In Time and Again, the search team finds Janeway's and Paris' combadges and notes that the combadges were caught in the explosion. This implies that there must be (or have been) some reality in which Janeway and Paris are present before the explosion but do not prevent it. What's the story of the Janeway and Paris who are there before the explosion but don't prevent it? At what point does it diverge from the pre-explosion story we see? And how?
We see see future fade away. Literally turn to smoke and wisp away. There are not two time lines or any sort of pollination. The future rewrote itself. but the rewrite did not extend into the past before the schism which jostled continuity into a completely new shape. Which is why the Janeway was... Wait? Janeway faded too? But all the knock on secondary effects of her life 2 days in the past still existed? Hmmm? (The time laws for trek are inconsistent. Just roll with it.)
I don't know if you're thinking of it "right". The episode seems to depict a closed-loop of cause-and-effect. There were no versions of Janeway and Paris that did not prevent the disaster. 1. Voyager stumbles over a ruined planet; Janeway and Paris land an investigate. 2. Janeway and Paris are thrown back in time to before the planet was destroyed. 3. Chakotay et al. try to rescue Janeway and Paris from the past. Their "bore hole" through subspace caused the disaster (it made the big boom when it destroyed a power plant, I think). 4. Janeway prevents the rescue, thus preventing the explosion and thereby preventing them from being thrown back in time, and therefore not needing rescue in the first place. "This time" (the only time from their perspective, really), Voyager flies by the planet without stopping. The timeline where Janeway and Paris are in the past is "self-destructive", I guess. It existed, but left no evidence of its existence. Frankly, having the first two episodes of VOY deal with time and space anomalies was a bad idea, in my opinion. This episode was a giant reset button. We saw the characters, got to know them a little better, but there was no character growth, because nothing happened in the episode, as far as the characters are concerned.
Then how did the planet blow up? (I just put my dvd into the machine.) That world only blew up because Janeway blew it up, and she did that at least once. There was a loop which iterated, although not fixed identically, many, many times until enough of a difference took place that finally Janeway did not destroy that planet.
You could make that same argument about "Year of Hell" as well, but that's still usually recognized as a good VOY episode.
A good episode by VOY standards perhaps, but the resolution of YOH is pretty stupid. Destroying the time ship prevents its invention? How is that supposed to work?
It only worked because the weapon was inside time with no temporal shields. But you're right because of the entire existence of this penultimate timeline, the weapon had been outside time, it's removal from time shouldn't done jack to the timeline becuase the weapon had only attacked the previous impression of the universe which was no longer connected to this new universe... Unless all the so called destoyed universes were still alive and intimately connected.
The ending is ambiguous, but it leaves the impression that destruction of the timeship didn't restore the original timeline, but somehow created a new timeline in which Annorax decides to spend more time with his wife instead of mucking around with temporal incursions in the first place.
The time ship wasn't destroyed. The raw resources used to make the time ship were removed from existence. Some of the fake science used to make the weapon could have been incredibly rare which might have made building the weapon impossible or just added months to the construction timetable. Later we discover that a Krenim scientist is inside Seven's brain. "Krenimia"(???????) seems to have been assimilated before Anorax built the weapon even if that temporal scientist Janeway was talking to wasn't Annorax. Meh?
The whole scenario in "Time And Again" is hard to explain and I haven't found any good explanation to the enigma. However, this episode is one of my Top 10 Voyager favorites.
It's your girl. Kes. Every time the entire population of that planet dies, their death knoll gets a little louder due to compounded shock and dread. Her telepathic sensitivity to time forced the little Ocampan to remedy what was going on and... In TNG Cause and Effect, all the mundanes, hell even Data began to notice they were in a loop after a couple weeks. It's a build up of psychic residue. If Kes hadn't been there, or her "powers" sucked, then she wouldn't have... Although without Kes, they never would have mounted an effective rescue when they did and where they did. Since it was the rescue attempt which blew up the power plant. "Sigh"
It was implied in Year of Hell that all the damage done by the time ship was reversed. The thing about Star Trek time travel is, they just do whatever they want to do and don't worry about the logic of it. Heck, with Relativity and Fury Janeway knew every single important thing that happened to Voyager for the first few years and yet it didn't impact her decision process at all somehow. Time and Again started out as a predestination paradox, then Janeway was able to prevent the loop from completing because she used the knowledge that it was a predestination paradox to avert the causal event.
If destroying the weapon, reversed what happened in all the previous universes, then destroying the planets they destroyed would have been already destroyed those planets in all the previous universes already. Unless there's a domino knock on effect which pushed through the creation of each new universe, and then into the next and the next and the next and... Like a reverse Galactus.
Future's End does the same thing. Braxton diagrams the predestination paradox and explains that A leads to B leads to C leads to A, but we see C lead to not-A. How does C lead to both A and not-A? When and how do the C-leads-to-A and C-leads-to-not-A stories diverge?
Young Braxton that shows up at the end says that they have the technology to scan through alternate time lines, which is something grampaBraxton couldn't do. Young Braxton also thought that Janeway had a destiny meanwhile Grampa Braxton thought that she was an asshole. The simple answer is the Doctor's 29th century mobile emitter kickstarted a lot of inovation that didn't happen when it was blown apart into a billion pieces as Voyager crashed into the 29th century.
I like comedy and am a sentimental mushball most of the time, so I like Future's End because: 1) Sarah Silverman! She was adorable flirting with Tom! As much as I love the Paris/Torres 'ship, I think Silverman and McNeil had great chemistry. 2) Ed Begley Jr. I love him as the evil egomaniac! 3) Tom and Tuvok's banter with each other and... again, Sarah Silverman. 4) The Doc's mobile emitter is discovered and taken. The most prized object ever given to him. It brought him so much joy and made for great EMH episodes later on. 5) You get to see how much Tom ACTUALLY knows about 20th Century culture. It's good, but not as perfect as he thought. 6) They finally were on Earth again. Right place, wrong time. As for the time travel madness... I will abide by Janeway's philosophy.. "Time travel. Since my first day on the job as a Starfleet captain I swore I'd never let myself get caught in one of these godforsaken paradoxes - the future is the past, the past is the future, it all gives me a headache."
Janeway was such a nimrod, forgetting that she couldn't go into stasis for 300 years or time travel forward by her self with KNOWN Technology. She slingshots around th sun, arrives in the wrong future, slingshots back to 1996 to find out how they fucked up the timeline. That's five minutes I would have been much more happy with than the show down with the survivalists.