star trek the year of hell

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

Year of Hell, Part II

• Episode aired Nov 12, 1997

A year after Voyager encounters the Krenim time ship, a badly damaged Voyager with a skeleton crew leads an armada of interplanetary ships against them. A year after Voyager encounters the Krenim time ship, a badly damaged Voyager with a skeleton crew leads an armada of interplanetary ships against them. A year after Voyager encounters the Krenim time ship, a badly damaged Voyager with a skeleton crew leads an armada of interplanetary ships against them.

• Michael Vejar
• Gene Roddenberry
• Rick Berman
• Michael Piller
• Kate Mulgrew
• Robert Beltran
• Roxann Dawson
• 11 User reviews
• 5 Critic reviews

• Capt. Kathryn Janeway

• Cmdr. Chakotay

• Lt. B'Elanna Torres

• Lt. Tom Paris

• Seven of Nine

• Ensign Harry Kim

• Krenim Commandant
• (as Peter Slutsker)
• Annorax's Wife

• Voyager Computer
• Krenim Officer
• (uncredited)

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

Did you know

• Trivia Voyager is depicted as being severely damaged in this show. To achieve that effect without lasting damage to any of the permanent sets, acrylic sheets similar to those used when the sets are in storage was draped over most of the "clean" bulkheads, and were then sprayed with charcoal dust to simulate the effects of multiple explosions. Unfortunately this resulted in many surfaces having a "wrinkled" appearance.
• Goofs The Doctor tells Captain Janeway that there are seven people aboard Voyager other than her. However, there are only six: the Doctor himself, Tuvok, B'Elanna Torres, Seven of Nine, Neelix and Harry Kim.

B'Elanna Torres : [crew raises coffee mugs] To distant friends.

Captain Kathryn Janeway : Hear, hear.

Harry Kim : Cheers.

Seven of Nine : Yes.

[cut to Kim taking a sip]

Neelix : [anxious] Well?

Tuvok : [pauses] Interesting.

Harry Kim : Not bad. Not bad at all!

B'Elanna Torres : What is it, exactly?

Neelix : I call it "the Elixir of Endurance." It's loaded with amino acids, carbohydrates, all the nutrients necessary for the crew to withstand these stressful conditions.

B'Elanna Torres : Ration cubes...

Neelix : Well, yes, yes. But this time, pureed and mixed with water and enhanced with Talaxian spices.

Seven of Nine : It is offensive. Fortunately taste is irrelevant.

• Connections Featured in Troldspejlet: Episode #35.4 (2006)
• Soundtracks Star Trek: Voyager - Main Title (uncredited) Written by Jerry Goldsmith Performed by Jay Chattaway

User reviews 11

• marianthenightman
• Dec 4, 2020
• November 12, 1997 (United States)
• United States
• Official site
• Paramount Studios - 5555 Melrose Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA (Studio)
• Paramount Network Television
• See more company credits at IMDbPro

Technical specs

• Runtime 46 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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Year of Hell, Part II (episode)

• View history
• 1.2 Act One
• 1.3 Act Two
• 1.4 Act Three
• 1.5 Act Four
• 1.6 Act Five
• 2 Log entries
• 3 Memorable quotes
• 4.1 Production history
• 4.2 Story and script
• 4.3 Cast and characters
• 4.4 Production and effects
• 4.5 Costumes and props
• 4.7 Continuity
• 4.8 Apocrypha
• 4.10 Reception
• 4.11 Video and DVD releases
• 5.1 Starring
• 5.2 Also starring
• 5.3 Guest star
• 5.4 Special guest star
• 5.5 Co-stars
• 5.6 Uncredited co-stars
• 5.7 Stand-ins
• 5.8 References
• 5.9 Meta references
• 5.10 External links

Summary [ ]

Voyager takes refuge in a class 9 nebula

Wrecked nearly beyond repair, and with most of the crew having abandoned ship, the USS Voyager hides in a class 9 nebula in the Delta Quadrant near the temporally-fluctuating Krenim -controlled space. The ventilation system , while still partially functional, has allowed nebular gas to flood one of the remaining decks . Captain Kathryn Janeway and Ensign Harry Kim don gas masks and enter the deck. They manage to fix the controls, preventing further damage, but the ventilation system is too damaged to eject the gas. Forced to repair the system, Janeway and Kim use up their respective air supplies. They struggle to keep from inhaling as they finish the job, but the gas enters their lungs and causes extensive damage. The Doctor treats Kim, but Janeway refuses to sit still long enough. The Doctor follows her to the bridge , trying to convince her to undergo treatment.

Janeway marches onto the remains of the bridge. Lieutenant junior grade B'Elanna Torres sits at the still somewhat functional conn station and reports on the status of the warp drive . The starboard warp nacelle is still partially operable, but non-functional, but the port one is beyond repair and a lost cause. Coughing, Janeway orders Torres to route all available power to getting the starboard nacelle working again.

The Doctor implores the captain to rest for 48 hours, to allow her lungs time to heal. She refuses and demands an injection of trioxin to help her breathing. He objects, as trioxin is only a stopgap measure stressing that her lungs have been seriously damaged. The Doctor tries to invoke medical rank and force her acquiescence, but as captain, she sternly orders him to use the trioxin. The Doctor reluctantly obeys and administers the medication. enabling Janeway to continue working, despite coughing.

Act One [ ]

Chakotay , his face grimy and covered in stubble, is taken from a holding cell aboard the Krenim weapon ship . He is cleaned up, shaved, given clean Krenim clothing, then brought to Annorax in his quarters .

Chakotay and Paris join Annorax for dinner

Annorax sits at a table loaded with an impressive feast. He removes his uniform gloves and greets Chakotay. Chakotay asks about his crewmate, Tom Paris . Annorax responds that " no doubt he is making himself difficult ". Chakotay asks what he expects, given their captivity for the last two months, in isolation, poked and prodded. Annorax, with dignified irritation, responds that he expects they would act with at least some level of dignity or restraint, of which Paris shows none.

Chakotay demands to know what Annorax wants from them. " At the moment, information " he politely replies. Paris enters and ascertains that Chakotay is unharmed. Annorax invites them to join him, describing the feast as a selection of delicacies found nowhere else in the galaxy.

The Starfleet officers accept. Annorax pours each a glass of an extremely rare vintage of Malkothian spirits , noting that this bottle is the sole remaining component of the once-powerful Malkoth race. Everything else – their cities, culture – even the very species itself – never existed. In fact, every dish on the table has come from civilizations erased from time. When he informs Paris that he is " devouring the last remnants of the Alsuran Empire . ", Paris stops eating immediately. Annorax recounts having collected artifacts from each of the hundreds of worlds he has erased, calling his weapon ship more than a weapon, but a " museum of lost histories. "

Annorax then says he has decided to spare Voyager , planning instead to try and alter the timeline and restore Voyager , thus achieving both their goals. They might even find themselves closer to the Alpha Quadrant . In order to make the necessary calculations, he needs information about their experiences in the Delta Quadrant, other races they encountered, and how their presence affected any species with whom they came into contact.

Paris does not believe him, bluntly asserting that the only reason Annorax has not destroyed Voyager is that he has lost track of the ship and for the past two months, Janeway has eluded him. Annorax threatens to destroy Voyager unless Paris and Chakotay cooperate. Paris derides the offer because no Starfleet serviceman would accept such a proposal – not at the cost of wiping out the entire existences of whole civilizations. He disgustedly rises to leave, expecting Chakotay to follow.

But Paris is shocked when Chakotay remains seated and orders him to wait. Chakotay asks Annorax if he can restore Voyager without harming anyone. Annorax says he can, but only with extreme difficulty. For his plan to succeed, Annorax needs their cooperation. Paris scoffs at the idea, refusing to obey Chakotay's order to return to his seat. Annorax has Obrist enter and take Paris to the guest quarters, encouraging him to think about it. Paris leaves without a word.

Annorax focuses on Chakotay, complimenting him on his ability to truly perceive time, as evidenced by his question about the possibility of restoring Voyager without harming anyone. He offers Chakotay the chance to work with him toward that end. Chakotay accepts and the two seal their agreement with a toast of Malkothian spirits.

" To distant friends. " Voyager 's senior staff toast their departed comrades

Aboard Voyager , in the wreck of the mess hall , Janeway and the senior officers also toast, with the " elixir of endurance ", a concoction that Neelix has created using ration cubes , water , and Talaxian spices . It is unpalatable but, as Seven of Nine notes, taste is irrelevant. Janeway takes the opportunity to get situational updates from each of her officers. The Doctor has repaired an optronic error in his program. Kim also reports that the power grid is operating at 32% capacity, but that he would need a few more days to getting it up to 50%.

Torres informs the captain that it will take at least three weeks to fixing the starboard warp nacelle. Janeway realizes with frustration that they will be forced to remain in the nebula instead being out in open space, finding allies to fight against Annorax. She decides to leave the nebula the next morning. Seven objects that they should wait as long as possible to complete their repairs, but Janeway's mind is made up. Upon leaving the room, Tuvok points out to Seven the inappropriateness of openly contradicting the captain's decision. Seven asks if this applies even when Janeway's logic is flawed, to which Tuvok replies, " Perhaps ".

Act Two [ ]

Aboard the Krenim weapon ship, Chakotay tries his hand at temporal incursion calculations. He has come up with an incursion in which erasing a comet that Voyager changed course to avoid eight months before will prevent her from ever entering Krenim space. Annorax lets him simulate it.

Chakotay attempts a simulated temporal incursion

But when he does, he is shocked when a totally unexpected simulated result occurs: eight thousand species are erased with the comet. Amused, Annorax explains that four billion years ago, fragments from the comet crashed into a planet , releasing hydrocarbons that caused the rise of several different plant species. These in turn fed other complex organisms. In time, several space-faring civilizations arose. By erasing the comet, he would cause these civilizations never to develop.

Annorax further explains that he too made such a mistake when he first oversaw the use of the weapon ship against a race called the Rilnar , who had removed the Krenim Imperium as the dominant power of the region. Thus their erasure led to the Krenim staying in power.

But it also led to fifty million Krenim dying of a plague within a year. This occurred because the Rilnar had introduced a critical antibody against the disease into Krenim physiology and their erasure took the antibody with it. Annorax tells Chakotay that he has been seeking to correct that mistake by his incursions against species whose erasures his calculations show would undo this first incursion.

He again asks Chakotay for his help. Together, he asserts, they can restore the Krenim Imperium and Voyager and undo the damage he has caused. Chakotay tells him he, Chakotay, still has much to learn of temporal manipulation. Annorax takes him to see the heart of the weapon ship, the temporal core .

A micrometeoroid shower…

…hits Voyager

Voyager has left the nebula but a huge micrometeoroid shower hits the crippled ship. Thousands of the microscopic rocks pelt her ruined hull, rapidly destroying what little is left. As theshower hits the hull, on the bridge Janeway asks Torres if engines are available yet, to get them out of the shower's way. Torres replies that they are not and Kim reminds Janeway their navigational deflector is nonfunctional. She orders Tuvok to divert emergency power to it, but is subsequently informed that there is "none available".

Janeway makes a decision. She rises from her command chair and announces she is heading for deflector control. Tuvok warns her that the area is far too hazardous, but she still goes. When she opens the door, she sees that there is a raging fire inside, so hot that she recoils against the opposite wall with a gasp. But she is determined to fix the deflector. Kim reports that the damage from the micrometeoroid shower is growing rapidly and that a nacelle pylon is about to buckle.

Janeway orders Tuvok to prepare to engage the shields. She also tells him to inform The Doctor she will be coming back with severe burns. Tuvok objects, but she sternly repeats her order. Then, steeling herself, she charges into the inferno.

On the bridge, Kim monitors as Janeway accesses the deflector and manages to bring the shields on-line. Tuvok immediately raises them. The sound of the micrometeoroids hitting the hull stops immediately. Tuvok hails Janeway, but she does not respond. Torres and Kim look blankly ahead in horror.

Janeway, unconscious and severely burned

Among the flames, Janeway lies unconscious on the floor. Half her face and an arm are severely burned.

Later Janeway, still unconscious, rests on a makeshift bed in what remains of the mess hall. The Doctor wakes her with a shot from a hypospray . Awake, she asks him her condition. He informs her that she has suffered third-degree burns over 60% of her body. He was able to heal most of them but, not having a dermal regenerator , he could not heal the damage totally and her face and arms are scarred.

Janeway rises, prepared to return to the bridge, but The Doctor stops her. He insists that she stay in the mess hall two days for observation, having diagnosed the risks she has been taking as signs of Traumatic Stress Syndrome . If she does not follow his instructions, he threatens to relieve her of command. She counters that if he tries it, she'll deactivate him which The Doctor simply takes as more proof of the syndrome. Janeway apologizes, but refuses to stay in the mess hall. The Doctor responds by using his authority as chief medical officer to officially relieve her of duty.

She asks him how he intends to have this enforced as there is no security staff except Tuvok, the brigs are both destroyed and the transverse force fields no longer work, thus she cannot be confined. He quietly reminds her that by disobeying his direct medical order she is now facing a court martial . She responds that if they do get back home, a court martial will be a small price to pay, given what she has endured and leaves the mess hall.

Act Three [ ]

Janeway and Neelix walk through Voyager 's bombed-out corridors, assessing damage. Turning a corner, they find themselves in front of Chakotay's former quarters, now in ruins. Janeway whips out her tricorder and follows its signal inside the room, where she uncovers a still-intact pocket watch. Stunned, she murmurs, " You disobeyed orders. " Neelix asks, " Captain? " and she replies, " Chakotay gave this to me five months ago – a birthday gift. I ordered him to… " but her voice trails off as she relives the memory. Struggling with her emotions, Janeway resolutely fastens the watch to her belt and her composure returns. She and Neelix continue on.

Paris plays a game with Obrist

On the weapon ship, Paris plays a Krenim board game with Obrist . To Obrist's amusement, Paris wins convincingly, though he has never played the game before. Obrist reminisces that Paris' end-game sequence is the same one Obrist's brother favored. His face then falls. When Paris asks him what is wrong, he recalls sadly that he used to celebrate his brother's birthday, along with those of his parents and closest friend, until a hundred years ago when he realized that he was celebrating birthdays for people who were dead or, because of the temporal incursions, never even existed. Paris looks at him sympathetically and says, " I'm sorry. "

Chakotay in his guest quarters, pores over a large PADD filled with temporal incursion calculations. Paris enters excitedly and reports he has vital information about the ship's defensive systems, information provided by Obrist, who, like many of the crew, has become discouraged and disillusioned with their seemingly endless mission. The ship, he tells Chakotay, depends on its temporal core for defense because it keeps the vessel out of the space-time continuum , making it immune to all conventional weapons. Due to its temporally fluctuating nature, its designers and builders paid little attention to conventional defenses and construction. As a result, its deflector shields are extremely weak. Paris wants to incite mutiny among the already disheartened crew and disable the temporal core, leaving the ship vulnerable to attack.

But Chakotay forbids Paris from setting his ideas into motion, intending to focus on Annorax's offer instead. Paris becomes insubordinate, telling Chakotay that Annorax is flattering him with talk of his having an "instinct for time." Chakotay orders him to make no move against Annorax, but Paris responds that Chakotay is hardly in a position to give orders any more. Chakotay warns Paris that if he refuses to maintain the chain of command, they can settle things 'the old fashioned way'. Following a tense moment between the two men, an alarm sounds.

They go to the bridge. Chakotay is shocked to find Annorax and crew proceeding with an incursion operation against the Ram Izad . Annorax explains that it occurred to him that their erasure would aid his mission. His calculations indicated a 52% restoration of the Krenim timeline . Chakotay begs Annorax to stop, that he can achieve his goals in other ways. Paris asks Chakotay if this is what he calls enlightened behavior.

Annorax ignores Chakotay's desperate pleas and commands, " Prepare for total erasure ", and seconds later, " Fire ". Stunned, Paris and Chakotay watch as the weapon targets the Ram Izad homeworld . A temporal shock wave spreads out over the planet, then beyond, eradicating the species from existence. Obrist reports the results as the sensors track the wave. Annorax orders him to continue, then retires to his quarters. Paris angrily tells Chakotay that he will deal with "this maniac" if Chakotay will not.

Act Four [ ]

Chakotay enters Annorax's quarters and insists he did not need to fire on that planet. Annorax, indifferently points out that he's altering history on a massive scale, that the destinies of countless star systems are in his hands; one species is insignificant. Unswayed, Chakotay argues, " You're trying to rationalize genocide. One species is significant. A single life is significant. " Annorax guiltily explains that it was so easy the first time; in the blink of an eye, he'd changed history itself. But on his next incursion, when he changed history a second time, he lost " more than you can imagine. "

" The colony on Kyana Prime ", says Chakotay, who explains he's been studying Annorax's previous incursions and no matter how close he came to restoring the glory of the Imperium, one component was always missing… the colony on Kyana Prime. Annorax tells Chakotay why he is obsessed with its restoration – his beloved wife was on Kyana Prime. Her erasure took her away, along with his future, his children and grandchildren. He picks up the pyramid containing the lock of hair and tells Chakotay that it is his wife's hair. He asserts that time itself is against him, keeping him from his wife in retaliation for his arrogant manipulation of it.

Obrist enters and reports to Annorax that he was correct and a 52% restoration of the Imperium was achieved. Annorax asks him about Kyana Prime. Obrist, barely able to conceal his exasperation, states that it has not and questions Annorax's continued manipulation of the timeline. Annorax notes his feelings on changing the timelines and dismisses him. He then tells Chakotay that Chakotay's calculations are promising, but need more work. While he is working on them, he will continue his mission. Chakotay angrily tells him he does not have the right to do what he is doing, but Annorax responds that he indeed has the right to fight for what is his and only time itself can judge him, not Chakotay.

In Chakotay's guest quarters, Paris asserts that Annorax is insane , after Chakotay has informed him of Annorax's belief that time has a grudge against him. Chakotay finally agrees with Paris that Annorax must be stopped. Paris informs him that he believes that Obrist will help them get a message to Voyager , informing Janeway of the ship's location. Obrist will also help him sabotage the temporal core, taking it offline so that the ship will be vulnerable against conventional attacks. Chakotay gives him the go-ahead to proceed with his planned mutiny.

Voyager leads a small fleet against the temporal weapon ship

Janeway addresses her senior staff on the wrecked bridge

Voyager is in formation with four other ships from the Coalition , but with massive damage to her port saucer as a large section of it is gone. Janeway addresses her officers on the bridge which is now all but destroyed. Almost all of the lights are out, the displays are dark and cracked, consoles are covered in dust and the room is black and marred with twisted debris. The only functioning area is the command section.

She informs them that she has received an authenticated message from Paris, giving her the location of the weapon ship, as well as the location of its temporal core. Paris has promised to try and take its temporal core offline, leaving the ship vulnerable to conventional weapons. Voyager and her allied ships will then disable the weapon ship and retrieve Paris and Chakotay.

She then issues instructions to the officers. Kim and Torres will go to the lead Nihydron ship while Tuvok, Seven, Neelix, and The Doctor will go to the lead Mawasi ship. All ships are to be outfitted with temporal shielding . She will remain aboard and pilot Voyager . Torres questions this decision, claiming Voyager has barely enough to reach the battle, let alone fight one, but Janeway believes that the six photon torpedoes and temporal shields that the ship has left will be sufficient. Furthermore, she believes that the captain must go down with the ship.

Janeway on Voyager 's damaged bridge

The crew disembarks, except for Tuvok. Janeway tells him that Voyager needs her, prompting Tuvok to voice his puzzlement with the Human predilection to bond with inanimate objects, as Janeway has evidently done. She tells him that Voyager has been their home and she feels as close to it as any member of the crew. She elaborates that the ship has carried them, even nurtured them, and now needs one of them. Tuvok respects Janeway's decision and gives her the traditional Vulcan salute , intoning " Live long and prosper " to his captain and dear friend. Janeway reciprocates and embraces Tuvok in a hug, which the Vulcan returns before departing. Alone on the bridge, Janeway checks the watch that Chakotay gave her and with a quick glance at the empty first officer's chair and around the silent bridge, the captain assumes her station.

Act Five [ ]

The Coalition nears Annorax

Voyager and the other ships reach the Krenim weapon ship. Aboard the ship, Chakotay and Paris put their plan into action having succeeded in getting Obrist to support their mutiny. On the bridge, Obrist informs Annorax of the approach of the attacking vessels. Unconcerned, Annorax comments his ship is immune to conventional weapons. Chakotay assures Annorax that Janeway would not be attacking unless she knew she could somehow inflict damage, artfully distracting him from noticing that Obrist is covertly transmitting information to Paris in his guest quarters.

Chakotay further points out that if Janeway has given the temporal shielding to the other ships, they may in turn have passed the technology onto their homeworlds to defend themselves against Annorax and his ship. Annorax orders Obrist to bring the weapon online and prepare for multiple incursions against the attacking ships and to make calculations for disabling their temporal shields.

The Coalition launches its first attack on Annorax

Obrist does so, while Paris begins attempting to shut it down the temporal core. Aboard Voyager , Janeway orders the attack commenced. Two Nihydron ships go in and perform a strafing attack.

Two Nihydron vessels are deleted from time

But Paris fails to take the temporal core offline. The Nihydron weapons have no effect. Annorax orders the temporal incursion beam to fire on them. Almost immediately their temporal shields are overwhelmed and they vanish. Janeway orders the fleet to engage in evasive maneuvers . She verbally wills Paris to succeed.

Annorax orders Obrist to target the other ships. He does not, instead exchanging a look with Chakotay. Annorax repeats his order. Obrist works the controls and deactivates the temporal core as alarms start to go off. Annorax realizes with shock that he has been betrayed as Obrist apologizes to him sadly, firmly stating that this must end now. He works the console again and beams Chakotay and Paris to a Mawasi ship. Annorax angrily rises from his command chair, rushes to the console and pushes Obrist away. He notes that they are phasing back into the space-time continuum and are now vulnerable to the attacking ships' weapons.

Voyager and its fleet fighting against the weapon ship

He orders reconfiguration to conventional weapons. Another officer obeys. He orders firing at will and bursts of energy are fired at Janeway's fleet.

