Set a course for home
TNG’s “All Good Things…” set a high standard for Star Trek finales, covering three time periods — the past, the present and the future — and celebrating both Jean-Luc Picard as a character and the family who made up the senior officers of the Enterprise. It had moments of pathos and humour. Relationships began and ended. And if the future we saw was a bit grim, well, now we can avoid that fate (and instead have the much grimmer fate depicted in Star Trek: Picard).
That’s a lot to live up to. Deep Space 9, as always, forged its own path with a finale which wrapped up an extended run of serialised episodes. But Voyager, typically, had to follow in TNG’s footsteps with a bit of time travel.
Is “Endgame” a good finale? Yes and no. Is it a good episode on its own? Sometimes. Do its successes outweigh its flaws? Maybe?
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room
The biggest problem with “Endgame” is the Chakotay/Seven relationship. It’s not just that it’s a factor in the story — the same is true of the Worf/Troi relationship that developed in season 7, appeared to reach fruition in “All Good Things…” and was then never spoken of again. Chakotay/Seven is a load-bearing component of Admiral Janeway’s motivation. Chakotay’s grief at Seven’s death is said to be utterly ruinous, even though he lives another couple of decades and we’ve had seven seasons of seeing that he’s a guy who tries not to dwell.
But that’s the problem in a nutshell. Chakotay/Seven, as depicted in “Endgame”, has almost nothing to do with the characters of Chakotay and Seven. It barely has anything to do with Seven’s experiments with romancing a Chakotay-shaped hologram, and even less with their relationship as we saw it in “Natural Law”. Last time we saw these two interact, they were co-workers who mostly respected each other, but who didn’t have much in common and saw little reason to change that.
So … how did that change? And why? Did Seven pursue Chakotay, or was it the other way around? As I said in my write-up of “Human Error”, I get why Seven would perceive Chakotay as a safe choice for a first relationship, but with respect, what does Chakotay see in Seven? Aside from the fact that she looks like Jeri Ryan, of course.
Because we’ve seen Chakotay with a number of women over the seasons. Some are very attractive blondes, yes, but what they all have in common — Seska and Janeway and Riley and Kellin — is that they’re in their 30s or older, and have some experience of the world. Okay, some of that experience encompasses things like “being a Cardassian spy” or “fascist memory-wiping cop” or “being a Borg”, but even Riley or Kellin, whom I do not consider well-written or complex characters, had more going on. And obviously Seven is going to get there — the writing in Star Trek: Picard notwithstanding — but right now, she’s 27 years old and has been an independent, autonomous individual for all of three years.
Imagine if Voyager had spent less time this season telling the same old Doctor story over and over again, and put even a fraction of thought into dealing with this problem.
And then there’s the conversion therapy side
It’s difficult for me to get past the fact that this “important” “relationship” only “exists” because the Doctor performed surgical conversion therapy to fix Seven’s inability to feel strong emotion (which is the same as a sexual drive, obviously).
Offensive as it is, this is actually better than what Brannon Braga wanted for the character, as he discussed in 2010:
“It was my feeling that Seven Of Nine should have died. If you watch the episode ‘Human Error’ written by Andre Bormanis, it was not only a heart breaking episode in that Seven Of Nine learns, as she begins to explore her human emotions, that she can’t experience them. There’s a Borg chip inside her that will kill her if she tries to do so. First of all, that’s kind of an interesting ‘rape victim’ analogy or whatever you want to call it, about a damaged woman who can’t get past what happened to her, but I also always saw it as a crucial episode that would set up the finale.
“This was a woman who knew she was neither here nor there. She couldn’t go back to the Borg, nor would she want to, but she could never be fully human, so she was doomed. And I wanted to have her sacrifice herself to get her shipmates home.” (source)
I like Braga’s work more than most people, but fuck off, Brannon.
Here’s a complaint that I was wrong to have
I’ve complained in the past — not specifically in this blog, but around the internet and probably on my podcast — that “Endgame” is bad because, like, why does Admiral Janeway travel back in time to save Seven but not Joe Carey? Or any of the other people who died along the way?
Answer: she specifically came back to this time because it’s the day Voyager encountered the transwarp hub, but decided not to risk using it. It’s not about saving some people and letting others die, it’s that this was the specific road she did not take.
Okay. My complaints from here on out are more nitpicks than serious, episode-breaking problems.
Admiral Janeway is the real villain of “Endgame”
Yes, yes, yes, the Borg Queen is here, she’s played by Alice Krige again, blah, blah, blah. She’s a villain. But Admiral Janeway is the villain.
And I love that. We had some foreshadowing in “Shattered”, where past!Janeway becomes the antagonist, the one who has to be talked down from changing history to keep Voyager’s crew safe.
