1x04 Time and Again

[6.5/10] It’s a little strange for Voyager to do two “Our choices from the future are having causal effects on the present!” episodes in a row. “TIme and Again” and “Parallax” have different premises. One’s a “escape the crazy space anomaly” story, and the other’s a “save the doomed planet from destruction” story. But the central mechanism is the same, of effect preceding cause in a timey-wimey sort of way.

Don’t think too hard about it though. At least in the last episode, you had the sort of “future reflection” explanation, where the events of the future ensured the events of the past in a strange, but internally consistent sort of way. “Time and Again” sees a paradox, where Janeway and Paris get trapped in the past thanks to a rescue attempt in the future, except they avoid that dark future by thwarting the rescue in the past, which should have theoretically stopped them from getting trapped in the first place, but which should also have prevented them from taking the actions that averted the dark future that led them to get trapped?

Predestination paradoxes are a headache. Maybe it’s best to take Janeway’s advice from the last episode and accept that temporal mechanics are simply fuzzy -- the parlance of sci-fi writers who don’t want to have to game out time travel stories where everything adds up.

Still, the synchronicity of the solution here is the best part of “Time and Again”. The episode is a “ticking clock” sort of story and also a mystery. The ticking clock comes from the fact that, thanks to being from the near future, Janeway and Paris know that the planet of the week will suffer a worldwide explosion in a matter of hours. It’s a mystery tale because they don’t know exactly why or how, and there’s plenty of red herrings along the way.

Could it be a malfunction in the “polaric” (read: nuclear) power system that fuels the planet’s lifestyle? Could it be the activist group trying to sabotage one of the power plants that inadvertently sets off the chain reaction? And whatever it is, can Janeway and Paris get out of the past in time to avoid suffering the same fate as the locals without violating the Prime Directive?

The premise is a good one. The ticking clock adds urgency to the rescue. The mystery adds intrigue to what went wrong with this society. And the Prime Directive, as always, hamstrings our heroes, making it so that they have to keep their best resources close to the vest and try to avoid getting caught in their lies. The fact that the Starfleet officers’ presence is what turns out to have caused the explosion, and the way that frees the two of them to be more open to interfere since it was their interference that disrupted things in the first place, is genuinely clever.

There’s just one big problem. I don’t care about this generic planet or its stock inhabitants. I don’t care about the standard issue agitators who are trying to strike a blow against polaric energy. I don’t care about the irksome wannabe journalistic moppet who sees through Janeway and Paris’ fibs. And I don’t care about the conflicts or understandings the two officers develop with the activists who capture them or the twerpy kid who follows them. The bones of “Time and Again” aren’t bad, but on a scene-to-scene basis, the episode becomes a heap of the usual Trek cliches without anything particularly interesting in the character of the planet or its inhabitants, or anything in the performances to really grab you.

The same is true back on Voyager itself, where the remainder of the ensemble is working to get their colleagues back. Chakotay, Tuvok, B’Elanna, and Harry put their heads together to figure out that Janeway and Paris fell backward in time through a subspace crack or something, and they have to open one up again at the right time and place to fish them back out. I tend to enjoy Star Trek the most when the characters are in problem-solving mode, but this whole song and dance is so dry and procedural that it does little to hold your attention. The only bit of character it has is Tuvok’s skepticism of whether the rescue is feasible (and whether the charred combadges they find mean the Captain and Tom are dead). But otherwise, this could be any random quartet of Starfleet officers and the scenes would be no different.

At the same time, Kes is getting the psychic heebie-jeebies. Cards on the table, I never especially cared for Kes or this continuing storyline in general. Jennifer Lien’s shaky acting for a version of Kes who’s distraught at the massive loss of life doesn’t help, and the budding mental abilities thing puts her too far in line with the worst uses of Deanna Troi. Still, it does get us a good scene from a sarcastic and disgruntled Doctor, whose presence is a greater-making thing in pretty much every scene he gets.

That said, for all I tire of the bare technobabble sections of “Time and Again”, and the overwrought Kes sections too, I actually like the way they come together. The fact that it takes a combination of science and what is effectively magic to find Janeway and Paris is a neat trick. Kes using her psychic powers to locate Janeway’s location, and the engineers working together to effectuate their crack-creator in that spot makes for some nice synergy between the regular crew and their less traditional passengers.

All that aside, it’s not clear what, if anything, the writers are trying to say with “Time and Again”. I thought, at first, that this whole thing would turn into a polemic on nuclear power, since it's this society’s reliance on a nuclear power-like energy source that results in all their deaths. But then it seemed the episode would turn into a critique of those agitating against nuclear power, since the protestors were not only willing to take hostages and sabotage a plant, but shoot a child. Then, it turns out neither thing that causes the trouble, just a weird reverse-causality aberration that’s no one’s fault. So maybe this isn’t trying to say anything and is just using a familiar societal tableau as texture for a sci-fi story not interested in any broader message beyond its funky time dilation tale.

Whatever the reason, “Time and Again” is more fun to contemplate than actually watch. The premise is interesting. The story is sound. And the recursive nature of the temporal shenanigans is cool, if a little nonsensical. But the character interactions, in the past and in the present, are nothing to write home about, which makes each scene duller and less engrossing than the episode seems on paper. You can tell Voyager is still working out the kinks in the early going here, and the series repeating itself so soon is another mild, but noteworthy symptom of that.