She thinks that altering the deflector array to the inverse of the variance might succeed. Before they can go test it, another Krenim ship attacks. Seven goes to deflector control while Tuvok reports to the bridge, which now has a tactile interface for him.
The new shield modifications work, and the chroniton torpedoes are completely ineffective. Voyager is able to run away, and the Krenim ship follows, but doesn’t fire, as their weapons are now useless.
Then another temporal shockwave approaches (though the crew is encountering it for the first time from their perspective). Again, the timeline changes—but this time, Voyager is unaffected. They watch as the Krenim ship becomes a smaller, less threatening ship, and all the local Krenim colonies and many of the nearby Krenim ships are gone—and the few of the latter that remain are of the less-impressive variety of the one they’re facing.
Annorax is stunned to learn that his latest incursion, which has wiped out the Garenor, has reverted the Krenim to this weakened state. Obrist determines the x-factor: Voyager with its altered shields. Annorax orders a course plotted to rendezvous with Voyager.
It takes five days to bring astrometrics back online. Seven and Janeway are able to call up sensor scans from before the shockwave and compare them to current sensor readings: it’s radically different, and Krenim territory is much smaller. They trace the shockwave to the Garenor homeworld. To Seven’s confusion, the Garenor do not appear to exist, even though Voyager passed by their homeworld three weeks earlier.
Before Janeway can set course, the ship is fired upon: Annorax has reached them. He kidnaps Chaoktay and Paris and then intends to hit Voyager with a temporal incursion. Voyager’s shields are, at best, a stopgap against Annorax’s weapon, and sooner or later, they will collapse and Voyager will be erased from history. Seven points out that Annorax’s ship cannot exceed warp six, though Tuvok cautions that travelling at warp speed will cause severe damage.
Janeway risks it, and reluctantly leaves Chakotay and Paris behind, and goes at warp seven. That gets them away from Annorax, but the outer hull takes spectacular amounts of damage.
Three days later, Janeway is forced to implement Chakotay’s plan. Voyager can no longer sustain its crew. She orders all but a skeleton crew (that, by a startling coincidence, consists of the remaining people in the opening credits) to abandon ship, to work their way through Krenim space, try to find allies and faster ships, and rendezvous on the other side.
The escape pods all bugger off.
To be continued…
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? After Janeway orders the ship to flee at warp six early on, Tuvok reports that main power is down and the computer is offline and they don’t have long-range sensors. How it is possible to travel faster than light without main power (or a computer) is left as an exercise for the viewer.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway initially refuses to abandon ship, not doing so until she’s forced to in time for the cliffhanger. She also refuses to accept Chakotay’s incredibly sweet birthday gift, even though I can’t imagine the mass of a pocket watch would be enough to make a significant difference in their supplies.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok does everything he can to get Seven out of the Jefferies tube before the torpedo blows, and is only partly successful, and is blinded for his trouble.
Half and half. Torres apparently failed interstellar history at the Academy. She also has seen holographic versions of 20th-century films (I suspect the influence of dating Paris there) and knows professional Parrises Squares trivia.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. After Tuvok is blinded, Neelix becomes part of security. Since the mess hall is now sickbay, and he probably can’t really acquire foodstuffs (and Kes’ old hydroponics bay is probably long gone after all the Krenim attacks), his job as cook is a thing of the past.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH prepared an obscenely long speech to commemorate the opening of astrometrics. He also is forced to close a bulkhead on two crewmembers, which makes him fairly testy for much of the rest of the episode.
Forever an ensign. Kim and Seven have finally finished their astrometrics lab, just in time for the Krenim to kick the shit out of it. Kim is also apparently a sports aficionado, as he knows the answer to Torres’s Parrises Squares quiz almost instantly.
Resistance is futile. Seven does the exact same thing Kes did in “Before and After,” and determines the phase variance of the Krenim torpedoes. She also becomes Tuvok’s helper, willing to go so far as to shave for him (he cuts himself shaving at one point), but Tuvok apparently has too much pride for that…
Do it.
“Who would’ve thought that this eclectic group of voyagers could actually become a family? Starfleet, Maquis, Klingon, Talaxian, hologram, Borg, even Mr. Paris.”
–The snarkiest part of the EMH’s rather lengthy benediction for astrometrics
Welcome aboard. After playing three different Ferengi on TNG (in “Ménàge à Troi,” “Suspicions,” and “Bloodlines”), Peter Slutsker appears here with much less makeup as the Krenim commandant. Regular extra Sue Henley gets a name—Ensign Brooks—and a line of dialogue, as she is Seven’s roommate in the beat-up Voyager. Deborah Levin makes her final appearance as Lang, Rick Fitts plays the Zahl, and John Loprieno plays Obrist.
But the big guest is the great Kurtwood Smith in his third of four Trek roles, having previously played Federation President Ra-ghoratreii in The Undiscovered Country and Thrax in DS9’s “Things Past.” He will also voice Clar in “Veritas” on Lower Decks.
Smith, Slutsker, and Loprieno will all be back for Part 2.
Trivial matters: This episode was inspired by one of the future bits experienced by Kes in “Before and After.” Brannon Braga reportedly loved the image of Voyager having the shit kicked out of it by Krenim chroniton torpedoes—originally just meant to be the vehicle for Kes’ backwards time travelling in the episode—and he and Joe Menosky built this two-parter around it. Originally intended to be the season-spanning two-parter before it was decided to do the Borg for that, Braga also reportedly wanted this to be a season-long arc, but neither UPN nor Rick Berman would have agreed to such a thing.
Kes’ departure and Seven’s arrival already made the future of “Before and After” consigned to the realm of an alternate time track, but there are some similarities: Neelix joining security, an undetonated Krenim torpedo in a Jefferies tube providing intelligence, and sickbay rendered inoperable.
While trapped in a turbolift, Torres and Kim play a trivia game, and the answer to Kim’s final quiz before Seven rescues them is the Phoenix, Zephram Cochrane’s ship that made the first human faster-than-light journey, as established in the original series’s “Metamorphosis” and seen in First Contact. Seven comments that the Borg were present for that mission, adding that it’s a complicated story.
This episode also debuts astrometrics, the improved stellar cartography lab that combines Starfleet ingenuity with Borg knowhow. This set will become an important part of the ship for the rest of its run.
