Starfleet must have been thrilled when technology from 2404 arrived on their doorstep. Unless...
Unless, the department of temporal integrity turned up seconds after the credits roll and took Voyager back.
That's why we never saw the homecoming. It all makes sense now. They were instantly taken back .
Maybe, since it was found along with other Delta Quadrant technologies, the 25th century tech could be lumped in as acquired DQ technology.
Please, don't forget about the 29th century, as in one, very significant and valuable item known as a mobile emitter.
It didn't appear to be a choice made by the Sphere. Rather, Janeway told Paris to "adjust [his/their] heading". The audience was at first supposed to think she wanted the ship to veer off and be stranded in the Delta Quadrant again. But this wasn't it: instead, Paris piloted the ship through some other maneuver. And apparently this was a maneuver that took the ship inside the Sphere, no doubt against the will of the Borg.
Sure, the Borg were using a tractor beam. But they regularly use that when they destroy ships; it's not a sign of them trying to haul in, or even to board. No maneuvering would have been needed if the Sphere were actively pulling them inside with that tractor. Yet Tom was told to maneuver. Ergo, problem eliminated, concern voided, issue solved... It was Janeway's decision, not that of the Collective.
Timo Saloniemi
Thank you very much for the perspective. I don't think I ever intuited the intention of that order, but as you're suggesting, it amounted to some verbal legerdemain, at least to viewers as myself who are often unable to render just a slightly altered version of 1 +1 =2. Again, please accept my appreciation!!!
I finding it somehow bracing, it sometimes rather disorienting, at how some very adept members of the community can instantaneously hijack or transmute a thread, so that a mere two or three posts later, it is totally unrecognizable. Kudos to you of fertile imaginations, voluminous knowledge of related? cultural touchstones, and the gumption to make over a conversation in your own creative vision!!!!!
I guess.
I've sometimes thought about how appropriate it might have been for the voyage's successful conclusion to be as the result of an action, likely self-sacrificial, taken by Kes. To bring the story full circle and have Janeway's decision and the concomitant stranding to a highly uncertain destiny,
not turn into a debt that could never be repaid. But unfortunately, there was too much that would have argued against such a concept. First, Kes had already worked her magic to significantly help Voyager. To repeat using her as a deus ex machina, would inevitably be seen as repetitive, even if the scenario built for her salvation of the ship, involved an inevitably existential struggle with the Borg, who I'm sure had to be seen as being an integral element in this final chapter. It would probably inspire complaints asking simply why she couldn't have pulled off the full job in the first instance, to which I think it could be reasonably answered that at that initial point of her transformation, she didn't yet quite possess such a capability. Secondly, given the state that Kes was left in as she departed for Ocamapa at the end of Fury, would not seem to augur for her necessarily having the constitution or drive to carry off such a final heroic act. It's just hard to see her at that point as the insuperable being coming into the full fruition of her powers as was the situation when she left the show in the Gift. Lastly, I just don't think that TPTB would cede the role of the critical player or difference maker in a series ender to a character that, regrettable as it was, never was allowed to evolve beyond a minor character, however intuitively appropriate such a closing might be reasoned to represent.
Indeed, I think that if Voyager's ultimate fate was to be able to get home, the agent of that feat almost would have to be either Janeway or Seven, the former as the leader who guided the crew safely to that point, despite innumerable threats and wild cards, and the latter, whose transformation and redemption became such an integral focus of the series in its last four seasons. The fact that time travel, always a seductively high fructose sweetener was contrived to be worked into the mix along with the Borg, of course, so prominent in the plot, made the execution of the finale as it was carried out, much more plausibly attractive and inevitable, than a risky, even if potentially more moving and evocative concept might have proved.
