[8.1/10] Hitting one-hundred episodes is a big deal. The Original Series fell well short. The Animated Series didn’t come close. Enterprise couldn’t quite make it. And four modern Star Trek series ended without even being within spitting distance. So crossing that threshold is a legitimate milestone for Star Trek: Voyager.
What I appreciate about “Timeless” is that it feels sufficiently momentous in light of that achievement. Plenty of episodes of Star Trek, even ones where nominally major things happen, feel a little ho-hum, even when they’re well done. Big catastrophes are pretty much the order of the day in Star Trek, so even a ship- or galaxy-threatening crisis can seem like just another day at the office for our heroes.
But “Timeless” feels like a story worthy of the occasion. For one thing, there’s a celebratory atmosphere to this one. The scene where B’Elanna comes to christen the new quantum slipstream drive, draped in slow motion confetti, with a suitable benediction from Captain Janeway herself, plays like a tribute not only to Voyager’s ostensibly impending journey home, but to the accomplishments of this cast and crew in reaching a point not every television show, let alone Star Trek series, can say they’ve crossed.
For another, the writers (including Trek impresario and reputed shitbag Rick Berman), bust out two of Star Trek’s favorite spicy chestnuts for the occasion: time travel and alternate timelines.
That's part of what makes this one seem like a big deal. You can practically feel the show busting out special things. We open on Voyager buried under a sheet of ice! We see Janeway herself as a frozen corpse in the decaying remains of the ship! We get alternate versions of Chakotay and Harry (with franchise trademark unconvincing old age makeup to boot)! We have a daring mission to save the future by rectifying the past! We get a cameo from Geordi! We jump between one period and another as the tension ratchets up! Sure, those things usually mean a big reset button is hit, but sometimes, that's the price of fun.
And most importantly, this feels big because it’s a chance to go home. Sure, Voyager’s had some of those in the past. But this time, it isn’t a trick or a fleeting wormhole or some other aliens’ tech that they’re asking to borrow. It’s built on the strength of their own ingenuity, the product of all that they've learned while in the Delta Quadrant. Savvy viewers can probably guess that they’re not going to make it to the Alpha Quadrant halfway through the series, but in a landmark episode like this one, it’s not outside the realm of possibility, which adds excitement.
True to form, there is a thrilling technical problem to solve here. When we meet them, fifteen years in the future, Harry and Chakotay (and some rando named Tessa, because why not), have already stolen the Delta Flyer, purloined a Borg temporal node from Starfleet Intelligence, and from there they have to revive The Doctor, dissect the part of Seven’s skull with her ocular transceiver, and send the exact right “phase corrections” at the exact right moment in the past to avert a decade and a half-year-old disaster from happening. Oh, and Captain LaForge is bearing down on them in the process.
Solving technical problems with creativity and dering-do is at the heart of Star Trek. So using the occasion to have our heroes (or the ones who’ve survived fifteen years later at least) deploy all their fancy tech and know-how to save the future, while the rest of them are doing the same to get home in the past, pays suitable tribute to the kinds of adventures that have fueled the series and the franchise.
True-to-form, it’s also a personal story. As much as this is about finding the right frequency to realign the antimatter coagulators through the main deflector dish or what have you, it’s also a story about Harry Kim’s struggles with his choices. Harry’s often seemed like the character most interested in getting home, and so there’s weight in him taking a big risk in order to try to complete their mission that goes horribly awry but leaves him as one of the few still breathing.
The only problem is that poor overmatched Garrett Wang does not have the chops to play the grizzled, regretful rogue who’s older and more haunted by his actions. Honestly, I was impressed with Wang’s acting in the regular timeline. He’s not always the show’s most dynamic performer, but when Tom identifies a problem with the slipstream drive, and he gives a rousing speech about how they can still do this, you believe his enthusiasm and determination, in a way that's almost stirring.
Unfortunately, he’s just not up to the other half of the equation, He can't quite muster the up-to-eleven emoting required to sell someone haunted by survivor’s guilt and frustrated to the point of madness at his inability to fix the past. (The Doctor is, though, so thank heaven for Robert Picardo!) It’s one of the big weaknesses in an otherwise well-conceived episode.
The other problem is to put the focus on Chakotay and his lifeless, disposable love interest. I get what the show’s going for here. There’s an interesting story to be told about Chakotay having made a real connection in the fifteen years since Voyager’s demise and having to reckon with that all being erased if he succeeds. (The Orville, which “Timeless” writer Brannon Braga is involved with, touches on a similar idea.)
But Tessa is such a nothing character. Despite some good outings this season, Robert Beltran is too wooden here to sell the romance. His guest star paramour isn’t much better. And neither of them can quite convey the graveness of the decision or the preciousness of what they’re losing in the process. And that's before you get to a certain ickiness from the implication that Chakotay might be dating a younger Voyager fangirl.