Janeway states that they’re now 65,000 light-years from home, and Seven plots a course that will get them home five years sooner than their current estimate.
Set a course for home. “This is turning into the week of hell.” I love and hate this two-parter in equal measure, though my biggest issue with the storyline is mostly seen in Part 2, so we’ll talk about that in more depth on Thursday. But suffice it to say, this episode encapsulates what Voyager really should have been all along. Even granted that they have replicator technology, it should take a very long time for them to repair damage, yet the ship is always pristine and in perfect working order by the next episode. (This was particularly galling after the ship suffered catastrophic damage in “Investigations” and “Deadlock.”)
Except in this two-parter, anyhow. It’s fantastic to see the crew actually dealing with real hardship and difficult decisions. Being stranded half a galaxy away should be a nightmarish existence, one fraught with difficulty and danger, and far too often we see a bunch of people on a luxury liner playing dress-up on the holodeck and never wanting for anything significant.
For these two episodes, at least, that changes, and it’s impressive as hell. Janeway’s determination to get them through, Chakotay’s compassion and morale boosting, Seven’s ruthless efficiency, leavened by her growing concern for her crewmates, Tuvok’s stoicism, Paris’s improvising.
Plus we have Kurtwood Smith being awesome, though his best work is saved for Part 2. For now, all we see is someone ruthlessly determined to achieve perfection, and a willingness to commit genocide many times over to do it. Annorax is one of the most brutal villains in Trek history, and in this part what we see is just the brutality expressed by Smith’s hard face and stentorian voice.
Having said all that, there’s one other issue with this episode in particular that keeps it from being quite the perfect episode it should be: at the end of “Before and After,” Kes dashed off to write up a full report on everything she learned from her time-travelling odyssey in general and about the Krenim in particular. Yet the crew doesn’t seem to recognize the Krenim, or even note that they’ve been told about them. Much more to the point, though, is that one of the things Kes learned was the phase variance of the chroniton torpedoes. Indeed, that piece of information was crucial to saving Kes’ life in that episode, so it’s not something she was likely to forget about or leave out. So why the hell didn’t the crew know about it until Seven obtained it at the cost of Tuvok’s eyesight? (And yes, it’s possible that Annorax’s time-travel shenanigans affected the timeline, but that doesn’t make it feel any less like a plot hole.)
Even with that, though, this is a great episode of Voyager on its own, with a devastating ending, as dozens of escape pods eject the battered remnants of the vessel…
Warp factor rating: 8
Keith R.A. DeCandido is very proud of himself for not making a “year of hell” joke about 2020 in this rewatch entry.
I unabashedly love “Year Of Hell.” It really is one of only a handful of times that Voyager fully embraces it’s premise, and it all pays off so wonderfully. The reset button on the ship itself always annoyed me, but what annoyed me even more is the reset button that gets hit on the characters. The things that they have been through should be absolutely life-changing for them, and should impact them long after the episode wraps. Here, we really get to see the emotional toll that the trip is taking on people- and see how they cope. It’s full of little touches that work well- Janeway complaining about the waste of the gift even though it logically can’t make much difference, Tuvok’s stubborn insistence that shaving is at least something he can do for himself, the EMH dealing with having to make cold equations, Seven dealing with an annoying roommate. I love the second part of the two-partner for what it tells us about Tom and Chakotay, too. I understand the practical reasons that would make constantly having the set all messed up might cause, but there is really no reason why the *characters* can’t seem to remember what happened to them from one episode to the next. While some characters *do* have a lot of character development (like Tom, who has enough for 5 people, and B’Elanna), a lot of the characters are barely any different at the end of the series than they were at the beginning. Even the characters that *are* changed always seem to be changed by being around the The Goodness That Is Starfleet (Seven, Tom, B’Elanna), and not by the terrible things they have been through. Considering all the cr*p Harry gets put through, you’d think he’d be more like say, Chief O’Brien, by the end, but he’s basically as shiny and new after seven years as he was when he left Quark’s Bar in the pilot.
I just wish that “Year of Hell” was business as usual, and not a dramatic change of pace in the overall story of Voyager.
I think it was around this time that I realized DS9 was where you went for deep, thoughtful storytelling and VGR was where you went for shallow, cinematic action spectacle. This 2-parter is epic, but it’s a total mess conceptually, and emblematic of VGR’s essentially incoherent approach to temporal theory.
As for why the crew showed no memory of “Before and After,” here’s the take I offered in my blog annotations for Myriad Universes: Places of Exile (covering some aspects of YoH Part 2):
Despite the order in which events were depicted onscreen, I submit that the entirety of Voyager (and thus the 23rd/24th-century Trek universe as a whole) takes place in the timeline seen at the end of “Year of Hell,” in which Annorax’s timeship had been wiped from existence. After all, there is no explicit mention in “Before and After” of Annorax, a timeship, or any kind of historical alterations; the only thing mentioned is that the Krenim exist and use chroniton-based torpedoes to penetrate shields.
So: “First,” in the Annorax timeline, a version of Voyager encounters Annorax’s timeship and destroys it, resetting the timeline back to the 2170s and creating the timeline seen in TOS, TNG, DS9, and early VGR, in which Annorax never invents his timeship. Two centuries later, in May 2374 in the B&A timeline (six months after B&A), another version of Voyager encounters the Krenim Imperium, which does not engage in rewriting history, but is aggressive in defending its territory. A Krenim ship attacks Voyager without provocation, Janeway and Torres are killed, and the B&A version of the Year of Hell occurs. Four years later, a dying Kes jumps back to 2373 and creates the timeline seen in the series from that point on, telling Janeway of her future experiences with the Krenim. Later, in March 2374 (64 days before Janeway’s May 20 birthday), the final bridge scene of “Year of Hell” occurs: Voyager is hailed by a different Krenim ship, one whose commander is more talkative and warns them to bypass their territory. (By arriving two months earlier, they may have encountered the Krenim before their military status had escalated to the point of firing without warning.) Janeway readily follows their advice, because she remembers Kes’s warnings about the Krenim from the end of B&A. (Why else would she so unquestioningly agree to bypass their territory, rather than negotiating for passage as she normally would?)
