Year of Hell, pt.1 and 2

[JirinPanthosa]

I wonder if Voyager had kept the temporal shielding and kept it up all the time if they would constantly see everything changing around them because the timeline actually gets changed by random time travelers all the time.

 

[jmidnight_99]

I don't agree.

As we saw many times, when the ship does a temporal incursion on a target, it creates a new timeline where that target never existed. Same story here. The only difference is that in its final moments before destruction, the ship did an incursion ON ITSELF (Annorax even points this out - he says "it's going to cause a temporal incursion within the ship"). Thus creating a new timeline where the ship will never exist.

I never interpreted it as creating a new timeline where some object never existed. I interpreted the concept as removing the object from the current timeline. I guess when you get down to it, it's splitting hairs, I just never thought of it that way. Interesting.

Annorax was talking about the space-time continuum, not the Q.

Agreed.

 

[jmidnight_99]

"Year of Hell" is a fantastic concept, but give it any thought and it falls apart. A delete ray that shoots things and makes it so they never existed? Awesome.

But... how far does it go? Do the victim's families get erased elsewhere? Do sperm vanish from their fathers' testicles? And what of the testicles that created the sperm? How far does it go back?? Does the factory where the captain's favourite teacup get erased when a ship is destroyed, or patches of earth where the raw materials were taken? Or the entire planet??

This doesn't make any sense. Find something that never existed, and evaluate the effects it has had on the factory that didn't create it?

 

[Gaith]

I tried rewatching "Year of Hell" a few years back, but lost all respect for it when Janeway ordered the crew to disperse in escape pods, spread out across the local systems and "form alliances"... um, what? Isn't that like tossing people off a heavily damaged (but not yet sinking) cruise ship in the middle of an ocean with nothing but life preservers and a bottle or two of Gatorade, and saying "good luck!"?!

Voyager works best when it's silly and goofy: "Life Line," "Worst Case Scenario," "Body and Soul" ... "Year of Hell" may be an ambitious attempt to show a darker, more serious side of the premise, but the writing wasn't nearly up to snuff.

 

[Akiraprise]

I never agreed with that part of the episode either. To disperse the crew in non-warp capable escape pods, in hostile territory, is almost like forcing them to commit suicide. Star Trek usually depicts that any problem can be solved by bringing people together and working the issue out. The crew should have remained together. Janeway definitely didn't do them any favors. What alien species would form an alliance with a band of mostly humans floating in space that have nothing to offer? They probably became target practice or slave labor.