Taken on its own, this double episode wouldn't be so bad: battles with the Borg, time travel, Janeway in a dual role and the big homecoming. But if you look at this episode as the conclusion of a saga, then you can only be disappointed with this finale. This ending doesn't do the series justice. It seems rushed.
Somehow, while watching this episode, I thought of the disastrous ending of Game of Thrones. Same story. Or imagine Frodo in the Lord of the Rings being in Khazad-dûm one moment and suddenly in the next scene he's standing at Mount Doom and throwing the ring into the volcano. And Samwise is now engaged to Galadriel. You simply skipped half the journey.
It's pretty obvious what happened here: the showrunners were convinced there would be a few more seasons of Voyager. The stories for the episodes of the seventh season had been written, the return to Earth was not the focus. After all, Voyager was still 30,000 light-years from home. The season clearly wasn't focused on the big finale at the end. Then someone from the network called and pointed out that TNG and DS9 only had seven seasons each, which should be enough for Voyager also. So the last episode that had already been written was thrown into the bin and this double episode was filmed instead. Since the season didn't come to an ending, the entire resolution of seven seasons had to be squeezed into this one episode. And how do you usually do that in the Star Trek franchise? With time travel, of course! Make it so!
The writers even packed a lackluster romance between Seven and Chakotay into this episode. For four seasons, Chakotay has given no indication that he is romantically interested in Seven. Harry invested more energy than Chakotay. But in the last episode, Chakotay is suddenly head over heels in love with Seven? What far-fetched nonsense.
Extremely unsatisfactory. Into oblivion with warp 9.9.