Easily my favorite episode of the series. The only nit I have to pick is the reset at the end for all the characters. If I could change one thing there, I would have Seven retain some memory or vague sense via her temporally sensitive Borg brain of these events, giving her a revelation of how much she could care about this new “collective” of people.
But the real strength of this story for me, why I keep going back to it, rests on Annorax. I mean what a great idea for a character! Space Captain Nemo with a great big time gun! On paper that sounds as schlocky as hell, but it works. Thanks in no small part to the always outstanding Kurtwood Smith.
Huh, yeah, I’d always assumed that the limit on replicators would be energy budgets, not a lack of matter to play with. Other than that, I agree with our rewatcher about it being nice to see Voyager struggling and low on resources.
My household has been watching/rewatching Voyager and we hit this set of episodes a month into our state’s lockdown. Maybe not the best timing given the following quote from part one:
CHAKOTAY: Today is May twentieth.
JANEWAY: Is it? I thought we were still in April. Guess I’ve lost track of the time.
@@.-@ Yea, I always assumed that the limitations on replicators was either the energy (since you can get matter from any random asteroid, but anti-matter would be far harder to replace, and things like dilithium apparently can’t be replicated) or the units themselves (either there aren’t enough of them to meet demand, or they don’t have enough of the industrial ones as opposed to the little wall ones, or that they require components that aren’t easily replicated).
I bailed in season 3, just wasn’t digging it, but thencaught this episode in reruns a few years later and it brought me back
Ahem.
From the introduction post:
Your high heels will be assimilated. Seven of Nine’s role in the episode.
From the start of season 4:
Resistance is futile. Seven does the exact same thing Kes……
I don’t believe this was ever addressed, and I’m very surprised that it didn’t come up in The Gift, when there was a whole sub-discussion about high heels.
I suppose that’s the risk you take when you outline a characters section 5 years before you reach her in the re-wat…….
…..what’s that?
This rewatch only started in January of 2020?….It only feels like it’s been 5 years?
[Insert obvious and terrible 2020 joke here]
Torres didn’t fail Interstellar History, she almost failed it.
And this episode showcases many things that Voyager should have done all the time but didn’t. Voyager taking damage, characters playing stupid trivia games to pass the time (I don’t care if the holodecks are on a separate power grid, they still need power and should be reserved for training exercises and the occasional special occasion party when they’re in a position to take on supplies and so can afford to waste power for a few hours as they’ll just replace it anyway), Janeway being irrational, Chakotay making sensible suggestions and attending to the crew’s and captain’s sanity by remembering the little things, Seven being forced to bunk with a human (how’s she going to learn about non-Borg life if she lives in the cargo bay?), Tuvok being Seven’s mentor (he can teach snark just as well as the Doctor can, actually understands emotions, and doesn’t run the risk of going all Pygmalion on her), Neelix being given a pointless background job to keep him busy and out of the way instead of being made the cook for several species who don’t share his tastes or biology…
Just had a thought to consider, the year of hell should have probably happened ten years later in the Kes timeline when you consider she moved them forward ten years when she left .
I haven’t watched this episode (or many other Voyager episodes) since they were first run so I don’t remember many details. The synopsis reminded me of Tuvok’s blindness which I had forgotten about.
But it occurred to me just now reading it: How did that light compare to the light that blinded Spock in Operation: Annihiliate (a million candle-light per square inch)? That Vulcan inner eyelid should have protected Tuvok’s eyes, and even if it didn’t his blindness should probably have been temporary as Spock’s was, and not taken nearly as long to recover.
@2
Can’t the same be said of the whole timeline where Voyager is getting their asses kicked? IE why didn’t Voyager just go around the territory if the Krenim were so overwhelmingly powerful? I don’t think Janeway is ever presented as foolish; she’s willing to go through where she’s not wanted if it’s absolutely necessary, but presumably it wasn’t. So in the altered timeline where the Krenim empire suddenly jumped from a small, weak power to overwhelmingly powerful at the 98% restoration, Voyager should have been sent back to a point in time when they encountered the Imperium and decided it wasn’t worth going through.
If anything, I wonder if there isn’t something temporally weird about Voyager on whole, that it’s able to stay in position even while everything else is moved around by the temporal shockwaves. It can’t be just the shields, because it was occuring before that.
As a teenager i was a big babylon 5 fan. Probably too much to see its flaws with hindsight, but a friend at the time was an ever bigger star trek fan, including models hanging from the ceiling, magizines etc. We had somewhat heated discussions on the point.
Obviously i was right and he was wrong, given that star trek is now forgotten and babylon 5 is… Ok, moving on. He made me watch this 2 parter to show me how wrong i was. We got to the end of the first part and I absolutely I agreed with him, this was awesome and i was sold. Just so long as they don’t chicken out and push the reset button. His face was priceless…
“I promised myself that I would never give this order, that I would never break up this family, but asking you to stay…would be asking you to die.”
I watched this episode some years ago and wondered why we all thought it was a good story back then. And I still feel that way. As has been mentioned, this was originally meant to be the cliffhanger ending to Season Three before someone went “Actually, we haven’t used the Borg enough this season, let’s bring them back instead.” I sometimes wonder what happened in that parallel universe, where they made a proper follow-up to “Before and After”, with Kes in it, instead of pretending she never existed because in the course of the change someone went “And you know what would be really cool? Having an ex-Borg join the crew. Who can we axe to make room for her?” Maybe then this wouldn’t be such an unholy mess and I wouldn’t have spent so much of the run-time shaking my head in disbelief.
So, the moment we’ve been waiting half a season for arrives and Janeway comes face to face with the Krenim, the race she’s been warned will kill her and several of her crew and wreck the ship and she… laughs at them and flies past them? Tuvok announces the Krenim are using temporal weapons as if he’s discovered the holy grail while the audience shout “You know that! We know that! Remodulate the targeting scanners like you were told to!” (which they never do). Seven lingers in a jeffries tube to get the exact temporal variance of the Krenim torpedo, possibly causing Tuvok to be blinded, when Kes already did that and they used the information to bring her back in phase, but hey, we’re pretending Kes and her big episode never existed because we’ve got a new catsuited blonde regular who we like better. And I’m sorry, I don’t buy that the whole story takes place in the wrong timeline and it then gets puts right at the end, because they still haven’t heard of the Krenim in the “proper” timeline in Part II. That scene is not written or acted as “This is us responding to that warning we were given.”