A Mawasi vessel crashes into Voyager

The attack disables most of the attacking ships, one of which loses helm control and collides into Voyager 's primary hull. A huge chunk of the saucer section is destroyed with the majority of the rest of the section burning in space. Janeway, who was at the conn console, is thrown violently out of the seat by the collision. Sparks fly and smoke rises in the room. Janeway crawls to her command seat. The entire forward bulkhead is gone, with nothing separating her from open space but an emergency force field, which fritzes unstably. She sees the weapon ship straight through the opening. Aboard it, Annorax orders fire concentrated on Voyager and to "put Janeway out of her misery."

Janeway watches the weapon ship through a breach in the forward bulkhead

Tuvok hails Janeway, telling her that all their ships were disabled and requests her status on weapons. She tells him that the torpedo launchers are offline and she has set a collision course to the weapon ship. She then hails the other ships and instructs them to take their temporal shields offline and does the same to Voyager . Tuvok points out that they will no longer be protected from the weapon ship's temporal incursion beam, but Janeway has realized this. She explains that if the weapon ship is destroyed, all the damage it has ever caused might be reversed.

Janeway's kamikaze attack on the weapon ship

With Voyager close to falling apart, she heads for the weapon ship, staring at it firmly. Moments before the collision, she braces herself and declares " Time's up ." Voyager plows into the weapon ship in a huge explosion, utterly destroying itself. Annorax and the bridge officers are all knocked off their feet, as the bridge descends into chaos. As the consoles erupt in sparks and explosions, Annorax notes with horror the temporal core is destabilizing and a temporal incursion within the ship is imminent.

He rises and hurries to his quarters just in time to see the pyramid containing the lock of his wife's hair fall and shatter. He watches this with horror but his expression changes to one of wonder as the hair vanishes. He looks at the spot where it was, as it suddenly dawns on him what is about to happen…

The weapon ship explodes and then is engulfed by a temporal shock wave, erasing itself from history.

Voyager , undamaged, continues on her journey home. On the bridge are Captain Janeway, Chakotay and the duty officers, clean and relaxed, along with Seven of Nine.

A Krenim warship approaches and hails. Janeway orders an on-screen answer. It is the Krenim commandant . His demeanor, though curt, is not hostile and his ship does not attack Voyager . He informs Janeway that they have entered Krenim space and instructs her to identify herself and her ship. When she does so, he informs her that the region is in dispute, suggesting she avoid it.

Janeway thanks him. He wishes them a good journey and cuts the communication. He and his race remain completely unknown to Voyager 's crew. Janeway and Chakotay decide to have a commissioning ceremony for the astrometrics lab, complete with a bottle of Saint-Émilion , 2370 . Janeway jokes to Chakotay that she heard this was " a good year ".

Restored to Kyana Prime in the 2170s, Annorax sits at a desk in his home, working on a large PADD. His wife comes to him and asks him to join her for breakfast and he tells her he will do so in a little while but he still has " a few more calculations ". She lovingly chides him that he always says that and reaches her hand out to him, persuading him into putting the PADD down and spending the day with her. He rises and takes her hand with a smile and they leave together.

The work he was doing on the PADD is left behind… it is temporal incursion calculations.

Log entries [ ]

• " Captain's log, stardate 51425.4: Our condition has left us vulnerable to spatial anomalies and to any alien species eager for a piece of hardware. We've taken refuge in a class 9 nebula . "
• " Captain's log, stardate 51682.2: I've forged a coalition with the Nihydron and the Mawasi . Together, we're preparing to attack the weapon ship. "
• " Captain's log, stardate 51252.3: The past couple of weeks have been uneventful but we've made excellent progress on the new astrometrics lab. "

Memorable quotes [ ]

" It's your body; who am I to judge? I'm only the chief medical officer; what do I know? "

(Speaking about Paris) " I've never seen such an intransigent young man. " " You've had us in isolation for two months. We've been scanned, poked, and prodded. How do you expect us to act? " " With some degree of dignity and restraint. Your crewmate has none. "

" This vessel is more than a weapon. It's a museum of lost histories. "

" It is offensive. Fortunately, taste is irrelevant. "

" Remember this guideline: the captain is always right. " " Even when you know that her logic is flawed? " (Pauses with uncertainty) " Perhaps. "

" You've been at this for 200 years, Annorax. What makes you think you're ever going to succeed?" " What makes you think Voyager will ever reach Earth? The odds against you are astronomical . Yet you keep trying. "

" What are you going to do, take away my holodeck privileges?" " Either we maintain our command structure, or else we settle this the old fashioned way."

" Have you seen enough yet, Chakotay? If you won't do something about this maniac, I will".

" If that little display didn't convince you, I don't know what will. He's insane!" " No, he's not. Wounded, maybe. But I can still reach him; convince him to stop. " " Not from what you've told me. This guy thinks that time has a personal grudge against him! That's called paranoia, Chakotay; with a hint of megalomania. " " You don't know what he's been through. " " He's lost his family. Okay, that's a terrible thing. But so has everyone else on this ship. AND, FRANKLY, SO HAVE WE! "

" Tuvok, I can hear your objections already. I am not leaving. " " Given Voyager 's damaged state, the probability of your surviving an armed conflict… is marginal. " " Oh, I know the odds. But I have to stay. Voyager 's done too much for us. " " Curious. I have never understood the Human compulsion to emotionally bond with inanimate objects. This vessel has done nothing. It is an assemblage of bulkheads, conduits, tritanium – nothing more. " " Oh, you're wrong. It's much more than that. This ship has been our home. It's kept us together. It's been part of our family. As illogical as this might sound, I feel as close to Voyager as I do to any other member of my crew. It's carried us, Tuvok. Even nurtured us. And right now, it needs one of us. " " I respect your decision. Live long and prosper, captain. " " Same to you… old friend. "

" Target Voyager . Put Janeway out of her misery. "

" If that ship is destroyed, all of history might be restored. And this is one year I'd like to forget."

" Time's up!"

" It's a beautiful day. Spend it with me? " " I suppose I can make the time. "

Background information [ ]

Production history [ ].

• Production number: 011-40840-177
• Final draft script: 15 August 1997 [1]
• Day 1 – 19 August 1997 , Tuesday – Paramount Stage 8 : Damaged bridge
• Day 2 – 20 August 1997 , Wednesday – Paramount Stage 8: Damaged bridge, damaged mess hall
• Day 3 – 21 August 1997 , Thursday – Paramount Stage 9 : Damaged corridors ; Paramount Stage 8: Damaged mess hall
• Day 4 – 22 August 1997 , Friday – Paramount Stage 9: Int. Krenim weapon ship ( temporal chamber )
• Day 5 – 25 August 1997 , Monday – Paramount Stage 9: Int. Krenim weapon ship (temporal chamber/ Annorax 's ready room )
• Day 6 – 26 August 1997 , Tuesday – Paramount Stage 9: Int. Krenim weapon ship (Annorax's ready room); Paramount Stage 16 : Int. Krenim weapon ship ( Chakotay 's quarters ), int. Annorax's home
• Day 7 – 27 August 1997 , Wednesday – Paramount Stage 8: Bridge, damaged bridge, damaged mess hall; Paramount Stage 9: Damaged corridor, damaged crew quarters , Krenim patrol ship bridge; Paramount Stage 16: Int. Krenim weapon ship ( Tom Paris ' quarters/ brig )
• 2nd Unit – 22 September 1997 , Monday – Paramount Stage 8: Int. Krenim weapon ship (Annorax's ready room/Chakotay's quarters); Paramount Stage 16: Int. Deflector Control
• Airdate: 12 November 1997

Story and script [ ]

• Originally, episode co-writer Brannon Braga did not want the "Year of Hell" story arc to end in a second part such as this, but with a fourth episode. He later remembered, " I was pushing to make it four parts, but ended up with two. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 30, No. 9/10, p. 108)
• Brannon Braga and Joe Menosky temporarily struggled with writing the majority of this episode. Menosky related, " We've got the bad guy, the weapon ship, the first episode, and the ship wrecked. We're doing this over the course of a year, and we've got those [day-setting] subtitles. We've planned out an episode and about a quarter, and we had no idea how to fill the rest of that second part. We had run out of story. I think we were totally stuck a week or two weeks. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 30, No. 9/10, p. 108)
• Following this period of uncertainty, Brannon Braga came up with the solution of basing the rest of the story (especially the character of Annorax) on Jules Verne 's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (and especially the persona of Captain Nemo ). Joe Menosky recollected, " Brannon came in one morning and said, 'It's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea . This guy [Annorax] is Nemo.' That was all it took. We sat down, watched Twenty Thousand Leagues . The character of Nemo was just awesome, because he's a bad guy but he's also a hero. He's evil, but he's also tortured, and all of that informed the character. All we had was a guy who was changing the timeline to benefit his race. But as soon as you had Nemo […] you had a guy who was trying to not just restore the timeline, but to bring back his wife who was lost to him through his own arrogance. That gave us the whole second episode. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 30, No. 9/10, p. 108) For his part, Braga described Annorax as "a villain that we modeled after Captain Nemo." ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 34 , p. 15) An in-joke that plays on this link between Annorax and Nemo is when Tom Paris, in this episode, refers to Annorax as "Captain Nemo" while conversing with Chakotay.
• Despite the viability of this influence, the writers were still not entirely certain about how to draw the episode to a conclusion. " We had at least half a dozen different endings, and reshot endings, " Joe Menosky recalled. " Brannon wanted to keep the ship wrecked for the entire season, and he didn't want to end with a reset. The studio [namely, Paramount Pictures ] didn't want to do that. [Executive producer] Rick Berman didn't want to do that. So we didn't do that. I wanted at least a couple of people to know what had happened. We actually wrote this ending even though we didn't shoot it, where time is reset, the weapon is gone; we know what has happened to us through some complication I can't even remember. When we meet up with the next Krenim, Chakotay asks offhand, 'Have you got a colony called Kyana Prime?' And the guy says, 'Sorry, I don't know what you're talking about.' The idea was that time had in fact in some ways punished Annorax. Everything was reset except that. That was denied him, so it was this great, final, tragic moment. That was written and never shot because Rick said it was too complicated, and he was right. I can't even remember the tortured reasoning we had so that some of us could remember. Rick said, 'Just plow Voyager into the weapon ship, and reset the timeline, and nobody remembers.' That was the simplest solution. " At the time, however, Menosky regretted the ending that was chosen. " I wasn't completely satisfied with it, " he remembered. ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 30, No. 9/10, p. 109)
• Joe Menosky did, on the other hand, enjoy writing some of Annorax's dialogue, particularly when it is made clear that the character is personifying time. Menosky reminisced, " I loved Annorax's speeches in 'Part II' […] That stuff was really fun to write. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 30, No. 9/10, p. 108)

Cast and characters [ ]

• The name "Annorax" seems to have been created intentionally to fit with the theme of time that is associated with that character, the word "anno" being Latin for "year." However, in A Vision of the Future - Star Trek: Voyager , author Stephen Edward Poe suggests that producers created the name of Annorax as a not-so-subtle dig at the more obsessive Trekkies ( Anoraks ). It may also have been an anagram for "Aronnax", a fictional professor who serves as the narrator of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , a possibility supposed by the Star Trek Encyclopedia  (3rd ed., p. 581).
• Although Chakotay and Tom Paris find Annorax's methods debatable in this episode, Joe Menosky's interpretation of the character favored Paris' opinion of Annorax. " This guy was personalizing time. His paranoia, and his sense of guilt and megalomania were crashing in on him, " Menosky stated, " to the point where he thought time itself was after him to punish him for his arrogance. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 30, No. 9/10, p. 108)
• Executive producer Jeri Taylor found Annorax to be a notable character. " He's a very three-dimensional villain, " she observed, " and in part two you really see him come to the surface. There's a lot going on with Chakotay and him. " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 36 , p. 13)
• Annorax actor Kurtwood Smith enjoyed appearing in this episode and the previous one. He remarked, " I liked Annorax. He was Captain Nemo, though not in terms of his behavior or personality. Nemo wandered through the oceans, while this guy wandered through space and time. I empathized with him […] I had a good time with Annorax, and I got the girl at the end. If you know my career, you know that almost never happens. " ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 18 )
• Kurtwood Smith especially enjoyed working with a particular pair of Voyager 's main cast members in this episode. He commented, " I actually didn't work with the regulars in the first show [of the "Year of Hell" two-parter], but I got to work with Robert Beltran and Robert Duncan McNeill in the second. They're all good people. " ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 18 )
• Both Joe Menosky and Jeri Taylor were highly satisfied with Kurtwood Smith's acting in this episode and the previous one, Menosky later describing Smith as "incredible." ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 30, No. 9/10, p. 108) Taylor remarked, " He gives the whole thing some substance, some weight. " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 36 , p. 13)
• Tuvok actor Tim Russ observed that this episode's two-parter gives an insight into an alternate version of the relationship between Tuvok and Seven of Nine. " You see […] what direction it could have gone into, " noted Russ. ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 30, No. 9/10, p. 101)

Production and effects [ ]

• This is the first episode of Star Trek: Voyager to be directed by Mike Vejar , who went on to direct twelve subsequent installments of the series. Joe Menosky was extremely pleased with Vejar's work on this episode and said of both parts of the "Year of the Hell" two-parter (despite each of the two episodes having been helmed by a different director) that they "were amazingly well directed." ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 30, No. 9/10, p. 108)
• CGI Effects Director Ron Thornton thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity that Foundation Imaging was given to blow Voyager up for this episode. He noted, " Getting the chance to destroy Voyager at the end was very cool! " ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 16 ) Visual effects supervisor Mitch Suskin and coordinator Arthur J. Codron also worked on this episode, in a changeover of supervisor and coordinator from the first half of the "Year of Hell" two-parter, and the look of this episode (as well as the previous one) were added to in the compositing bay, by animation effects artist Greg Rainoff . ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 30, No. 9/10, pp. 108-109)
• According to the call sheet for Tuesday 26 August 1997 , Jeri Ryan had no scene filmed for the episode but was in makeup and on set for shooting publicity photos. Her stand-in , Cameron , was also on set, but standing-in for guest actress Lise Simms . The call sheet noted that Cameron had to wear flat shoes for standing-in.

Costumes and props [ ]

• The costume worn, for the final scene of this episode, by Lise Simms as Annorax's wife was a reuse of a costume previously worn by Susan Diol as Danara Pel in the episode " Lifesigns ". [2]
• The two bird statues in Annorax 's ready room from " Year of Hell " can also be seen in this episode. Here, they were turned around and featured the front sides. They were previously seen in Marla Aster 's home in the TNG third season episode " The Bonding ", in the reception area at Arkaria Base in the sixth season episode " Starship Mine ", and in the conference room of the Maquis in the seventh season episode " Preemptive Strike ".
• The wall sculptures seen in Annorax house on Kyana Prime were previously used and seen as sculptures on both sides of the door to Tolen Ren 's house in the first season episode " Ex Post Facto ". The only difference are the gold decorations in "Year of Hell, Part II".
• The soundtrack of this episode's two-parter includes some rare instances of melodic content, chordal arrangements having been usual since the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation . During the recording of the score for Star Trek: Voyager 's fourth season finale, " Hope and Fear ", composer Dennis McCarthy reckoned, " I think the last time I wrote a melodic piece was in 'Year of Hell'. " ( Star Trek: Action! , p. 91)
• One of the most recognizable musical themes in this episode is that of "A Busy Man" from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier , which was also used in Star Trek: First Contact for that film's main theme.

Continuity [ ]

• The events of the episode take place between July 27th and November 28th , 2374 , resetting to March 17 in the final scene. These dates can be extrapolated from the previous episode, in which day 65 is identified as being May 20th.
• As well as referring to Annorax as "Captain Nemo " here, Tom Paris also implies a comparison between Annorax and Captain Bligh, referencing the historical British Vice Admiral William Bligh and implying a reference to the well known mutiny on the HMS Bounty ; a seafaring craft that was under the command of Bligh when the takeover occurred.
• This episode is similar to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes " Cause And Effect " and " Yesterday's Enterprise ", the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode " Visionary " and the Star Trek: Enterprise episode " Twilight ", in that catastrophic events occur (or are about to occur, in the case of "Visionary"), and then a time-change returns everything back to normal.
• This episode is the only one in the seven-year run of Voyager wherein Janeway is relieved of command (albeit momentarily) by The Doctor , on the grounds that she is suffering from Traumatic Stress Syndrome .
• This episode features the second of five times that the destruction of Voyager is depicted on the series, the previous occasion being " Deadlock ". On this occasion, an alternate timeline version of Voyager is destroyed in a deliberate collision with an enemy ship.
• This episode features the fifth of nine times that Kathryn Janeway 's death is depicted over the course of the series. Previous episodes that depict this include " Time and Again ", " Deadlock ", " Before and After ", and " Worst Case Scenario ". On this occasion, the version of Janeway that succumbs to death is one of an alternate timeline that ultimately doesn't come to pass, and the cause of death is Voyager 's deliberate collision with the Krenim ship.
• This is the second consecutive episode to feature no scenes in Voyager 's engineering and sickbay departments.

Apocrypha [ ]

• The novel A Pocket Full of Lies stated that Annorax of the new timeline lived out his natural lifespan as a man of peace. However, the Krenim of the revised 24th century discovered Janeway's shielded log buoys from the Year of Hell. Calculating that the Voyager crew would interfere with their conventional imperial ambitions, they would attack Voyager with a chroniton torpedo, triggering the events of " Shattered ".
• This episode was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Series in 1998 . The nominees were Eric Chauvin , Arthur Codron , Paul Hill , Koji Kuramura , Adam "Mojo" Lebowitz , Greg Rainoff , Mitch Suskin , and John M. Teska .

Reception [ ]

• This episode achieved a Nielsen rating of 5.2 million homes, and an 8% share. [3] (X)
• Upon its first broadcast in on the BBC , this episode was shown edited together with the first half of its two-parter, forming a feature-length television movie, although it was not intended to be viewed that way. ( Delta Quadrant , p. 207)
• Ultimately, Brannon Braga believed that certain chances he and Joe Menosky had taken while writing this episode's two-parter had paid off. Shortly after the duology first aired in the US, Braga remarked, " We took some big chances with that show, and I think it's really interesting. " Braga thought that a good example of the two-parter's quality was the destruction of Voyager in this episode's conclusion. " It's just filled with that kind of sweeping drama, " he enthused. ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 34 , p. 15) Braga also counted this episode's two-parter as a highlight of the fourth season (along with " The Killing Game " and " The Killing Game, Part II " as well as " Prey "), and opined that – in common with the two-parter "The Killing Game" – this episode's duology involved "high concept stories with an epic sweep, with big cinematic action sequences, and all of the characters [having] something fun to do." ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 44 , p. 12) An element of the two-parter's development that Braga felt was "unfortunate" was that he and Menosky had chosen to make Tuvok blind. Braga explained that his reasoning for disliking this element of the plot was "because of the Geordi La Forge connection," referencing the fact that Tim Russ had been temporarily considered to play the character of Geordi La Forge on TNG. ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 30, No. 9/10, p. 100)
• Joe Menosky thought that, due to the caliber of actor he believed Kurtwood Smith to be, the "Year of Hell" two-parter "worked really, really well." In common with Brannon Braga, Menosky was ultimately satisfied with this episode's ending, despite having had initial feelings to the contrary. He opined, " It got us a great climax, which is plowing the ship into the weapon, and in some ways took the arc of destroying the ship to its ultimate conclusion, and a very satisfying conclusion. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 30, No. 9/10, pp. 108 & 109)
• Jeri Taylor was also highly satisfied, ultimately, with the "Year of Hell" two-parter. Citing it as a highlight of Star Trek: Voyager 's fourth season, Taylor counted it as an example of "some of our more epic episodes [that] had everything going for them." ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 40 , pp. 14-15) Taylor further enthused about the two-parter, " It had a lot of action, a gigantic adventure, personal stakes, an intriguing villain and a very science fiction-based premise. Those are the things we love to get. " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 40 , p. 15)
• In a 2002 interview, Bill Peets – a veteran chief lighting technician for Star Trek – cited this episode's two-parter among his favorites from the episodes he had worked on (along with TNG : " The Enemy " and DS9 : " Crossover "). ( Star Trek: Communicator  issue 138 , p. 50)
• This episode's ending was controversial among fans. " Obviously we angered a lot of people with the ending, " Joe Menosky admitted. Remembering a particular manifestation of this fan response, he stated, " I got one of the greatest little pieces of fan mail I've ever gotten, from a fan who said, 'Annorax is the best Trek villain in all of Trek history.' Then he went on to say in the same letter, 'I'm sorry to say that I'm not going to be watching Voyager anymore,' because he was so incensed about the ending, about the reset button. " Of course, not all fan response to the episode's conclusion was negative. " I got a really interesting fan letter from someone who just loved the ending, " Menosky also related. " Her take on it was that Janeway made this big sacrifice, and everything was reset, and then both of them were subtly changed, both the villain and the hero, both Janeway and Annorax, even though neither of them knew and was aware of that timeline. Somehow there was a hint that something positive had changed. Janeway was just a little less arrogant, for example, when the Krenim came on the viewscreen […] For this fan, there seemed to be this interesting sense of a positive and a humanizing effect that the adventure had on both Janeway and Annorax. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 30, No. 9/10, p. 109)
• Star Trek author Kirsten Beyer disliked the conclusion of this episode. " It was [a] fabulous episode right up until the end […] The whole thing just made me sad, " Beyer remarked, " because the writers did it to themselves. They had no business going as far as they did if they didn’t have a better resolution in their pocket. " [4]
• Cinefantastique rated this episode 3 out of 4 stars. ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 30, No. 9/10, p. 89)
• Star Trek Magazine scored this episode 4 out of 5 stars. ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 40 , p. 59)
• The unauthorized reference book Delta Quadrant (p. 211) gives the installment a rating of 9.5 out of 10.
• The book Star Trek 101 (p. 175), by Terry J. Erdmann and Paula M. Block , lists this episode and the previous part of its two-parter as being, together, one of the "Ten Essential Episodes" from Star Trek: Voyager .
• After leaving Star Trek , Ronald D. Moore used this episode as an example of how he believed Star Trek: Voyager should have proceeded all along but also implied that he was not fond of the way in which this episode ends. [5]
• John Austin 's costume from this episode was sold off on the It's A Wrap! sale and auction on eBay and later re-used by Eric Hunter in the episode " Tsunkatse ". [6] Lise Simms' costume was also sold off. [7]
• Following his appearances in this episode and the previous one, Kurtwood Smith considered the possibility of returning to Voyager as Annorax. " As 'Year of Hell Part II' ended, " the actor said, " you saw Annorax with his wife, but the camera also moves in to show you that he's designing something. If it's that ship and he hasn't learned his lesson–who knows?–he could be back again. If they come up with a story as good as 'Year of Hell,' count me in. I would love to do it. " ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 18 ) However, the writers were – or, at least, Joe Menosky was – admittedly unsure what would become of Annorax, following this episode's final scene. " Does he give up work, spend more time with his family, and become more humanized? I don't know, " Menosky conceded. ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 30, No. 9/10, p. 109) Perhaps as a result of this uncertainty, this episode's two-parter constitutes the only Star Trek production in which the character of Annorax features.

