Janeway had a rather pleasant chat with a Krenim scientist who Seven of Nine had eaten, about temporal physics in "Infinite Regress". It might not have been Anorax, but it did mean that the Borg were assimilating their way up that food chain until they acquired that technology.
It wasn't lazy writing Christopher, because enough care was taken to leave the temporal variance of the torpedo in both stories exactly the same. They just didn't know at that point that TPTB were going to fire Jennifer. DAMN YOU GQ MAGAZINE FOR MEN!!!!
The Krenim said they had been altering time for 200 years(while temporally orbiting a fixedish point in time probably because Annorax wouldn't have wanted to restore the empire to find that his wife had died of old age, because either no one "aged" on board his timeship weapon, or they all had incredibly long life spans.), which means the universe had been altered thousands of times between what we knew before this episode started and the first timeline we saw in the course of Year of Hell. The first time all this played out, which we didn’t see, she knew all about the Krenin from Kes' report, but not about Anorax, who would have altered time again and again until those clues from "Before and After" vanished, but once Before and After was an impossible foot note in history gone by, it’d have been unlikely that that story could have come back into play if those events were contingent on something Annorax removed from the timeline.
In fact, knowing the temporal variance of the Krenim Torpedoes, and how to fight them, and not to fight them AT ALL beforehand defangs the Krenim to such an ultimate degree that Voyager would have blown through (or around) Krenim space effortless in as little time as possible never ever having come into conflict with Annorax whatsoever, who would have spun time on it’s ass and forced Janeway into a do-over rematch again and again until our story begun in Year of Hell.
Christopher said
For one thing, if Kes stayed with the ship in the original timeline, that means she never evolved into a higher being and never pushed Voyager 10,000 light-years forward. That means that in "The Gift," Kes should've jumped Voyager clear over Krenim space and the Year of Hell should never have happened at all.
Unless they found a Wormhole? Bargained for new technology? Or we were dealing with different edges of the Vast Krenim Empire which if it is any indication from Infinite Regress is mostly owned by the Borg now? Considering Equinox caught up, it's safe to say that travelling though space is much like playing snakes and ladders on a cosmic scale.
Exodus says
The way I see it because time is linear, "B&A" never happened and was erased from time. All sci-fi has one rule about time travel events-*the future isn't written in stone*. Any deviation and that future becomes altered or non-existant. Kes meeting 8472 changes everything she's learned and makes it null and void.
(God help me, I'm trying to say something new. Dance of Death or Circle of Life?)
You seem to subscribe to the branch theories of infinite/multiple universes where new timelines can be inspired by "choices" made by people from a grassroots level midstream which can change these peoples destiny without being acted upon by an outside force, and in the case of Futures End, that would be a fair assessment because Chakotay just changes his mind for no reason whatsoever fracking up a predestination paradox, that is if you remember that the diverged time lines in that case in conflict were not destroyed but just running in parallel because young Braxton at the end possessed the technology to scan alternate timelines, that the destruction of another sol system in an alternate future still occurred to provoke the actions in that episode despite sol surviving in the eventual outcome of Futures End... But the writers are insane(Lazy is suggesting "they" don't know "they" contradict themselves ALL the time, it's more than possible they enjoy the muddle.), and there is no universal understanding of Time in Voyager, every episode depending on the writer and how they are feeling alters many universal constants. The whole point of Year of Hell was that time could only be altered through external forces to the seemingly closed system of the universe. They changed time, then the Krenim took readings about the what was (and what was going to happen?) to decide if the time line was favourable. From Annorax's perspective time was a series of predictable dominoes falling one after the other, y'know after he'd tipped the first one, totally taking into account all the free will from everyone in the universe that the future is as set in stone as history until they decide to change it again. Although, Anorax and his crew, and his ships records/logs remember/catalog every temporal incursion they made and the basic history of those altered timelines, including the Before and After timeline, so those events may have been erased from Time by Annorax, but Annorax is outside of time and has as much understanding of those events as he couldn’t been bothered to have since at the time they probably didn’t bare any relevance to the issue of getting his wife back, so Before and After did happen even though it was erased.
Coming at this backwards… Before and After may have happened because of changes made to the timeline by Anorax? So that after Janeway topped him, that story became impossible? Which would explain why Janeway didn’t know who the Krenim were after Annorax and his weapon were removed for the equation as we supposedly returned to the natural timeline. Although I still think bringing First Contact into the math makes everything make sense, despite that I do not for a second think that the “writers” would bother to go that far in explaining such a minor inconsistency while writing Year of Hell, that Species 8472 only came into play because the Queen sent herself a message in 2063, which is an outside force acting on established events like how Anorax changes time. Kes just meeting 8473 would not change time. She was destined to meet them. Had been forever destined to meet them, and destiny knew it, and destiny would not be blindsided or surprised and wait till the last minute to start erasing episodes ust because destiny was fulfilled. It’s just a question of what changed time from whence that Kes was more destined to become a mad god than Tom’s brood cow? How long had the War with Species 8472 been going on? Possibly years, from before Kes was even born, if I remember the extent of the casualty reports? Species 8472 had always been between Kes and Earth since
this became the timeline after all the fiddling with time mounted up to these stories even (if the fiddling happened after the point?) we’d come to be watching… Not that everything before Fury is a redundant timeline anyway.