And even if you view the episode on its own terms and pretend that “Before and After” never happened, it’s still nonsense. Right at the start of the episode, we see that Voyager only ended up in this region of space to begin with because Seven brought up her new cool astrometrics lab and went “I’ve discovered a shortcut that will take five years off our journey. We just have to go through the territory of a peaceful species called the Zahl.” So, are we meant to assume that in the new timeline she went “We’ll get home a bit quicker if we go through this section of space here. It’s controlled by a powerful race called the Krenim who’ll kill us all as soon as look at us, so we should totally do that”? Janeway arrives in Krenim space and is immediately hopelessly outgunned. Does she reverse course and go round? No, she just carries on for months, getting at least three crewmembers killed, almost certainly more, and wrecking the ship beyond repair. No-one even bothers to claim that Krenim space is too big to go round, or they’ll carry on attacking Voyager even if it leaves their space. They just keep flying in a straight line and getting shot at, as if Janeway got her tactical training from studying the Western Front of the First World War.
(To make this even more maddening, we see in Part II that taking the Krenim’s warnings seriously and going around their space is exactly what they did in the proper timeline. Honestly, just two episodes ago she hightailed out of B’omar space the minute things got hot, and they seem to have been a much more minor threat than the Krenim. Yet here Janeway literally says “We’re going through their space whether they want us to or not” and loses almost her entire crew as a result.)
He only gets a few scenes this week but on the other side we have Annorax. Who is quite clearly an idiot. He changes history and restores the Krenim to their glory. Cool, his crew say. Nope, not quite right, he replies. So he changes history again and wipes the Krenim’s empire out of existence. Presumably he’s been doing this for two hundred years, restoring the Krenim Imperium and then wiping it out again because he can’t stop tinkering. Okay, we learn his reason in Part II, but how have the rest of his crew just gone along with this for so long instead of shoving him out an airlock? (Oh, and why does he abduct Chakotay and Paris instead of just erasing them with the rest of the crew? As trophies? Because he needs someone to interact with in the next episode?)
Basically, it’s a collection of set-pieces that fail to form a coherent narrative. There’s some quite good set-pieces: Janeway mining a Krenim ship as the Doctor is forced to close a bulkhead on lingering crewmembers, Seven’s allusion to First Contact, Paris coming up with a way not to sink the Titanic, Neelix’s Danger Will Robinson moment… But there’s no real story. It’s basically 35 minutes of false plot, as someone does the Year of Hell promised in “Before and After” in fast forward, realises that the ship being constantly attacked is a bit monotonous, and so wipes out the episode’s antagonists and then unveils the real villain in the closing scenes. That 35 minutes doesn’t really serve any purpose except to explain how Voyager’s in such a bad way. It’s not even properly explained why Voyager having temporal shields is such a problem to Annorax’s plans. (And…it has to be said. They called the villain “Anoraks”?)
And even on first viewing, I imagine no-one really expected the show to continue with Voyager falling to pieces and being operated by a skeleton crew, so the spectre of the reset button is looming. I think Part II gets better but not by much.
Ensign Brooks is only seen fleetingly here but does get a line and a name. I made her Admiral Janeway’s aide in my fics, mainly to resolve a continuity error where I forgot who was on which ship…
See, this is why I hate time travel.
@14/cap-mjb: “(And…it has to be said. They called the villain “Anoraks”?)”
Annorax is an anagram of Aronnax, the protagonist of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. As if the Captain Nemo analogies weren’t obvious enough. Although in part 2, it’s Chakotay playing Aronnax while Paris is Ned Land.
@14 Are you trying to say time travel plots make no sense!? Quick, call the temporal police. Wait, they’re already here. Hope they don’t charge by the hour!
Oh no, i just stepped on a butterfly that was my ancestor, so apparently this comment didn’t happen, so who killed jfk?
I watched Voyager on and off when it first came out, but not thoroughly until it was in reruns, and I was always very confused about when Before and After had happened. I thought it was some Kes nostalgia episode that they’d brought her back to do some time in season 5 or 6 maybe, and occurring completely outside the usual Voyager timeline. The details so closely matched what happened in the year of hell, made no sense that it was actually before those episodes. It definitely can’t have been in the usual timeline, since they show no prior knowledge of the Krenim when they get there. Its like they wrote year of hell first. Before and After also showed that they must have more or less decided Kes was going to leave the show, even though I hear they hadn’t decided that and were going to write Kim out. B&A seems like they knew it was over for her so here’s the rest of her storyline all at once.
But Year of Hell is great, I wish it had been the season spanning 2-parter. Janeway’s speech at the end is perfect for it.
One wishes Brannon Braga had gotten his way and did an entire season of Voyager as the Year of Hell. It would have challenged all the writers out of their comfort zone. Sadly, it wasn’t meant to be. Berman and the higher ups were comfortable and the expectation for Voyager was to continue the same classic storytelling model that worked for 7 seasons on TNG.
Thankfully, he would get his way on Enterprise with the Xindi Arc, with some memorable results. It only took another six years of dwindling ratings to shake them out of their comfort and push the envelope.
But the good thing about these two parters is that they provide just enough room to tell a story big enough, even it comes with a reset button at the end. Year of Hell is a bold, devious two parter that pushes Voyager and the crew to their limit. Tightly written and superbly directed, making great use of the ensemble. Plus, the evolving use of CG at this point proved the perfect instrument to display the increasingly battered Voyager. Mulgrew is pitch perfect playing this worn down version of Janeway.
But the biggest coup was casting Kurtwood Smith as Annorax. Voyager is really lucky to score these guest stars every now and then, with the likes of Joel Grey and Ed Begley Jr. Smith is fortunate to be able to inhabit one of Trek’s better villains. A tragic figure lost in his obsession to fix everything that went wrong, and only compounding the error in the process.
I like to think that Kes’ information would be rendered moot given the constant temporal tinkering from Annorax. It wouldn’t take much for the Krenim to change frequencies in one of these time shifts. Maybe there could have been a scene where they try Kes’ number only for it to not work. Nothing that a minor rewrite wouldn’t fix.
