Timeless

This episode had it all - time travel, Voyager crash landing, big continuity advancement in the series story, and even a wonderful special guest appearance!

Great episode, very fun to watch and so many things that make Trek great.

Most of this episode is fine. It has a fascinating premise and it is nicely put together. There are some "buts" however. The business of changing time is still out there in the realm of impossibility. How humans can change it, is also beyond me. But, we need it for science fiction, so let's give it a pass. The one issue that bothered me here is that the cause of all the problems is a blind trust in Harry Kim, knucklehead at large. They had run 20 simulations and each had ended in problems. Enter the impatient Kim, and a little speech allows him and his friend Tom to go off into the ethos with no regard for testing. Anyway, the dark future is interesting and the effort to correct a fatal mistake are fun. One last thing. Don't give Harry any responsibility that affects the lives of the crew.

Despite the nitpicking I enjoyed this episode, the things that bug me about the teek universe is its always advertised as "the United federation of planets is about exploration, meeting new species, making friends" but every time they show a time travel episode it shows star fleet as being almost evil, uncaring, not at all showing anything their captains and crew preach about! There's always a criminal aspect to them too.. even in picard series it shows the future of drug users, alcohol, swearing etc.. its like as time went on the series just moved away from jeans original vision. Kim is a great character but in this episode he's a hot head and it doesn't suit him. They keep saying they have no time but they have time to talk about sex and go over all that's happened! The biggest mistake tho was using laforge, going off TNG and his character, he's a genius, able to do incredible things yet in this episode he's powerless to stop a shuttle from its mission Despite having a starship and full crew..

Kim and Chakotay attempt to change the present by altering events in the past.

This is a refreshing episode for several reasons. Firstly, it approaches the concept of the Voyager crew attempting to speed up their journey home in a different way. Previous episodes have unsuccessfully attempted to raise hopes of a return home, whereas the writers establish this as a failed attempt early and develop a good story around the failure.

Most Star Trek stories about temporal anomalies show characters fixing deviations created by other characters or phenomena. I like that this one has the central characters trying to create an anomaly due to a vested interest in how events will unfold.

Arguably the highlight is that it makes great use of Kim as a central character in a way that works well. The writers make him suffer, but he has very strong arc and Garrett Wang puts his heart into the performance.

If I had to nitpick, I would say that once again the writers have characters over explain their feelings in certain moments of dialogue rather than come up with ways of showing it through behaviour. My least favourite scene involves this type of conversation between Chakotay and Tessa.

Visually it is one of the best Voyager episodes. Scenes of dead characters frozen is are very well designed and the crash sequence is excellent. Both timelines are edited in a way that makes the story flow.

Previous episode felt like they didn't know what to come up with so they introduced an alien that worked before, only to completely turn the plot of that first episode upside down.

Harry was acting tough and cool, and angry, but it wasn't that good.

Beside from a small plot twist at the end which was kind of interesting the whole episode I felt like it was clear what they were going to do. If I would have to tell someone this story it would be a few lines long, and those few lines were stretched for almost the entire episode.

And the idea of the theme for this episode is something that also feels like visited too often in Star Trek.

That is as much as I can say without spoilers. If I could fix my previous mistakes I would send my drone girlfriend a message: skip this one.