| "Timeless" | |||
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| Star Trek: Voyager episode | |||
Voyager crashed here long ago |
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| Episode no. | Season 5 Episode 6 |
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| Directed by | LeVar Burton | ||
| Written by | Rick Berman Brannon Braga Joe Menosky |
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| Production code | 201 | ||
| Original air date | November 18, 1998 | ||
| Guest stars | |||
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LeVar Burton as Captain Geordi La Forge |
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| Episode chronology | |||
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| List of Star Trek: Voyager episodes | |||
"Timeless", the sixth episode of the fifth season of Star Trek: Voyager, was also the series' 100th episode. It has an average fan rating of 4.7/5 on the official Star Trek website as of September, 2009.
The episode was directed by LeVar Burton, who also featured in a cameo appearance as his Star Trek: The Next Generation character Geordi La Forge, along with complete restoration of his eyesight.
The episode begins with a "cold opening" on a frigid windswept planet. Two figures wearing survival gear beam onto the scene and search until they discover what they are looking for: Voyager, buried beneath the ice.
The episode also marks an important turning point among the series when Janeway notes in her personal log the changing perspective of their journey home: it's no longer "if" the crew will ever return to Earth, but "when."
The Voyager crew is about to experiment with a new form of faster-than-light drive: the quantum slipstream. If successful, the trip back to home space would be accomplished in hours, rather than years. However, simulations show that the slipstream is unstable and would tear Voyager apart. As many of the components of the slipstream drive are perishable, waiting is no longer an option. It is decided that the Delta Flyer, flown by Chakotay and Kim, would fly ahead of Voyager in the slipstream and send course corrections back to the ship. The slipstream experiment fails; Kim and Chakotay are propelled to Earth in the Flyer, but Voyager, presumably unable to maintain the burst due to its greater mass, crash-lands on an ice planet just a few parsecs from the Alpha Quadrant, killing everyone onboard instantly.
In the future, Kim and Chakotay become obsessed with finding a way to change the timeline so that the crew can live. After resigning from Starfleet and stealing the Delta Flyer from a Federation shipyard with the help of a woman named Tessa, they finally find the planet where Voyager crashed and enter the long-frozen starship. They succeed in reactivating the Doctor and track down Seven of Nine's body, intending to use her Borg implants to send a signal to the past. However, they are intercepted by the USS Challenger, a Galaxy class starship commanded by Captain Geordi La Forge. Starfleet officials realize what Kim and Chakotay are trying to do, and the Challenger has been sent to stop them from altering the timeline. They quickly attempt to alter the slipstream to allow Voyager to make it through, but fail. The future Kim reasons that the new course corrections must not have worked, as they're still trying to evade the Challenger, which manages to damage the Delta Flyer's warp core. Told of the impending core breach, at first Harry bitterly accepts his failure - but when the Doctor suggests that the link to the past be used to to safely take Voyager out of the slipstream rather than stay in it, Kim suddenly realizes that he still can save the ship, and rushes to make the calculations needed for this to occur. At the same time the temporal beacon they established begins losing power, so the Doctor gives up his mobile emitter, as it has a power source of its own. Just before the core breaches, killing him, Chakotay and Tessa, Harry triumphantly sends a message to the Seven of Nine of the past - with the instructions ("corrections") which she follows that intentionally shut down the slipstream, altering the timeline to one in which the experiment "fails" and the crew survives.
Afterwards, even though Captain Janeway slightly disappointed that the trip didn't work as planned, she consoles Harry, helping him feel that his attempt to get them home was not as disastrous as he feels. She notes that in their aborted slipstream hop, ten years are taken off Voyager's journey to the Alpha Quadrant. She also reveals that when Seven of Nine accessed her internal sensors to ascertain the nature of the transmission she received, she discovered a personal message which contained a Starfleet ID: Harry's ID. Janeway hands Harry a PADD and tells him that the message itself is to Harry Kim, from Harry Kim.
In the present, Kim watches a recording which the future Kim left for him. Harry's future actions have placed his timeline in a closed loop. It happened, yet the events that prompted the timeline have now been prevented. In a future episode, "Relativity", Starfleet officers from the 29th century, dedicated to protecting the flow of time, are said to have been left to clean up the "mess" caused by future Harry's message to his past self; they refer to it as 'the temporal inversion in the Takara sector'.
"Timeless" is generally highly regarded by Voyager fans.[1]
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