(And hey, as with Picard and Dr. Crusher on TNG, this is more of a tease than anything substantive, but it doesn’t help the Chakotay/Tessa relationship when the show is clearly stoking fans interest in a Janeway/Chakotay romance in the same episode. The suggestion that there might be room for the relationship if they can make it back to the Alpha Quadrant and not have a whole crew depending on them is intriguing. More immediately though, the Captain and her first officer have infinitely more chemistry than Chakotay and Tessa do. That's partly the point, I think. You get the impression that Chakotay is still moved to hear Janeway’s voice on the ship’s last log, which is why he’s willing to throw his current relationship away. But Tessa is such a nothing character that it never feels like a fair fight.)
Still, despite those weaknesses, there’s a sense of importance, novelty, and urgency that carries the day for an exciting installment like “Timeless”. Part of that comes from the clever scripting. The deftest move the writing team (which also includes Trek stalwart Joe Menosky) makes here is to expertly cut between the past and the present.
That helps in the early part of the episode, where the audience is thrown for a loop by what misfortune could have occurred to leave Voyager in such a state, before cutting to a flashback that shows us the build-up to how it happened. The hope and anticipation in the past, matched with the grim resignation of the present, makes for a striking juxtaposition. And even in the middle, the dramatic irony of comparing young Harry’s grand plans to get them home, with older Harry’s grand plans to fix what he broke as a young man, has an impact.
The smart editing also keeps the excitement up in the episode’s final third act. The writers add the usual Star Trek threats in the future, with a destabilizing ship and not enough power to run the various gadgets and a galaxy class starship there to stop our heroes from changing history. So you get the sense of urgency in the future, as this is the good guys’ one big chance to set things right. But theoretically, the past has already happened, so it should be harder to wring tension from it.
Thankfully, the episode smartly cuts between Harry and Doc’s trials and travails in the future, with Janeway and the crew’s attempt to use the sli-pstream drive in the past, making it seem like the events are happening simultaneously. You can't think too hard about it, or as Harry himself suggests, the whole thing might fall apart in a sea of temporal mechanics and predestination paradoxes. But it’s a nice way to present the material in a way that keeps the audience energized and invested. And the smart structure allows the show to give viewers hints at serious events before letting us witness them firsthand.
The alternate timeline idea also lets us see big things the show can't do as a going concern. The ship can crash into the interstellar equivalent of an iceberg and the crew can die. We can hear snippets of what a return to Earth would look like. We can...see the inside of Seven’s skull, I guess.
Alongside the novelty, there’s a poetic twist, in that Harry’s phase corrections sent to the past through Seven are what turn out to send Voyager crashing down in the first place. There is a bitter irony in the fact that the best future Harry can do is not bring Voyager back home, but restore the status quo. The ticking clock feels a little contrived, but it’s a nice way to solve the immediate problem without solving the series’ big problem, and the Doctor giving the one time ensign a pep talk that spurs him to success is a true fist-pump moment.
Despite falling well short of expectations, and the notion that this was their one big chance for the slipstream project to succeed (presumably to avoid Comic Book Guy-style fans like yours truly from asking why they don’t just keep trying), there’s a sense of optimism at the end of “Timeless”. In an act with a certain amount of sacrifice, Harry and Chakotay become Voyager’s guardian angels. The ship is ten years closer to home. And as Janeway herself puts it, the idea of returning to the Alpha Quadrant is starting to feel like a “when” not an “if”.
Voyager’s writers reportedly included the Caretaker’s mate as an out, in case the whole “stranded in the Delta Quadrant” thing didn’t work and they had to retool the show. At a landmark like one-hundred episodes, you could be forgiven for suspecting the show, which has already switched out castmembers and given the ship a Borg makeover, might do something big. Whether that's killing off another character, or letting Harry and Chakotay exit the show, or even bringing everyone home and starting a new adventure, the heightened aura of a round number gives this one an “anything can happen” quality.
Of course, they stay in the Delta Quadrant; the ship and her crew remain intact, and despite all of that, Harry is back to being an ensign. There is a certain entropy to network television in the 1990s -- a fear of changing or bending the premise too much lest it break. But in heightened moments -- season premieres, season finales, and milestones like this one, shows like Voyager still pull out all the stops, and in outings like “Timeless”, deliver something worthy of the billing.
(As a personal aside, the cameo from director LeVar Burton threw me for a loop because I swear I remember a scene where Geordi is on the bridge of Voyager! I wonder if it was just from a featurette on the production or something like that, and I’m mixing things up. Just goes to show how your memories of the shows you watched growing up can be unreliable!)