Video and DVD releases [ ]

• UK VHS release (two-episode tapes, CIC Video ): Volume 4.5, catalog number VHR 4626, 1 June 1998
• In feature-length form, as part of the UK VHS collection Star Trek: Voyager - Movies : Volume 2 (with "Scorpion"), catalog number VHR 5072, 18 September 2000
• As part of the VOY Season 4 DVD collection
• As part of the Star Trek: Fan Collective - Time Travel collection

Links and references [ ]

Starring [ ].

• Kate Mulgrew as Captain Kathryn Janeway

Also starring [ ]

• Robert Beltran as Chakotay
• Roxann Dawson as B'Elanna Torres
• Robert Duncan McNeill as Tom Paris
• Ethan Phillips as Neelix
• Robert Picardo as The Doctor
• Tim Russ as Tuvok
• Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine
• Garrett Wang as Harry Kim

Guest star [ ]

• John Loprieno as Obrist

Special guest star [ ]

• Kurtwood Smith as Annorax

Co-stars [ ]

• Peter Slutsker as Krenim Commandant
• Lise Simms as Wife
• Majel Barrett as Narrator

Uncredited co-stars [ ]

• John Austin as Krenim officer
• Tarik Ergin as Ayala
• Lydia Shiferaw as command division officer
• Bob Shuttleworth as Krenim officer
• Pablo Soriano as operations division ensign
• Adrian Tafoya as Krenim officer
• John Thaddeus as Krenim officer
• Unknown actor as Krenim officer (voice)

Stand-ins [ ]

• Cameron – stand-in for Jeri Ryan and Lise Simms
• Sue Henley – stand-in for Kate Mulgrew
• Susan Lewis – stand-in for Roxann Dawson
• Louis Ortiz – stand-in for John Loprieno
• Lemuel Perry – stand-in for Tim Russ
• J.R. Quinonez – stand-in for Robert Picardo and Kurtwood Smith
• Robert Rasner – stand-in for Ethan Phillips
• Keith Rayve – stand-in for Robert Duncan McNeill and Peter Slutsker
• Richard Sarstedt – stand-in for Robert Beltran
• Simon Stotler – stand-in for Ethan Phillips
• John Tampoya – stand-in for Garrett Wang
• Hand double for Robert Beltran
• Hand double for Kurtwood Smith

References [ ]

4 billion years ago ; 2174 ; 2370 ; ability ; Alpha Quadrant ; Alsuran ; Alsuran Empire ; alveoli ; amino acid ; arm asphyxiation ; astrometrics ; attack pattern ; birthday ; Bligh, William ; Borg Collective ; breakfast ; breathing mask ; brig ; burn ; carbohydrate ; chief medical officer ; class 9 nebula ; The Coalition ; collision course ; color ; comet ; command chair ; command structure ; communications array ; component 37329 ; coordinates ; corrosion ; damage ; Deflector Control ; deflector field density ; dermal regenerator ; Earth ; " elixir of endurance "; emergency hand actuator ; EPS conduit ; evasive pattern ; face ; fire ; flattery ; fluidic converter ; galley ; general court-martial ; genocide ; glove ; gravitational plating ; hair ; heart ; holodeck ; hour ; hull breach ; hydrocarbon ; impact planet ; insanity ; instinct ; isolation ; Krenim ; Krenim game ; Krenim Imperium ; Krenim patrol ship ; Krenim space ; Krenim weapon ship ; Krenim warship ; Kyana Prime ; light year ; logic ; lung ; Malkoth ; Malkothian spirits ( spirit ); Mawasi ; Mawasi cruiser ; megalomania ; micrometeoroid ; Milky Way Galaxy ; mood ; museum ( museum ship ); mutiny ; nacelle pylon ; Nemo ; Nihydron ; Nihydron warship ; nutrient ; Obrist's family and friends ; paranoia ; particle emitter ; percent ; photon grenade ; pocket watch ; power grid ; probability ; purée ; Ram Izad ; Ram Izad homeworld ; ration cube ; Rilnar ; Rogue comet sector ; safe haven ; Saint-Émilion ; scar ; schematic ; sculpture ; skin ; sleeplessness ; Starfleet ID code ; Starfleet Medical Regulation 121 ; Starfleet undershirt ; Talaxian spice ; temporal core ; temporal incursion ; temporal mechanics ; temporal shield ; third-degree burn ; thread ; time ; toast ; torpedo launcher ; Traumatic Stress Syndrome ; trioxin ; tritanium ; unnamed food ; Vassbinder ; vessel ; vintage ; Vulcan salute ; water ; " Year of Hell "

Meta references [ ]

External links [ ].

• "Year of Hell, Part II" at StarTrek.com
• " Year of Hell, Part II " at Memory Beta , the wiki for licensed Star Trek works
• " Year of Hell, Part II " at Wikipedia
• " Year of Hell, Part II " at the Internet Movie Database
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http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/StarTrekVoyagerS4E8YearOfHell

Recap / Star Trek: Voyager S4 E8: "Year of Hell"

Edit locked.

This is one year I'd like to forget.

This two-part episode provides examples of

• 2-D Space : Averted with the creation of the Astrometrics lab , so Voyager 's course no longer has to be represented on flat screens. Annorax's vessel plays the trope straight.
• A Million Is a Statistic : Annorax and his crew are willing to erase billions of people from existence, simply to get a few percentage points closer to their ideal timeline.
• Abandon Ship : Averted at first; Chakotay suggests they abandon Voyager and use the shuttles to sneak through Krenim space. Janeway refuses to consider the idea until the cliffhanger end of Part One. " I’m not breaking up the family , Chakotay. We’re stronger as a team — one crew, one ship."
• The temporal shields make Voyager immune to the changes caused by the Timeship when the crew didn't even know that was a threat they needed to be protected from.
• Unfortunately, the temporal shield also prevents the damage to Voyager and her crew from being "healed" from the reset.
• Affectionate Gesture to the Head : When saying goodbye to a blind Tuvok, Janeway cups his face in both hands.
• Brought up by Janeway when the Doctor tries to relieve her of duty due to her potential PTSD, as she forces him to acknowledge that the ship doesn’t have the resources to keep her confined even if they would go through with that order.
• Janeway also asks this when Chakotay first suggests the idea of abandoning the ship - sure, a bunch of escape pods and shuttles could probably sneak through Krenim space much easier than the starship itself, but those pods and shuttles would have a distinct disadvantage with weapons and shields, and, even if they did make it through to the other side, what would they do without Voyager 's resources going forward in their journey home? Even Chakotay acknowledges that he didn't like the idea, but he had a duty to suggest it all the same.
• Anyone Can Die : Surprisingly averted despite the inbuilt Reset Button , and the alternate timeline of "Before And After" in which both Janeway and B'Elanna were killed during the Year of Hell. At most, two Nihydron vessels are erased during the climactic battle, but it's unclear whether the two crewmembers (B'Elanna and Harry) assigned to work with the Nihydron are actually on-board those ships.
• Apologetic Attacker : Annorax has the grace to apologize before trying to wipe Voyager from existence.
• Artistic License – Ships : Contrary to what Paris seems to think, compartmentalizing a ship via transverse bulkheads did not originate with the Titanic , having been invented in China in the 5th century AD and having become near-universal in Western ships as well a century before Titanic . It's also ridiculous that Starfleet vessels wouldn't already have such compartmentalization.
• Attack Pattern Alpha : In this case, Janeway orders Attack Pattern Omega.
• Beard of Sorrow : Chakotay gets pretty scruffy on the damaged Voyager .
• Beauty Equals Goodness : Inverted with the Krenim and the Zahl—the latter look less like humans but are friendlier to Voyager .
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished : Averted when Janeway gets a severe burn scar on one side of her face, though strangely her famous red hair is unsinged. Meanwhile Seven's face is pristine as always.
• A Birthday, Not a Break : Janeway's birthday means little on a half-destroyed ship.
• Bomb Disposal : Seven finds an unexploded chronoton torpedo lodged in the hull. She can't defuse it as it's about to explode, but she can scan it for the exact temporal variance which will enable them to create effective shields.
• Book Ends : The two-parter started with Voyager coming across an aggressive but underpowered Krenim ship trying to bully Voyager while lacking any sort of weaponry to back it up . After Annorax restores most of the Krenim Imperium, the timeline shift has Voyager being pounded on by a much more powerful ship, and the same commander is now a full-on Jerkass who casually threatens to have the crew executed, with Janeway commenting that they have been dealing with these attacks for weeks now. After the timeship is destroyed the timeline resets to Day One where Voyager comes across the original, smaller Krenim ship, whose commander is now much more reasonable and politely requests that they divert around the area, which Janeway agrees to do.
• The Bore : The Doctor insists on giving a speech at the opening of the Astrometrics Lab, despite the ill-concealed impatience of his fellow crew, who take the first excuse available to leave the room en masse.
• Brutal Honesty : Janeway says they need to leave the nebula before their repairs are complete. Only Seven voices what everyone's thinking , and is told off for it later by Tuvok. Seven: As a Borg, I submitted to a single authority: the Collective. Over the past several months I've been encouraged to think and act as an individual. It is difficult to know when to restrain myself. Tuvok: Remember this guideline. The Captain is always right. Seven: Even when you know her logic is flawed? Tuvok: ( Beat ) Perhaps...
• Bullying a Dragon : Subverted; a fifteen-man, lightly-armed Krenim vessel makes a pathetic attempt to scare off Voyager ... until a time shift turns it into a powerful warship with torpedoes that can pass right through their shields.
• A time distortion passes over the bridge; when it clears, Janeway is still standing in center frame, except the ship is now on Red Alert . This shot is very similar to one from TNG’s " Yesterday’s Enterprise ".
• Seven hints at the events of Star Trek: First Contact , in which the Borg also tried to remove a troublesome enemy by changing the timeline.
• A tea cup falling from the table and shattering is from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country .
• Captain Nemo Copy : A man of culture who isolates himself and his crew from the outside world, driven by a quest that wrecks destruction on them all.
• The Chains of Commanding : The Doctor diagnoses Janeway as suffering from traumatic stress syndrome. It's not a stretch to guess Annorax is under similar strain, though his is largely self-induced.
• Many of the events depicted in "Year of Hell" were foreshadowed in " Before & After ", e.g. Neelix becoming a security officer and the torpedo stuck in the hull. This despite the fact that the character used to foreshadow the events (Kes) is no longer on board.
• Paris' transverse bulkheads idea comes in handy when Voyager needs to pull a Hyperspeed Escape and loses part of the outer hull.
• Cliffhanger : At the end of Part One, Tom and Chakotay have been abducted by Annorax, and Voyager’s crew takes to the Escape Pods .
• Close-Enough Timeline : Defied; Annorax achieves this at the start of the episode, with the erasure of the Zahl restoring the Krenim Imperium to 98% of its original scale. However, because his wife's colony has not been restored to him, he is determined to keep trying.
• Cold Equation : The Doctor leaves a hatch open as long as he can, but eventually has to close the door on two crewmen who wouldn’t make it before an explosion destroys most of that deck.
• Companion Cube : Janeway gives a moving speech on behalf of Voyager. Tuvok: Curious. I have never understood the human compulsion to emotionally bond with inanimate objects. This vessel has done nothing. It is an assemblage of bulkheads, conduits, tritanium, nothing more. Janeway: Oh, you're wrong. It's much more than that. This ship has been our home. It's kept us together. It's been part of our family. As illogical as this might sound, I feel as close to Voyager as I do to any other member of my crew. It's carried us, Tuvok, even nurtured us. And right now it needs one of us.
• The Krenim timeship is immune to conventional weapons fire because its shields keep it outside the space-time continuum, an Outside-Context Problem . When the time core is disabled, the ship becomes a Glass Cannon .
• The Wave-Motion Gun on the ship has no other setting besides "erase from existence," which means no matter how precise their target the results are always taking a sledgehammer to the timeline. In fairness, it has to be said that Annorax is perfectly aware of this, hence his rigorous attention to detail and trying to take every outside factor into account when making the temporal calculations.
• Critical Staffing Shortage : With several dozen crewmembers dead already from the Krenim attacks, Part 1 ends with significant damage to Voyager 's basic systems to where it can't support everyone anymore. Janeway orders most of the crew to escape pods to find help.
• Curb-Stomp Battle : When the timeship's conventional weapons open fire, they cripple the attacking fleet in seconds.
• Damage Control : With only a skeleton crew on board, their entire time is spent fixing repairs.
• Death Seeker : Janeway chooses to remain on Voyager for the final battle even though it's almost certainly too damaged to survive combat.
• Deflector Shields : Voyager is getting hammered because the Krenim torpedoes use temporal technology that can pass right through Voyager ’s shields. Thanks to Seven's analysis of the chronoton torpedo, they develop temporal shields that have the unexpected side-effect of leaving them unaffected whenever Annorax changes the timeline, which previously they hadn't even been aware of.
• The Determinator : Janeway and Annorax are each, in their way, determined to protect their people, but Janeway's actions are all defensive and focused on a clear threat where Annorax is consumed by an obsession that drives him to eliminate innocents in the name of restoring one specific person.
• Distinction Without a Difference : Tuvok: It is inappropriate to contradict the captain in front of the crew. Seven: That was not my intention. I simply pointed out that her decision was wrong.
• Doctor's Orders : Averted — using a precedent well-established in Star Trek continuity, the Doctor tries to relieve Janeway on medical grounds, but Janeway counters that he has no way to enforce that order.
• Dramatic Shattering = Portent of Doom : Janeway finds her lucky coffee cup has survived the destruction of the Ready Room. Just then the Krenim attack and the cup is knocked off the table and smashes .
• Enemy Mine : Annorax tries to make an ally out of Chakotay in order to solve their common problems. Tom and Janeway are more successful in gaining allies to oppose him.
• The End... Or Is It? : After the timeship is destroyed, history gets a Reset Button back to 'normal' and we see Annorax in a happy moment at home with his wife whom he'd previously wiped from existence. She convinces him to put his work aside and join her, and the camera finishes on a shot of his table, on which lie the plans for the timeship. Even then, the Point of Divergence condition still applies. Even if Annorax builds a "second" (original) timeship, the complexities of the time-line do not guarantee a repeat of the past events.
• Exact Time to Failure : The Doctor gets angry at Janeway for spending more than the time he recommended breathing a Deadly Gas , though it's justified in this case as him trying to minimize Janeway's exposure. EMH: I told you eight minutes on that deck, not eight-and-a-half, not nine, and certainly not twelve!
• Fake Better Alternate Timeline : Double example. A Krenim named Annorax had previously tried to win the Krenim war against the Rilnar by removing the latter from history. This caused a plague that would have been averted by the presence of Rilnar DNA in the Krenim genome. Annorax attempted to fix that with another temporal incursion, causing the disappearance of his home colony and his wife.
• Final Solution : Annorax isn’t just trying to make the Krenim Imperium greater than its rivals, but to destroy those rivals from ever having existed (as well as restore the colony planet where his wife lived). He's at least humane enough to realise what he's doing is wrong, but not enough to stop .
• First-Name Ultimatum : Chakotay calls his captain “Kathryn” when she rejects his birthday present. She ignores him .
• Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon : The Krenim timeship’s temporal disruption beam. Makes you wonder why any of the ships of Janeway’s fleet would willingly fly in front of it during the final battle ...
• Forever War : The crew of Annorax’s vessel have been trying to change history for over two hundred years as no-one can age inside the temporal field. When Annorax tells his Number Two they have all of eternity to get it right, he doesn't look happy .
• Going Down with the Ship : Janeway even invokes the trope.
• Hair Memento : All Annorax has left of his wife is a lock of her hair.
• Hand of Death : The Krenim all wear black gloves.
• Heel Realization : Chakotay gets this when he sees Annorax wipe out another civilization, simply to see what will happen.
• Heroic Sacrifice : Janeway crashes Voyager into the timeship in the hope that the destruction of the ship will cause the timeline to revert to normal. Luckily, it works.
• He's Dead, Jim : Time changing for the worst is immediately marked by a dead ensign on the bridge.
• After achieving a 98% restoration, a result they had never witnessed in 200 years of trying, Obrist argues that they should dismantle the weapon and return to their people. But Annorax is determined to keep going until his homeworld is restored.
• Hyperspeed Escape : Krenim warships can only do Warp Six, so Voyager (with a maximum cruising velocity of Warp 9.975) at least has the option of outrunning them. The last time Janeway tries this, however, large parts of the hull come flying off due to the structural damage it has sustained so far.
• I Ate WHAT?! : Annorax makes a meal for Chakotay and Paris . They seem to enjoy the food until they find out where it came from. Each dish that Annorax has had prepared is the last remnants of a civilization he has completely removed from history with his temporal weapon. There are about 20 different items on the table, showing the scale of what he has done. Chakotay and Paris' horror is palpable. "This bottle is the only component left of the once powerful Malkoth race. Everything else about them, cities, culture, the very species itself never existed, because of me. Every dish you see here comes from a civilisation that has been erased from time. Mister Paris, you're devouring the last remnants of the Alsuran Empire."
• Immortality Field : The timeship is clearly protected by one, considering that Annorax and his crew haven't aged a day in over 200 years.
• Internal Retcon : Implicit for every Series Continuity Error up to that point.
• Ironic Echo Cut : From Annorax and Chakotay toasting their alliance with crystal wineglasses to the crew of Voyager toasting their absent friends with the Elixir of Endurance in battered metal cups.
• It's All About Me : Annorax claims his time-alterations are to restore the Krenim Imperium to its former glory. But it's obvious he only really cares about bringing back his wife and homeworld, especially after he declares a 98% restored Imperium (with his wife's colony in the missing 2%) isn't good enough. Paris even notes that Annorax has reached a point where he appears to basically believe that Time itself has a grudge against him and is punishing him for his hubris by 'withholding' his wife.
• It's a Long Story : Seven knows about Zephram Cochrane's vessel The Phoenix because the Borg were present during those events . “It’s a complicated story.” Since this episode took place before Voyager had re-established contact with the Federation, it's understandable that they wouldn't be aware of those events.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope : Annorax reflects on how easy it was to use the temporal weapon the first time, and how easily he's continued to justify it.
• Krenim chroniton torpedoes generate a field which pushes them out of normal space-time until the moment of impact, rendering all defensive measures worthless against them until Voyager can generate a similar field of its own.
• Annorax's ship has a temporal core which has the same effect, rendering the entire ship immune to changes in the timeline and somehow making the entire crew immortal as long as it's active.
• Karma Houdini : Annorax ends the episode living happily with his wife on their home colony, with no memory of his 200+ year campaign of temporal genocide. Of course, technically he never committed those crimes in this new timeline...
• Lethal Chef : Voyager 's crew drink a toast to absent friends, only to pull disgusted expressions at Neelix's latest concoction. At least this time the limited resources give him a good excuse. Neelix: I call it the Elixir of Endurance. It's loaded with amino acids, carbohydrates; all the nutrients necessary for the crew to withstand these stressful conditions. Torres: Ration cubes. Neelix: Well...yes, but this time, pureed and mixed with water and enhanced with Talaxian spices. Seven: It is offensive. Fortunately, taste is irrelevant.
• The Lost Lenore : Annorax is obsessed with tweaking the timeline until his wife is brought back to him.
• The Main Characters Do Everything : An egregious example, as Tom goes straight from showing off his modifications to Voyager's hull to assisting the Doctor with triage. This is literally the case when the crew Abandon Ship except for a scratch crew made up of the main characters.
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds : Chakotay suggests using the weapon ship to erase a comet, which would prevent Voyager from entering Krenim space. Annorax has him run a simulation that demonstrates what the actual result of this would be — namely the eradication of all life within 50 light years, as fragments from the comet had landed on a planet billions of years in the past and helped create life on it, which eventually gave rise to a spacefaring species.
• Minion with an F in Evil : Obrist helps Tom sabotage the timeship because he wants their ordeal to end .
• My Friends... and Zoidberg are True Companions The Doctor: Who would have thought this group of voyagers could actually become a family: Starfleet, Maquis, Klingon, Talaxian, Hologram, Borg, even Mr. Paris.
• Necromantic : The reason Annorax keeps aiming for the perfect result is because he erased his wife from existence, and they lived on a colony that only exists in the original timeline.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero : Voyager's temporal shields are enough to throw off Annorax's calculations, causing him to come after them when his latest incursion reverts the Krenim to a pre-warp status.
• No-Sell : As long as the temporal core is active, Annorax's ship is immune to enemy attacks.
• "Not So Different" Remark : Annorax compares his attempts to restore his original timeline to Voyager's journey home, in an attempt to sway Chakotay. Chakotay : You've been at this for 200 years, Annorax. What makes you think you're ever going to succeed? Annorax : What makes you think Voyager will ever reach Earth? The odds against you are astronomical. Yet you keep trying.
• Nothing Personal : Annorax tells Janeway that he bears her no malice; she's just an obstacle he needs to get rid of.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business : When the Doctor tries to relieve Janeway on medical grounds, she threatens to shut down his program. He points out that threat alone is proof that she's not thinking rationally. To her credit, she apologizes.
• Open Air Driver : In the final battle, the Voyager has it's bridge opened up and a makeshift forcefield keeping Janeway inside. Janeway decides to ram the timeship, which causes time to revert to before the ship came to be in the first place.
• The Krenim, and specifically the timeship and their temporal-based weapons. Janeway and the Voyager crew have no idea what is causing the temporal shockwaves, let alone that they are a weapon, and have no defenses against the Krenim’s temporal torpedoes until near the end of Part I.
• The timeshield they developed ended up protecting them from another timeline alteration from Annorax, which in turn throws off all their calculations to where the Krenim fleet are cargo transports instead of warships. This serves to attract Annorax to target Voyager for temporal destruction...
• The Perfectionist : Annorax. After being told that they've achieved a 98% restoration, he orders another temporal incursion and makes it clear he won't stop until "every colony, every individual, every blade of grass is restored."
• Plot Armor : Tuvok is only a few feet away from an exploding torpedo, and while he's permanently injured, his only injury is blindness. Seven, who he shielded with his body, is uninjured.
• Plot Parallel : As noted under The Determinator , Annorax and Janeway are both facing the annihilation of everything they hold dear, with the viewer getting a ringside seat to how well they handle it (or don't) and what means they are willing to justify to achieve their desired ends. Janeway is proven willing to give up everything , even her own life , while Annorax will sacrifice everyone but himself (and his power). This is even represented symbolically by their Tragic Keepsakes : Janeway, though touched by the watch Chakotay gives her, insists that it should be recycled because its components would be better used helping everyone on the ship, while Annorax refuses to "recycle" the lock of his wife's hair, instead retaining it in a stasis field to keep him focused on his goal. * And ironically, it may be his refusal to sacrifice, to let this piece of her go, that is preventing him from achieving what he seeks, thanks to the way the timeshield and Ripple Effect Indicator works.
• Point Defenseless : Averted. The timeship has gatling gun like conventional weapons on the sides of its hull.
• Annorax gains a 98% restoration of the Krenim Imperium which his Number Two insists is a Close-Enough Timeline , but Annorax continues with his quest to change the timeline because he's obsessed with getting the perfect result (his wife is part of the unrestored 2%). The second time he tries, Voyager ’s new temporal shields are enough to throw off his calculations and revert the entire Imperium to a pre-warp state.
• In Part 2 Annorax demonstrates why such precision is important. Chakotay tells him Voyager made a course correction eight months ago to avoid a comet, putting them on a heading into Krenim space, so he suggests erasing the comet from time. Annorax says that would destroy almost 8000 civilizations . Annorax: Four billion years ago fragments from that comet impacted a planet. Hydrocarbons from those fragments gave rise to several species of plant life which in turn sustained more complex organisms. Ultimately several space-faring civilisations evolved and colonised the entire sector. Chakotay: By erasing the comet I altered all evolution in this region. Annorax: Past, present and future. They exist as one. They breathe together. You're not the only person to make this mistake. When I first constructed this weapon ship I turned it against our greatest enemy, the Rilnar. The result was miraculous. With the Rilnar gone from history, my people, in an instant, became powerful again. But there were problems. A rare disease broke out among our colonies. Within a year, fifty million were dead. I had failed to realise that the Rilnar had introduced a crucial antibody into the Krenim genome and my weapon had eliminated that antibody as well . Chakotay: And you've been trying to undo that damage ever since, but each time you pull out a new thread, another one begins to unravel.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner : Just before crashing Voyager into the timeship , Janeway declaims rhetorically, "Time's up!"
• Ramming Always Works : Janeway rams Voyager straight into the timeship, causing all history to reset to the beginning of the year .
• Red Alert : Newly-promoted security officer Neelix consults Tuvok on what the audio warning should be. “Do you want it to say, ‘Intruder alert’ or do you want it to say something more dramatic like ‘Warning – intruder alert’ or ‘Intruders among us! Danger! Danger! Intruders among us!’?
• Real Men Get Shot : Tuvok takes getting blinded with the expected Vulcan poise. Janeway shows this trope applies to women too. Janeway: Tell the Doctor I'll be coming back with severe burns.
• Invoking this trope, to restore the lost greatness of Annorax's society, is the timeship's entire purpose.
• Destruction of the timeship undoes two centuries of Annorax's timeline tweaks and returns the timeline to its original form with a single difference; Annorax never built the timeship.
• Retcon : "Year of Hell" was originally meant to be all of season 4, and wasn't going to involve a Reset Button , and would have involved a more general conflict with the Krenim, rather than a single time-ship. The departure of Kes also means that it's Seven who deals with the chronoton torpedo; neither is there any mention of Kes' warning about the Krenim. Although the former, at least, is explainable by Kes altering the timeline. What is not, however, is how, the Year of Hell went from Constant attacks by the Krenim as stated in Before and After, to dealing with a single timeship (although that could be explained by the fact that, without Seven around, Voyager likely never devised the temporal shield in that timeline — meaning that Annorax's calculations were never thrown off, the Krenim just got stronger with each incursion and Annorax himself never had any reason to go after Voyager ).
• Ret-Gone : Essentially what the Krenim timeship is designed to do in-universe, and what it ultimately does to itself when Janeway rams it.
• Retro Upgrade : Paris comes up with transverse bulkheads to seal off Voyager ’s sections in case of a hull breach. He got the idea from the Titanic . Janeway: As I recall, it sank. Paris: I admit I’ve improved on the design.
• Ridiculously Difficult Route : Janeway doesn't take the first warning seriously as the Krenim commander is hardly a threat, and she's never been the type to back down from casual bullying. Suddenly they're inside the territory of an aggressive species, but it's not revealed how they got there in this alternate timeline (it's possible they got in the path of a Krenim offensive). Averted when Janeway accepts the polite warning of the Krenim commander at the end, and avoids the 'disputed' region.
• The weaselly Krenim subcommander who cringed in the presence of Voyager becomes very smug indeed when his guns outmatch theirs. At the end of the episode, he's a little cool, but respectful.
• Subverted with the lock of hair belonging to Annorax's wife , which is not only on the timeship but kept preserved in a stasis crystal, so it can never be affected by any of the changes in the timeline he causes. It's entirely possible that this is why he can't ever get 100% recovery, because time can never fully change or reset to bring her back so long as a piece of an erased timeline still exists; his smile when the crystal is broken and it vanishes could suggest he's realized this. See the YMMV tab for more details.
• Rousing Speech : Janeway to her crew before they abandon ship.
• The first time, he's a xenophobic but pathetic nuisance, trying to assert his will over a ship ten times larger than his. Janeway all but laughs at him.
• When the timeline changes, he becomes a Smug Snake , calmly and heartlessly discussing the wholesale slaughter of Voyager 's crew.
• And, finally, after the Reset Button , he shows a professional demeanor, firmly yet politely requesting Voyager avoid this area of space, and wishing them safe travels when they comply.
• Rule of Symbolism : Chakotay gives Janeway a watch for her birthday in an episode about time. Counts as an In-Universe version too, as it's a replicated reproduction of a watch belonging to a 19th-century captain who brought his ruined ship home against all odds. Janeway originally refuses to accept the gift, as they have limited replicator supplies. Later, she finds it again and attaches it to her belt.
• Serious Business : What's the first thing Janeway retrieves from the trashed Ready Room? Her coffee pot, of course!
• She's Dead, Jim : The first temporal shift reveals a ruined bridge and a dead female crewman. Chakotay: She's dead...

