Relativity

Another episode about time travel and again with Captain Braxton of the Starfleet Temporal Integrity Commission. This time, however, he's played by a different actor, which is a bit confusing - not particularly helpful in an already confusing story about time travel and alternate timelines.

This time, Seven is recruited by the Commission to prevent an attack on Voyager, which will not only destroy the entire ship and crew, but also disrupt the space-time continuum. Seven discovers that the saboteur is actually the future self of Braxton, who suffered a temporal psychosis as a result of the events in the episode "Future's End" - he spent 30 years in the past after his ship crashed on Earth by the intervention of Janeway and Voyager. In the future, he will suffer further psychological breakdowns and ultimately will lose his rank and position. He sees the only way out of this misery as erasing Voyager from the timeline once and for all.

As with all episodes about time travel, it would have been better if these stories had been planned well in advance and integrated into the earlier episodes that are now referred to. For example, the future Janeway with a shorter haircut appears on Voyager just as it is being attacked by the Kazon and meets Torres there. But she doesn't seem to notice that her captain suddenly has a different hairstyle - because at that point in this episode Janeway still had her long hair pinned up. It would have been interesting to have seen this scene in the old episode.

Furthermore, time travel paradoxes not only give Janeway a headache but also give me a headache. Actually, the catastrophe that sent Braxton into the past was prevented in the episode "Future's End" (a causal paradox). A new timeline appears to have emerged. But since Voyager and Janeway moved in the timeline that was created when the catastrophe was prevented and were sent back into the future by a Braxton who didn't spend 30 years on Earth at the end of the 20th century, it's impossible for this version of Braxton to have suffered psychosis in this exact timeline. Otherwise, the psychotic Braxton would have jumped over to the other timeline. But as always with films and episodes about time travel: Don't think too much, as you will always discover plot holes that make no sense in the end.

Forget plot holes and this one is fun.

As Kate said "lets just get on with it before my headache gets any worse."

Likely one of Kate's best performances even though it is a Jeri episode.

If you think too much about most time travel stories you can fly a galaxy class starship through the plot holes, and this one prompts many questions. However, if you suspend the disbelief and go with the flow, this one is pretty enjoyable. I like the pace of the story and how it builds to a good reveal.

Seven of Nine is the main focus and this works well. Jeri Ryan leads the relatively exciting sci-fi adventure charismatically and uses the no nonsense persona very well.

It is also a good Janeway episode and the numerous versions of the character contribute well in all scenes. Katie Mulgrew is great as always.

The guest character Braxon is written in a fairly silly way, but the performance by Bruce McGill lifts it significantly.

It is one of the stronger episodes for visual storytelling, with the cinematography and editing combining nicely.

For me it's a 7.5/10, but I round upwards.

Our friend Captain Braxton from "futures end" visits Voyager again, actually visits Voyager for the first time. The last time we saw him he was a bag man at the Long Beach pier it looked like. Oh, it was the Santa Monica pier. Southern California is all one boardwalk when it comes to beaches.

Allan Royal played that first rendition of Braxton, this time it was MacGyver's constant pilot, Bruce McGill. Who, ironically, was also in the 1994 film "Timecop" with Jean-Luc Picard Van Damme. So although I hate that they have to change actors occasionally, they chose a good person to do it this time

But, there was no Sarah Silverman, no place to put her. I never knew that they had been considering her to join the cast of Voyager after futures end.

This is a pretty unusual time travel story, it's not just happening between two different times, it is occurring at several different times, at once.

And captain Braxton, from his perch on the starship, timeship, "relativity", can snap up any person from Voyager's crew and put them anywhere in the past.

He warns everybody that he chooses, to watch out for the "Janeway factor". Unfortunately that is not something that can be done...

By the time 3/4 of this episode has traversed, we have lost 3/4 of our hair trying to keep up with all of these different segments of the story.

I love it! You can't have Star Trek without some convoluted time travel story and this is probably one of the best ones, of course this show was produced by Brannon Braga, who is the king of the star trek time travel stories. He was very good with them.

This episode was also a very good excuse to exploit Jeri Ryan. Especially when she is playing against herself...

The Doctor's mobile emitter, a result of obtaining future technology, a crashed time ship is overlooked at episodes ending. Time guardian (Cptn Braxton) makes no effort to assure the time-line is cleaned up. In other words, his century's technology. The mobile holo-emitter is allowed to be kept by Voyager's crew. Thus the result of technology obtained from some 400 years ahead of Voyager's technology) would surely violate the time guardians prime directives. Gross script error. But did lend a key aspects to broadening the Doctor's character. Regardless that the screenplay was somewhat corny and futile attempts at writing in some of the character's humorous and/or witisome line's, time travel will always be an interesting theme.