Exodus says
Everything hindges on Kes being exposed to the torpedos radiation inorder for her to time jump in the first place. Kes was exposed to the radiation going backwards, not forwards. For the events in "B&A" to happen as we saw them, Kes would have to be re-exposed to the kronoton radition in linear time.
You mean if she hadn’t tuned into a god and if she hadn’t left Voyager, and if she hadn’t started shagging Tom, and if Seven of Nine hadn’t joined the crew… Not sure where the Tom shagging fits into this, but she’s not supposed to be fertile till she’s 3 according to ellouguim, so goodness knows when in the BaA:Year of Hell respective to the YohYear of Hell if the dates over lapped precisely, that she actually gave birth to Miral… But that’s a lot of stuff that also makes Before and After impossible well before she didn’t sock up some Chronoton radiation and live a long and heathy life as a Doctor on Voyager. That’s a lot of unlept hurdles between Kes and the finish line.
Exodus says
Being that she encounters Species 8472 first and causes her to leave Voyager, thus never being exposed to the radiation at all . That's when "B&A" and everything she knew becomes erased from time. It also explains why in both timelines Janeway nor Tuvok remember Kes telling them to avoid the Krenium. Without being exposed, she never experanced the "Year of Hell". So no record of her experances exists.
She encountered the radiation in a redundant timeline. At the end of Before and After, in the so called present, she’s “caught” in a biotemporal chamber travelling back to her death rubber band snapbacking from being a tiny fetus, where the Doctor removed the last of Chronoton radiation from her, after which she was already living in a divergent timeline where most everything that had happened in before and after was already impossible to play out in the current timeline’s new future history because of all her pesky foreknowledge. Of course time was altered after that making a relationship between “Before and After” and “Year of Hell” convoluted and impossible only because Janeway forgot about Kes’ “report on the Krenim” which she gave to Tuvok and Janeway might not even have read, but a relationship between “Before and After” and “Scorpion” is just about factual that there is no reason to believe that “Before and After” had at that point already been removed from continuity at the point that Scorpion was written and produced.
Exodus says
It hinges on where the Timeship was and how far the time shock wave reached before it dissipated. Anything after or beyond that that dissipation shouldn't be affected.
It never struck me as healthy that the causality ripple could just “dissipate” as if the there was a line in space, maybe half way through a world that there are two different histories on either side of some division marker, god forbid that the breaker ripple doesn’t keep collapsing on different sections of that same planet (Empire seems more likely.) that it wouldn’t end up looking like that Chakotay episode in the seventh season, which was just ridiculous. I’d have thought of it as more like a snowball going down hill.
Christopher said
That's incorrect. Her backward jumps relived things that had happened to her the first time around going forward, aside from the changes she made by her own actions. She was exposed to the chroniton radiation the first time around. This was explicitly stated in dialogue. That's how she knew to scan for the torpedo's signature -- because she'd been told earlier in the episode/later in her life that she had been exposed the first time around.
Now this is what I considered to be lazy writing. The crew should’ve already knew what was going on with her because of the next several jaunts she had not yet taken into her own past had already been occasions at which she had told them what was up. Although that Kes had no memories might have been suggesting that she had no past until she made it, which is almost a poetic explanation of the situation. But as soon as she started travelling forward again, they were up to speed… What if other people who have been exposed to the chronoton radiation hopped into the biotemporal chamber? It’s not a very good time machine, but it is a time machine.
Christopher says
There is only one explanation for Janeway's unfamiliarity with the Krenim in "Year of Hell": The writers were lazy.
I prefer to think of it as that the writers of Voyager (all 100 of them, I counted once. It was around that.) have
no faith in their audience to grasp conceptually strange imaginary science or extended crosstime multy season spanning continuity, so them dumb it down for “all of us” while keeping the Borg boobies fully stocked and squashed up against the camera lense. Really it is the opposite of Laziness some of these writers have gone to, to make sure 10 year old children, stoners and High School Gym Teachers do not find their thinking meat over taxed by half.
exodus seyz
Dude, there is no correct or incorrect in this.
There was nothing mysterious about the relationships between these episodes. I can see what I see, and I can see what you you see, and I’m not saying I’m right, because my answer is wiggy and (*&^ed up, but there most certainly is an answer to how these stories interconnect whatever it may be, but I can be sure of this much though, if Brannon told us what he thought happened, what he thought he expressing clearly in his writing of Year of Hell, we’d probably find it difficult not to punch him in the nose.
And Jennifer so pretty and well spoken and gosh she's just so dreamy.
I would have loved seeing Paris' reaction to the proposal. I think an old-fashioned wrench and a corridor chase were probably in order.