• Paris sarcastically calls Annorax 'Captain Bligh', referencing the Mutiny on the Bounty .
• His anthropomorphism of time as a ruthless, cunning foe is straight out of Moby-Dick .
• Janeway demands trioxin to treat her injuries. The Doctor refuses, perhaps because it has a habit of turning people into zombies .
• Small Name, Big Ego : The initial Krenim attack on Voyager is brushed off because the Krenim in that timeline have limited warp and weapons capability, despite his arrogant posturing, but that timeline only lasts a few days before Annorax's next major temporal incursion.
• Something That Begins with "Boring" : Stuck in a turbolift, Harry and B’Elanna play a quiz game. Most fanfic writers would make them have sex instead, but B’Elanna has internal injuries.
• Space Clouds : A crippled Voyager hides inside a nebula so dense that it produces a visible fog inside the ship's corridors. Captain Janeway even orders the hull breaches sealed to avoid having an "indoor nebula." One would think she'd be more concerned about all the air escaping...
• Spanner in the Works : Voyager is able to rig up temporal shields; however, this leaves it unaffected by the temporal shift, while at the same time upsetting all the changes that Annorax is trying to make.
• Standard Female Grab Area : Averted; the Doctor grabs Janeway's upper arm to stop her leaving Sickbay. She responds with a Death Glare and a threat to shut down his program.
• Swivel-Chair Antics : The Krenim captain after the time shift lets him take a level in arrogance.
• Taking the Bullet : Tuvok shields Seven from an explosion, permanently blinding him.

• Janeway gripes that this is turning into the Week of Hell. A year later, things have gone From Bad to Worse .
• Tuvok to Seven when she stays to calculate the temporal variance of the torpedo, enabling Voyager to construct a shield against them...and delaying Tuvok so he gets blinded by the exploding torpedo.
• The Doctor insists the captain give him time to treat her injuries, whereas Janeway just wants a hypo of trioxin to keep her going. EMH: Trioxin is used in emergency situations as a stop-gap measure. Your lungs have suffered serious damage. They need to be treated properly. Doctor's orders. Janeway: Captain's orders. Trioxin. Now. EMH: Aye, aye. It's your body. Who am I to judge? I'm only the Chief Medical officer.
• Chakotay ordering Tom to not do anything against Annorax. Not that Tom seems inclined to obey that order.
• Time Is Dangerous : Obviously Annorax's weapon is one of the most horrific ever shown in the franchise, but his obsession with it has led him to think of himself as less of an engineer confronted with a problem so much as a profiler chasing an UnSub . Annorax: When I tell that Time has moods, a disposition to be intuited, I'm not speaking metaphorically. Chakotay: What do you mean? Annorax: Anger is one of its moods. Anger and the desire for retribution, vengeance. Time itself has tried to punish me for my arrogance. It has kept me from my wife, denied me my future.
• Time-Passage Beard : Chakotay starts growing at least a Time-Passage Mustache when he is first seen in Part 2 on board Annorax's time ship. It is soon shaved off when he is brought out of his holding cell to meet with Annorax.
• The Time Traveller's Dilemma : Invoked and played to its obvious conclusion; the best thing to do with a time machine is un-invent it.
• The Title Drop actually occurred in "Before and After"
• To Absent Friends : Well, "distant" friends, actually, but the sentiment is close enough.
• Too Dumb to Live : During the final battle, two of Voyager's allies fly directly in front of the weapon ship after making an attack pass, leaving them open for a full temporal burst that erases them from time.
• Annorax keeps a lock of the hair of the wife he accidentally erased from time in a special container that shields it from dissipating into nothing because it can't exist in the world he created. As his vessel is destroyed, he watches helplessly as the container breaks and the hair vanishes from existence... and then he smiles as he realizes he's about to get exactly what he's wanted; the weapon backfiring erases itself from history, restoring all of his victims — including his wife.
• Janeway is quite moved when she finds Chakotay disobeyed orders to recycle the watch, and wears it from then on.
• Trash the Set Janeway: You have the Bridge...what’s left of it.
• Unperson : In a sad moment, Obrist admits that he stopped celebrating his family's birthdays because they probably died centuries ago. Or worse, they may have been erased from history altogether.
• Vestigial Empire : When Annorax first built the weapon ship, the glory days of the Krenim were long behind them and he used it on their greatest enemy in an attempt to restore the Imperium to power.
• Villainous BSoD : Annorax has been frustrated in his quest for so long, he believes that Time itself is somehow punishing him for trying to change it.
• Voodoo Shark : Annorax and his crew are ageless due to their ship's temporal shields, which protect them from the flow of time. It doesn't stop them from eating and breathing.
• The Watchmaker : Janeway realizes that she's starting to lose track of time. Chakotay chirps that he has a remedy for that, and presents her with a pocket-watch. She later finds the watch again while rooting through Voyager 's wrecked upper decks. It also symbolizes Chakotay's newfound power as an apprentice onboard Annorax's timeship.
• Wave-Motion Gun : An unusual one in that it doesn't just destroy its targets; it erases them from history.
• We Come in Peace — Shoot to Kill : The Krenim Imperium's response to Voyager trying to negotiate a way through their space is just to shoot at them.
• What the Hell, Hero? : Tom tells off Chakotay for working with Annorax, and various crewmembers question Janeway on her recklessness.
• Who Wants to Live Forever? : Annorax may be content to spend eternity rewriting history, but his crew sure isn't...
• Whole-Plot Reference : At least the portion set aboard the Krenim temporal weapon ship is this to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea . Referenced in the name Annorax — a version of Arronax, The Narrator of the aforementioned novel.
• Wild Card : Voyager for Annorax; because she arrived unexpectedly from such a faraway sector and is generating her own temporal field, it's impossible to predict her effect on the timeline. Annorax initially considered the ship to be a minor element, but when the temporal shields throw off his latest incursion, he decides to take a closer look.
• With All Due Respect : As per usual for this trope, Janeway uses it on someone she obviously doesn’t respect at all. Krenim subcommander: Reverse course, or be destroyed! Captain Janeway: With all due respect, unless you’ve got something a little bigger in your torpedo tubes I'm not turning around.
• You Can't Go Home Again : Annorax can't, because his home no longer exists — he accidentally Ret Goned it two hundred years ago, along with his wife and children. He's been desperately trying to correct that mistake ever since, without success. note  And even if he somehow managed it, he still wouldn't have a family to go back to, as they'd be long dead by now. Whether he would retire satisfied that they got to live out their lives, or continue to rant and rave at time for keeping them from him, we'll never know. In the end, however, history is changed so that he never left home in the first place.

Video Example(s):

Throughout its seven seasons, the series "Star Trek: Voyager" became notorious for pushing the reset button. One moment, however, will likely always stand out in the minds of fans: when Captain Janeway declared "Time's up," ramming the starship Voyager into the Krenim weapon ship and negating the alternate timeline known as the "Year of Hell."

Example of: Reset Button

• Star Trek Voyager S 4 E 7 Scientific Method
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Bryan Fuller Describes ‘Star Trek: Voyager’ Serialized “Year Of Hell” Season Rejected By Rick Berman

| May 29, 2020 | By: TrekMovie.com Staff 206 comments so far

Star Trek: Voyager  was launched 25 years ago and continues to have a strong fan base, but it never achieved the same level of ratings as its predecessor,  Star Trek: The Next Generation .

Bryan Fuller, who had worked on  Deep Space Nine  before writing for  Voyager  and eventually becoming a staff writer (then story editor, then co-producer), was the guest on the latest episode of the excellent  Inglorious Treksperts  podcast to celebrate  Voyager ‘s 25th anniversary, where he revealed some of the show’s inside drama.

Voyager chasing The Next Generation

Fuller spoke about how from its start, Voyager was “very much a reaction” to the more serialized Star Trek: Deep Space Nine , which had premiered two years before, adding the show was “in some ways an antidote to the vision of Deep Space Nine .” Fuller talked about how Voyager was pulled in different directions, trying to recapture the magic of TNG, while differentiating itself from DS9:

I think Voyager initially was trying to be The Next Generation and finally decided what it was going to be around season four. I think part of that in a strange way is we lost very quickly the dynamics of the Maquis interacting with a Starfleet crew. They were terrorists and committed terrorist acts and everybody was like, “It’s okay, let’s all go together.”… That’s not good storytelling. You need to know these characters are coming from a place that is culturally different, so they can’t just be regular members of the crew which it fell into very quickly to solve the problem of Deep Space Nine .

The podcasters and Fuller acknowledged that eventually Voyager found its voice and delved into some high-concept science fiction ideas. Fuller gave a lot of credit to showrunner Brannon Braga and Braga’s writing partner Joe Menosky, while pointing out their struggles with Voyager co-creator and executive producer Rick Berman:

Brannon Braga should be given a lot of credit – Brannon Braga and Joe Menosky – and it really was their two voices more commonly than anybody else’s. I think what was interesting in the evolution of the show was you could sense the creative struggle. I witnessed the creative struggle when I was working there. There was an appetite for these bigger, bolder science fiction stories. And there was a lot of resistance from Rick Berman in embracing them because he was chasing The Next Generation and was not allowing Voyager to be the show that it could be.

Season one publicity shot for Star Trek: Voyager

The “Year of Hell” season

The season four episode “Year of Hell,” written by Braga and Menosky, is considered one of the Voyager ‘s best. In the two-parter, the crew was split apart and facing its greatest threat yet, from Annorax (Kurtwood Smith) of the Krenim Imperium, who used time itself as a devastating weapon. During the podcast, Fuller talked about how the writers were originally hoping for the Krenim to form a much longer serialized arc, but the idea was rejected by Berman:

The “Year of Hell” and the behind-the-scenes drama not only to craft episode, but that season, was fascinating because we wanted “Year of Hell” to last the entire season. We wanted to see Voyager get its ass kicked every episode and through that season was going to be marbled the story of Annorax and the time ship that was changing things. So, we would go back to it every once in a while to remind the audience that is the larger story. But [it was rejected] because Deep Space Nine made Rick Berman allergic to serialized storytelling, violently so.

Fuller spoke enthusiastically about how the longer serialized arc “charged up” the writers:

We are really going to be on the outskirts of the galaxy and we are going to be fighting enemies that are kicking us when we are down. The crew is going to have to separate and we are going to be following episodes that are going to deal with people on shuttlecrafts with escape pods that are electrically buoyed together. There would be an episode where you never saw Janeway and never saw Voyager because you are with the people who are on the escape pods trying to find a new source of power or safety. It was like creative crack for the writers’ room, because all of a sudden there were so many opportunities.

Kate Mulgrew as Captain Janeway in “Year of Hell”

Fuller then talked about the letdown when the “Year of Hell” season idea was rejected:

I remember Brannon going over to Rick’s office with all of this enthusiasm and coming back broken and his head hanging low and having to break it to the writing staff. We all felt like we were doing it, we are making great Star Trek. For him to come back and say we can’t and we can only do two episodes as opposed to twenty-two, it was heartbreaking. There was an interesting division between what Rick Berman wanted the show to be, which was episodic and for the syndicated audience, and how we wanted to be creative storytellers playing with the Star Trek toy box. “Year of Hell” is such a fascinating point in Voyager history.

As for why  Deep Space Nine didn’t have the same struggle, Fuller explained that DS9’s showrunner, Ira Stephen Behr, “didn’t give a fuck what Rick Berman said.”

Ira was like, “I don’t care, this is what we are doing and if you don’t like what we are doing, fire me… If you are not behind it, then I suggest you find someone else to do my job.” He was kind of fearless about it. He was righteous creatively and knew that this was the right direction for Deep Space Nine.

Kurtwood Smith as Annorax in “Year of Hell”

Listen to Fuller talk Voyager with the Treksperts

There is much more from Fuller about Voyager , so it is worth listening to the full episode. Inglorious Treksperts is available via Apple Podcasts , the Electric Now App , or your preferred place for podcasts. You can also listen to it below via Stitcher.

Keep up with all our stories involving Star Trek: Voyager here at TrekMovie.com .

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A full season Year of Hell would be interesting, only if there was no reset at the end of the season. Just like the reset at the end of the 2-parter.

Indeed the reset is the main reason why I don’t even think it’s a very good episode. UPN virtually telegraphed how it was ending (“Time’s up!”) in the Next Episode teaser.

Agreed. Year of Hell never happened to our characters — so why should I care? The two episodes are bad enough. A whole season of that would be unwatchable.

@plastics Only assuming there would be a reset button. I find it difficult to believe the show as Braga envisioned it would do that after a whole year and not have characters remember it all at the very least. The reset button was clearly there to appease Berman and probably UPN, wipe away any hint of a storyarc.

This is the first I’ve even heard of Braga actively pushing for more serialized storytelling. Prior accounts from Ron Moore seemed to portray Braga as being in lockstep with Berman. (Moore specifically felt betrayed by this during the brief time that he worked on VOY)

To defend Braga, Moore joined Voyager in Season 6, so by that point, I’m sure Braga would have been demoralized and acknowledged what would be approved and what wouldn’t.

@sam This is not the first time I’ve heard it mentioned that Year of Hell was meant to last longer, Braga has brought it up in the past.

He’s brought it up many times. And Moore was only briefly on the show toward the end of the run.

Well, “Dallas” did that and got away with it. (Pam waking up and finding Bobby in the shower. Entire previous season in which he was dead never happened.)

Younger people may not understand that reference!

Even Dallas watchers at the time, who were not too discerning, whined about it.

Hey! Some of us are moderately discerning. — I think I remember being disappointed with the, ‘it was all a dream’ shower scene because I wanted to know how they were going to get out of that. And what the fallout was going to be, and when it was ‘all a dream’, I got no satisfaction. — as other commenters have said about the year of hell, If it never happened, and they don’t learn anything and they don’t retain anything, then why do I care. And that’s a very disappointing and dissatisfying feeling.

There were many bad choices made in Voyager. I looked forward to them getting home (for the entire series!), and when they did, it just…ended. No epilogue, no anything. Very disappointing. Voyager was disappointing and pointless.

That was soo when Dallas jumped the shark…

@Ian Yes. We agree about the reset button being a critical factor to whether it would work.

It would have, however, if they were upfront about the plotline to the audience, I mean, if they openly made the plotline about Voyager trying to destroy the time machine in order to revert time to a pre destructive state, then it would be a watchable year.

We would all be hooked for a year wondering if and when Voyager would be able to destroy the time machine, and I think the audience would feel a sense of collective accomplishment when they succeeded after a year.

Albeit a bittersweet victory if there were no memories about what happened. Though a record of the events of “year of hell” could always be written in to the conclusion using some type scfi magic, like a subspace data stream that survived the revert, so the crew of Voyager might not remember the Year of Hell, but they could read about it in their own words, or see images. Just a thought….

I suspect the season would have concluded with something like ENT “Dead Stop,” where the ship gets repaired or even improved by advanced technology.