@2/Christopher: While I don’t deny Voyager’s penchant for doing action adventure episodes, I wouldn’t say DS9 was only focused on thoughtful storytelling either. They could be comic book shallow every now and then. Ever since they introduced the Defiant they gradually shifted towards big action spectacle. By this point, the Dominion War was as much about spectacle and big explosions as it was about the cost of war and Sisko’s burden. Even Allan Kroeker had just done DS9’s Call to Arms and Sacrifice of Angels, two bombastic shows, and Berman rightfully put him on the helm for Year of Hell Pt 1, well aware of his ability to craft intense, focused action (him doing Before and After the season before didn’t hurt either).
And I just remembered something. Voyager placing Year of Hell at this point in season 4, is a near-identical mirror situation to what happened on DS9, a couple of years before.
Season 3 of DS9 was supposed to finish with the Homefront/Paradise Lost two parter in a season-ending cliffhanger, involving Changeling infiltration. Behr and Wolfe’s plans were derailed by Rick Berman and Paramount’s desire to reintroduce the Klingons as antagonists and place Worf on the cast. The result was a different finale (The Adversary), a bombastic two hour premiere (The Way of the Warrior) and the original two parter being shifted to the middle of season 4 with a reduced budget.
This is very, very similar to what happened on Voyager with the Year of Hell two parter being postponed on account of the last-minute Borg reintroduction, plus a great new character being added.
@19/Eduardo: “While I don’t deny Voyager’s penchant for doing action adventure episodes, I wouldn’t say DS9 was only focused on thoughtful storytelling either.”
I never said “only.” I was contrasting the overall approach and style of the two shows. A land mass can have lakes and rivers within it, but it’s still meaningful to contrast it with the ocean.
Christopher: that’s not a bad hand wave for the inconsistency with “B&A,” but it’s still a plot hole…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@22/krad: It’s definitely a plot hole, but I’m able to go easy on it because the changes were dictated by the change in circumstance with Seven replacing Kes. They could’ve tried to come up with nitpicky rationalizations for the changes, but instead they just embraced the fact that things had changed and let the story be as different as it needed to be. I just see “Before and After” as a first draft of the concept and this as the revised draft. (By the same token, I don’t expect Discovery to remain perfectly consistent with “Calypso,” but rather to cannibalize elements from it and put them together in a new form.)
I mean, sure, the contradictions create a credibility problem, but it’s a Voyager time travel story, and thus it has negative credibility going in. Simpler to abandon any attempt to make sense of any part of it and just let the mindless spectacle flow over you.
If this story had been written today it would be a season long arc with the big confrontation with Annorax in the season finale and the following season’s arc about rebuilding Voyager.
Also this episode was the debut of Janeway’s new hair style which she kept for the remainder of the series.
There is spectacle without a doubt, but I wouldn’t call this pair of episodes completely mindless. We have the obvious theme of obsession concerning Annorax and, as we’ll see in the second half, Janeway and Chakotay dealing with their own obsessions as well.
But one could also argue there’s something to be said how nostalgia and memory affect our actions; illustrated by the preoccupation with inanimate objects: a lock of hair, a watch, the game between Paris and Oberst; the food and drinks at Annorax’s table; the Voyager itself.
It’s not Trek’s deepest couple of hours but not brainless either.
@25/Tom Turkey: I was thinking specifically of the time travel elements. Every time Voyager did a time-travel episode, the temporal mechanics got more and more nonsensical and ludicrous.
To each their own. I can’t say I watch sci-fi specifically for science fictional mechanics, rather how characters cope in ludicrous situations.
I love this EPIC two-parter (especially part II which gets me choked up), but I agree that it both represents the best and the worst of Voyager. It’s wonderful because this is really how the show realistically should portray the crew on a weekly basis. Maybe not as beat to shit week-to-week, but at least struggling and showing continuity of ongoing challenges like rebuilding parts of the damaged vessel and not being able to use the godforsaken holodeck all of the time. And it’s also the worst because it hits that goddamn reset button at the very end rendering all of the heroism and sacrifice for the last of year of their lives pointless and moot. I didn’t realize Braga had advocated to do the whole season with this plot which would have been bold, but I’m glad that didn’t happen because if the reset button had happened after the whole season worth of these shows then that would have been a 1000 times more awful.
I think we have to just say the lack of preparation the crew has for the Krenim despite Kes’s warnings is because this isn’t the same timeline as “Before and After.” It’s also interesting that in this iteration of “The Year of the Hell” as opposed to that previous episode is that Janeway and B’Elanna don’t die.
This new look for Janeway is the best and I’m glad they kept it moving forward.
I think this is also the best Chakotay has ever looked: all scruffy and sweaty and sexy.
And the CGI is truly impressive here when it comes to the ship exploding and coming apart. As long as the CGI isn’t rendering aliens which still looks fake and cartoony to me, it totally reads as believable.
Oh, and Janeway leaving Voyager at the end of this episode with a skeleton crew, one which included Neelix instead of a trained Starfleet officer? Give me a fukkin’ break!
I read interview with Ronald Moore, creator of Battlestar galactica (2004). He said when he originally started working on ST:V he had an idea that Voyager over seasons would steadily deteorate, will need to find and fight for resources such as materials, fuel and food, crew conflicts would rise but other producers would not go for it. He later implemented all his ideas on Battlestar Galactica.
@29/Masha: Moore had the right idea. His version of BSG is how Voyager should have been like more often, just not totally bleak and depressing because it is still Star Trek after all.
Quoth Christopher: “It’s definitely a plot hole, but I’m able to go easy on it because the changes were dictated by the change in circumstance with Seven replacing Kes.”
Changes were dictated, yes, but it wasn’t necessary to completely ignore what happened at the end of “B&A.” Hell, they could have made it so that it was Kes’s knowledge that enabled them to survive as long as they did. There was no reason to pretend that they never got Kes’s intelligence about the Krenim. There were plenty of other ways they could have done the same basic plot that would have actually paid attention to the prior episode.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’m glad someone mentioned anoraks. I had begun to think it was a British only thing. (Yes, I know the ‘other’ derivation, but it raised a smile on our household.)
