Star Trek: Voyager: Year of Hell, Part II (1997)
Season 4, Episode 9
7/10
Disappointing & illogical ending
3 November 2021
Warning: Spoilers
First major problem: A few episodes ago, Kess warned them of this Year of Hell yet this episode doesn't even mention it. They should have stated "Kess warned us, so we changed x. We can get through this." (But of course, they can't defy destiny.)

Second major problem: Kess says that Janeway dies, but in this episode she doesn't. Why does Janeway survive the fire?! There's no need. Let her die in the fire. We all know that she will be magically restored anyways. How do you go through a Year of Hell without losing any of the main characters?! This is the situation that you can let them die.

The main storyline is interesting: 200 years ago, A Krenim named Annorax uses a temporal weapon to erase an enemy people from history but this erases his wife's colony and many of his people die from a disease because they don't have any genes from their enemy. Therefore Annorax keeps using the weapon, erasing more people but never succeeding to restore his wife.

Today, Voyager enters Krenim space and is greeted by a Krenim vessel that warns them to go around Krenim space. Janeway ignores this and therefore is attacked.

For the next year, Voyager is repeatedly attacked but the Krenim, with no explanation of why Janeway doesn't decide to go around their space.

Annorax keeps erasing people from history but miscalculates the effect of the presence of Voyager. (Voyager created temporal shielding to protect them from the Krenim's temporal chroniton torpedos.) So he tries to erase Voyager but fails. He then erases more peoples.

Voyager joins forces with other peoples to attack the time ship. Janeway has no weapons so she rams the time ship with Voyager, destroying both.

Third major problem: Presto, the destruction of the time ship erases everything that it ever did. WHY?! They destroyed the ship to stop Annorax from committing more new genocide but there's no foreshadowing or expectation that its destruction will change history. (Only the audience's expectation that by the end of the episode everything must be magically restored.)

Fourth major problem: Voyager encounters exactly the same ship that they did at the beginning of part 1. This should NOT be the case! For this to happen, then everything in the last 200 years would have happened, so not all history was restored, only the history since Voyager arrived in their space. Why would destroying the time ship only restore the last year? If all time was restored then hey should have met a ship but it would be the Krenim's enemy that Annorax had tried to erase. Them we would know that he did not use the weapon.

Also, we see a scene from 200 years ago of Annorax with his wife where he takes a break from his calculations. If this break is to imply that he never uses the weapon, then it should be a DIFFERENT ship that greets Voyager. Since we see the same ship, he should have turned away his wife and kept working, to show that time does not change. What can change is Janeway's decision, even though there is no basis for a different decision, only chance.

More: Beyond that, it's boring that the time ship is destroyed via a rather conventional fight.

More interesting would be if Chakotay, Tom and the sympathetic Krenim devised a way to turn the Time Ships weapon back on itself, to remove it from the timeline, such that Annorax never built it. The most reasonable method would be for a deflector to reflect the weapon's beam back at the ship. But not Voyager's deflector (that's too simple). Voyager works with the other ships to create a large temporal deflector. Could have a nice graphic of a network of beams between the ships creating this temporal deflector. Of course, place Voyager at the center and use some communication with Annorax that entices him to target Voyager first. Include the mutiny aspect because the sympathizer must program the weapon to produce a beam to send the time ship back (instead of one designed to eliminate Voyager.)
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