It wouldn’t be Star Trek without a time travel paradox. The various Star Trek shows have taken heat for too often falling back on time travel as a plot device. Intellectually, I might agree with this criticism. And perhaps it does not bode well that Voyager is breaking out a time travel plot exactly three episodes into the series. But I always try to listen to what my heart tells me, and what my heart tells me is that time travel paradoxes are awesome. So let’s get started.
Oh, before I forget: you should probably consider all of these episode recaps to have a “spoiler” warning attached.
Plot synopsis: Voyager encounters a planet that has very recently been wiped clean of life due to a massive detonation of nuclear polaric energy. When the bridge crew sensibly immediately beams down to check out the death planet, Janeway and Paris are transported one day back in time, to the final hours before the civilization-ending catastrophe takes place. Will they find a way to prevent the disaster and travel back to their own time? Or will Voyager come to a tragic end three episodes into its first season?
It turns out that this civilization was destroyed because polaric energy is actually super dangerous, and yet it was being used to power the entire planet. This made me initially take this episode for a morality tale about the perils of nuclear energy (Star Trek is known for its subtle social messages), but later in the episode, Janeway and Paris encounter a band of (thoroughly unconvincing) anti-polaric energy protestors/terrorists who shoot children, muddling the moral message. So I’m not sure what this episode is saying, beyond that powering your George Foreman Grill with the equivalent of liquid hydrogen is a poor idea.
Kes has psionic powers: Kes (whose psychic powers have been mentioned briefly before) plays a minor, and weirdly ineffectual, role in this episode. She senses the death of the planet when it first occurs (Obi-Wan Kenobi style), and later uses some form of telepathy to contact Janeway and Paris through space-time. Telepathy is not new to Star Trek, but this episode reminds me why I generally don’t like psychic powers as they are used in science fiction shows: the exact nature of the psychic power is left deliberately vague and employed largely as a lazy means of involving characters in a plot that they would otherwise have no business participating in. In this case, Kes tags along with the away team that is trying to rescue Janeway and Paris; but not much comes of it and the episode is resolved without her. This isn’t terrible—I imagine this is just an early precursor to the development of Kes’ psychic powers later in the show—but we’ll just have to see where they go with this.
The time travel paradox: the big reveal at the end of the episode is that Voyager itself has caused the polaric detonation, even though it arrived at the planet after the detonation occurred. (The effect-preceding-cause paradox was mentioned in “Parallax” as well.) Twelve Monkeys it ain’t, but I’m a sucker for this sort of thing, so I liked it. Sue me. Janeway and Paris get most of the meaningful screen time, and I continue to find Janeway appealingly direct. Sue me for that too.
The Prime Directive: Oh, the damn Prime Directive. Sure guarantor of instant moral dilemmas, the Prime Directive is invoked here by Janeway to explain why she does not intend to intervene to save an entire civilization from being wiped out by a preventable disaster. Look, we all get the concept behind the Prime Directive. But at some point, somebody back at the Federation should probably take notice of the fact that attempting to strictly adhere to it turns you into Space Hitler.
Also, there is the matter that exactly two episodes earlier, Janeway happily jettisoned the Prime Directive to save a much smaller civilization from a much less serious threat.
The away team: while Janeway and Paris are stuck in the past, the present-tense Voyager crew works hard to try and rescue them. I’ll confess that with all the technobabble involved, I never understood exactly what they were trying to do or how it was supposed to work. This sequence highlights another learn-to-love-it-or-it-will-drive-you-crazy element of Star Trek: characters in the show routinely make incredible technological breakthroughs (in this case, opening a time-travel portal to the past with a few hours’ work and some random parts that were laying around the starship) that would utterly change all life as we know it were anybody were to ever remember how it was done after the episode ended.
How long would you wait: “Time and Again” opens and closes with a short but welcome reference to Voyager‘s lost-in-space plight. Paris pressures Harry to go out on a double date with him and two of Voyager’s lovely ladies, but Harry hesitates and reveals that he’s got a girl back home. No revolutionary dialogue or acting here, but this is a matter that every person on Voyager should be considering: will my loved ones back home wait for me? Will they assume I’m dead and move on with life? Will my spouse remarry? Should I try to start a family here on Voyager? Will I raise my children within the walls of this ship? This scene treats the matter light-heartedly, but I hope we’ll see characters wrestling with these questions as the series goes on.
Final verdict: Time travel paradoxes are always fun, but there’s a lot of mediocre in this episode. I can’t get too excited about this one, nor is there anything to get especially riled up about.
Grade: Episode quality is proving too uneven to make it easy to assign a letter grade. So I’ll stick with just the written verdict for now.