I want to talk about 'Endgame'

[Adm_Hawthorne]

Specifically, I want to talk about Admiral Janeway's reasoning for going back in time to the point she did. This has always bothered me. For many, many years I asked, "Why didn't she just go back to 'Caretaker' and stop the array from happening?"

Then, another thread in here slapped an idea on me that I had never considered before, and it got me to thinking that maybe I've misjudged my beloved Kathryn. (If you know me, you know how shocking this is. )

So, here's what I realized:

1. Admiral Janeway had nearly 4 decades to become incredibly close to her crew.
2. Admiral Janeway had ample opprotunity to contemplate every single opprotunity they had to get home that they missed.
3. Admiral Janeway had nearly 4 decades to grow a fine hatred of the Borg the likes of which Picard and Sisko could only dream.

Here's what I know if the Caretaker array episode had never happened:

1. Chakoty's crew would have been captured and arrested by the Federation.
2. The Maquis would more than likely have gone on fighting and been killed in the war along with the compatriots.
3. If Voyager's crew had not been thrown into the Delta Quadrant, they, too probably would have died in war; at the very least, most would have persished.
4. The Federation would never have gained all the informaiton they had on the Borg.
5. More than likely, Species 8472 would be slowly crawling through the Delta Quadrant destroying everything in it's path because of the Borg/8472 War
6. The Equinox would have continued on, and slaughtered an entire race of beings (or almost all of them) as it raced home.
7. 7 of 9 would never have existed.
8. Neelix would never have been introduced to Voyager, and, therefore, would never have found a home with other Talaxians.
9. Kes would never have ascended to a new higher plane of existance.
10. Tom Paris would never have redeemed himself and become the good person he turned out to be.
11. Janeway would have married Mark. (This may sound great, but he waited 4 years before marrying someone else. That means he found her, fell for her, and married her in less time than it took to become engaged to Kathryn. I'm following the Mosaic timeline here. He doens't really sound very devoted to me.)

So, maybe the reason Admiral Janeway picked the time and place she did was because:

1. It was a missed opprotunity they could take advantage of while also causing mass havoc to the Borg.
2. It saved the lives of the crew she'd come to know as family by keeping them out of the war.

I understand she lost crew members before this point. I mean, she lost a lot right when they hit the Delta Quadrant. But, she didn't spend 4 decades with those people either. Plus, I could see the appeal of trying to save people she cared that much about from being thrown into the Dominion War. At some point, after that many years isolated and surviving together as a cohesive unit, I can't imagine that Starfleet's needs would remain the top priority for anyone on Voyager.

What do the rest of you think?

 

[SpyOne]

Someone else here suggested this one to me, and it was the first one that made sense:
The point she chose, the first opportunity after Lt. Carey died, was chosen because it was the first time that the younger Janeway could be talked into it.

Janeway in Caretaker would have believed that violating the Temporal Prime Directive was wrong under any circumstances, and would have preferred to take her chances. But having seen Lt Carey die pointlessly on a simple little errand (and the first mission given by Starfleet Command in seven years) drove home that death is not always in service to a greater cause. Janeway was now in a frame of mind to be receptive to the idea of cutting a few corners to save lives, especially lives of people she cared deeply about.

I, too, had always wondered why Admiral Janeway had not chosen one of the earlier moments when they might have gotten home, and had felt that she must have felt that Seven was special somehow: she went to the last possible chance to do it before Seven died. I hadn't thought at all about the idea that it was necessary to pick a moment when Captain Janeway could be talked into going along with the plan.
Perhaps partly because I apparently missed Friendship One while watching Voyager that year.

 

[Adm_Hawthorne]

That's another good point. But, I think Janeway could have been talked into it when they had to pass through that void where there was nothing. I'm pretty sure she would have been super receptive to cutting the journey short by whatever means simply to alleviate her guilt at stranding them all there.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Any point after they Jumpstarted the computer revolution of the 1970s wouldn't have incalculably wrecked time.

