Now, I get that Year Of Hell was originally going to be the season three cliffhanger, and was originally going to feature Kes. But what I don't get is why they completely forgot that Kes told them that a race called the Krenim terrorized them for a year. My feeling is probably that the events in Before & After represent what would have happened before the original Krenim alterations of the timeline, just because it's the only explanation I can think of besides 'Sloppy writing', and I prefer not to admit that explanation.
Nice effort with continuity, sloppy execution in regards to the details. An extra line mentioning the past warning Kes gave would've given a nod to Before and After's events and wouldn't require changing the rest of the plot in any way.
Would have been kind of cool if through the end of episode one, the Voyager crew didn't realize that the people that they were facing were in fact the Krenim. The revelation would have brought back Kes's warning. Janeway: "The Krenim? Why does that name sound familiar?" Kim: "Didn't Kes mention ... " Janeway: "Shut up Harry, I'm trying to remember something."
Every thing Kes experiences going backwards also has to happen exactly the same going forward. Any changes no matter how small, creates a new timeline.(isn't that how they also explain in in "Deja Vu" w/ Denzel Washington?) In "Before & After" the Doc says that Kes is jumping back in time due to her being exposed to the Kronoton radiation from the Krenium torpedoes, so Kes still needs to be on Voyager going forward to still be exposed to that radiation. The Doc clearly states that her exposure to it is from their past. So because Kes encounters Species 8472 and leaves Voyager BEFORE the YOH, she is now never exposed to the radiation that would have caused her to travel backwards in the first place. Which means everything BEFORE or AFTER that Kes tells the crew about the YOH and the Krenium become a whole new timeline.(If you're a fan of the Avergers comics, then you'll understand much of this due to the villain Kang. B&A and YOH are both stories adapted from that concept) Proof is, Seven taking Kes' place in YOH and discovering the torpedo frequency instead. If Kes actually had experienced all that, even if the crew forgot the computer wouldn't.....unless it never happened.
Trying to keep track of all of Voyager's time travel screw ups is a full time job. I'd have tried to blow up Voyager too if I was Braxton.
After Kes gets normalized and she's having a drink with the rest of the crew and Tuvok insists that he needs a full briefing on the Krenim. Too much foreknowledge about the Krenim allows Voyager to survive and sidestep the bog standard krenim without needing to invent Chronometric Shields. If Voyager didn't invent chronometric Shields Annorax changes the universe and rexperiences/reviews how the new universe eacts to the same days and weeks, he has always been obsessing on, even though his crew was out side time for 200 years (look it up) not ageing, and had changed time/space with their weapon hundreds or even thousands of times since they first delted Red's wife or Kes had her Before and After. Only in a timeline where Before and After never happened are Chronometric shields conceivable becuase Janeway would never become so desperate with such a tactical advantage against an all too well known foe to be so devious and invent the impossible. How are you reconciling Kid Kang/Ironlad into the Kang mythology Exodus?
That's the last inconsistency to bother me in the Year of Hell. I think it was a neat and feeling-inducing story, I liked the character backgrounds, the Krenim background and the aftermath, but the writers got too inventive and created a jumble that's trying hard to make sense and still doesn't quite do it. I still enjoyed it pretty much, and in the light of the much bigger Voyager issues including missed opportunities, arcs going nowhere or ending too soon, I think this was handled well with some technological details aside. (One might complain that it was also a missed arc opportunity, but with the just wasted Borg space potential and the rushed Seven of Nine development, the Krenim are pretty pretty low on the list of complaints.) Still... I have much less trouble with the fact that everyone would forget the warning by Kes (easy to believe) than the whole time travel tangle with that deus-ex machina ending on top (pretty much impossible to believe). And a nod to the show established history? Are you kidding me, Voyager doesn't do consistency. As soon as something is established, it tries best to run away from it as quick as possible.
That's not how time works in this episode. Annorax removes a species from existence. The universe changes. Space changes more than time, but space everywhen changes. Sitting "outside" of time watching the effect on the single non branching universe, his crew remains the only witness to the all the previous manifestations of the universe that were demolished by his process. That's how his tech worked, and that's how he thinks the universe works, he could be wrong, but his tech works, which either he's right about how the universe works or he's blundered through a series of fortunitous set of conincideces where his theories seemed to have panned out, despite being wrong.
Okay, when the timeship was destroyed by Voyager, why didn't time just continue forward from the last time change made? Where did the reset come from? And did everything single that was changed by the timeship reset back to "zero?"
The time-eraser weapon overloaded/backfired within the ship when it blew up and erased itself from time. So in the new timeline Annorax never was able to figure out how to get the thing to work (the equations were erased from time itself) and gave up on the project. So the Universe afterwards was what happened when Annorax never built the thing in the first place.
The time ship wasn't "destroyed" it was "removed from time". Every one on the ship should have been removed form time as well, but i suppose they if the ship was removed completely first, it wouldn't exist any more to remove the crew from time and they would have just popped in the supper vacuum of whatever passes for space outside of time. the idea of the ship wasn't destroyed. But the raw resources used to make the weapon, some of which would have been very very very rare, and the loss of which could have put off their time table by months, which gave Annorax's wife time enough to play hide the salami a few more times before the Borg assimilated the Krenim which we discoverd was the final fate of Annorax in what would become status quo for this time during Infinite Recess (And that he's inside Seven.).
So if they removed one hand gun from time, everyone would forget how to make handguns, or just the guy that personally made the hand gun that was removed?
At the end of the episode the whole thing just reset. No one remembering anything and there being no consequences killed it for me.
I recall an explanation of this which centred around Janeway's different hairstyles and ultimately said that the timeline changed. They did avoid any mention of Kes for the most part, though (and when they finally brought her back, everyone wished they hadn't...).