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2024-05-13T03:17:56Z
[8.1/10] Hitting one-hundred episodes is a big deal. The Original Series fell well short. The Animated Series didn’t come close. Enterprise couldn’t quite make it. And four modern Star Trek series ended without even being within spitting distance. So crossing that threshold is a legitimate milestone for Star Trek: Voyager.
What I appreciate about “Timeless” is that it feels sufficiently momentous in light of that achievement. Plenty of episodes of Star Trek, even ones where nominally major things happen, feel a little ho-hum, even when they’re well done. Big catastrophes are pretty much the order of the day in Star Trek, so even a ship- or galaxy-threatening crisis can seem like just another day at the office for our heroes.
But “Timeless” feels like a story worthy of the occasion. For one thing, there’s a celebratory atmosphere to this one. The scene where B’Elanna comes to christen the new quantum slipstream drive, draped in slow motion confetti, with a suitable benediction from Captain Janeway herself, plays like a tribute not only to Voyager’s ostensibly impending journey home, but to the accomplishments of this cast and crew in reaching a point not every television show, let alone Star Trek series, can say they’ve crossed.
For another, the writers (including Trek impresario and reputed shitbag Rick Berman), bust out two of Star Trek’s favorite spicy chestnuts for the occasion: time travel and alternate timelines.
That's part of what makes this one seem like a big deal. You can practically feel the show busting out special things. We open on Voyager buried under a sheet of ice! We see Janeway herself as a frozen corpse in the decaying remains of the ship! We get alternate versions of Chakotay and Harry (with franchise trademark unconvincing old age makeup to boot)! We have a daring mission to save the future by rectifying the past! We get a cameo from Geordi! We jump between one period and another as the tension ratchets up! Sure, those things usually mean a big reset button is hit, but sometimes, that's the price of fun.
And most importantly, this feels big because it’s a chance to go home. Sure, Voyager’s had some of those in the past. But this time, it isn’t a trick or a fleeting wormhole or some other aliens’ tech that they’re asking to borrow. It’s built on the strength of their own ingenuity, the product of all that they've learned while in the Delta Quadrant. Savvy viewers can probably guess that they’re not going to make it to the Alpha Quadrant halfway through the series, but in a landmark episode like this one, it’s not outside the realm of possibility, which adds excitement.
True to form, there is a thrilling technical problem to solve here. When we meet them, fifteen years in the future, Harry and Chakotay (and some rando named Tessa, because why not), have already stolen the Delta Flyer, purloined a Borg temporal node from Starfleet Intelligence, and from there they have to revive The Doctor, dissect the part of Seven’s skull with her ocular transceiver, and send the exact right “phase corrections” at the exact right moment in the past to avert a decade and a half-year-old disaster from happening. Oh, and Captain LaForge is bearing down on them in the process.
Solving technical problems with creativity and dering-do is at the heart of Star Trek. So using the occasion to have our heroes (or the ones who’ve survived fifteen years later at least) deploy all their fancy tech and know-how to save the future, while the rest of them are doing the same to get home in the past, pays suitable tribute to the kinds of adventures that have fueled the series and the franchise.
True-to-form, it’s also a personal story. As much as this is about finding the right frequency to realign the antimatter coagulators through the main deflector dish or what have you, it’s also a story about Harry Kim’s struggles with his choices. Harry’s often seemed like the character most interested in getting home, and so there’s weight in him taking a big risk in order to try to complete their mission that goes horribly awry but leaves him as one of the few still breathing.
The only problem is that poor overmatched Garrett Wang does not have the chops to play the grizzled, regretful rogue who’s older and more haunted by his actions. Honestly, I was impressed with Wang’s acting in the regular timeline. He’s not always the show’s most dynamic performer, but when Tom identifies a problem with the slipstream drive, and he gives a rousing speech about how they can still do this, you believe his enthusiasm and determination, in a way that's almost stirring.
Unfortunately, he’s just not up to the other half of the equation, He can't quite muster the up-to-eleven emoting required to sell someone haunted by survivor’s guilt and frustrated to the point of madness at his inability to fix the past. (The Doctor is, though, so thank heaven for Robert Picardo!) It’s one of the big weaknesses in an otherwise well-conceived episode.
The other problem is to put the focus on Chakotay and his lifeless, disposable love interest. I get what the show’s going for here. There’s an interesting story to be told about Chakotay having made a real connection in the fifteen years since Voyager’s demise and having to reckon with that all being erased if he succeeds. (The Orville, which “Timeless” writer Brannon Braga is involved with, touches on a similar idea.)
But Tessa is such a nothing character. Despite some good outings this season, Robert Beltran is too wooden here to sell the romance. His guest star paramour isn’t much better. And neither of them can quite convey the graveness of the decision or the preciousness of what they’re losing in the process. And that's before you get to a certain ickiness from the implication that Chakotay might be dating a younger Voyager fangirl.
