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"Star Trek Voyager: Endgame"
(Reviewed May 24, 2001)
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What an incredible disappointment. Don't get me wrong, there certainly have been worse finales in TV history ("Seinfeld" being the hands-down champion). But I definitely was hoping for a much
better send-off for my all-time favorite "Star Trek" series.
Let's put it this way: I didn't have either of the two reactions I wanted to experience by the time the closing credits rolled. I was hoping that I would be sniffling and choking back big, unmanly sobs, with
streams of salty tears running down my time-ravaged face. And then I was hoping to feel a total endorphin rush of triumph, satisfaction, and "all's right with the world" joy. (Gee, was I maybe hoping for
too much?)
Instead, the first words out of my mouth when the episode ended were, "That absolutely sucked." Ouch.
Here's what I didn't like (if you missed the episode and are waiting to see it in syndication, bail out now, because I'm going to blow major plot points):
Frankly, the Borg Queen has been rendered so toothless and silly by now that she's about as threatening as a one-eyed teddy bear. How many times have Janeway and Company already defeated her? At
least twice (and, of course, Picard flicked her aside earlier). The Borg's tolerance for failure seems to be on a par with a bloated business corporation that keeps missing its earnings estimates but whose
board bafflingly refuses to fire the CEO. The Borg started out as a great concept, but they were so completely "defanged" over the years that I started wondering why the Voyager crew kept getting worked
up over encountering them.
(A nerdish aside: The castration of the Borg over the years was bad, but the real tragedy was how a single episode of "Voyager" completely ruined Species 8472 for all time. Those very "alien" aliens, who
were genuinely scary the first time they popped up, became campy jokes after the shockingly embarrassing script in which they assumed human form on a recreation of an Earth Starfleet academy. All of a
sudden, a species of 12-foot-tall aliens with whom humans could not even communicate became "just folks" led by Ray friggin' Walston. What were the producers thinking???)
So, anyway, here we have the Borg Queen monitoring Voyager and Admiral Janeway's shuttle after Voyager's near-miss with a Borg cube in the "gateway" nebula. We are supposed to accept
this ridiculous premise: Even though there are only six of those hubs in all the universe, the Borg Queen will not destroy Voyager to protect this one because Seven of Nine always has been her "favorite."
(Gosh, BQ must be getting sentimental in her old age...) If BQ can monitor Admiral Janeway's communications with Voyager AND appear to Seven of Nine during Seven's regeneration process, she
certainly knows where Voyager is, but she keeps her hands off. I didn't buy it.
Here are several other plot holes and basic inconsistencies that I didn't like:
(1) A recurring cliche on this series is the sustaining of dramatic tension by refusing to allow characters simply to say
upfront what they know or what they plan to do. In this case, Admiral Janeway knows that Captain Janeway is no idiot, and therefore Admiral Janeway should realize that Captain Janeway will figure out
what the hub is and its importance to the Borg. So why wouldn't she simply say, upon first meeting her former self, "Here is exactly what is in that nebula, here is how it can get you home, now let's
figure out how to have our cake and eat it, too"; i.e., how to get Voyager through the wormhole and destroy the hub after Voyager is through it. I never was convinced for a second that Janeway's
personality had so completely changed over the decades that she honestly would be up for sacrificing billions of beings for the sake of getting Voyager home earlier. To make that personality change
credible, we should have seen one heck of a lot more bitterness (if not actual psychosis) in Admiral Janeway.
(2) Having said that, I had a basic problem with the premise that billions of lives could be saved by destroying the hub anyway. If there are five other hubs in the universe, and if each of them permits
near-simultaneous travel to anywhere, what big difference will shutting down one of them make?
(3) The Unimatrix Zero uprising was mentioned during Admiral Janeway's classroom lecture, but that bit of continuity appeared to have been forgotten by the second hour of the episode, when the Borg
Queen was able to invade Seven's mind. Wasn't the whole point of the Unimatrix Zero ending that Seven, and others including her Borg boyfriend, had freed themselves from the collective and become
true individuals?
