Before & After/Year Of Hell relationship

[exodus]

Lord Manitou wrote:

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The problem was, and about the only thing that made the ep., is Annorax couldn't get back, he couldn't get home, he couldn't return. If at the end they show him working on it again, and with some foreknowledge, it only means Janeway solved that problem for him. In the years that follow he might be effected by what the time machine already did.

......or he just creates it again.
He said he created as weapon to use on a Krenium enemy.
Ep. ended with the Kernium still in dispute of territory.
We see him still working on the equation, he didn't learn his mistake because it was Janeway that figured out getting rid of the ship would fix everything..not him.
So what I saw was, just because he took a break with his wife, he still oneday would create that ship for the same reason.
He was doomed to repeat time.
He did believe time was punishing him.
Maybe Annorax' punishment for being Ahab is to live the punishment of Sisyfus?

[Guy Gardener]

There was no memory retention of events, so no one learnt anything.

Janeway was a *&^% to tell the other ships in her armada to turn off their temporal shields, and are we completely sure that they all did, because she was telling them to commit suicide to make way for temporal dopplegangers they didn't owe shit to.

Someone still had to stop Annorax in the revirginized timeline, and they were idiots if they didn't plan for him to reinvent the weapon.

[R. Star]

The episode was one huge push of the reset button with no consequences... again.

It's implied that a sunny day and a wife with a pretty smile at the very least slow down Annorax long enough for Voyager to pass through. Even that really doesn't make sense though. When Annorax has said he's been at it for hundreds of years, it's obvious the vessel hasn't been experiencing time as normal, and it's implicated they can move forward and backward somehow, since he's manipulating the same people and events over and over again trying to produce a better result.

So even if he was working on it while Voyager flew through and built it later, he's still fly it back to the "present" time setting of Year of Hell to start manipulating events as he wants them. And thus Voyager would be caught up in the mess, directly or not. And if destroying the timeship resets everything to how it happened before, why would his wife be changed to influence him not to finish the work as the ending implied?

[Guy Gardener]

The weapon existed outside of time (but could return to real space whenever it felt like it.) which is why they didn't change when the universe was changed, because they were outside the universe.

No one on the weapon got older since they were outside time.

(Bad fake science)

It's possible that some of the crew on the weapon who were too close to the core when it detonated were erased along with the raw materials of the weapon so that the new timeline wasn't completely like the virgin timeline before Annorax started played silly buggers.

[R. Star]

Yeah but even when they were "outside time" they were still setting courses and flying to other planets/places with a perceivable delay in getting there.

I guess for a real cynical take, you could argue that the disintegration of his girl's hair was her being erased from time even as the machine blew up, and the girl you see at the end is someone else he ends up with instead, that stops him from building it.

[Guy Gardener]

Not just anyone could have been Lady MacBeth.

[JirinPanthosa]

I'm going with my 'Before & After happened in the original unaffected timeline' theory. It helps me sleep at night.

My interpretation of the ending is that time had changed so the timeship never existed. Perhaps in this timeline, because it never existed, he failed to invent it.

Anyway, if Kes can move the ship 10,000 light years, why not 70,000?

[Guy Gardener]

From big bang (multiple big bangs) to entropy, every universe that we saw in Year of Hell took place beginning to end. Annorax was destroying future history as much as the past. Just because Captain Chakotay made it past Krenim space like a champion, it doesn't mean that Anorax was not yet about to destroy that future and replace it with another one.

After a universe normalized from a wrecking by the weapon, Annorax scans the universe past present and future to understand the state of the Empire and what he doesn't see is himself destroying time again in the relatively immediate future. the future must flow unto the end until it doesn't because as an agent outside of time he is not bound to any such continuity or predestination or paradoxes.

Although I do think that the before and After timeline is the base line original universe however, the krenim were using temporal torpedoes which means that they were on their way to inventing all sorted of time technology that could be as dangerous to every one as Annorax's weapon.

Although... Anroax would have noticed Kes and jumping about and had to deal with her since according to his book keeping Voyager was temporally inert and beneath their consideration.

[Anwar]

The thing is, I think that last scene with Annorax was supposed to be set during his lifetime. As in, it was back 200 years ago when he was aging normally and was just a scientist. We just didn't have a "200 years ago" caption at the bottom of the screen to say so.

[Guy Gardener]

Yes Annorax had been on the weapon for 200 years out side time not ageing.

But he was always trying to get his wife back.

Do you think that he just wanted her grave?

Or was the weapon constantly hovering over the year of hell for two hundred years?

It's a fricking time machine.

They can tell the passage of time to fuck off.

They drift for while (because the writers were morons.) so it seems they are caught up by linear time to the outside observer, and then course-correct (which must be a real big deal because we never saw them do it) and the weapon is back at January 2373, because Annorax doesn't want to get his wife back when she's an old lady.

[exodus]

Star Grinch wrote:

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The episode was one huge push of the reset button with no consequences... again.

It's implied that a sunny day and a wife with a pretty smile at the very least slow down Annorax long enough for Voyager to pass through. Even that really doesn't make sense though. When Annorax has said he's been at it for hundreds of years, it's obvious the vessel hasn't been experiencing time as normal, and it's implicated they can move forward and backward somehow, since he's manipulating the same people and events over and over again trying to produce a better result.

So even if he was working on it while Voyager flew through and built it later, he's still fly it back to the "present" time setting of Year of Hell to start manipulating events as he wants them. And thus Voyager would be caught up in the mess, directly or not. And if destroying the timeship resets everything to how it happened before, why would his wife be changed to influence him not to finish the work as the ending implied?

I think that might have been the point, he can't see(just like with the time ship) that he is the factor that's causing the whole mess to begin with. It's a vicious time loop because literally is punishing him. No matter what delays there are, Annorax is still destine to build that ship. The only thing that would factor that out, is to erase himself from time.

[Guy Gardener]

But he didn't erase himself.

Here's the stinker.

If he got the wife back, she'd be married to another Annorax already native to this freashly created new universe and old Annorax from out side of time would have to get rid of himself "somehow" or set up some sort of timeshare solution.

And really after 200 hundred years how could he be anything close to the man she fell in love with? And after 200 hundred years how could he see her as anything less than a child once all the ressurectiongoogles have been lifted off?

[Anwar]

Yeah, it was kind of a mad quest after a while.

He didn't erase himself, the core of the time-ship got erased. The weapon that started the mess got erased and thus Annorax himself was now restored to his original self.

Works out.

[Guy Gardener]

If the core was made out of stuff so unique to that part of the galaxy that it wasn't replaceable in his life time, Anorax would no longer be a temporal physicist and suddenly become a theoretical temporal physicist

[exodus]

Guy Gardener wrote:

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But he didn't erase himself.

You can't erase yourself.
Too erase yourself, you had to exist.
If you erased yourself, then who was the you erasing you if you don't exist? ..but it's true.

The only way to fix it is,if someone else from the future went back in time a killed Annorax as a child or any point before the idea of the time equation was created.

Guy Gardener wrote:

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If the core was made out of stuff so unique to that part of the galaxy that it wasn't replaceable in his life time, Anorax would no longer be a temporal physicist and suddenly become a theoretical temporal physicist

Wouldn't the equation be more dangerous?
Annorax shared his idea with others in the Krenium science and military depts.
Even if the Krenium didn't have the resources to create the ship, what happens if by chance that knowledge just happened to fall into the hands the Borg or the other planet the Krenium are in dispute with?
Now everybody has the idea.......and maybe the means.