In 2375, the USS Voyager attempted to utilise a quantum slipstream drive to return to the Alpha Quadrant. Chakotay and Harry Kim were assigned to the Delta Flyer which would fly ahead of Voyager in the slipstream, and transmit the necessary phase variance back to the Voyager so that the starship could make the required corrections in order to keep the slipstream stable. Apparently, Kim transmitted the wrong variance and the slipstream became unstable, causing Voyager to crash land on an ice planet. The Delta Flyer continued on travelling in the slipstream and managed to return to Earth.
By now, the USS Challenger, a Galaxy-class starship under the command of Captain Geordi La Forge, has arrived at the scene to prevent Chakotay and Kim from altering timeline. Kim realized that his corrections were still wrong, but he doesn't have time to find his mistake. Instead, Kim transmits a phase correction to Seven that dispersed the slipstream entirely, just as the Delta Flyer was destroyed.
As a result of Kim's actions, both the USS Voyager and Delta Flyer were thrown out of the slipstream, and the accident was prevented from happening. This also excised the future timeline from existence, although at the end of the episode, Kim received a message from the future Kim, which was transmitted alongside the phase corrections.
In this future, by 2390, La Forge has attained the rank of captain and was commanding the USS Challenger. We can assume that La Forge may leave Starfleet by 2395 and become a novelist, if this element as suggested by "All Good Things..." (TNG) should come to pass.
In this episode, Capt. Braxton from the 29th century recruits the present-day Seven of Nine to help find out who has planted a temporal disruptor weapon on the USS Voyager, which was fracturing space-time aboard the starship, making people sick and causing bizarre paradoxes to occur, and would eventually destroy the Voyager if not removed. Seven of Nine was recruited as her Borg ocular implants could detect irregularities in space-time.
After accepting the assignment, Seven was transported to various time periods aboard Voyager where she scanned for both the weapon and the intruder. Eventually, the intruder was revealed to be the mad Braxton, who had been stranded on 20th century Earth for thirty years. This Braxton believed that Janeway was responsible for his exile and he planted the weapon so as to take revenge upon her. The mad Braxton was eventually caught by Janeway before he has a chance to plant the weapon.
Meanwhile, aboard the timeship USS Relativity, Capt. Braxton was arrested for the "crimes he will commit" by his first officer, who takes command of the timeship and vows to clean up the contamination in timeline to prevent any of it from happening in the first place. Both Seven and Janeway are returned to the normal timeline, and Janeway is urged to avoid time travel.
Also, the mad Braxton who stayed on 20th century Earth for thirty years reappeared in this episode, suggesting that he did not just disappear when Voyager destroyed the Aeon and prevented the temporal explosion from happening in the 29th century. Since there was no explosion, Braxton would not have returned to 2373 and try to destroy Voyager, therefore he should just have disappeared in 1996. ("Future's End" [VOY]). I speculate that the mad Braxton was retrieved by his colleagues and returned to the 29th century, where he plotted to destroy Voyager for having caused his exile.
Obviously, Janeway did not regard much about the advice to avoid time travel, as the events of "Endgame" (VOY) shows.
Note the 29th century Starfleet Insignia.
The episode starts in the future, in the year 2403. It was the 10th anniversary of USS Voyager's return to Earth after 23 years in the Delta Quadrant. (23 years in Delta Quadrant means a return year of 2393, ie. 2371 + 23 = 2393, since the 1st year of VOY took place in 2371. And 2393 + 10 = 2403, quite literally). By 2403, Janeway had become an admiral, Harry Kim was captain of the USS Rhode Island, a Nova-class starship. The Doctor has married and named himself "Joe". Tom Paris has become a holonovelist, while B'Elanna Torres was Federation Liaison to the Klingon High Council. Paris and B'Elanna had a daughter, Miral, who was an ensign in Starfleet. The USS Voyager has become a museum on the grounds of the Presidio.
However, there had been some tragedies. Seven of Nine had been killed sometime in the past. Chakotay had married Seven, and her death had seriously upset him. Chakotay himself died in 2394. Tuvok will suffer from a degenerative neurological condition and become hospitalised. With the help of Cmdr. Barclay, who now taught at Starfleet Academy, Adm. Janeway decided to alter timeline and give everybody a better chance at life.