(4) The whole last-minute romance this season between Chakotay and Seven has been a tad bizarre and extremely rushed, as if Chakotay suddenly noticed that the most beautiful woman in the universe just
might make a good girlfriend. Continuity has been jettisoned for both characters: We have to believe that Chakotay somehow has lost all of his hopeless yearning for Janeway. And we have to believe that
Seven simultaneously has human emotions regarding Chakotay while appearing to be unaware or uncaring about the Doctor's feelings for her (even though he expressed his love for Seven a mere two
episodes ago).
(5) What was the deal with Tuvok's mad rant, which led absolutely nowhere? More than anything else in the episode--the rushed and confusing ending, the terrible pacing, the complete lack of emotional
punch--this had the feeling of something that fell victim to an incompetent editing job. Translation: Some resolution of this hanging thread must have been filmed, even though we didn't see it in the episode
that aired. Maybe the original script will turn up on the Internet somewhere and reveal what the heck he was talking about...
(6) Time travel always has been...problematic...on this show, because the inherent paradoxes make so many stories simply fall apart. The basic problem is that the show allows for multiple alternative
futures (instead of sticking to the golden-age Heinlein "one timeline" rule), and yet wants to have it both ways by making those alternative futures vanish if the past is altered. (Using Heinlein's golden-age
rule, Abraham Lincoln can never be saved because Abraham Lincoln WASN'T saved; no time-traveller appeared to stop John Wilkes Booth, and so no time-traveller ever will stop him. There is one
unalterable past that incorporates all time-travelers' efforts to change it--which therefore also means that no future visitor can make his own existence impossible by preventing his own conception.) In this
episode, the dying Borg Queen says that if Captain Janeway dies, then Admiral Janeway never would exist: "If she has no future, then you will never exist, and nothing you have done here today
[destroying the Borg Queen and the hub] will happen." But think about it for a second and that reasoning falls apart: Captain Janeway only would be dying because Admiral Janeway has appeared from the
future and set Captain Janeway on the course of action that led to Captain Janeway's death. Silly.
(7) I refuse to believe that in a future where transporters are the norm, it would not occur to a brilliant Klingon inventor that Admiral Janeway just might be carrying a portable transporter device which she
could use to spirit away a piece of technology that is rightfully hers. What, did his henchmen forget to pat her down when she arrived or something? Stupid.
(8) Even though the dying Borg Queen points out that she has assimilated knowledge of the armor Admiral Janeway brought with her from the future, and even though she is in communication with the
Borg sphere that is chasing Voyager through the wormhole, the sphere does not use that knowledge to reconfigure its weapons in order to destroy Voyager. Huh?
(9) Call me a sentimental fool, but what I most wanted to see on this episode was the Voyager crew back on Earth, adjusting to a world they hadn't seen in seven years. If you're gonna have a finale, then
by God make it something special. A ticker-tape parade. Their uncomfortable status as celebrities and heroes in a world that presumably would be even more media-saturated than our own. Touching (or
frustrating) reunions with loved ones. Something different, for Pete's sake. No such luck. Maybe it was a budget problem. UPN seemed to have lost interest in the series months ago, and did not even
deliver on the promise of airing a "clips" show of "Voyager" highlights to commemorate the conclusion.
On the Los Angeles UPN affiliate's newscast following the "Voyager" finale, coverage included an interview with Garret Wang (Harry Kim on the series). Wang was asked what he thought of the final
episode. In a jaw-dropping display of honesty, he said it did not end the way he would have liked, and that one problem was how the episode was edited. Jeri Ryan said she thought the ship should have
blown up just when it was close to Earth, which would have been pretty funny, actually. Unfortunately, the series ended with more of a whimper than a bang.
And one last complaint: Where the hell was Naomi Wildman?
Back Row Grade: D
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