The other smile raiser, probably just for Brits, is the Krenim which, if you say it quickly, sounds just like Kremmen a 1970s science fiction radio serial set in early 2000s performed and written by DJ/Comedian Kenny Everett. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Kremmen. Also took me out of the moment a bit.
On the episode, wasn’t Kurtwood Smith good? Nearest you could get in just two episodes of TV to managing to portray the complexity of an almost sympathetic genocidal nutter.
@23 et al: I don’t really see how the lack of continuity was forced on them by circumstances. Yes, Kes isn’t on board anymore, but everyone else is. We saw her taking a moment to warn Janeway about the year of hell, we saw her talking to the rest of the crew about the Krenim and going to prepare a report on them. Even if you can come up with a patch with a lot of good will, it makes no sense narratively and emotionally to bring in the Krenim and have the crew act as though that episode didn’t happen and they never received the warning.
In fact, it’s occurred to me that a lot of the problems with this episode could be solved if they just hadn’t used the Krenim at all. As has been said, Annorax and his time-ship are new to this episode. So why not just create a new race of aggressive aliens with weapons that can bypass Voyager’s shields and have them duff up the ship? As has been pointed out (and I must admit this has never occurred to me before either), it doesn’t make much sense for them to run into the Krenim on schedule given the jump forward in “The Gift” that was directly tied to Kes leaving the ship and should have pushed them past Krenim space anyway.
My biggest problem with this two-parter is that I figured out very early on that they will use a reset button at the end and none of the loses or character development will stick. So all the emotion from watching the characters struggle was sucked out. I liked the antagonist and the action held my attention, but I felt a distance from what was happening, because I kept expecting it to be erased at the end.
@32/krad & 34/cap-mjb: I never said they were “forced” to change things or that they couldn’t have acknowledged B&A. I just said it was clear that they made the choice to approach it that way in response to the changed circumstances. There were two possible ways they could’ve responded to the change: bend over backward trying to rationalize it for that small percentage of viewers who cared enough about continuity to notice, or take the opportunity to shrug off continuity concerns altogether and just start from scratch, telling the current story according to its own needs.
And I can understand why they chose the latter. They had a lot of plot and action to fit into this 2-parter — literally a year’s worth of events in less than two hours. And reminding viewers of “Before and After” and explaining the changes would’ve taken a lot of very confusing exposition — she was in an alternate future, then she came back and warned about that future she’d been in, but now she was gone and yet the same things are happening without her in several different alternate presents. Those viewers who already remembered B&A would value the explanation, but most viewers would need to be reminded of those events, and that reminder would demand more exposition and it would’ve dragged them down a rabbit hole and just called attention to the gaping logic holes in the story rather than smoothing them over. So I can see why they decided it was simpler just to shrug it off and not worry about it, given that the story was set in a constantly shifting reality anyway. Continuity is nice when it supports the story, but not when it impedes or overcomplicates the story.
It’s not the decision I would’ve made, but then, I never would’ve told this nonsensical mess of a story to begin with. There are much bigger plot and logic holes throughout, so this is just one more bubble in the Swiss cheese.
@28
They wouldn’t have had to, though. “Before and After” showed that they had gotten through the year of hell, and had even fixed the ship mostly back to normal, but it still clearly effected the crew, both in no longer having everyone there, and through (frankly) Robert Duncan McNeill’s incredible acting in that episode, which did a really good job of showing us a Paris who had clearly been through *a lot* but had still come out on the other side of it. Everyone was a little older, a little wiser, closer as a team, and maybe a little less idealistic after what they had been through. They obviously never would have killed off Torres and the Captain for real, but they certainly could have taken a whole season to introduce some new characters that would be killed, and it wouldn’t have been all that hard to reference back to it every now and then. It also would have been a good opportunity for some character development. Tuvok and Seven as friends works really well in this two-parter, but that is basically completely dropped after this, and I think that’s a shame. It also would have been a good chance to take someone like Harry- who is still super young and hadn’t had much in the way of character development- and have the events of the year be the hardest on him. He doesn’t need to be a broken shell of a man at the end- but he could be someone who is more like Chief O’Brien or even post-558 Nog- someone who has seen some really bad stuff and changed because of it. I normally really dislike time travel episodes because you know nothing is going to really change (especially on Voyager) but I think that “Year of Hell” would actually be able to avoid a lot of those problems, since the focus is on the alien’s past/future more so than on Voyagers. Nothing in the plot required them to slam the reset button- the staff on Voyager just refused to have any real continuity in the show.
@36/CLB: I think that’s giving the audience too little credit. I don’t think anyone but the most obtuse would be confused if someone had said “The Krenim? That’s the race Kes warned us about. She saw a future where we spent a year being attacked by them” and the story had proceeded from that viewpoint. Imagine if “The Best of Both Worlds” had been written with the crew acting as though they’d never heard of the Borg before instead of acknowledging that they were forewarned that they were out there in the previous season even though some of the audience may have forgotten or missed “Q Who”. That’s what this is like.
@38/cap-mjb: Again, I’m not saying I would’ve made the choice they made. I’m saying that, given Voyager‘s already low standards for continuity and this particular 2-parter’s very low standard of credibility, I can shrug it off because I can see why they did it. Like I said, I realized by this point that DS9 was the show that had thought put into it and VGR was just about turn-off-your-brain spectacle. It’s just not worth complaining about anymore, because it’s not going to get any better. This is just what VGR is.
@39/CLB: In general, I agree. It’s not that long ago since we were on the other sides of the argument, with you saying the show missed the opportunity to have “Tuvix” make a big impact on Tuvok and Neelix’s relationship and me saying that they made a creative choice and I could see why they did. But I’m struggling to see any logic in making a sequel to another episode that pretends it’s not. Either acknowledge the earlier episode or don’t have the connection there in the first place.
See and this is why in the 2380’s or so we have the Janeway Protocol.
I really felt like Year of Hell should’ve been longer than just two episodes, I mean if any Trek show could work with serialization it should be Voyager.
The end of Part Two annoys me too.
I actually like the explanation offered in @2, that the start of the episode must have been the events as occurred in the timeline Kes first experiences before she can warn VOY, and what we see at the end of episode 2 is the warned crew. I still don’t really see any sign that they are cautious because of the warning. I don’t need them to literally exposit “oh the Krenim, that’s what Kes said”, but i didn’t see a knowing look among the crew, or recognition at the term Krenim space. But as an explanation it works for me.