Old janeway must have been using reverse psychology to get the kid version of her to be her flying monkey, because it should have been impossible to get that pwned by yourself unless you had a completely unrealistic self assessment of who you are on file in your noggin'.

There were plenty of easy ways home.

She waited till Chakotay and Seven were into one another.

there was no point in going back to save chuckle's heart if his heart was just going to fall in love with the wrong woman, possibly someone Janeway didn't like or approve of.

Then of course considering Miral was her stooge henchwoman in the future, it can't have been to promising for the girl to figure out that the crazy old lady wanted to fuck with time ON HER BIRTHDAY!

I can imagine Miral saying something "As long as I'm actually born, make sure I've gotten out of my mothers cooch before you actually change anything big. Thanks."

Miral should have been the first one to stop Admiral Janeway unless the method they were employing had no effect on the future they were living in and Admiral Janeway was just flarking about in a alternate and separate history which had no impact on her present like maybe an extraordinarily similar mirror universe.

 

[JanewayRulz!]

Stolen from my post in the "Friendship One" thread.

I think there was a reason for Admiral Janeway to show up just 2 or 3 days after they reached the nebula. She knew herself "enough" to try and limit the introspection her younger self would go through, to try and prevent Captain Janeway from doing exactly what she did. Find a reason not to simply hop into the Borg conduit and go home. She knew her former self enough that the younger woman would try and be the Starfleet HERO we expect all our Captains to be.

If the Admiral had gone back to year zero, and prevented Janeway from leaving Deep Space Nine, then Chakotay, Tuvok, B'Elanna et al would have been stranded in the DQ.

If the Admiral was able to return in year 2 to convince Janeway to trust Q in "Deathwish" and rule against suicidal Q then millions would have died on that planet from the Dreadnought torpedo. But it wouldn't end there, Seven would have remained BORG, and Icheb, Mezoti, Rebi and (?) Azan would have died alone on that BORG cube. Not to mention a little thing like species 8472 winning their battle against the BORG and sterilizing the galaxy of humanoid life. Ditto (everthing post Dreadnought) if the Admiral was able to convince Captain Janeway to ignore the Ferengi and hop into the migrating wormhole in year 3's "False Profits".

I don't think they had another creditable chance to get home until the begining of year 7, and that assumes that the resistance sphere in Unimatrix Zero could have transported them home. Of course, had they done that, then the nomadic Klingon tribe they ran across in "Prophecy" would have died since B'Elanna's fetus would not have been there to save them.

As Chakotay told the Romulan astrophysicist that first year, in "Eye of the Needle"...

TELEK: I can assure you, Captain, that I would not do anything that might contaminate the future and perhaps harm the Romulan Empire, but, in twenty years I could alert Starfleet not to launch the mission which sent you here.
CHAKOTAY: I’m afraid that’s not possible either. We’ve already had a huge impact on this quadrant. People and events here would be drastically affected.

In "Shattered", Chakotay told Janeway it would be "presumptuous" of her to change the timeline and affect everyone's future, but I suspect that argument wore thin the longer she was in the Delta Quadrant as more lives were needlessly lost.

(His argument itself was presumptuous, because he was arguing against Janeway doing the very thing he and Harry did in season 5's "Timeless". Change the past, and thus everyone's future.)

I pretty much stand by what I said previously, but I'd like to add the complexity Admiral Hawthorne added by reminding us how much closer Janeway must have come to the next 22 people who died under her command simply because she's known them even longer is interesting to contemplate.

 

[stj]

It's been a while since I've seen Endgame but first, the script decided that the cominbination galaxy spanning spaceship and time machine could make only one trip. (That's so that there would be obstacles to overcome.) Therefore she could only go back to times when there was a way home. The array was still too difficult to learn to operate before the Kazon could take over; the Q are never to be trusted; the Barzan wormhole was unstable; the new warp drive in Timeless was still too difficult to operate safely. But Janeway knew a lot about the Borg.

