I'd have had a coda episode about them on Earth acclimating to life, meeting their loved ones again etc. "Endgame" itself was fine, IMHO.
It seems contradictory to me that you can say "Endgame" was fine as a finale but then say there should have been a coda... I imagine you mean it works fine as an episode but not-so-fine as a finale episode?
I guess so. Although I'm not sure the crew doing stuff on Earth is worth a whole episode. If only they had Short Treks in 2001.
I would have had Braga appear on screen as himself at Paramount studios and have the plot about how his brain was stolen for the last 7 years and that was the reason for the shitshow known as Voyager.
(I'm surprised to notice that, according to all crisis Voyager experienced before and during its airing, there was no "Behind the Scenes" made. For fans, it could have been interesting .
I would remove the time travel element, and have Seven sacrifice herself to kill the queen and borg, and get the ship into the wormhole. I would make it so only Seven could be a carrier of the borg disease. I would have it set some time after the penultimate episode, so instead of getting future technology, they have developed it on their own. I would not, however, change the last few minutes of the episode. I would have the closing credits more slowly fade to black, and use a different closing theme song this once.
Naomi Wildman is the Caretaker's Child. Seven of Nine is the Borg Queen. Chakotay is collecting WMDs to wreck the Cardassian Union. There's a mirror universe ditty, afterwhich there are the Delanney Quadruplets. Janeway has an affair with Harry Kim. Voyager uses it's 38th torpedo. Chell "cooks" B'Elanna's placenta for Tom.
1. Naomi. Nice plot twist. 2. Eww. Though their argument in Disease was kinda hot. 3.And Chell would call it: Utopia Placenta.
For the first proposition, it could have been completly possible though it would be after the death of the original Borg Queen. For the second proposition, I'd say . Plus, it could be quite incestuous from Harry's point of view, he who considers Janeway as a surrogate mother from the beginning of their journey in DQ! As for Janeway choosing to have an affair with Harry instead of Chakotay or even Tom, I'd say that she smoked a lot of carpet in her spare time ... unless she wanted to revisit the movie "The Graduate" to see what it was!
Let's assume that we have some rules otherwise we could disregard the whole script. Time travel will be a must. I think the biggest problems with Endgame were that a) it was essentially a remake of Timeless, and b) Janeway ended up being the biggest villain in Starfleet history because she destroyed a timeline for no reason other than her selfishness. She didn't like something, so she changed it. I'd want to remove the Janeway is a villain factor. So I would give her a REASON to time travel. The big problem was that the future that Janeway came from was perfectly fine. So I would borrow a bit from Yesterday's Enterprise and show a future where things are not fine. That the Borg have taken over the Alpha Quadrant, and the only hope to prevent this disaster was on Voyager, at the right stardate. Maybe it was something that Seven of Nine knew or a project she was working on, that was destroyed at this point in history, and could have stopped the Borg. With the help of Admiral Janeway, Voyager had to return home so the Federation could protect itself. No choice. This removes the Janeway is a villain factor, and distinguishes things from Timeless. The ethics are similar, but sometimes you have to cut off the arm to save the body. Playing God is wrong, but when all of humanity is destroyed or close to it, it really doesn't get much worse than that, and a species does have a right to survive. They can even have this conversation, but unlike what actually happened, Admiral Janeway will have a fair point, and Captain Janeway would see it and agree, as would the audience I believe. Of course it would end up with a similar battle, and Voyager would get home. Now whether the ship gets home or just the crew, that's another issue. Maybe the method of getting home would be a transporter that Barclay worked on. Or maybe it is the ship and something similar. However, I absolutely would consider an epilogue showing how the crew ended up after returning home. Maybe a time jump, but at least 5 or 10 minutes worth of post-getting home goodness.
[QUOTE="Kirk Prime, post: 12981685, member: 73917" The big problem was that the future that Janeway came from was perfectly fine.[/QUOTE] Fine for who? Voyager came back on Earth in hardly enviable conditions: surely less than half of the crew as we have known it & older/exhausted because of a new internal organization to offset the workstations left vacant. Of course, the most of them found a job at their return but can they really be happy after all these years in a world they know no more, with strangers all around and of course, a strong feeling full of regrets and bitterness?! I don't think so!
This is probably a stretch, but as a way of tying the series together, it might have been compelling if Janeway had time traveled not just to save Our Heroes, but to save the DQ itself from the expansion of the Borg, which in her future have assimilated the entire quadrant. Starfleet has essentially thrown the DQ under the bus in order to buy time to build their own Borg defenses (as shown!). The only problem with this idea is that so many of the DQ races seemed to be belligerent jerks that it might be a hard argument to swallow that anyone would feel like going back to try to help them was a worthwhile endeavor. But imagine if it was less "I want to save my family" and more "we wouldn't have survived without the races we encountered in the DQ, and I won't just let them be crushed under the Borg". More ambitious would be if Janeway had to work with some of those friendly (and assimilated in her future) races to save Our Heroes.
I always wondered if Voyager, the ship, would get 'home', but the crew alas, would not. The final shot being Admiral Paris, Barclay, et al on the bridge of Voyager, with Janeway and the senior staff on the view screen, as a final recording of explaining they had to leave the ship for it to get home and hoping one day with all the computer records and logs intact Starfleet will find a way to find them. And that's it, no explanation of why the crew had to leave the ship, where they went. It just 'had' to happen.
I don't think Janeway endangered the alpha quadrant by time traveling. If anything, she screwed over any members of her own crew who had gotten married in those intervening years of traveling... but I suppose it saved the lives of a bunch of others. She also destroyed a Borg highway that led straight to earth, so there's that. I don't really see Chakotay and Kim as villains either. The changes to the timeline from both episodes would have been very minor back in the Federation. If I rewrote the episode, I would simply remove the time travel element, have a final confrontation with the Borg, and have Seven sacrifice herself to get the crew into the transwarp thing.
I don't know if I would kill off anyone, but the same episode without the time travel element would be better because you are removing Janeway turning into such a big villain, which was so hypocritical given her rebuke of Chakotay and Kim because of what their future selves did in Timeless. And she didn't just screw over her own crew who had happy lives. What about the children they had that now won't be born? Or 137 people interacting with the Alpha Quadrant and how their encounters change the timeline. As a wise Vulcan said, "millions will die that did not die before." Mistakes happen.