(And hey, as with Picard and Dr. Crusher on TNG, this is more of a tease than anything substantive, but it doesn’t help the Chakotay/Tessa relationship when the show is clearly stoking fans interest in a Janeway/Chakotay romance in the same episode. The suggestion that there might be room for the relationship if they can make it back to the Alpha Quadrant and not have a whole crew depending on them is intriguing. More immediately though, the Captain and her first officer have infinitely more chemistry than Chakotay and Tessa do. That's partly the point, I think. You get the impression that Chakotay is still moved to hear Janeway’s voice on the ship’s last log, which is why he’s willing to throw his current relationship away. But Tessa is such a nothing character that it never feels like a fair fight.)
Still, despite those weaknesses, there’s a sense of importance, novelty, and urgency that carries the day for an exciting installment like “Timeless”. Part of that comes from the clever scripting. The deftest move the writing team (which also includes Trek stalwart Joe Menosky) makes here is to expertly cut between the past and the present.
That helps in the early part of the episode, where the audience is thrown for a loop by what misfortune could have occurred to leave Voyager in such a state, before cutting to a flashback that shows us the build-up to how it happened. The hope and anticipation in the past, matched with the grim resignation of the present, makes for a striking juxtaposition. And even in the middle, the dramatic irony of comparing young Harry’s grand plans to get them home, with older Harry’s grand plans to fix what he broke as a young man, has an impact.
The smart editing also keeps the excitement up in the episode’s final third act. The writers add the usual Star Trek threats in the future, with a destabilizing ship and not enough power to run the various gadgets and a galaxy class starship there to stop our heroes from changing history. So you get the sense of urgency in the future, as this is the good guys’ one big chance to set things right. But theoretically, the past has already happened, so it should be harder to wring tension from it.
Thankfully, the episode smartly cuts between Harry and Doc’s trials and travails in the future, with Janeway and the crew’s attempt to use the sli-pstream drive in the past, making it seem like the events are happening simultaneously. You can't think too hard about it, or as Harry himself suggests, the whole thing might fall apart in a sea of temporal mechanics and predestination paradoxes. But it’s a nice way to present the material in a way that keeps the audience energized and invested. And the smart structure allows the show to give viewers hints at serious events before letting us witness them firsthand.
The alternate timeline idea also lets us see big things the show can't do as a going concern. The ship can crash into the interstellar equivalent of an iceberg and the crew can die. We can hear snippets of what a return to Earth would look like. We can...see the inside of Seven’s skull, I guess.
Alongside the novelty, there’s a poetic twist, in that Harry’s phase corrections sent to the past through Seven are what turn out to send Voyager crashing down in the first place. There is a bitter irony in the fact that the best future Harry can do is not bring Voyager back home, but restore the status quo. The ticking clock feels a little contrived, but it’s a nice way to solve the immediate problem without solving the series’ big problem, and the Doctor giving the one time ensign a pep talk that spurs him to success is a true fist-pump moment.
Despite falling well short of expectations, and the notion that this was their one big chance for the slipstream project to succeed (presumably to avoid Comic Book Guy-style fans like yours truly from asking why they don’t just keep trying), there’s a sense of optimism at the end of “Timeless”. In an act with a certain amount of sacrifice, Harry and Chakotay become Voyager’s guardian angels. The ship is ten years closer to home. And as Janeway herself puts it, the idea of returning to the Alpha Quadrant is starting to feel like a “when” not an “if”.
Voyager’s writers reportedly included the Caretaker’s mate as an out, in case the whole “stranded in the Delta Quadrant” thing didn’t work and they had to retool the show. At a landmark like one-hundred episodes, you could be forgiven for suspecting the show, which has already switched out castmembers and given the ship a Borg makeover, might do something big. Whether that's killing off another character, or letting Harry and Chakotay exit the show, or even bringing everyone home and starting a new adventure, the heightened aura of a round number gives this one an “anything can happen” quality.
Of course, they stay in the Delta Quadrant; the ship and her crew remain intact, and despite all of that, Harry is back to being an ensign. There is a certain entropy to network television in the 1990s -- a fear of changing or bending the premise too much lest it break. But in heightened moments -- season premieres, season finales, and milestones like this one, shows like Voyager still pull out all the stops, and in outings like “Timeless”, deliver something worthy of the billing.
(As a personal aside, the cameo from director LeVar Burton threw me for a loop because I swear I remember a scene where Geordi is on the bridge of Voyager! I wonder if it was just from a featurette on the production or something like that, and I’m mixing things up. Just goes to show how your memories of the shows you watched growing up can be unreliable!)