The transwarp hub, one of six that the Borg control, connects thousands of transwarp conduits to endpoints in every quadrant of the galaxy, and Capt. Janeway initially considered destroying the hub so that millions of lives could be saved from assimilation by the Borg. But after learning about the tragedies that would befall on the crew in the future from the admiral, Capt. Janeway eventually agrees with Adm. Janeway's plans, to return home using the transwarp hub, but at the same time she also planned to destroy the hub.
The Borg Queen sends a Borg sphere after Voyager, even as the Unicomplex crumbles around her. Under pursuit within the transwarp corridor, Voyager launches its weapons to collapse the transwarp hub. Voyager finally emerge from a transwarp aperature into the Alpha Quadrant, just as a Starfleet armada destroys the Borg sphere. Voyager is then escorted back to Earth, with Adm. Janeway apparently having sacrificed her life so that Voyager could finally return home.
By the end of the episode, Tom Paris' and B'Elanna's daughter was born. Her name is Miral, named after B'Elanna's mother, and she would eventually serve in Starfleet.
By 2379, Janeway had attained the rank of admiral (Star Trek Nemesis). There had been speculations as to why Janeway could have been promoted to admiral so quickly. Perhaps it is because of her leadership which led to the Voyager's successful return to the Alpha Quadrant in 2377, or that the destruction of the Borg transwarp hub dealt a disastrous blow to the Borg. Also, the Voyager returned with futuristic technology that Starfleet by right shouldn't have any knowledge about for another 26 years. All these are valid reasons for Janeway's promotion. In addition, I believe that with the ending of the Dominion War in 2375, Starfleet embarked on a massive reconstruction which not only involved the building of new starships to replace those lost in the war, but there was also a recruitment drive to replace the personnel lost. Naturally, people like Janeway would have been promoted to admiral to oversee the reconstruction efforts.
It should be noted that Adm. Janeway's uniform (2403) is different from that of Adm. Riker (2395) as seen in "All Good Things..." (TNG), while the Starfleet duty uniforms and Starfleet insignia seen in both episodes are the same. In comparison with "Timeless" (VOY), I can deduce the following:
- By 2390, Starfleet has adopted the new insignia, but old grey-shoulder uniforms is still in use ("Timeless" [VOY]). This ignores the Cmdr. Nog sequence in "The Visitor" (DS9), which had Nog wearing the TNG uniform with the 2371 Starfleet insignia in 2391.
- By 2395, grey-shoulder uniforms had been replaced by the new uniforms, but admiral uniforms still do not conform to the new uniforms' style. In fact, the "All Good Things..." (TNG) admiral uniform follows the TNG style, and not the grey-shoulder style, because Star Trek First Contact has not happened yet by the time of "All Good Things..." (TNG)! See discussions for "The Visitor" (DS9) for a similar situation.
- By 2403, admiral uniform had conformed to the new uniforms' style, as seen in "Endgame" (VOY).
- Tuvok suffers from a degenerative neurological condition, sounds similar to the Irumodic Syndrome suffered by Picard.
- Tom Paris becomes a holonovelist. Geordi La Forge became a novelist too! Hey, these people sure love to write.
- Janeway goes back in time to correct a mistake, didn't Chakotay and Harry Kim do the same thing in "Timeless" (VOY)?
- More to come, if there's any...
In this episode, an accident shatters the space-time aboard the USS Voyager, and only Chakotay could travel between the different time frames to repair the damage. Actually, not much of Starfleet's future is glimpsed into in this episode, except for perhaps only a few ideas that are supported elsewhere. Namely, Chakotay travelled into a portion of the Voyager that existed seventeen years into the future in 2394 (2377 + 17 = 2394), where he meets the grown-up Icheb and Naomi Wildman.
Naomi revealed that Chakotay and Janeway both died in the accident that shattered space-time in 2377. Later on in the episode, Chakotay manages to avert the accident, and he decides to tell no one about the incident, citing the temporal prime directive.
In any case, the accident was prevented from happening, and Chakotay and Janeway were not killed. This means that the future sequence in this episode probably took place in an altenate timeline.