The only occasion when going back in time gave Admiral Janeway an opportunity to get Voyager back home was at the nebula hiding the Borg hub. I seem to remember Admiral Janeway fretting about the Borg catching on to her presence (detecting the Klingon superspaceship-cum-time machine.) The implication was that quick action was necessary to evade Borg comprehension of the threat from the future. And as it turned out, Admiral Janeway, meeting unexpected resistance from Captain Janeway, did indeed cut it too close. Saving Carey was never an option.

Of course, the episode arbitrarily set the parameters of the problem. But I don't think there is any error, so that they inadvertently wrote Janeway as indifferent to Carey's death.

 

[purplebic]

Setting the timeline elements aside...I thought the ending was awfully short. Absolutely no closure (no landing, no reuniting, nada).

 

[Evil Person]

You have to remember, back when voyager was around, you only got aloted so much time on the air, 2 hours was the best they could give, so voyager could not have been 2 hours, and a half, impossible, but i think the last one should have been a movie.

If the Kazon had captured voyager, in that timeline, and janeway diddnt know, and trnasported to voyager, why do you think would have happened

 

[Guy Gardener]

DS9 got a 16 part ongoing continuous soap style heavily plotted story arc.

Minus ads, that's over 10 and a 1/2 hours to wrap up everything that was going on (and they still needed more time if you ask me.).

Voyager spent 120 minutes saluting TNG's perfect enemy and rehashing a gutted version of TNG's final episode as well as one of their better time travel stories "Timeless" which had already done a perfectly good mimic of All Good Things... all the while vilifying their hero and leader by showing the certain eventuality that she would become a dark fiend with zero emotional reservation for committing chronounicide even if every thing turned out almost perfectly and happily ever after because... IT'S THE PRINCESS AND THE PEA!!! Janeway couldn't sleep though that pea despite twelve mattresses left to comfort our captain between her backside and the most minor of intolerable irritations... Remember Riker with that BEARD from TNG Parallels? "We Lost, it's all Borg, and we're not going back!!!" Now that was a man who should have slungshot around a sun to put right which once went wrong.

So don't you dare say that it was all about financial logistics Evil person.

What if Admiral Janeway travelled back to 2351ish, created some diversion (cou-torpedo-ough!) which sidelined Telek Rimor, and it was she who was waiting on the other side of the pinhole wormhole barely halfway into the first season in eye of the needle?

O.

Tuvok figured out the array.

it was the process of sending them home which was going to take a long time, not figuring out how the machine works. Going home was pushing a big "return" button. Janeway only needed the Caretaker to show them how to skip the health and safety checks, or some one to frakk the Kazon so that they could take the rest of the day low and breezy. And after the Val Jean rammed Jabin's capital ship, all the Kazon had left on the table was two shuttles to continue their assault. Supposedly Janeway was afraid of hypothetical reinforcements "suddenly" (which admiral Janeway would know was weeks or months away because Neelix knows that any Kazon who sends a distress signal is ASKING for every other Kazon to flock upon them in a feeding frenzy and assimilate their goods and personal into their own sect if their is even the mildest perception of "weakness".) or on the days when I think she has even a slither of goodness in her soul, Kathy just didn't want to kill them no matter how easy it was, how incredibly easy it was, because the Kazon were obviously a century or two behind her weapons technology. You know like how some people won't set traps and lay poison if theirs vermin in their house because killing is wrong?

Tuvix question.

Would Tuvix have gone batshit like Tuvok? As the most minor tweek compared to what was done, Admiral Janeway could have convinced captain Janeway to keep Tuvix around till they get home as a band aid to keep Tuvoks sanity in line surely? Safely split the two of them in the AQ where Tuvok could be properly looked after.

Did Neelix catch that space syphilis (cosmic clap?) off Tuvok from Flashback?

 

[Adm_Hawthorne]

What if Admiral Janeway travelled back to 2351ish, created some diversion (cou-torpedo-ough!) which sidelined Telek Rimor, and it was she who was waiting on the other side of the pinhole wormhole barely halfway into the first season in eye of the needle?

O.