I would think that the very existence of the time weapon and the idea that Annorax was repeatedly altering the timeline would sufficiently predict and reveal to the audience that this was probably all going to be undone. Start killing off main characters, permanently wipe out Voyager’s Warp Drive at some point… I think Trek audiences are smart enough to go, “Hmmm.” ;)

Just my two cents.

Great ideas start with a thought….Now how did the borg evolve? Cellular Automata maybe?

Eh, I would have been fine with a rewind button, if that was what the crew set out to do. Like if fe. after half a season they had lost so much, so many people that they decided the only way to fix this is to make it all go away, even if we lose our memories of it, and then have them work the rest of the season to accomplish that.

I think it might have worked better if it were done in the final season.

I’m so glad you wrote this, Zaid. You’re absolutely right.

I think it shows Fuller’s deficiencies as a writer if he thinks you can gave a whole season only for the reset button to be hit at the end. At least Timeless had alternate Harry send a message back.

The more I read of Fuller, the more I think he’s a bit of a hack, who got lucky a couple of times early on and is dining out on that for his whole career. It explains why Discovery is such a mess.

Yeah I have to agree. I was bitterly disapointed with the reset button at the end of Year of Hell. I would have LOVED a season-long year of hell arc. But ending it with a reset button would have been terrible.

Good discussion here.

I didn’t mind the reset button after a two-parter, and I might have even enjoyed the situation running a few more episodes, but not for an entire season. It would probably have lost me and many others in the audience.

Whenever I hear this kind of either/or, I think about Farscape which was able to land multipart serialized episodes in the middle of a season and then revert to episodic with longer-term arcs. I’m not sure why this seems to be such a rare format, but that’s about as far as I would have been comfortable with for Voyager.

I mind it (in principle) because I’m a firm believer in the theory that a really good idea only works once. ST in general rarely seems to understand this.

Yesterday’s Enterprise was already Star Trek’s (and Berman Trek’s) “it happened but nobody really experienced it” time travel story. It’s no coincidence to me that no subsequent Berman Trek time travel story (except for some of the comedies) has rated as strongly, and certainly none of Berman Trek’s subsequent “reset” stories.

No one thing is ever an automatic deal-breaker, but Year of Hell ultimately did something that Berman Trek had already done on quite a few occasions, and they had already done it both better and worse. Not to mention UPN’s own advertising gave away how the second part was going to end.

For anything longer than a two-parter, I think they would definitely have needed to avoid the reset ending.

Interestingly, Farscape’s Season of Death (S3) was what came to mind while reading Fuller’s description of what Berman ultimately shot down.

There would have to be some sort of reset, you couldn’t leave voyager in the state it was.

The reset button ending for the two parter I think is a great dramatic irony and works really well thematically with what the story is about. Would that be as satisfying to reset a whole season? Probably not but I quite like it for the two parter ending.

I don’t mind the reset that much. In my head canon, since the Borg have some sort of temporal sixth sense, Seven becomes vaguely aware how much of a family or “collective” the Voyager crew is and is drawn a little closer to them. This being still early in her development.

Interesting division here between Ira Behrs and Brannon Braga’s reactions to Rick Berman. Would have been interesting to see Year of hell as a whole season.

Brannon was just out a few years out of college, and looked up to Rick, so he probably didn’t feel he could challenge him the way Ira could.

Imagine if Behr had run Voyager instead.

c d, uhh, no thanks. The talented writer folks on DS9 would not have gotten the opportunity to shine so brightly and bring their visions closer to fruition. I say closer because there was a lot they didn’t get to do, even with Behr, but he clearly made a huge dif, probably why DS9 is the only series that matters to me outside of the original 66-69 show.

maybe he could’ve run both and kicked berman off the staff!

Not a good idea. Behr would have had to split his attention between DS9 and VOY. Also he would have had to waste his time fighting with the network and DS9 most likely wouldn’t have been able to kind of fly below the radar and do what they did.

That’s why I said ‘imagine’. It did not appear to be possible in reality.

I find all of this rather typical and not surprising. Look fwd though to hearing the podcast though when there’s time.

At least Rick Berman’s Klingons were watchable! Honestly, I find it difficult to take Fuller’s criticism of anyone when he was fired from “his” Trek show for not giving it full attention.

Great point! He’s a mess of a show-runner and couldn’t plot his way out of his own house.

His career is mirroring Bob Orci’s…a lot a bling for a few years, then you find out he’s a bit nutty and his on-screen material is not all that good.

Interesting that Kurtzman, also with on-screen material not all that good, was able to pivot and take over all of Star Trek, especially after his failure at creating the Universal Dark Universe.

Kurtzman is kind of lowest-end form of Berman (who I thought was the lower end), mediocrity is king. The folks at Universal were smarter (slightly) than the CBS ones, they knew to torpedo that ship once it demonstrated its malformed keel was going to steer it into more and more trouble.

And yet, Rick give us a lot of years of good Star Trek. Fuller give us a crappy pilot with Klingons Orcs.

At least the actresses are being respected now

What did Berman do that was disrespectful? I’ve not heard any accusations?

Terry Farell has spoken out against Berman in multiple interviews, and Marina Sirtis and Patrick Stewart called him out on gender-based pay disparities. Those would be the two off the top of my head; the DS9 documentary and the fan wikis that cite recorded interviews are decent sources.

I posted a youtube link further down that goes much more in depth into Berman’s behavior, as well as his limitations as a creative force for Trek and his restrictions over more creative people. Doubt I could get away with posting it again in the same talkback.

He did not bring us a lot of years of good Trek. Middle-phase TNG with Mike Piller was when Rick was most in his element. That and his largely ignoring DS9 (and apparently allowing Behr to ignore him in turn).

Oh yeah I knew about that, he was a hard ass as far as being a show runner goes, hell he was probably a lot better than a lot of other producers at the time, he was a product of his era and I still think he did a solid job given how much work he had to do combined with the studio pressure.

I don’t think he ignored other creative forces either, just showed them why their ideas wouldn’t work for Trek, I agree though if they were going to take risks on a show it should’ve been Voyager not DS9. IMO Voyager should’ve been the darker show, DS9 should’ve remained the more Roddenberry’esque show because of where they were located.

Typical Disco fanboy reaction. Evreything that is not Disco is a rapist, misogynistic, bla bla bla.

For your information, Voyager put the firs FEMALE MAIN captain of a ship. It was not Disco.. it was VOYAGER under RICK BERMAN.

Yes, Marina earn less than the rest.. but guess what.. she was and still is a BAD ACTRESS.

And the issue with Terry was not about female or male, it was an issue of an actror or actress demanding more money from the studio and been rejacted.

Stop acussing and trying to ruin other ppl life with out any proof.

Maybe Voyager’s producers should have acted more like Ira Behr. It seems like the less involved Berman, the better the stories were.

I think VOY was the main reason Behr got away with what he did.

Behr has said as much. I don’t know if I read it somewhere or if he said it in What We Left Behind, but basically he’s of the opinion that once Voyager came along, no one paid attention to what DS9 was doing anymore, so they were able to get away with a lot of things.

Voyager was more scrutinized than DS9 from everyone. It was the number one show on a network rather than a syndicated show with no fixed time slot. Paramount and UPN had their say, so Berman was probably feeling that on top of his own preferences, good and bad, and as it’s been said, Braga appeasing him probably saved DS9 from his asserting more control. It also got him the job of co-creating Enterprise, a big notch on his resumé but another victim of network interference and the show where Rick Berman was then trying his hand at writing. Braga never had it easy after TNG.

Berman had his moments. The middle seasons of TNG were his, and those were outstanding. But he must have burnt out or something and just got stuck in “I want more of the same” pedestrian stories with Voyager and Enterprise.

This is a very interesting listen. I was actually very surprised by the overall tone of it, even though most of the purported facts agree with things that have been said before.

Renegade Cut channel — Berman Trek

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeSz2gW8IsE

I always thought Michael Pillar had more of a hand in the middle seasons of TNG than Berman.

Creatively speaking, I think he did.

Berman had more authority, at the end of the day his was the final word, the combination of a good producer like Berman combined with a gun writers room and Pillar was a match made in heaven. Unfortunately Star Trek hasn’t been good since Season 4 of Enterprise

Berman’s input on those middle season (overrated IMO) was still mostly negative, writing on BROTHERS, making sure the music was creatively neutered and vetoing risky choices (Frakes wanted to have a male actor play opposite him in the Melinda Culea single-sex-race episode.)

Sounds like the Zindi storyline which I think ruined any possibility of Enterprise actually being an epic series. Just got tired of it dragging on and on and on….

Now, if that had been the Earth/Romulan War instead of the never-mentioned-before and mentioned only once since Xindi, we might have had something.

They were leading to that… Had they stuck around. According to Manny Coto.

That is not a common take on season 3 of Enterprise. The general consensus is that season 3 was a large improvement.

Seasons 3 and 4 of Enterprise were great, seasons 1 and 2 were good, they were probably more solid than TNG’s first 2 seasons.

No argument from me regarding S1 & 2 of Enterprise vs TNG’s 1 & 2. But I did like Enterprise from the start. Never warmed up to Bakula, however.

I must’ve been one of the few that liked him all the way through, it was an interesting character arc from naive explorer to troubled military hero then back to a blend of warrior/leader/explorer by Season 4.

I like what they did with the character. But I never like Bakula in the role. He always seemed forced to me. He never felt natural. He felt like he was acting.

Ehhh, agree to disagree I guess. I liked him as much as all the other Captains, Pike, Picard, Sisko, Janeway, Gerogiou.

Fair enough. I didn’t mind the character. In fact, I liked the character. Just felt that Bakula was not right for the role. Conversely, I never liked the Picard character. But Stewart held massive charisma and played the part brilliantly.

Xindi, not Zindi

Looking back, to the chagrin of the writers, based on the two episodes in question I am glad they didn’t get the go ahead to do the 22 episode Year of Hell story arc – although I have to admit, maybe the writers could have come up with some really great stories. We shall never know. Considering Fuller was one of the leads in creating Discovery, it’s not surprising that S1 was a serialized Klingon War year-long story arc. If Fuller was never brought on for Disco, I wonder if there ever was discussion of making Discovery episodic? In the end, fans now have multiple series to watch and it looks like SNW will be more episodic so I guess everything is turning out just fine, but I am sure they could have saved themselves a lot of heartache.

The way I heard it was that Discovery was never thought of being episodic, but more like an anthology series where every year there’d be a different crew or different part of Trek being focused on.

That was Fuller’s take on it. Different centuries, different crews.

and I believe fuller wanted to have uniforms more in keeping with TOS, so the visual change wasn’t rly his idea? I don’t know if it would’ve looked like SNW or not but it’s interesting to ponder.

These guys were amazing. Writing 22 episodes each Season!? That must be Hell! Very talented what they did with Voyager. I enjoyed the show very much. Timeless and Blink of an Eye are my favorite episodes.

Ahem, 26 episodes. :)

And this is what it has come to. People being impressed with what used to be the norm. It’s like thinking if a staring pitcher goes 5 innings and gives up 3 runs today it’s a “good outing”. When 30 years ago it would have been seen as not very good.

The high episode count is one of the main reasons for a lot of frustratingly average to mediocre episodes.

That has been proved to not be the case. There are a LOT of short season shows out there that are not very good in ANY episode. Most that I have encountered in fact.

And yet there are a lot of such shows that are consistently good. In fact I don’t know of any series in which a shorter season didn’t benefit the production.

I also don’t know of many FX-heavy genre shows that performed consistently at 22-plus episodes/season.

Farscape and Buffy both managed it, after a rocky couple of seasons. I don’t think BSG ever did, even at 20 eps (its 13-ep 1st season will always be the strongest).

And Star Trek? Outside of TOS season 1, not a change. For Berman Trek, the middle seasons of TNG and MAYBE DS9 come the closest, but still with plenty of weak episodes every season.

As for VOY and ENT, forget it. You were probably lucky if you found 12 good VOY episodes out of 24. Same with most of ENT, same with early/late TNG, and even very early DS9.

I’d say the Stargate shows did consistently well with having at least 20 episode seasons and those were especially FX heavy series.

Long seasons of episodic shows will always produce dog episodes. But shortening the season doesn’t help. In fact short season story arcs are HEAVILY relying on the story arc. They are essentially one giant episode. If that one story doesn’t work, then the entire season sucks. Perfect example… Star Trek Discovery. And I have seen some Netflix originals that were pretty darn bad from the beginning. And I’ve some others that were interesting. The fact is, short seasons do not increase the odds of good shows or even episodes. At all.

Star Trek has WAY too many “dog” episodes. When up to half a season (or more) can be dog episodes, its’ a problem. Having to churn out 26 episodes has rarely worked for ST; they’ve proven time and again they can’t do it. The writers’ room needs time to fracking breathe between coming up with stories — and without being told they’ve used up their seasons’ budget in two episodes and everything else has to be bottle shows.

Whether episode count encourages or discourages serialization is neither here nor there. So what if the overall arc doesn’t work? That’s going to blow the whole season no matter how many non-arc episodes you have. Yours sounds like an argument for not taking any risk at all (Safe Trek). STD’s a bad example because they’ve either got too many people in charge or just bad people (one of the two). There is nothing to show that giving them more episodes would produce better results when they can’t even manage what they have.

TOS didn’t have a lot of dog episodes until season 3. In fact, their good to bad ratio was pretty high. Do not confuse this with saying there were none in the first two seasons. Just saying the ratio was good. TNG is the show that had a lot of dog episodes. They did have some that shined but the majority were mediocre to bad.

I’m not saying don’t take chances. The concept of Secret Hideout to do different genres of Trek as well as the short Treks is a good idea and in theory should encourage new ideas. But in three seasons of short season shows they have not fared very well at all.

My point was not that traditional longer seasons will give you good shows. Only that shortening the season does not guarantee the shows will be good. It doesn’t even increase the chances any.

Where was Jeri Taylor during all of this? Wasn’t she still technically the showrunner in season 4?

I thought she was being mildly steamrollered out to accommodate Braga, though it was peddled as an early retirement. Hard for me to feel sympathy for her, I think that even for what she brought to the show in terms of female perspective, she still harmed trek with her cramming meat-eating throwaways into scripts and playing it safe and non-edgy a la Berman. She even helped trash GEN’s open by telling Berman you can’t go from one action scene directly to another, which scuttled the transition from century 23 to century 24 and instead landed us the lame boating scene.

honestly I consider myself an intersectional feminist and a lot of the opinions she pushed were pretty regressive, even back then. like the mother who tells you a short skirt is “inviting trouble”.

Kaitlyn, I was trying to be polite and not knock her too hard, she did write THE OUTCAST. Personally (well personally/professionally) I have issues with her because I wound up having to pitch to her instead of Piller when something came up with GR on TNG and I think she didn’t know her stuff yet (12/90.) Even the pitch I made that Ron Moore defended and championed (when the other guy in the room stayed quiet) just got ‘picard wouldn’t do that’ from her, without much in the way of elucidation.

that sucks, I’m sorry you had that experience. Also personally I hate The Outcast lol. It was trying to be “the gay episode” but it ended up being about gender instead, and very clumsily so I might add. Honestly Profit and Lace was closer to a trans experience, and that’s ALSO awful, lol. Such gems in The Outcast as “there’s no gender neutral pronoun in English” (hello, “they”), or conversion therapy actually working and being defended by the main guest star at the end.

Hey, on a series where SYMBIOSIS was supposed to be their AIDS metaphor show, THE OUTCAST reads like CRIME AND PUNISHMENT! Very good point about the conversion therapy aspect, I guess I was swayed by the show doing a downer ending (about the only good takeaway on SYMBIOSIS as well, and my giving passes to un-good TREKs with downer endings goes all the way back to TOS and A PRIVATE LITTLE WAR.)

I guess I’m one of those odd fans who never love the Year of Hell story line and was happy it was only two episodes. People talk so much about this story and it definitely is an interesting one but I can only imagine how messy that story line would’ve felt by the end of the season with so many alterations. But maybe it would’ve came out great. I just didn’t want an entire season of the Krenim being the villains because no offense they weren’t exactly at the level of the Dominion either. I think I would’ve got tired of them fast.

That said I agree with pretty much everything else he said. The ball was dropped hard between Starfleet and the Maquis where people always point out Chakotay as an example. Not five minutes he’s made first officer he’s become loyal as a puppy. Realistically he can’t be battling Janeway every episode or have the Maquis take over the ship because they are on the other side of the galaxy. But there should’ve been MUCH conflict and tension in those relationships besides just Seska.

And yeah Voyager should’ve been more serialized but I don’t think its Berman alone who was against it as the network people were also very much against the idea and an executive from Paramount on the What We Left Behind documentary said just that. They didn’t want the shows serialized at all because hey were afraid of losings audiences every week. DS9 only got away with it because it wasn’t on UPN and was allowed more freedom than Voyager. But yes it became a MUCH better show because of it as well.

I enjoyed the episode but an entire season on that storyline is unnecessary.

“I just didn’t want an entire season of the Krenim being the villains because no offense they weren’t exactly at the level of the Dominion”

That’s the whole problem with VOY’s premise: *nothing* can be at the level of the Dominion, because the lone Federation ship would be outgunned. So all antagonists need to be technologically unsophisticated (the Kazon) or implausibly neutered or magically defeated (the Borg).

I really fear we’re going to see a repeat of this problem in DIS season three. Thousand-year old technology is not going to be a match for anything. Even the Battle of Agincourt and the longbow was only 700 years ago; how would longbows compare to Civil War or WWI technology, much less today’s?

“Even the Battle of Agincourt and the longbow was only 700 years ago; how would longbows compare to Civil War or WWI technology, much less today’s?”

This is a fascinating analogy and I have frequently brought up these past comparisons to illustrate why there are too many “anachronisms” particularly in the new series, yet we have to admit that there is no guarantee that history always progresses upwards. As for what is happening (or rather, has happened) 930 years in the future of Discovery, the more apt historical comparison may be the 500 years between the retreat of the falling Roman Empire from Britain, and the (re)unification of Anglosaxon kingdoms. If the Federation has fallen and the galaxy has entered a dark age (especially if the nadir has been reached close to the 31st century, as other, unimpeded excursions into the future seem to suggest), all bets are off.

That is one of the reasons why that far in the future has often been depicted as dystonian or where a society has fallen apart. That way writers don’t have to come up with what tech might be around in a 1000 years. That is an awfully long time….

That was my one real beef with Voyager. That the Maquis merged so very well in with the star fleet crew so very quickly. It reminded me of how quickly Burnham when from pariah to beloved crew member in just 3 episodes. They started off with a few problems but they faded out pretty darn fast. I would have thought that the bad feelings might have stuck around a little longer. Although to play devil’s advocate here a bit… If they did that story element might get pretty old pretty fast. And if they wanted to survive they would have HAD to work together. But it would have been nice if it took a little time for the Maquis crew to learn that lesson.

The Maquis were made up of former starfleet officers, that was made clear from when they first appear in STNG. They were only against the Federation because of the deal they struck with Cardassia. As soon as that disappear their no reason why wouldn’t integrate back into being good officers. Many many people in starfleet was against the deal as well.

The Year of Hell was a good opportunity for the Marquis side to come out again, as they fight the newly restored Krenim empire, greatly expanded even beyond Annorax wildest dreams. As they have to teach their non Marquis friends to be rebels an terrorists. That could open up a lot of storylines.

wow that thought is so good i may actually watch Hell straight through to think about the Maquis angle. More of a V-miniseries feel.

@david knowles That is a lovely idea. A bit like Kira teaching Damar her techniques, but giving much needed development to what was supposed to be a core element of Voyager. After season 2, apart from the odd reminder like Worst Case Scenario, Hunters or Shattered, they just dumped that aspect of Chakotay and Torres and certainly never bothered to develop any new recurring guests. Chakotay going rogue to stop Seska in Maneuvers and Suder’s untimely demise were basically the last vestiges.

Year of Hell is a awesome episode.

Just commenting to say that I can’t believe these post-games on Inglorious Treksperts podcast eps don’t go up sooner. It’s essential listening for pre-2009 Trek fans.

Despite these restrictions that Berman enforced, he did eventually relent and I would still have Berman era Trek over what Kurtzman is doing

I wouldn’t. I’ve seen enough Safe Trek for one lifetime. I’ve mostly lost faith in Kurtzman, but he’s still required to succeed the Berman stuff if his is to be the only Trek game in town.

I agree with you bro.

Sadly I agree with you as well Captain Neil. I don’t hate Kurtzman and support him but funny 20+ years later I still watch all the Berman shows no problem and still really enjoy them. In fact I’m watching a Voyager episode as I type this. Maybe future seasons will bring more interest in the Kurtzman shows but so far none of them has been a huge draw after watching them the first time.

Ironically maybe because they are probably too serialized (and not very strong serialized stories so far).

Funny I feel the same way about most of season one of Discovery so even though the local SciFi channel was showing Choose Your Pain this week,I was going to pass on it. I relented of course and surprisingly it was actually quite good as a standalone episode. Same thing happened regarding the music, there is a new YT posting of a violinist playing the themes from all 7 tv series. She got to Discovery and Picard and surprisingly I have a newfound appreciation for Russo’s two themes – I really liked hearing them! I could take or leave them before – this pandemic must be making me soft haha!

Yes I saw that violinist video here and commented on it. I’m not in love with the Discovery and Picard themes but as you said listening to her play them made you appreciate them more.

As for rewatching the new shows, yeah for me its really first season of Discovery I have the least interest in rewatching. I have watched a few in the last few years but I have zero drive to watch them, but mostly because I just felt very let down by season one in general. Season two does fare a little better for sure and I actually forgot I rewatched Brother just recently, the day we found out Pike was getting his own show. I was so excited over the announcement I wanted to watch his first introduction again and its still VERY good. But generally speaking outside of a few episodes I don’t really feel the need to rewatch anything although I will try and rewatch all of season 2 before season 3 starts. But I said that about season 1 before season 2 startes and I never did.

At this point in time, Fuller sounds downright anachronistic, a broken record from the past… I saw what Fuller’s vision of “serialized grimdark Trek” looks like in Discovery; I say NO THANK YOU to that and welcome back escapist episodic storytelling in Strange New Worlds!

