Endgame

i was a little confused about the finale, how did Voyager get inside the Borg sphere at the end? Did they ever explain that?

 

It flew through the wreckage of the Borg sphere.

 

Really? I always had the impression that Voyager deliberately got "swallowed" by the Borg sphere in order to be able to withstand the extreme pressure from the transwarp conduit, and afterwards they used the weapons which Admiral Janeway had brought back to destroy the sphere from inside.

 

I thought it was “Riding in the wake” of some technobabbly sort,

 

The Borg ship was tractor beaming Voyager, they let themselves go inside, then blew up the sphere from the inside with a magical future torpedo.

 

It does get a little confusing. Janeway tells Paris to adjust the heading. That makes you think they've got into another conduit. But I think it's obviously blown up from the inside.

 

It was intentional misdirection, to make viewers thing they'd end up in the Delta Quadrant again.

 

But why would that Borg sphere swallow Voyager in the first place and travel to the Alpha Quadrant?

Sure, it contains future technology, and they perhaps they don't want to run the risk of loosing that by Voyager being destroyed by the exploding transwarp network around them. However, even though their armor is almost down they're still armed with those deadly transwarp torpedoes that can obliterate them with a single shot and if they do get home (as they indeed do), the sequence of events will start again .... making the Federation end up with future tech and the Borg crippled .... perhaps the safer bet for the Borg would have been to destroy/disable Voyager first after all ...

 

They didn't plan for that scenario. Out of character for the Borg. Then again, a time-traveling Janeway is out of character for the timeline too.

 

Well... Braxton suffered under what he called 'the Janeway Factor' so apparently it wasn't that out of character, even though Janeway herself loathed temporal paradoxes ....