Tuvok figured out the array.

it was the process of sending them home which was going to take a long time, not figuring out how the machine works. Going home was pushing a big "return" button. Janeway only needed the Caretaker to show them how to skip the health and safety checks, or some one to frakk the Kazon so that they could take the rest of the day low and breezy. And after the Val Jean rammed Jabin's capital ship, all the Kazon had left on the table was two shuttles to continue their assault. Supposedly Janeway was afraid of hypothetical reinforcements "suddenly" (which admiral Janeway would know was weeks or months away because Neelix knows that any Kazon who sends a distress signal is ASKING for every other Kazon to flock upon them in a feeding frenzy and assimilate their goods and personal into their own sect if their is even the mildest perception of "weakness".) or on the days when I think she has even a slither of goodness in her soul, Kathy just didn't want to kill them no matter how easy it was, how incredibly easy it was, because the Kazon were obviously a century or two behind her weapons technology. You know like how some people won't set traps and lay poison if theirs vermin in their house because killing is wrong?

Let's not rehash "Tuvix" here. It has it's own thread.

That doesn't really cover the idea that Janeway was trying to protect her crew from the War raging at home by leaving them in the Delta Quadrant for seven years before coming back in time to bring them home.

 

[Guy Gardener]

What if Admiral Janeway travelled back to 2351ish, created some diversion (cou-torpedo-ough!) which sidelined Telek Rimor, and it was she who was waiting on the other side of the pinhole wormhole barely halfway into the first season in eye of the needle?

O.

Tuvok figured out the array.

it was the process of sending them home which was going to take a long time, not figuring out how the machine works. Going home was pushing a big "return" button. Janeway only needed the Caretaker to show them how to skip the health and safety checks, or some one to frakk the Kazon so that they could take the rest of the day low and breezy. And after the Val Jean rammed Jabin's capital ship, all the Kazon had left on the table was two shuttles to continue their assault. Supposedly Janeway was afraid of hypothetical reinforcements "suddenly" (which admiral Janeway would know was weeks or months away because Neelix knows that any Kazon who sends a distress signal is ASKING for every other Kazon to flock upon them in a feeding frenzy and assimilate their goods and personal into their own sect if their is even the mildest perception of "weakness".) or on the days when I think she has even a slither of goodness in her soul, Kathy just didn't want to kill them no matter how easy it was, how incredibly easy it was, because the Kazon were obviously a century or two behind her weapons technology. You know like how some people won't set traps and lay poison if theirs vermin in their house because killing is wrong?

Let's not rehash "Tuvix" here. It has it's own thread.

That doesn't really cover the idea that Janeway was trying to protect her crew from the War raging at home by leaving them in the Delta Quadrant for seven years before coming back in time to bring them home.

And she couldn't have stopped the war?

Killing/diverting Sisko from finding the wormhole or collapsing the wormhole before the first ship ever set foot in the Delta quadrant... Hell, destroy the borg a thousand years earlier, so that jennifer Sisko is never killed during the Best of Both Worlds (and Anika is never captured as a child.) which means that Sisko would never be so depressed as to take a dead end job on Bajor.

Good god, she could have poisoned the great link in 2367 and it would have been all plain sailing, and no one would have been the wiser.

All that she did, she murdered almost 30 years of of good history to save barely 23 people from dying when the causality reports/statistical forecasts from that war we were hearing about on ds9 were totalling out into the hundreds of millions.

Janeway has the BEST priorities.

Janeway was Annorax a little bit, and if she hadn't died she would have been Annorax a lot.

 

[Adm_Hawthorne]

No one knows how the Borg came to be, and I would suspect that trying to kill them off wouldn't work very well without really knowing how they started.

Diverting Sisko from finding the Wormhole would keep ships out of the Delta Quadrant how?

Sisko's mental state... not really relevant to this thread...

Her end goal was Voyager, so taking out the great link would not have accomplished that. Furthermore, I return back to the idea that Admiral Janeway's priorities were, in fact, skewed due to the length of time in the Delta Quadrant and the close attachments she developed for her crew.