Ironically Fuller answered his own question. Voyager was not allowed to be serialized and dark because DS9 was. Even back then Berman was trying to strike a balance for a diverse audience, as Kurtzman is (belatedly) now!

VS, I really think that this is the key point.

To every “Oh, wouldn’t that have been cool” sentiment, I’d like to point out that a grim or even grimdark endless loop was not the premise/concept for Voyager.

With so many fans calling out for a return to episodic Trek where it doesn’t take an entire season of darkness to get to the optimistic/aspirational conclusion of a storyarc, can we not see why Berman would have said, NO this is not within the format for this show, especially when our other Trek offering is leaning into that format.

Voyager was promised to fans as a premise to get out and see the new and strange and to get out of complex political and diplomatic stories.

Let’s step back and think how the Trek audience would have felt to have Voyager move to week after week of hell, while DS9 was in its final seasons.

Or, let’s think of what it would be like if they did something like that with Strange New Worlds a few seasons in.

Fortunately, one thing that has come out clearly from Goldsman and Kurtzman is that they know what the format, concept and premise for each show is. There have been times when I’ve winced and thought that they were too locked into “this is what you have to do in a serialized story structure”, but if they give the same commitment to maintaining an episodic foundation for SNW, I won’t complain.

You know I will say while I was genuinely excited to see what Fuller would do with Discovery, I think it probably would’ve been even darker if he stayed on. I appreciated Voyager because it WASN’T overly dark and cynical. And now thinking about it that’s why I didn’t love Year of Hell so much. Yes, as a two part episode, fine, but I don’t know if I want see that brutal future for 20 episodes either. I think that’s why Fuller liked it, its kind of what attracts him looking at all the work he’s been doing since he left Star Trek. And its good work, I like both Hannibal and American Gods, but I don’t need Trek that dark either.

DS9 was a darker show but it was never bleak or cold like how I felt Discovery was in season one and thank Kahless they did much less of that in season two. If Frakes is right about season 3 and its suppose to be more upbeat and optimistic then that’s a big positive but I’m still guessing its going to be a bit dark.

The year of hell was an amazing episode. There was even a indication that they were going to meet such an enemy through a previous episode involving Kes when she went through that whole bizzare time/age jumping phase who remembers that at the end she wants to write down what she remembers about her experience. However disappointingly that part was never used. The Krenem story was very interesting, so unusual, using time as an actual weapon, the time ship looked incredible. Temporal weapons and shielding all were cool. But I agree with most others here that a reset at the end of an entire season would just have made it all seem pointless. Avoid that and it could have been aswesome.

This post should be a wakeup call for those folks calling for the Pike series to be episodic.

VOY is the only failed Star Trek series. It had some impressive acting from Mulgrew, Ryan, and Picardo (and mediocre acting from everyone else); it broke ground with a female lead; and it did have some high-concept episodes after Ryan joined. But on the whole, it suffered from very poor writing, and the militantly episodic nature of the series was a huge reason why.

An episodic SNW risks creating this situation on steroids: a cast with real chemistry squandered on pointless forehead-of-the-weak aliens and simplistic, 40-minute, commercial-friendly plotlines. Hell, throw in some 1980s cliches like an endless parade of divorcee characters-of-the-week portrayed by celebrity guest stars. This is not the recipe for success in the second Golden Age of Television.

SNW needs to be serialized. The excellent casting will not save it otherwise.

SNW fail from the start, another precuel from the same guys that did Discovery and Picard.

I would assume that they’ve leavened their lesson, furthermore Goldsman even stated that events will follow characters from episode to episode

He said it will be less serialized than DS9, which is already more episodic than I think most fans are willing to acknowledge. It will almost DEFINITELY be less serialized than, say, Buffy.

Buffy was the first time I saw a show be serialized all season long. Although about the first half to 2/3 of the season were mainly stand alones that contained small elements of the season’s arc. Towards the end of the season it become all about the overall story. Enterprise kinda worked that way too. A lot of stand alone stories up front but they were more in line with the overall arc than Buffy was.

Buffy I believe illustrates the ideal balance for a serialized episodic television show.

Yes, and I think the Xindi arc worked pretty well, too. You just have to find a way for a stand alone episode that has an element of the overall arc in it. Good writers are able to do that.

“VOY is the only failed Star Trek series.”

Stopped reading after this.

Yeah… That didn’t earn much respect from me, either.

Yeah. There are other failed Star Trek series.

It’s not even reflective of reality. One can only take the assertion as a statement of River Temarc’s personal opinion.

ToS lasted 3 seasons before cancellation, and much of the last season is pretty bad (due to the change in showrunner). But it’s remembered for its success in syndication.

Voyager is the most streamed on Netflix globally. It’s ratings in first run on UPN, a marginal network at best, weren’t great. Now however, it’s outperforming other Trek offerings.

We hear of fans, including physicist and Trek science consultant Dr Erin MacDonald, who were brought to the franchise by Voyager. I’ve reported here that for a long while, it was our kids favourite and one of them still goes back to rewatch Voyager again and again.

So, despite the inconsistent commitment to its original concept and format, there is something about Voyager that really works for many people. It’s it’s own thing. It filled it’s own niche in the menu.

Perhaps it was never fully appreciated even by its own writers room, but these ‘if only’ stories from creatives and fans who still don’t understand that Voyager was and is one of the most successful Trek offerings, is getting tiresome.

Yes, getting very tiresome indeed.

I think it’s fair to say VOY was the weakest of the ST shows prior to Kurtzman Trek, by virtue of being the most derivative ST series overall. Might even have remained the weakest if Kurtzman Trek could have retained the consistency of STD’s first eleven episodes.

TOS is balanced by one having one of ST’s all-time strongest seasons in its first. Overall its balance of great to terrible is about equal with TNG. Whereass VOY is the show that offers the least of what we didn’t already have from TNG.

I don’t claim to account for how well it performs in streaming. Except I’m more likely to stream it just because I already own almost every other ST on physical media.

Enterprise was much weaker, in my opinion.

ENT at least tried to be different. It was the NASA version of Berman Trek.

VOY was like a diluted version of TNG’s finally phase, the kind of bizarre “high concept” sci-fi that characterized Braga’s and Taylor’s rising influence over TNG. Only without the TNG chemistry.

“ENT at least tried to be different.”

I think the premise was meant to be different, but the show failed to be different. In the end the vast majority of episodes could have been told on TNG or VOY with very few changes. That’s not different, that is same ol’ same ol’. VOY was diluted TNG. ENT was diluted VOY.

There’s no such thing as diluted VOY. Such a statement would require that VOY and ENT share characteristics in common with each other that neither shares with TNG (they don’t). You’re literally attempting to one-up what I said using my words.

However you’ve highlighted the core problem with Berman Trek, which is that everything’s a copy of a copy. VOY was just a vehicle for making TNG-styled episodes. ENT started out as a vehicle for making more TNG-styled episodes. Even DS9 was originally intended as a vehicle for making TNG-styled episodes.

And don’t forget… TNG was trying to copy the lightning in the bottle that TOS captured.

My response is Discovery season 1 & 2 and Picard. Strong evidence Secret Hideout seems to have a problem mapping out even a short season story arc. There is no reason to think SNW would be better off being serialized. And every reason to think it may be bad no matter which direction it goes because the same staff is running this show that is running the others.

I really want to be wrong because Mount was a shining star in STD S2.

Akiva Goldsman will be heavily involved with SNW so I am not hopeful. Even Mount, Romijn, and Peck may not be enough to save it.

Way too bold for Rick Berman. Berman weirdly didn’t like DS9, and so with Voyager and Enterprise we got “TNG incrementalism” types of series instead. So this bold and creative concept was NEVER to going to happen under him. The latter Berman area was disappointing, to say the least, and eventually went down the shitter with Enterprise and those awful two final TNG movies.

I know it’s filmed and won’t happen, but sounds like a good season of Discovery… 900 years in the future, like a caveman with rocks and a club going up against Stealth bombers.

this is why i quit voyager and ds9 is my favorite show… i was just telling my friend who has been watching ds9 with me for the last year… (we only have 8 to go) and explained the premise of voyager then after all that i say none of it really maters they just want to be tng.

I liked what he said about Behr. That he didn’t care what Berman said. Classic.

Yeah, that was refreshing.

Ronald D Moore was annoyed with Voyager for the same reasons. He felt it should have treated its premise more honestly. He wanted photon torpedoes and shuttle craft counted and checked, for example.

Thankfully, he got to do what he wanted to do with Voyager on Battlestar Galactica.

Yeah BSG is very much Moore’s answer to Voyager. There are so many similarities on a surface level, but changed up where it counts.

Starfleet and Marquis having to coexist is very much Adama and Roslin for the first half of the show. Equinox is Pegasus. Deaths are common and the ship getting progressively more damaged are things he wanted in Voyager too. It’s even about a ship(fleet) trying to get home to earth.

BSG is my favorite sci fi show of all time.

BSG was a mess especially season 3 and 4. Great mini series, good season 1, went rapidly down hill from their when they realise they didn’t plan out a story and just through random crap onto our screens.

“Instant Shuttle: just add water.” >:>}

I have said and will always maintain that Berman and Pillar duohandedly tried to kill the franchise!

Pillar saved Star Trek. Without him the franchise would not have survived another year. It was barely hanging on after season 2. Everyone involved agrees Pillar saved the franchise by making show about the characters and story and not just high concept plot.

Incidentally, high concept plot and underdeveloped characters are what held back Voyager and especially Enterprise.

What? Michael Piller turned the ship around for TNG in season 3. There’s just too many stupid comments on here lately.

What are you saying? Pillar literally saved the whole franchise after he joined TNG and turned the show around during season 3.

No they didn’t try to kill the franchise. Paramount as a company did. Voyager did perfectly fine. It lasted seven seasons! A show doesn’t go that many seasons without doing something right. But there were always signs that the creative juices were running dry all throughout Voyagers lifetime, with glimmers of goodness, interspersed with a lot of tired stuff done over and again since TNG. Piller was there with Berman in S1 and S2 and it was basically a continuation of where TNG left off in S7 of that show. Personally I enjoy Voyager. It’s sometimes just nice dip in and out of show without having to watch entire seasons in order to understand what’s going on. These were the days before catch up and internet streaming. If you missed an episode on TV then it could be weeks or months until you might’ve been able to find that episode again. DS9 didnt go overboard with serialized tv, it sort of pushed the boundaries for it’s time. It’s still an overall episodic series.

Star Trek has suffered for the last few decades with bad producers, Berman and Braga previously and Kurtzman now. Could you imagine how good Star Trek could be with someone who knew what they were doing? I dare to dream.

I understand this guy opinion as an expert writer that wanted to make a name for himself. But he forgets what Star Trek stands for & for why it is loved my its many fans: original ideas of Rodenberry and Rick Bergman. The show is about hope and a bright future for humanity. So, Im going to stand as Ira Behr: this is Star Trek, if you want something else then leave! Why do you think DS9 failed? because it wasn’t ST. And I believe many things think the same way about ST.

I don’t think ds9 failed, it’s the only post TOS show that didn’t fail.

And I think you’re going to confuse a lot of people by suggesting Berman had any decent original ideas in his head, let alone that fans loved them.

Well there we have it again, proof that we need different formats of Trek shows for different tastes.

Why does this thread bring out such pronouncements of ‘This Failed’ or ‘That failed’ from so many on this board as opposed to ‘That series never engaged me, but I get that it has its audience?’

I won’t look to you kmart for any openmindness about new Trek offerings.

I loved ToS as a gradeschooler when it was in first-run, and as a teen when it was in early syndication, but are at least half the episodes that I find mostly unwatchable now (and I’ve been trying because of the kids).

For me TNG, and the Berman-era shows in general revived my interest, and I happily watch them again and again, with the exception of Enterprise.

But pronouncements about overall success or failure based on personal preferences doesn’t make for a conversation.

TG47 not sure if this ruins your op of me but BEYOND for all its faults (and act 3 is one big fault) is still the closest I’ve been to being entertained by a TREK feature in three decades.

It was wise not to make that story into a season. It was interesting, but too depressing and not in keeping with the optimism otherwise seen in the show.

This is exactly why Voyager failed as a show in my opinion. I don’t hate the show, but I can’t watch it again because I am constantly reminded of all the wasted potential. Voyager starts off with a decent premise and then throws it overboard within the first few episodes.

Does half the crew (that we see, anyway) being Marquis even matter beyond the first few episodes? There never is any sort of power struggle, not even the slightest tension aboard the ship. If you start watching the show a few episodes in you might not even notice that this isn’t a regulation starfleet crew.

Are the resources actually scarce, as the characters claim? The only consequence we see is that the use of replicators is rationed. But still, the ship has enough energy to spare to have the holodecks running 24/7 to give us an unholy amount of awful holo episodes that move us even further away from the premise and tend to not even develop the characters in the slightest. The endless supply of shuttlecraft and torpedoes are obvious and often mentioned (rightfully so), but it goes beyond that. Hull plating, technical components, hell even crewmembers … are never gone for good. At the start of the next episode, the ship will look like fresh out of the drydock.

Why even bother with the premise of Voyager being isolated, low on energy and supplies, incorporating the enemy into its crew to even barely function, if none of that really matters and the show desperately tries to be a clone of TNG? Nothing that happens in Voyager has any consequences due to its strictly episodic format. A more serialized approach would have helped the show tremendously.

The Podcasts have no meaning to me as long has there seems to be No ReRuns Anywhere …

Where are the ReRuns

I personally dislike serializing a story for a whole season, that is why I am not a fan of the new Star Trek Discovery.

One thing I never understood about the Year of Hell-two-parter was that they pretty much ignored the fact that Kes warned them about these upcoming events. In the “Kes-time-jump-episode”, Janeway approachs her at the end, saying “Tell me more.”, yet in Year of Hell, they all act like they never heard of this. Did Annorax erased the Ocampas?? That would be the only explaination I could think of.

@startrick Real world explanation is that there was a Kes line in Year of Hell that ended up getting cut, not sure if it was actually filmed.

argh i hate details like that getting cut. it’s less bad when stuff is formatted for streaming – though they presumably know where they will cut when they sell it to TV broadcasters in a couple of years – but even that has weird things, like a few seconds of narek getting re-jailed cut in the finale :/

@Ian Thanks for this, I never heard of that before. I have a feeling it was disregarded because they feared the audience who missed the previous episode would have been confused or something. Too bad, though – I always found the two-parter confusing just because of that. I wondered what I did miss.

(…and I just realised that erasing the Ocampas from the timeline wouldn’t have helped matters. After all, without them, no reason for the Cartetaker to warp the Voyager into the Delta Quadrant.)

@StarTrick Of course it would not have been an issue if they’d done their original plan and had Year of Hell be the season 3 finale/season 4 premiere. Making Scorpion was a relatively last-minute decision.

Lost interest in voyager.

I have never been a big fan of Rick Berman. Compared to Gene Rodenberry, Berman just doesn’t get it. He seems to be a typical Hollywood stereotype who lacks the vision necessary for a show like Star Trek. Star Trek under his oversight had thousands of star systems and planets to explore yet he seemed to be stuck in a search for self in way too many episodes.

And in hindsight DS9 is a cult hit that is still thematically relevant and watchable today, while Voyager is overall unmemorable.

Then years later the new Battlestar Galactica did not just a year of hell but four, with the exact premise of lost in space must find home, and is one of the best sci-fi series made.

I think a full “Year of Hell” would’ve been great. Only perhaps without the temporal plotline? Just going through an area of space that’s inhabited by “space pirate” types and being continuously attacked. Or if the temporal reset button plot was included, then later episodes could reveal “impossible” consequences to those events like Yesterday’s Enterprise did with Tasha Yar/Sela. It’s a shame because the last shot of part 2 revealed Annorax was still working on Temporal Mechanics. Could’ve been some good follow-up stories either way.

That was an extreme idea being considered there!

Having suffered through Season 3 of Enterprise I am glad a season long arc of Year of Hell was not green lit. I hate to think of the amazing single and double episode stories that would have been cut to make way for such a season. That said, it would have been good to have a 3 or 4 episode story arc as Year of Hell was ripe with potential. A season long story arc is not my idea of Trek as it is the diversity of stories that is a key element of TV Trek’s greatness.

Hm…? If you ask me, Enterprise’s 3rd season still had plenty of stand-alone episodes. DS9 wasn’t much different in that regard, so I don’t think it would have changed Voyager’s episodic approach as much as some people might fear.

I think what would have changed the most would be the impression that the Voyager is really all alone there, and the Delta Quadrant is a dangerous place. They have to think twice how to use all available ressources. The stakes would have been higher.

In the actual show you never really got the impression that the stakes are high, ressources are low – or that they were in any real danger – it just felt like TNG. “Set a course for starbase 177. They not only have coffee but also new crewmembers, new shuttles, new photon torpedos. We will be fine!”

I agree Richard Lutz.

2 episodes was a bit too little given the Year of Hell had been foreshadowed the previous season. A whole season would have lost me though.

Some seem to forget that what we got on discovery was Not what fuller would have done.

He left before and the treatment burnett mentioned sounded a lot different.

Discoverys wrong doings are not Fullers fault.

Unfortunately I think most fans like to gripe about the conceptual/pre-production design work (especially the Klingons) and just park there. So that everything bad = must be Fuller’s doing while everything good = must have been done afterward by the revolving hired-then-fired creative teams that “saved” the show.

I mean, I’ve even heard Nick Meyer’s contributions to the GOOD classic movies (you know, the even ones) trivialized, citing peoples’ idle speculation about whatever happened to him and his work (we don’t even know) on STD.

Nevermind that STD has been without a real identity since Fuller left, or that Kurtzman Trek in general (no matter who’s in the writing room) seems perpetually unable to block a fully-realized and meaningful story ever since 2/3 the way through STD’s season 1.

ST was ready for an overall retroactive facelift after DS9 (which I think at least benefited from being styled after TNG just because so many fans were already having trouble accepting it). And TNG’s by-then-tiresome “Ka-Pa-Cha!” Klingons were also already due for a retroactive facelift in my opinion.

Yeah its like blaming Alex Kurtzman for all the Writing of all of NeoTrek. People seem to not even know that there are a ton of writers included in these Shows.

Fuller has ruined shows wherever he’s gone — he a disorganized mess that always blows up the production budget. And he couldn’t plot his way out of his own house. His horrid Klingons re-design just stunk, and his handpicked special effects company had to be replaced to to subpar work, causing a 6 month delay. He creates good atmospherics, but that’s about it. He should go work on Westworld at HBO — that’s the perfect show for him — great looking, but makes no sense.

Thank goodness Moonvies stepped in with some adult supervision (Not that Moonvies was a good guy of course)

Methusalem. Thing is, your claims are pure speculation. You cant know the Les monves stepped in. Or that fullers “handpicked” vfx company created bad work. Or even if Fuller was fired. He said he left…. because he wasnt able to do what he wanted to do.

But still you judge, based on purely speculative claims.

And thats something so odd with fandom. This you jump on the train because of some stuff someone said and IT suits your needs for gossip. Regardless if true or Not.

Midnights Edge Syndrom

One thing is for certain though, Fuller seems to have trouble working within a studio system. He needs to have full control otherwise he just gets dismissed. He seems a bit egotistical in that regard. While his Hannibal and Dead Like Me were very good shows, I think him not being consistent in the business is not a good sign in general.

What became Discovery’s spore drive engineering annex was originally supposed to be a photon torpedo loading bay (!??) built at great expense. This and other preproduction decisions were taken fairly early on, so Fuller can fairly be critiqued for them.

Production Designer Tamara Deverell who was brought on board 4 episodes into season 1 has talked about being really surprised by the size of the bridge and how she needed to come up with ways to repurpose some of the original designs.

Whats the Problem with a Torpedo loading bay? I dont see the point. We dont know what excactly it would have been.

we only got what we got and dont know what could have been. So citisizing Fuller for something we dont know what it would have become is fairly odd.

We saw a version of the torpedo loading bay in Star Trek 2009.

You can seen the relationship in the design. The wall that held spore canisters was likely intended for munitions. Tamara Deverell made it clear that there was just a modest redressing of the set.

I found it bizarre to see 23rd century ships with manually loaded torpedoes. While I like thhe submarine warfare of older Trek, manual loading (except as a specialized adaptation or retrofit) in an age of robotics is darned anachronistic.

What we saw in 2009 was not a version of Fullers Torpedo loading bay. It was just a Torpedo loading bay.

I don’t think a season would have worked. Enterprise did this with the Xindi, and that was a failure. Today it makes more sense, but in the 90s?

I miss Voyager.

dont be sad. They will back back in some hundred years!

A year of hell series, or half series would have been awesome. I’m watching the DVDs now. And seeing them get attacked and 10 minutes later have a shiny new ship seems implausible.

There should have been Mark’s on the walls and carpets. Panels missing, damaged and not replaced. Broken doors. Everything none essential cosmetic should not have been replaced. The ship should have become utilitarian in nature.

So the year of hell series would have really shown voyager off as a starship very much far from home.

Voyager was great, but there was a lot that wasn’t right. The marquee members were too quick to join the crew. The ship remained too shiny and new. Where did all the shuttle craft and torpedoes come from? Why wasn’t there any damage marks on the ship’s hull?

It should have been so much better.

Don’t feel too bad for Braga. He got to screw Jeri Ryan.

OMG, seriously?? I never understood why fans needed to give him shit over that.

Same reason they read tabloid. They want to feel better about theire own lifes reading shit about others and judging the hell out of it.

DS9 was my least favorite of the Treks. It was ok, but no TNG, Voyager, or Enterprise. I am very happy with mini stories being done in 2 episodes. Maybe they could be stretched to a third episode, but after that I want a different thread. I’m SO glad they didn’t do the whole season on Year of Hell.

Doesn’t surprise me that Rick Berman was the biggest issue with Voyager. I wish Braga stood up to Berman the way Behr did. Voyager really could’ve been a great show.

Berman would’ve just demoted him, or had him let go. Never a fan of Braga’s nutty “high concept” sci-fi, but I think I’ve more sympathy for him now.

Rick Berman is an idiot if he didn’t like deep space 9. It ended up being one of the best of trek

In your view Ryan.