Janeway, as a person, needs constant work and purpose, or else she stops living in the moment and starts dwelling on “what ifs”. While nearly everyone else in the future is moving on with their lives and basically thriving, Janeway is visiting Tuvok, enduring an unchallenging job as a flag officer, and thinking about what she could have changed. And unfortunately, she has the clout and access to technology that means she can actually make those changes — even if it means she has to manipulate the Doctor and Barclay, and Miral and B’Elanna, and persuade Harry to risk his career.
“All Good Things…” presents us a vision of Picard’s future that’s chilling because his intellect is failing. “Endgame” sees Janeway’s intellect intact, but her moral code has gone askew. And it has happened so gradually that no one around her has noticed — until she lands in the 2370s and confronted by her younger, more idealistic self.
As a fan of Janeway, I love this. As a fan of pragmatic admirals who take it for granted that the common good is coincidentally exactly with their self-interest, I love it even more. “Endgame” is at its best when it’s a Janeway story.
It’s also a redemption story. The admiral’s initial plan is for Voyager to go through the transwarp hub and damn the consequences. Like Ambassador Spock in Star Trek (2009), she intends to stick around and use her advanced knowledge to help the Federation fight the Borg when they turn up to object to the trespass. Captain Janeway’s intransigence on this point, the fact that even Harry refuses to get home at any cost, is what leads her to a new plan — one where she offers herself up to the Borg as bait, only to destroy them from within.
I’m not gonna lie, I’m kind of sad that we don’t end up with a Two Janeway Scenario. (One of the things I like about the Kelvinverse films, which mostly don’t speak to me, is that they take big swings like destroying Vulcan and letting Spock move permanently to another timeline, and don’t walk them back.) But obviously the universe is too small for two Kathryns Janeway — especially when one of them has only recently been reminded of how ethics work.
I almost forgot! I do have another real complaint!
It slipped my mind because it’s almost a cliche at this point when people talk about “Endgame”, but — it’s over too soon.
Yes, “Mr Paris, take us home” is an iconic line on which to end the series. Buuuuuuuut maybe it could have simply ended the act? Fade to black, fade in, here’s a nice little montage of homecoming scenes?
You don’t even need to add big showcase effects, or to build new sets! Tom introduces B’Elanna and Miral to his father.1 Harry shakes hands with Reg Barclay. Various crew members are seen addressing a board of inquiry, culminating in their shaking Janeway’s hand and implicitly agreeing that we’re not going to ask too many questions about, for example, how the Hirogen ended up with holodeck technology. The main characters stand in the grounds of Starfleet Command, camera zooms out, look, it’s Earth! We’re really home! Now roll credits!
Alas, this was the era of terrestrial television and accordingly strict runtimes, and for some reason this episode decided to devote twelve or so minutes of screentime to Chakotay/Seven.
Other observations
- The “B’Elanna is in false labour/Tom is not awake enough to know what he’s doing” scene is almost obligatory, but we make up for it with the bit where B’Elanna, now actually in labour, sends him away to do his job because he’s more use as a pilot than a birthing partner. I’ve had a lot of complaints about how their relationship is written, but I appreciate that in this moment, B’Elanna was still tough, independent and forging her own path
- Garrett Wang’s first few lines as Captain Kim are SO flatly delivered that I have to ask why that take was even used. He’s much better in literally every other scene in every other time period.
- Star Trek‘s old age make-up in this era was nearly always terrible (remember that one episode which posited that Alexander Siddig would be decrepit by age 50?), so instead of dwelling on the bad (Tom, the odd padding around Dwight Schulz’s middle), I’m going to praise the good: Janeway and B’Elanna both look great, and not outrageously different from how Kate Mulgrew and Roxann Dawson look now. Kate’s weight has fluctuated since 2000, but I saw her at a con in 2023 and I was struck by how much her bearing now resembles the admiral version of Janeway, even if the details of her figure and hair are different.
- Having said that, the future uniforms are terrible. They’ve always been bad, but for some reason they seem especially ill-fitting and unflattering here. (To the point where I wonder if some were made for the TNG cast and reused with insufficient alterations.)
- The depiction of Tuvok’s illness is UNSPEAKABLY cliched, and worse, the portrayal of mental or neurological illness has developed so little since 2000 that we had the same vibe (locked in a hospital room, writing on the floor) in season 2 of Discovery.
- I can’t remember if this was a fan theory or confirmed by a Discovery writer, but I have this idea that the device Janeway steals from the Klingons is related to the time crystals of Boreth scene in season 2 of Discovery.
- And likewise, the attack on the Borg will effectively disable the whole Collective, leading to events in season 1 of Picard and Prodigy, but not season 3 of Picard, which is once again doing its own weird thing.
In conclusion
Should you watch this episode? Absolutely! Just maybe try to dissociate through the Chakotay/Seven scenes. Only three time crystals out of five, but you’ve come this far!
Anyway.
Guys, we did it! Every episode of Star Trek: Voyager! Blogged!
Uh. What do I do now?