As far as time travel goes, this is excellent.
Braxton must be an imbicile if he thinks Seven will remember the situation. How did he become captain of a time ship?
On the flip side, I absolutely love Bruce McGill!
The crew of the Relativity is fairly useless. It seems they have never encountered someone putting up a a simple force field during a mission. To borrow a quote, "... even in the future nothing works".
Oh Voyager, why didn't you have a competent group of writers?
An absolute gem of a temporal paradox episode!
What's particularly interesting is the idea that allowing them to retain these memories means that Janeway and Tuvok (and maybe B'lanna too, if she thinks back hard enough) now have memory of meeting a more human looking Seven on Voyager, years before they met her (again) as Borg. This theory would suggest that both Tuvok and Janeway shared some subconcious familiarity with Borg Seven (because they'd met her before) - core memory unlocked, an epiphany...
The Borg Queen told Seven that they let her go on purpose... what if the Collective DID remember Voyager through the shared consciousness, an "I knew you before I met you"...
...all of the above, the "Seven of Nine Paradox".
Also, having stopped older Braxton from placing the bomb in the first place, Relativity should have had no reason to recruit Seven, and as a result the events of this episode should have ceased to exist... However, in arresting younger Braxton I believe this cemented his exile and ensured his future misdeeds...
...a causal loop.
"Let's get started before my headache gets any worse." - Captain Janeway
Awesome episode. A time travel episode done right. It's still a time travel episode though. Thus, it's full of strange logic and paradoxes. You better don't think too hard about temporal mechanics and physics. It's just a well-made diversion from the main story.
The episode is mysterious, exciting and suspenseful. It has different intersecting timelines (who would have thought that). Seven, the Doctor and even the Captain prove quite capable. Stakes are high: one Voyager is destroyed in flight. One Seven dies. Could you have asked for more?
PS: biggest paradox: When did they go back to the old table tennis rules?
Ahh, good ol` time travel and all the paradoxes that go along with it.
Never try to make head or tails of it as you certainly get a brain cramp. Which is why I love this stuff so much. Pure entertainment.
Review by LeftHandedGuitaristBlockedParent2018-08-10T11:00:07Z
I do love time travel stories. This is an odd one, in that it doesn't seem to want to take itself too seriously. Of course, most time travel stories don't but this one in particular feels like it plunges ahead with abandon, not really caring too much about tidying things up.
It's good fun, though. I like that we revisit past events and there's a serious continuity nod by bringing back Captain Braxton (even if he's played by a completely different actor). The episode moves through different tones and ends in a very different place than it starts. Jeri Ryan is given a lot to do and - as usual - pulls it off very well. Once Janeway becomes involved in the time travel shenanigans it really begins to become great.
The ending is a let down, in that everything is wrapped up quickly and we're told not to worry, the timeline will now sort itself out and things were done off-screen to fix all the causality/paradox problems. And all the different versions of people will magically recombine into one. Somehow.
Slight continuity issue that really jumped out at me: the Doctor is activated for the first time at a completely different moment to what we've seen/been told before (everything previously has stated he was first activated in 'Caretaker' once they were stranded in the Delta Quadrant). What we see here does make more sense, of course, as you would think he would have been turned on previously for testing purposes if nothing else.