There are a lot of us here who like and appreciate DS9, but don’t agree that is the unequivocal best. Certainly most would agree it has among the best moments, but so do other series.

It’s also a matter of balance in Trek offerings though.

Both Voyager and Enterprise were conceived as responses for those fans who wanted to have ships that got out and explored, that bumped into new species and phenomena.

Many fans were weary of diplomacy, long mysteries (Odo, Dominion) and political arcs. They wanted less serialization. They wanted captains and crews who met situations beyond coping with in a civil Starfleet way. Once TNG was shifting to cinematic features, the chorus for “let’s get out there” became more shrill.

Presently, we see Strange New Worlds announced as an episodic show to balance the heavy serialization of Discovery and Picard. However, if Secret Hideout had started with an episodic series, there would have been derision from those who see serialized drama as the apex.

Since he created the thing he can’t hate it that much lol.

And what he was saying at the time WAS very true. Star Trek never really focused on war before. Yes, plenty of TALK about past wars but on the shows themselves it never went beyond showing a conflict over an episode or two and were usually wrapped up after that. DS9 changed the game in so many ways and why Discovery first season could be about the Klingon war.

And I think he was against serialization because frankly many producers, writers, network executives were at the time. Yeah it was starting to be done more in a few places and of course soap operas were always a given but for old school TV people it was still something you just don’t do because all it took was for someone to miss one episode and if they felt too lost they were probably not bothering the week after that. We just live in a very different time today. You don’t have to worry about missing episodes to anything anymore. But back then it was a risk.

But then of course by the time Enterprise came on the air things were changing more. Berman and Braga were the ones who decided to do a season long Xindi arc in third season. But that was nearly ten years later after DS9 first did it so clearly he was coming around to it and actually saw just what it did for DS9.

The funny thing now is if they remade Voyager that show wouldn’t get green lit UNLESS it was serialized from the start. It’s crazy on the 180 TV has done on this.

Voyager was always better than DS9. And more successful. Serialized storytelling is one of the things that are ruining Star Trek. Remember that God awful last part of Enterprise? I kept waiting for it to be over so it could return to some good episodic adventure, but it never did. The Xindi arc ended and the show was cancelled. So much more could have been said and done with that last season, so many adventures. Instead they beat that one story to death episode after episode, week after week. Berman was proven right in the end. While there was always an overall progression to the best Trek, it always worked best as an episodic show. If this week’s story or approach is not your cup of tea, no worries, there’s always next week. No need to be locked in to a particular concept for and entire season run. TOS and TNG are still the most popular, followed by Voyager. That says something. Most Trek fans never wanted it to be a space soap opera. Leave that to another show. Space Above and Beyond or something……..

As an aside,for the same reason, the comics industry is suffering. Not enough one-shot or short issue (3-6 installments) runs. They are obsessed with “arcs” that just go on, and on and on…..until they run out of gas. Or get cancelled. Sound familiar?

You Do know enterprise did Not ended with the xindi arc…. Right?

Just once I would’ve loved for Kurtwood to call one of his officers a Dunb-ass. Lol!

Voyager could have been so much more if Berman had been tossed aside. He was the worst thing about the 80’s-90’s Star Trek.

Pure speculation. could have been worse too… but we got what we got.

And as trek from the 80-90 is what defined trek…. Do you actually like trek? There is Not much more than what berman gave is.

I’ll bite this one.

I absolutely love ST. I love Classic Trek, I love Roddenberry Trek (especially The Motion Picture), I love Bennett~Meyer Trek (particularly Meyer’s Nautical Trek). I like Kelvin Trek (and even love the first movie).

I don’t love (or even “especially” like) Kurtzman Trek, so far, save for a few of the Short Treks and maybe the first 3/4 of STD season 1.

And I’ll never love Berman Trek, unless I can have my TNG (see Roddenberry Trek) and DS9 a-la-cart.

I don’t acknowledge Berman Trek as having any particular “authority” over how to do ST — any more so than any other version of ST I have just named. (And if you tell me some rule of quantity determines otherwise, I’m not listening).

“Really, seriously? We went from Nautical Trek to this? Homogenized Trek is to be the future from now on?” That became the frustrated experience over the years with Berman Trek.

I don’t mind being told I’m not a “real” fan because I don’t love Berman Trek. At that point I’ll choose to take it as a compliment.

Its just that basicly TNG,ds9, voy anf ent plus the TNG movies are berman trek. And thats the majority of trek.

Its not about being a real fan or not. It should never be about that. Every fan is a real fan.

Personally I have no big opinion on berman himself. I just think that under his eyes trek was defined and shaped the most.

Yeah only us fans makes these odd distinctions. For most people Star Trek is just Star Trek. I don’t know anyone personally who could tell you the difference since they only watched some of the shows or movies. They may know them by the characters and show names but that’s about it.

I don’t care who made what, I only care what I enjoy and I enjoy most of it. A lot of it comes from Berman but some of it doesn’t, who cares? I don’t love the new stuff that much now but I didn’t love all the old stuff that much in the beginning either, especially TNG and DS9, now my top two favorite shows.

Trek was defined under Berman the most for sure, but Star Trek will continue to grow and evolve, its never going to be about one show runner or director anyway. It’s all one beautiful universe (or multi-verse) and I’m happy all the characters and stories from the past moves on with new iterations and story tellers which is why I still like Picard even if the execution was a bit off (but just so happy to see this era and characters again) and I hope is done well with SNW. That’s what Berman did for a very long time, but as we are seeing now others are doing it. How successful it will be will be up in the air for awhile, but the beauty is there is SO MUCH Star Trek today there is plenty of something for everyone to enjoy.

A REAL fan just cares about Star Trek, period, and don’t spend time putting people in boxes of what Trek they like, which is sadly done here allll the fucking time.

I love nearly all of them and I appreciate Voyager so much more today than I did when it started. We’re all talking about the show like it just came on yesterday and clearly still has a big fanbase 25 years later that its still talked about, shown everywhere and plenty of cast events, specials and merchandise still being made. When the top 7 of the 10 most rewatched episodes on Netflix are from Voyager 20+ years later, it’s doing something right. ;)

But yeah it’s not everyone’s cup of black coffee either and completely understandable.

Rich berman is the reason Voyager was taken off.a big headed arse who was and is full of himself.he put great actors out if work,crew,series back workers.he needs to be taken down from anything in making a series.we fans of Voyager knew there was more material that could be in the show.but not with a Hitler that wants to destroy something that he doesn’t want to do.hateful hateful little man

Voyager ran 7 years – the same as TNG or DS9.

In fact, I believe that the expectation of a 7 year run was built into the contractual agreements of the creatives.

While I can agree that Voyager had the potential for a longer run, railing at Berman seems misplaced.

Paramount/UPN had its own bigger strategy and Voyager was sacrificed for that from the beginning, with a premature launch through significant meddling from network executives.

Berman would have had to have made a compelling strategic case to UPN to keep it going. Voyager’s ratings on UPN were not great (however much of the problem was UPN itself and it’s sluggish rollout beyond major metropolitan areas.

So, while I appreciate the irony of Voyager’s success in streaming (much like ToS’s in syndication), blaming Berman for not fighting Paramount to get an 8th season for Voyager when Roddenberry couldn’t keep ToS on network television for more than 3 seems unfair (and the tone of your post very certainly is).

What I love about you TG47 is how balanced you are about all of this, for every show. I wish I could be that way lol.

But I agree with your view about Voyager completely. It had its problems but that was mostly being on a network that wanted things done a certain way like all networks did. VOY and ENT were lesser shows than TNG and DS9 but because the demands were harder on them being flagships of a new network that never really thrived. It says a lot when it was basically gone a year after Enterprise left and barely last longer than a decade. I imagine if Voyager was syndicated it would’ve had more freedoms to do other things. I’m not saying it would’ve been better, but it could’ve been a different show in many ways UPN clearly was not allowing it to be.

Thanks for the cheer Tiger2.

I really do find things to like about all of the shows, but neither will I hold any of them up as perfect, or the ideal for every audience.

What I can say is more Trek has held more of my attention over more than five decades than anything else. So, all of the series have more than earned my respect.

I agree with that. I love all the Star Trek shows. The newer ones, not so much, but they are still very young and I’m still very excited to see where they go next.

I said this before but I treat all of Star Trek like my children, some are just better behaved than others. ;)

And its weird I love Voyager more today than I did back when it was airing. I always loved Voyager, but yes not at the level I do TNG, TOS or DS9.

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Episode Preview: Year of Hell, Part I

Screen Rant

Kurtwood smith's 4 star trek roles explained.

Kurtwood Smith is best known for RoboCop and That '70s Show, but the actor also played four different Star Trek characters between 1991 and 2020.

Best known for his roles in RoboCop and That '70s Show , Kurtwood Smith has played four different characters in Star Trek movies and TV shows. Smith's breakthrough movie role was Clarence Boddicker opposite Star Trek into Darkness ' Peter Weller as Alex Murphy/RoboCop in Paul Verhoeven's brutal sci-fi satire. After RoboCop , Kurtwood Smith went on to star in an eclectic collection of movies from Rambo III to Dead Poet's Society . In tandem with his movie career, Kurtwood Smith made many guest appearances on popular shows such as The X-Files , 3rd Rock from the Sun , and two Star Trek TV shows .

In 1998, Kurtwood Smith was cast as Red Forman in That '70s Show , starring in 200 episodes of the nostalgic sitcom. One of Kurtwood Smith's That '70s Show co-stars was Don Stark, who is best known to Star Trek fans as the actor who played Nicky the Nose in 1996's Star Trek: First Contact . Kurtwood Smith starred in another of the best Star Trek movies , Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country , after working with the movie's director, Nicholas Meyer on the espionage thriller, Company Business . Kurtwood Smith's casting in Star Trek 6 began a connection between the actor and the franchise that continued into the 2020s.

12 Star Trek Actors Who Appeared On The X-Files

Federation president in star trek vi: the undiscovered country.

Kurtwood Smith's first Star Trek role was as the Federation President in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country . The Federation President's species was given as Efrosian in some publicity materials for Star Trek 6 , but was never confirmed on-screen . With his cranial ridges, long white hair and whiskery beard, Kurtwood Smith cuts quite a figure as the head of the United Federation of Planets. Smith discussed his role as the Federation President in The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine issue 18 , way back in 1998:

"It wasn't really an acting role. I had to achieve a quick sense of presence and then be shot at. I also had that scene in the office with all the boys [....] I was pleased to be a part of it. "

The President was targeted for assassination as part of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country 's vast Khitomer conspiracy to derail peace talks with the Klingon Empire. Thankfully, the crews of the USS Enterprise and USS Excelsior discover the truth about the conspiracy in time to stop the attempt on the President's life. Captain Montgomery Scott (James Doohan) killed the assassin, restoring order to the peace conference. It may have been a small role for Kurtwood Smith, but despite his lack of screentime, the President who oversaw the Klingon peace process is a hugely important character in Star Trek 's fictional history .

The small black glasses the Federation President wears during the rescue operation scene in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country were supposed to denote that the character was blind, but the fact was never mentioned in dialog.

Thrax in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Season 5, Episode 8, "Things Past"

Kurtwood Smith played Thrax, the Cardassian predecessor of Constable Odo (Rene Auberjonois) from when Deep Space Nine was Terok Nor . Thrax appears in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine season 5, episode 8, "Things Past", in which a freak runabout accident created a telepathic link between Odo, Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks), Lt. Commander Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell) and Elim Garak (Andrew Robinson). The link takes them back to a dark moment from Odo's past, during which Thrax ordered the execution of three innocent Bajorans who had been accused of attempting to murder Gul Dukat (Marc Alaimo).

"Things Past" was the second time that Kurtwood Smith had worked with Rene Auberjonois on Star Trek , after they shared a scene together as the Federation President and Colonel West in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country .

At the end of "Things Past", it was revealed that it wasn't Thrax who ordered the execution, but Odo. Kurtwood Smith was, therefore, playing quite a complicated character in the episode. Thrax was essentially an amalgam of the original Cardassian security officer, and Odo's own guilt. In a 2017 interview with the official Star Trek website , Kurtwood Smith reflected on the duality of his Star Trek: Deep Space Nine role, saying:

"[Thrax] was a character within a character, and he was also a mirror of Rene's character from a different time. I loved the depth of it. I always liked the size of the characters on Star Trek . It reminds me of when I used to do a lot of Shakespeare, back when I was first coming up. It has that feel about it, you know, because you've got all this stuff on, and you're dealing with enhanced language. They’re just very fun, complicated characters."

10 Star Trek Actors Who Appeared In Shakespeare

Annorax in star trek: voyager, season 4, episodes 8 & 9, "year of hell".

Annorax is Kurtwood Smith's biggest Star Trek role to date, appearing in the epic Star Trek: Voyager two-parter, "Year of Hell". Annorax was a temporal scientist who had built a devastating weapon that could remove elements from the space-time continuum. Using his weapon, Annorax set about restoring the glory of the Krenim Imperium, which had been devastated by a war with the Rilnar. Star Trek: Voyager 's Krenim villains were so powerful that, in multiple alternate timelines, they destroyed Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) and the majority of the USS Voyager crew.

To prepare for the role of Annorax, Kurtwood Smith watched Star Trek: Voyager episodes to see what was expected of the show's guest performers.

Annorax was a tyrant, but he was also a tragic figure, as his temporal weapon had accidentally destroyed a Krenim colony, killing his wife. However, having nothing left drove Annorax to more and more extreme measures as he struggled to reorganize the flow of history in his favor. It's a compelling performance from Kurtwood Smith and his scenes with his former Zoot Suit co-star Robert Beltran as Commander Chakotay are some of the standout moments from the Star Trek: Voyager two-parter . Kurtwood Smith discussed how Thrax in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine influenced his portrayal of Thrax in The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine , saying that:

" I guess the producers liked what I did on Deep Space Nine , and asked me to come back, which was fine with me. [...] Because Thrax was actually in the imagination of another character […] he wasn't quite as interesting to play as Annorax. He didn't have nearly as much to do. "

Imperium Magistrate Clar in Star Trek: Lower Decks, Season 1, Episode 8, "Veritas"

Imperium Magistrate Clar was a much lighter Star Trek role for Kurtwood Smith, as the character featured in the animated comedy series Star Trek: Lower Decks . In "Veritas", the Lower Deckers are seemingly put on trial by Imperium Magistrate Clar as he interrogates them about the USS Cerritos' senior staff. However, Clar isn't putting the crew of the USS Cerritos on trial, he's instead honoring them according to his planet's traditions . However, Jack Quaid's Boimler and his fellow Lower Deckers torpedo the whole ceremony by misunderstanding Clar's line of questioning, which is designed to show them all as infallible heroes.

The design of the alien courtroom is reminiscent of the Klingon court in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country , a nod to Kurtwood Smith's first Star Trek appearance.

While it's a voice performance, Kurtwood Smith is clearly having fun in the role of Imperium Magistrate Clar, perhaps delighting in sending up his previous villain roles. Just as Annorax in Star Trek: Voyager was Kurtwood Smith's last Star Trek role before That '70s Show , Clar was his last role before That '90s Show . Hopefully, Kurtwood Smith can return to Star Trek once That '90s Show season 2 drops on Netflix later in the year.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is streaming on Max.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

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Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, also known as DS9, is the fourth series in the long-running Sci-Fi franchise, Star Trek. DS9 was created by Rick Berman and Michael Piller, and stars Avery Brooks, René Auberjonois, Terry Farrell, and Cirroc Lofton. This particular series follows a group of individuals in a space station near a planet called Bajor.

Star Trek Voyager

The fifth entry in the Star Trek franchise, Star Trek: Voyager, is a sci-fi series that sees the crew of the USS Voyager on a long journey back to their home after finding themselves stranded at the far ends of the Milky Way Galaxy. Led by Captain Kathryn Janeway, the series follows the crew as they embark through truly uncharted areas of space, with new species, friends, foes, and mysteries to solve as they wrestle with the politics of a crew in a situation they've never faced before.

Star Trek Lower Decks

The animated comedy series Star Trek: Lower Decks follows the support crew on one of Starfleet’s least significant ships, the U.S.S. Cerritos, in 2380. Ensigns Mariner (Tawny Newsome), Boimler (Jack Quaid), Rutherford (Eugene Cordero), and Tendi (Noël Wells) have to keep up with their duties and their social lives often. At the same time, the ship is being rocked by a multitude of sci-fi anomalies.

Year of Hell

Obsessed with restoring the Krenim Imperium, no matter the cost, a Krenim military temporal scientist creates changes in history that all but destroy Voyager.

In this episode of the podcast, Wes and Clay discuss both episodes of the “Year of Hell” and Kurtwood Smith’s excellent performance. Plus! The guys chat about remembering Kes, time-based weapons, and lackluster mutinies.

• Post author By Wes
• Post date 01/23/2024

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Welcome back to “The Pensky Podcast,” where I, Wes, and my co-host Clay, take on the monumental two-part Voyager episode “Year of Hell.” Aired as episodes 8 and 9 of the fourth season on November 5 and 12, 1997, respectively, these episodes are remembered for their intensity and a standout guest performance.

First off, we have to talk about Kurtwood Smith’s powerhouse appearance as Annorax. His portrayal adds significant weight and complexity to the narrative, making these episodes particularly memorable. Smith’s ability to bring depth to his character elevates the storyline and provides a compelling antagonist for Voyager to face.

We also touch upon Kes’ warning about the Krenim , noting our struggle to recall this piece of foreshadowing. It’s interesting to see how this element was seeded earlier but perhaps wasn’t as prominent in our minds as other plot points.

The time weapon, central to the “Year of Hell” storyline, brings up some interesting discussions. While it’s a pivotal plot device, we explore how it doesn’t quite give off a time-based vibe in its operation and implications, which is an intriguing departure from typical time-travel stories in Star Trek.

Character interactions, or the lack thereof, are a significant talking point. While we feel that some interactions were missing or underdeveloped, we also highlight a few memorable scenes where character dynamics really clicked, bringing some much-needed depth to the interpersonal relationships amidst the chaos.

Janeway’s characterization throughout “Year of Hell” sparks a debate between us. Is she portrayed as a disciplined, calculating captain, or does she come off more as a loose cannon in these episodes? This dichotomy in her character brings up questions about consistency and character development.

Finally, we delve into the pros and cons of the ‘reset button’ used in narratives like “Year of Hell.” This storytelling device can be contentious, and we discuss how it impacts the overall arc of the series, character growth, and the stakes established in the story.

In conclusion, “Year of Hell” presents a blend of high-stakes action, complex character dynamics, and narrative challenges. Join us on “The Pensky Podcast” as we dissect these intricate episodes. For those who love to delve deeper into the Star Trek universe, our Patreon page offers a wealth of additional content and discussions. Warp over and join us on this deep-space journey!

Year of Hell Stardate: 51268.4 - 51252.3 Original Airdate: 5 + 12 November 1997

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Such Sweet Sorrow (Part 2)

Unification iii, battle at the binary stars.

Year of Hell (Part 2)

The crew of the USS Voyager continues to bravely fight back against the Krenim Imperium, their captors in the Year of Hell. Following the events of Part One, Captain Janeway has broken the temporal weapons of Annorax, a Krenim scientist, but this has caused the Krenim Imperium to become an even greater threat as they are now more determined to eradicate Voyager.

The crew must now find a way to restore the timeline and undo the damage they have caused. Despite the difficult circumstances they face, the crew continues to remain hopeful. They intend to find a way to restore the timeline without further damaging it, as they believe that in doing so they can save both themselves and the Krenim Imperium.

Meanwhile, Annorax, who is still aboard the Krenim timeship, is determined to restore the Krenim Imperium to its former glory. He has been working on a new weapon, a temporal incursion, that he believes will be powerful enough to restore the Imperium. The Voyager crew becomes aware of this and sets out to thwart Annorax’s plans.

The crew of Voyager travels through time in an attempt to stop Annorax, but their efforts are hindered by the Krenim Imperium, which has become even more powerful and determined to eliminate Voyager. The crew is able to make some progress, but they soon realize that Annorax’s weapon is too powerful for them to stop. It appears that the only way to restore the timeline is to destroy the weapon.

Janeway is presented with a difficult decision; either to destroy the weapon and restore the timeline, or to save Voyager and risk ruining the timeline. She chooses the former and orders the crew to destroy the weapon. The crew is successful, and the timeline is restored. However, the crew finds that they have paid a heavy price for their victory.

The Krenim Imperium is destroyed, and the crew of Voyager is left to mourn the loss of their comrades who died in the battle. Furthermore, although they have restored the timeline, they have failed to save the Krenim Imperium and its people. Despite this, they have managed to keep their hope alive, and they press on with their journey, determined to make the best of the situation.

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Or, they try to. And okay, it turns out the gratuitous beaming was for good reason, story-wise, because in the instant that the pair attempt to beam back to the bridge, Discovery plunges through time, and only their mid-transport timing protects them from the ship’s time-hopping. Everyone else aboard Discovery is experiencing “regular” time travel, as it were, unaware of their movement and remaining “of the time” they jump to.

Everyone, that is, except for Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp), who thanks to his tardigrade DNA infusion all the way back in Season 1, the scientist is bouncing through time like the rest of the crew — but he’s mentally aware of the jumping remains “himself” like Burnham and Rayner.

Like “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad,” this is another episode about time shenanigans centering on Stamets and Burnham (and now also Rayner), but it doesn’t feel like a repeat of the same story so much as a deliberate permutation on a theme. Discovery , the show, is revisiting its past just the same way Burnham revisits her past self here; in both cases, the future versions have grown and changed in ways their past selves could never have imagined.

Who could have guessed, watching the series’ seventh episode, that original showrunner and creator Bryan Fuller would leave after just one season and a majority of the show would end up taking place in 32nd century? Not me, that’s for sure.

(As a side note, I was hoping one of the pasts they visited would be the “Magic” situation, just because come on, who doesn’t want to see what a time loop within a time loop looks like?)

It takes them all a few time jumps to figure out what’s going on, and a few more after that for all three of them to rendezvous. The second jump takes them back to Discovery mid-construction, sitting in dry dock at the San Francisco Fleet Yards, the Golden Gate Bridge framed nicely in a missing bulkhead section. (Both Star Trek and The Room have one rule: If you’re in San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge must be visible at all times!)