Annorax destroyed hundreds of worlds and thousands of civilizations to save one woman. I see the comparison, but I think it may be a bit extreme.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Sorry, my bad, frakking with Sisko would keep ships out of the Gamma Quadrant, which would mean that the founders were never angered and the war never began saving the lives of millions and millions and millions of people and it wouldn't have been so dangerous for Admiral Janeway to scoot her crew home earlier than after the close of the Dominion war. Hell Sisko would have been captain of the Saratoga soon enough, although considering his problems at the academy with that Vulcan it is surprising to remember that the captain of the Saratoga was a Vulcan too, which also means that his superior officer's "retirement party" might not be for another 2 centuries, so quite honestly if Sisko wanted to get his Admirality like Cal Hudson was harping on about he would have had to have left the Saratoga, but really Bajor was not going to help much for his accelerated command track he had in mind to sit behind a desk and be in charge of the big picture, and even then taking the worm hole out of the equation some how would have made DS9 a very different story.

 

[Kai Winn]

the idea to go back to caretaker had been dismissed earlier in season 7, in 'shattered'. bad idea anyway, to undo the entire show.

 

[Guy Gardener]

It was dismissed 6 years earlier in Eye of the Needle too.

During Shattered it was a question of the Math, not ethics which caused time to be reset to Chakotays "present in season 7. Hell, even the Borg agreed that resetting time to Chackotay's present would be best no matter what happened to them personally because the Borg are not evil, they just want to help everyone be the best they can be, and that's not a bad thing is it? To help people be better versions of themselves?

Did Eliza Doolittle fight the power much during her makeover?

ANYONE could have got them during Futures End. Captain Janeway could have travelled forward in time herself without begging for the trip back under Braxton's steam. No Borg tech or super spacedrive required for Admiral janeway either, just sling shot back to 1996 say hi, and remind them that the math to do this is so easy that if Spock could do it in his head, Kim could probably do it with paper and a pencil.

There is no reason that Janeway should not have aimed at the sun 12 seconds after she realized where and when they were in Futures End I, and she didn't need no one to hold her hand to get back either. Begging cravenly to Braxton for a tow towards the 24th century at the end of the story like that was eminently undignified, and I wonder if he asked to have a baby with her in return for safe passage home she would have said no like she did to Q?

 

[Adm_Hawthorne]

I hate to say it, but that's a good point.

 

[RyuRoots]

I have less issues with the time she chose to come back (although it's a great middle finger to Carey and Hogan) rather than that she did it at all. It delves into villain protagonist territory. She was perfectly happy to get rid of all those years of progress and the lives people built just for the sake of some of her personal friends. Like Guy said, it's the princess and the pea. It's selfish, short-sighted, and combined with stuff like her actions in Tuvix and Equinox, Kathy really doesn't look that good.

 

[SpyOne]

So don't you dare say that it was all about financial logistics Evil person.

He didn't say it had anything to do with money, he said that two episodes was the best "they" could get.

Apparently the network had given a firm "No" to multi-episode story arcs. The Voyager writers and producers had to work within the limits of what the network would air.

I have seen an excellent take on an "improved" version of Endgame, and part of what I liked about it was that it took 3 episodes to resolve, rather than 2. The penultimate episode set up the final one, and ultimately gets undone when Janeway changes the past (it was one of the writer in question's chosen limits to keep the same plot points, including time travel).

DS9 specifically did not have those limits, but Voyager was prohibited multi-episode arcs beyond the rare (network approved) 2 parter or 2 hour "special event".

 

[Guy Gardener]

Time is money and lunch time doubly so.

 

[SpyOne]

Time is money and lunch time doubly so.

I believe it was Frank Miller who said, "Hollywood is a funny place: they seem to think that 'no' means 'I want more money'".

I suppose it is possible that UPN would have given ground if they were offered enough money, but that is speculation, and does not change the fact that you were wrong to characterize Evil Person's comments as being about money, when all he was talking about was time.

Are you incapable of admitting mistake? Even when the best defense you can mount is a joke? (I mean a literal joke: a comment that is intended to be followed by a rimshot.)