I’m guessing the major complaints about episode 2 are over time travel “rules,” or the reset button. This is not a reset button. Its altering history. All the star treks have a “reset button” if you will when they go through such episodes, because what else can happen? This isn’t the ship going through massive damage and mysteriously being fixed next episode. The events battering the ship end up not happening, there’s really no other way for it to go. As for “that’s not how time travel works”, time travel is made up. It works however the fiction writers decide it does. There isn’t some scientific complaint to be had regarding how it’s portrayed.
@42,
Well, you can have someone who remembers it, which is what plenty of the “altering history” stories do. That way, you can have some character development, and didn’t just create an hour of television that has absolutely no impact on the characters. Like in “The Visitor,” when Jake dies, Sisko still remembers what happened- and we know that because he remembers Jake’s warning to duck so he doesn’t get hit by the Plot Device of Doom. In “City on the Edge of Forever” all the main characters remember what happen, and it has clearly had an impact on Kirk at the end when they are returned to the Guardian. Even in “Before and After” Kes remembers what happened to her and is able to warn the crew and theoretically enable them to avoid the fate they suffered in the alternate timeline.
@@@@@42- Well, I don’t know about that. It’s perfectly reasonable for a piece of fiction to stipulate a set of rules under which it operates which are different than those that we understand our universe to operate. But I would generally count it as a positive if those rules are well defined and consistently applied. It’s not necessarily the thing that makes or breaks the quality of a piece for me, but the larger the change is from our universe and the more central it is to the plot and setting of the piece (and the more important the plot and setting itself is to the piece) the more it matters that the rules have an internal consistency. Otherwise, you wind up with a situation where anything can happen for no reason and nothing matters.
On reset buttons more generally, I think an instructive model is Russel T Davies’s Doctor Who, especially the season finales. I remember reading, and, I’ll admit, engaging in, a certain amount of criticism at the fact that these tended to be resolved by someone either gaining godlike powers or twiddling at some buttons and completely undoing whatever the menace (Daleks, usually) was. But every time this happened, the Doctor wound up either parting ways with a companion and/or regenerating, marking a significant change in the show’s status quo. So in this sense there was a bit of a bait and switch- the stakes were never “Will the Daleks destroy the multiverse?” (They wouldn’t), but rather “What personal, emotional price will the Doctor have to pay to save the day?” Thus marking, if only in retrospect, an escalation from the usual run of episodes where the underlying question was “How will the Doctor save the day, and how many of this episode’s guest stars will make it?”
I’ll revisit this, and look at what the ultimate stakes of this storyline were when we talk about Part Two, but Voyager and more generally serialized television being what they are, I’m willing to bet that the answer won’t be “Does Voyager’s journey home end with everyone dying in Krenim space?”
(Edited to properly direct my @@@@@).
@42/karey: “As for “that’s not how time travel works”, time travel is made up. It works however the fiction writers decide it does. There isn’t some scientific complaint to be had regarding how it’s portrayed.”
Of course there is. The theoretical physics of time travel have been the subject of numerous papers, using relativity and quantum physics to extrapolate its workings. We have a pretty solid understanding of what could and couldn’t happen if time travel were real. There’s also the simple matter of logic and self-consistency — you can tell when a time travel story contradicts its own logic even without understanding physics. For instance, if a change happened decades or centuries in the past, why do we only see it taking effect in the present? Why would it be a “wave” that passes through space in the here and now and changes different parts of space at different times? How could people actually see it coming in the present and react to its approach?
Indeed, this is why I’m not a fan of time travel as a genre — because I’ve rarely seen a time travel story that didn’t contain a fundamental logical contradiction if you thought about it carefully enough. It’s not wrong for a story to be fanciful, but the important thing is to keep it consistent according to its own rules. Time travel stories usually fail that test.
You’re right that fictional time travel is usually treated fancifully with arbitrary rules. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to critique their logic and credibility or to recognize that some of those arbitrary rules are much, much stupider and harder to suspend disbelief about than others.
Which set of arbitrary time travel rules should Star Trek follow? There’s been so many of them. Each time they do a time travel episode, the rules are different. Sometimes they remember. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes a minor change sticks around. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Time travel, the mirror universe and the Borg are three things that I’d like to see a series totally ignore. Yeah, I know. Good luck with that.
@46- Well, Voyager’s one for three, at least. They never really do a Mirror Universe episode (and DS9 poaches Mirror Tuvok!), although they manage to eat their cake with Living Witness.
Having watched the first half of this two-parter in order to catch up with Krad, one simply couldn’t help but watch the second part immediately – as you can tell, I rather like this one, though I’m a little relieved that VOYAGER didn’t go to this particular well too often (if only because it’s difficult to see how they could sustain this level of fear, damage and nigh-hopeless tension while remaining recognisably STAR TREK).
Never have I been so impressed by the resiliency of Federation ship-building; the Intrepid class is explicitly something of a flyweight (more of a scout and a science vessel, with a neat turn of speed but relatively modest firepower) but it soaks up those knocks like a big, mean heavyweight!
@48/ED: The Intrepid class is actually somewhat bigger than the original TOS Enterprise, despite having a considerably smaller crew (presumably due to advances in automation). It’s more of a middleweight than a flyweight.
Speaking of nostalgia… holy cow a TRIPOD link.
Where’s the Under Construction gif? Does it work best with Netscape?
Doug Drexler (production designer, artist, jack-o-trades, and fanboy extrordinaire across the franchise) commented about a year and a half–two years or so ago that the original intent was to have the ship continually having to deal with running out of major consumables–starting with photon torpedoes and major spares–to show just how bad things really would get in their ongoing situation. They proceeded under this assumption until around two months before the premiere date that the Powers That Be scuttled the idea. He said he was never sure if it was the show’s senior producers or Paramount’s mandarins who made the call.
Personally, I think that it would’ve been fitting to have this mighty Federation ship showing serious wear and tear over the seven years of the series. Priority to keeping their home and transport as close to fully operational as possible…and a hull showing repaired spots, less-than complete paint over patched areas, singed markings (though with her name, hull number, and Federation insignia *fanatically* maintained); crew uniforms lovingly patched by their owners…etc. Janeway was going to get this ship home if it killed her, by the gods, and she made it clear that they’d do their damndest to maintain Star Fleet standards to the best of their abilities. That would’ve been a fascinating ongoing storyline in itself.
@51/resqspc: I dunno, I still think it was a bad idea to show the ship going it alone. The nature of the Federation is cooperation. The smart thing would’ve been to recruit allies, make connections, maybe find a local power that could help them rebuild and research faster ways home and defend themselves against predators like the Kazon and Vidiians. Just stubbornly going it alone and barreling on despite continuous breakdowns and resource shortages seems far too stupid for Starfleet.
On last week’s Discovery comment thread, I said I had no respect for Stamets acting like a macho tough guy and insisting on doing the critical repairs himself even though he was in no shape to do it and there were other qualified people, and he endangered the ship by almost passing out from blood loss before he could finish a vital repair. This is pretty much the same thing.
The time changes are great in this, not just the ship and technology changes but the attitude changes of the Krenim captain are absolutely spot on. Also You can’t really go wrong in casting Kurtwood Smith in anything, his Thrax was easily the best thing in the uneven DS9 episode ‘Things Past’ and he absolutely shines in this two parter, if there is anything wrong with this I would have liked them to really push the envelope and make this one a four to six episode arc as DS9 had just done in their sixth season opening, it really would have cemented it as a year of hell. Excellent episode though
Sending the crew away in the escape pods makes no sense. Are the pods not warp capable? Then Janeway’s condemning the crew to horrific deaths in the interstellar void.
If the pods _are_ warp capable, well, that raises questions: just how small can a warp engine be? I’d have thought shuttlecraft were at the lower end of that already. But still, I can’t think of any problems for the crew that wouldn’t be made worse by splitting them up, and that also adds the new problem of trying to reunite everyone after the crisis has passed.
If Voyager is no longer able to provide air, water, and food for the crew, but somehow the pods can, then the better course would seem to be to move all the crew into the pods, but then not eject them.
Tell me how I’m wrong!
(54). Well, once you’ve exhausted all the resources in the escape pods, you’re still on Voyager in the middle of nowhere. Probably better to use those things while searching for a habitable world or friendly ship. That’s assuming the pods are faster than Voyager’s current dilapidated state. But just how long can a pod sustain several people? Do they have replicators?
@54/terracinque: “Sending the crew away in the escape pods makes no sense. Are the pods not warp capable? Then Janeway’s condemning the crew to horrific deaths in the interstellar void.”
Are a sailing ship’s lifeboats capable of traveling for weeks to reach land? Escaping a shipwreck in a lifeboat has never, ever been a guarantee of survival. Rather, it’s a last-ditch chance, however slim, of avoiding death long enough to be rescued.
In the case of Starfleet escape pods, they have subspace distress beacons. The idea is not that they’ll cover an interstellar distance under their own power, but that some passing ship will hopefully detect their distress signals and come to their rescue. That’s much less of a sure thing in the Delta Quadrant, of course, but again, no lifeboat is ever a sure thing.
@56/CLB: Yes, but you’d only resort to the lifeboats once the ship herself is actually sinking, or is completely dead in the water. That wasn’t true for Voyager when her escape pods were flung free.
@57/terracinque: Oh, I see what you mean. The plan was to try to get through Krenim space in the pods and rendezvous on the other side, which would require the pods to have warp capability. Yeah, that’s a weird notion.
Unless the idea was that the pods would cluster in trains (something they’re designed for, according to the tech manuals) and be towed at warp by shuttlecraft. I don’t think they mentioned that, though.
“How is it possible to travel faster than light without main power (or a computer)? Does Voyager’s computer regulate every system on the ship? Is there no way to do it manually? Ronald D. Moore always felt Year of Hell was what VGR should have aspired to all along. And it surprises me how quick VGR was to forget about Jennifer Lien – YOH seems the best example.
1: YOH also makes use of the reset button. It’s a shame that after such a ballsy, audacious two-parter it must restore the status quo. 3: During the Year of Hell, we do get to see a miniature version of Seven’s development on VGR, where she gradually becomes more caring and less aloof towards her Voyager crewmates (acting as Tuvok’s seeing-eye guide, joining the crew for a drink, etc).
10: Kes didn’t send the crew ten years forwards in time, she cut ten years travel time off they’re trip in just a few seconds. 11: Had the Year of Hell continued, maybe Tuvok would have recovered his eyesight eventually. 14: Annorax always removes evidence of something or someone he’s about to erase from history, but not as a trophy, but as an attempt to salve his conscience. I wouldn’t try to explain temporal shielding because it’s a fictitious technology.
24: We did see that hairdo once before, in the S2 episode Parturition, before it reverted to form in Persistence of Vision. 25: I don’t know if anyone else had noticed, but YOH illustrates that Janeway and Annorax are similarly obsessive characters when they both lose something precious to them in they’re respective Ready Rooms – Janeway’s favourite teacup and a lock of hair, the last remnant of Annorax’s wife.
28: Yeah, you’re right that hitting the reset button after a whole season would be a thousand times worse, on the order of Bobby Ewing’s miraculous return from the dead in Dallas. 37: The Year of Hell lasting a whole season could’ve been something akin to the Dominion War, but VGR lacks the courage of DS9’s convictions. 38: I never understood Dark Frontier implying that the Federation already knew of the Borg’s existence when that didn’t happen until Q Who (or why they were the later design and not the TNG Borg).
52: I don’t think they liked the idea of any hangers-on impeding Voyager’s journey back to the AQ. 54: I don’t think Starfleet escape pods are warp-capable, which would make them an impractical means of traversing Krenim space. I don’t know how well-equipped they are either to sustain a person indefinitely, but Janeway sees it as a last resort only, at least until Voyager can be repaired (which seems a naive conceit).
If this story had been made on Voyager with Janeway and Chakotay instead then it would have felt redundant because of its similarity with that series’ episode “Resolutions”. In that episode, those two characters are stranded on a planet together and move beyond their professional relationship into the more personal realm. And they get to keep their memories at the end!
@60/garreth: Uhh, did you intend to post your comment in the ENT: “Twilight” thread? Because this thread is about a Voyager story.