Next jump is to the Season 2-ending battle with Control, and finally with three jumps there’s enough of a pattern visible for Rayner to identify what’s going on and what, exactly, is causing it. First, each time they jump Burnham and Rayner always return to the ready room – the place where they beamed themselves out of time — and second, that little mechanical spider that’s been crawling around the ship since it first detached itself from Adira’s uniform is a Krenim chronophage (yes, those Krenim ) left over from more lawless times  when paralyzing a ship by having it randomly cycle through time was a thing that apparently people did.

After a few more jumps, including one where a past version of Jett Reno (Tig Notaro) happens to save Rayner’s hide, he and Burnham land on an empty, dusty Discovery , abandoned by everyone except the one person who can’t leave: Zora (Annabelle Wallace). Listening to “Que Sera, Sera” and convinced that she’s dreaming, Zora explains that in this future, Discovery remained stuck in its time paralysis long enough for the Breen to get their hands on the Progenitor’s technology.

It’s a bleak future to visit, but it’s also very fortuitous that they did, because Zora is able to quickly do the math necessary for Stamets — who they finally meet up with in the next time jump –to figure out how to get them out of this. Just build a chroniton stabilizer and squish the bug with it, easy peasy!

And all Burnham has to do is get a component for it from her quarters without being seen. Not so easy as it turns out, as she runs into Book (David Ajala) who is very much in love with Burnham during this time period — and keen to show it. And she, as we all probably suspected, is still very much in love with him and gives herself a brief moment to indulge in that fact.

In their final final jump — this time to early in Lorca’s captaincy — Burnham runs into her much angrier and more jaded younger self; a Michael Burnham who is so barely out of prison that she still doesn’t even have a combadge and who flat-out does not believe this woman in a strange red uniform who claims to be her. Why? Because there’s no way anyone would ever make Michael Burnham a captain .

After a fight in a thankfully empty corridor, our Burnham ends up victorious and heads to the bridge… where she needs to convince everyone that they should listen to her and do something you never really want to do with a warp engine going at maximum speed: intentionally break the warp bubble and slam yourself back into the effects of general relativity.

Flashbacks are a tried and true way for shows to bring back departed characters, so the choice to include Airiam (Hanna Spear) on the bridge makes sense and is nice for audience members who miss her. What doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense to me is how her presence is used (which is a bit of an unfortunate parallel to her death for me – or at least the impact it was supposed to have).

Burnham knows she needs to convince the crew that she really is herself and that she really is from the future, but instead of, I don’t know, showing them her combadge which is full of 32nd century bells and whistles and exotic alloys that haven’t been invented yet she… convinces Airiam that they know each other because Burnham knows Airiam would sacrifice her life to save the ship? Then someone blurts out a “No she wouldn’t!” like that’s not the first thing any appropriately heroic Starfleet officer would do?

This scene is the one fumble in an otherwise great episode. Two minutes after this weird “I know you and here’s a generic hypothetical that applies to most people in Starfleet to prove it,” Airiam sees Burnham’s fancy holographic combadge and openly gawks at it. See, easily convinced! That would have worked and it wouldn’t have required the show to reexamine the hollowness of Airiam’s death without correcting its mistake.

The fact that Burnham doesn’t have anything better or more personal to say to or about Airiam except “You died, sorry that happened,” underscores just how undeveloped she was as a character. Why bring that up again? But hey, Burnham’s tactic works, and I suppose that’s what really matters here.

Meanwhile, past-Burnham and her era’s Rhys (Patrick Kwok-Choon) show up in engineering, phasers drawn, to try and stop Stamets and this weird guy they’ve never seen before from doing whatever it is that they’re trying to do to the ship. Rayner, solidifying himself as a solid gold example of a favorite character trope of mine — Grumpy Guy who’s a Secret Softie — defuses the situation by being brave as hell (he walks right into Burnham’s drawn phaser) but also emotionally astute.

He doesn’t just tell Burnham personal facts he couldn’t have known if he were really a stranger, he tells her with conviction that she really does deserve to be here on Discovery…  something that sinks to the core of who she is and what she’s battling in this moment in time.

The plan succeeds: the time bug is proverbially squished, and Discovery and her crew are all right back where they belong, minus the six hours they lost during all the jumping. Unfortunately, those six hours were long enough for Moll and L’ak to catch up with them and leave again. Did they find anything, or did they get sick of looking at seemingly empty space and leave? We don’t know yet, so tune in next week.

Which brings us to the beginning of “Face the Strange” — see, I can jump through time too! — when we see Moll (Eve Harlow) and L’ak (Elias Toufexis) acquiring the bug in the first place. While the Progenitors’ technology is enormous in its power and implications and Moll and L’ak are willing to do just about anything to find it, their motivations seem strictly personal.

Sure, if the way Moll takes revenge on the guy who sells her the chronophage is any indication, they’ll get some personal satisfaction out of seeing the Federation burn, but more than anything they’re in it for their freedom. Freedom from someone or something, certainly – though who or what we still don’t know – but, given the themes in “Face the Strange”, I’d guess freedom from their pasts might be the real goal.

OBSERVATION LOUNGE

• “Face the Strange” is a reference to the David Bowie classic “Changes.”
• This episode is a spiritual sequel to Star Trek: Voyager’s “Shattered,” a similar final-season tale which saw Chakotay bouncing through different eras of Voyager adventures.
• Discovery’s time jumps include visits to the ship’s transit through the Red Angel wormhole (leading to the ship’s crash-landing in “Far From Home” ), a time when the starship was under construction in the San Francisco Fleet Yards, the battle with Control ( “Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2” ), Stardate 865422.4 (during Osyyra’s takover in “There Is A Tide…” ), an unknown date nearly 30 years into the future, a period in early Season 2 (shortly after Jett Reno’s rescue in “Brother” ), a point ahead of the Season 4 premiere after Burnham was promoted to captai), and the encounter with past-Burnham which takes place just ahead of “The Butcher’s Knife Cares Not for the Lamb’s Cry” (denoted by the reference to a still-alive Ellen Landry ).

• Retrofit into corridor after Season 2’s set updates, the passage to the left-rear of Discovery’s command chair returns to its Season 1 “blue blinkies” configuration.
• Captain Pike’s broken wood-and-glass conference table returns to the ready room set during the first time jump, a good touch from the set decoration department.
• We’ve seen the San Francisco bay many times in Star Trek history… so just where in the heck was Discovery’s dry dock located?
• A Krenim chronophage — or “time bug” — snared Discovery in a time bubble, from the species behind Star Trek: Voyager’s “Year of Hell.”
• Season 3-era Reno’s drink of choice is a Vesper martini, served ice cold — and she tells Rayner that he can buy her a drink “at Red’s,” the onboard bar and lounge set added to Discovery during its 32nd century upgrades (though not introduced until Season 4).
• While the ready room set was not built for Discovery until Season 2, the second time jump confirms the room existed as part of the ship’s original construction… but in a continuity goof, the 32nd century version of the Starfleet emblem remains on the Discovery ready room floor in each different time period, instead of the old version seen in Seasons 1 and 2.

• Burnham gives a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nostalgic smile when Stamets hands her a 23rd century Starfleet communicator, retired after the crew upgraded to 32nd tricombadges in Season 3’s “Scavengers.”
• Saurian officer Linus (David Benjamin Tomlinson) appears in the Season 1 time period, indicating he boarded Discovery long before his first actual appearance in Season 2’s “Brothers.”
• Former Discovery cast members Hannah Cheesman and Ronnie Rowe, Jr. return as Airiam and Bryce, Julianne Grossman returns as the original voice of Discovery’s computer. (While Cheesman portrayed Airiam in Season 2, the role was actually portrayed by Sara Mitich in Discovery’s first season.)
• I forgot just how much Airiam moves like C-3PO. Might have toned down that arm placement there in that wide shot if it were me, yikes.
• Discovery’s viewscreen may be an open window to space, but it features blast doors which can be closed as necessary.
• The future time period Burnham and Rayner visit is reminiscent of the alternate future setting in “Calypso,” where Zora and Discovery sat abandoned for nearly 1000 years. Zora even believes she’s having “another dream” when the officers arrive, perhaps hinting that the events of “Calypso” may have been one of Zora’s dreams — as the “Zora-point-of-view” shots mirror moments from that  Short Trek  tale.

• This episode marks the first time we’ve seen Discovery’s original hull and nacelle configuration since its big 32nd century upgrade in “Scavengers.”
• Even living “outside of time,” it’s curious that Stamets can jump back to a time period before his tardigrade DNA injection occurred.
• Stamets’ tactics for clearing engineering get less and less sophisticated as the episode proceeds — going from making up specific problems with the spore drive containment field to just shouting “I’m grumpy!” It works.
• “Hey Paul, let’s show ‘em how a couple of old dogs still know the best tricks!” Whoever gave Rayner a used copy of a dictionary of idioms from 1962, I thank you for your service.
• Rayner’s hand gets the “Timescape” treatment, aging uncomfortably fast while he squashes the time bug — though thankfully avoiding those awful long fingernails.
• Rayner surmises that Burnham must be the first person in Starfleet to captain a ship she first boarded as a prisoner. He’s probably right, but if we allow for a few technicalities I’d put Seven of Nine in that rare club as well: she’s imprisoned very quickly after boarding Voyager , and while she doesn’t hold a Starfleet rank at the time, she does command that vessel for over a month during the events of “One”.

Even with all the time jumping and the temporal-relativity-heavy plot, “Face the Strange” is a straightforward hour of television that confidently knows exactly what it wants to do – both in terms of the story and the characters. There are almost no extraneous moments, but the episode doesn’t feel rushed or overly full. The pacing is great: quick enough that we get to jump through a lot of different time periods, but relaxed enough that there’s room for smaller moments of comedy and character work.

The pacing and placement of the more emotional moments is especially effective, with characters examining and confronting their past and present selves in a way that’s emotionally resonant but also truly moves the story forward both at the episode and season levels.

A frequent frustration I have with Discovery is that the emotional beats and plot beats feel like they’re competing with each other for the same space, but with “Face the Strange” it feels like the show has finally figured out a way to have them work together and compliment one another.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 returns with “Mirrors” on Thursday, April 25.

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• Star Trek: Discovery

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How Deep Space Nine's Dominion War Nearly Wrecked Star Trek's Utopia

How deep space nine 's dominion war nearly wrecked star trek 's utopia, over five years of hot and cold conflict, deep space nine charted the deadliest war in star trek 's history—one that pushed the federation to its limit..

Star Trek likes to imagine itself as a franchise that is largely above conflict , but it is defined by it : and how its most idealized heroes in Starfleet and the Federation react to, and become shaped by it. While Trek ’s history is littered with devastating battles , few conflicts hold a mirror to Star Trek quite like the bloodiest of them all— Deep Space Nine ’s Dominion War .

As one of the most legendary moments in the conflict celebrated its anniversary earlier this week—marking the airing of “In the Pale Moonlight” , where Captain Sisko sells his soul to bring the Romulan Star Empire into the war on the Federation’s side—we’re taking a look back at the longest game a Star Trek show ever played in setting up what would become one of its most memorable arcs, and a story that would forever shape its legacy .

Although Federation-aligned and independent powers of the Alpha Quadrant had begun colonizing Gamma Quadrant holdings and engaging in trade with the region’s myriad beings almost as soon as the discovery of the Bajoran wormhole in 2369—the first stable wormhole discovered in the Milky Way Galaxy—it was not Starfleet, the Klingon Empire, the Cardassian Union, or the Romulan Star Empire, nor any of the major military powers of the Alpha Quadrant, that first received intelligence about the Dominion’s existence, but the Ferengi Alliance.

Operating in intelligence secured by the Grand Nagus Zek, the Ferengi successfully entered a trade agreement with a major mercantile faction of the Dominion in the Karemma, in an attempt to secure the Ferengi as a major economic power on the other side of the wormhole. But while their alliance with the Karemma was established, solid intel or interaction with the wider Dominion remained out of reach for the Alpha Quadrant powers beyond intelligence reports from trading Gamma Quadrant species: the Dominion was solidifying its own borders, securing new worlds, and conquering species while lying in wait.

First Contact

Starfleet’s first formal contact with the Dominion set the stage for the scope of the war to come—but open conflict with the Dominion was still several years away. In 2370, after encountering the military arm of the Dominion in the Jem’Hadar, Commander Sisko, Deep Space Nine’s chief Starfleet administrator, and Quark were held hostage as Jem’Hadar forces destroyed multiple Alpha Quadrant colonies as a warning that the Gamma Quadrant was their territory. In an attempt to make a show of force of its own, Starfleet dispatched the Galaxy-Class starship Odyssey as well as several runabout shuttles on an expedition to recover Sisko.

Although Sisko was rescued, the show of force didn’t work. Immediately engaging with Starfleet, the Jem’Hadar’s technology proved more than a match for the Federation’s, with the Odyssey unable to damage the Dominion attack ships. They were no match for the Jem’Hadar’s ruthless tactics either, when the Odyssey was destroyed in a suicide run during the engagement. Sisko and the survivors were left to return to the Alpha Quadrant with a warning: the Federation had no idea what hell it had just unleashed.

A Cold War Begins

The destruction of the Odyssey did not mark the beginning of open conflict, but sparked realizations on both sides of the wormhole— a Dominion invasion of the Alpha Quadrant was not a hypothetical, but an inevitability. The Dominion began establishing simulations for how the various Alpha Quadrant powers would react to a potential Dominion encroachment beyond the Gamma Quadrant. Meanwhile, Starfleet entered production on the first explicitly designed warship in its fleets, the Defiant -class escort, stationing the first of its kind at Deep Space Nine, right at the wormhole’s entrance.

Deep Space Nine itself became the center of Starfleet’s plans for an early military footing. The Federation’s presence on the station was increasingly militarized even beyond the Defiant ’s stationing there, fortifying the station with increased defenses, and the establishment of a series of relays and listening posts on the other side of the wormhole as an advanced warning system. However, beyond the military might of its Jem’Hadar forces, the Dominion had another trick up its sleeve: a quasi-intelligence branch of changeling agents, preparing to infiltrate branches of each Alpha Quadrant power.

The Fall of the Obsidian Order

The Alpha Quadrant’s own intelligence agencies attempted to combat changeling subterfuge with increased security sweeps and detection, but the Dominion pivoted its earliest infiltrations at two intelligence targets in particular: the Romulan Tal Shiar, and the Cardassian Obsidian Order. Spurred by the discovery of a plan by Cardassian intelligence to assault the changeling homeworld, Dominion operatives lured the Obsidian Order and Tal Shiar into a joint operation in the Omarion Nebula in 2371—where a massive force of Jem’Hadar ships decimated the Cardassian-Romulan task force.

With the Tal Shiar badly damaged, Romulan planning to the war pivoted to neutrality, staying away from engaging with the other Alpha Quadrant powers. But the destruction of the Obsidian Order crippled Cardassia’s power structure: without the threat of the Order policing dissidence, Cardassia itself was facing a power vacuum prime for the Dominion to capitalize on.

Emboldened by the success at the Battle of the Omarion Nebula, the Dominion moved further into destabilizing the Alpha Quadrant. Infiltrating the upper echelons of Klingon Command under the guise of General Martok, a changeling operative influenced Chancellor Gowron into making public moves to seize Cardassian territories while the Union was distracted by internal conflicts. Drawing condemnation from the Federation, Gowron reacted by shattering a tentative peace between the Empire and the Federation that had lasted for nearly a century by formally pulling out of the Khitomer Accords that had established the Klingon-Federation Alliance.

Given free reign to effectively continue a war of attrition against the Cardassian Union, Gowron’s warmongering provided two advantages to the Dominion: the Klingons badly, badly damaged the Cardassian Union, itself already weakened by the civilian government’s overthrowing of the Cardassian military command’s rule over the world. But the Federation’s distraction by the Klingon powers also gave Dominion agents an opportunity to repeat their successes within Starfleet Command. After a changeling agent bombed a conference in Antwerp, dissident voices in Starfleet Command attempted to stage a coup d’etat—however, it failed after being exposed.

The Dominion’s influence in the Klingon Empire, however, allowed it to attack the Federation even without infiltration from within. The Martok agent convinced Gowron, emboldened by successes against the Cardassians, to begin staking claim on existent Federation territories in late 2372, formally beginning a new Klingon-Federation war.

Invasion and Union

Although a cease-fire in the conflict between the Federation and Klingons was secured relatively quickly after the exposure of the Martok agent, the ensuing chaos—as well as an attempted Borg assault that vastly damaged Starfleet’s military strength in Sector 001—had primed the Alpha Quadrant for the Dominion. Half a year later in 2373, the Dominion reaped the seeds it had sown in years of infiltration and subterfuge. With Cardassia drastically weakened through internal and external strife, a beleaguered Gul Dukat entered negotiations with the Dominion to formally develop an alliance, allowing the Cardassians to stage key territory retrievals on the Klingon front with Dominion backing. Plans by Starfleet to seal the Bajoran wormhole and cut off any threat of a Dominion invasion were thwarted by an agent posing as Dr. Julian Bashir, DS9's Starfleet medical chief, who successfully managed to stablize the wormhole’s integrity even further—allowing the Dominion to regularly transport a steady stream of supplies and military power to Cardassian space.

Growing tensions and small border conflicts on the fringes of what was now Dominion-Cardassian territory saw the Federation and Klingons bury the hatchet formally, with the Empire re-entering the Khitomer Accords. But even with one wound patched up, war was now inevitable, and Starfleet launched a plan to mine the space around Deep Space Nine and the Bajoran wormhole, effectively delaying further transport of Dominion materiel into the Alpha Quadrant. A field of self-replicating mines pushed the Dominion into action, sending a message to Captain Sisko and Starfleet at the station: disable the mines, or the Dominion and Cardassians would take Deep Space Nine and do it themselves.

Starfleet made its first humbling gambit: just days later, an overwhelming Cardassian-Dominion force assaulted Deep Space Nine, but not before the mine field was armed—and not before Starfleet withdrew from the station entirely, leaving the Bajoran security forces staged there to welcome Dominion control. In exchange, the distraction caused by the Dominion pressing so much of its Alpha Quadrant forces into action a Deep Space Nine allowed a joint Starfleet-Klingon allied force to invade Cardassian space, destroying a key Dominion shipyard and hampering initial production efforts of Alpha Quadrant-made weaponry.

On stardate 50975.2, the Dominion War turned hot.

A Sacrifice of Angels

Although the sacrifice of Deep Space Nine in exchange for mining the Bajoran wormhole was a key early victory for the Federation-Klingon alliance, it was pretty much the only one in the opening months of the war. Klingon and Starfleet forces were regularly pushed into retreat on all fronts, overwhelmed by the Dominion’s sheer numbers and their superior technology. Morale began to plummet—especially after a devastating battle in the Tyra system all but destroyed Starfleet’s Seventh Fleet, losing nearly a hundred ships and thousands of officers in a single engagement.

But while large scale conflict was going badly for the alliance, small-scale operations and individual skirmishes played to its military strengths. Small task forces managed to infiltrate Dominion space and successfully destroy significant amounts of the Dominion’s supply of Ketracel-White, the drug that sustained the Jem’Hadar as an effective fighting force, creating a supply crisis, while others sabotaged major sensor arrays to stem the flow of Dominion intelligence.

The War Digs In

The Dominion kept pushing, encroaching closer and closer to core Federation worlds like Vulcan and Bolarus. And as efforts back in the Bajoran system to disable the minefield around Deep Space Nine began to bear fruit, Sisko realized the Federation needed a win to steady morale and to avoid what was increasingly looking like a devastatingly swift loss to the Dominion: take back the station where the war had first begun in the first place.

Despite initial resistance from both the Empire and Starfleet Command, Operation Return was put into action in late 2374, securing an overwhelming victory for alliance forces. Although the mine field was ultimately destroyed, Deep Space Nine was retaken, and nearly 3,000 Dominion warships traversing the wormhole were mysteriously vanished away by the entities—believed by the Bajoran people to be their spiritual pantheon, the Prophets—that called it home. Having withdrawn ships from various fronts to defend DS9, Dominion advances on Federation and Klingon space were stalled throughout the Quadrant, and Gul Dukat, broken by the death of his daughter during the attack on DS9, was captured by the alliance, leading to new leadership in the Cardassian wing of the Dominion under Damar.

A Pale Moonlight

The third major battle for Deep Space Nine lead to a slowdown in the overall arc of the Dominion War, as both sides consolidated forces and territories. Formal peace talks even began between the two sides, but eventually stalled out. With direct access to the Gamma Quadrant now barred by the wormhole’s inhabitants, the Dominion ramped up direct production in its Alpha Quadrant holdings, stemming the Ketracel White shortage crisis through a trade agreement for a version of the drug developed by the Son’a. Its strength restored, the Dominion launched a surprise assault that put the Federation on the precipice: distracting alliance forces, an invasion fleet from the Kalandra sector managed to occupy Betazed, the homeworld of a major Federation member, in just 10 hours, successfully repulsing multiple Starfleet attempts to retake the world.

Through Betazed, the Dominion was on the doorstep of the heart of the Federation—attacks on Vulcan, Bolarus, Andor, Tellar, Alpha Centauri, and even Earth were now on the table. Once again on the back foot and with the war ramping up again, the alliance needed a win. As presented in one of the finest hours of all seven seasons of Deep Space Nine , “In the Pale Moonlight,” Captain Sisko, working with the Cardassian tailor Elim Garak, successfully managed to stage a deception for the Romulan Star Empire, assassinating a Senator carrying forged evidence of a Dominion plan to invade Romulan space. The Romulans took the bait, formally entering the war on the side of the Alliance—and all it cost was the life of one Romulan senator, one criminal, and the self-respect of one Starfleet officer.

Turning Tides

The opening of the Romulan front gave the Federation opportunity and space to reach out and secure diplomatic ties with smaller besieged powers in the Alpha Quadrant, to gain access to further staging grounds and material support. Bolstered by the significant military power Romulus brought to the table, a clear pathway to the end of the Dominion War was laid out by alliance command: a direct invasion of Cardassia, the heart of the Dominion’s stronghold in the quadrant.

As 2374 came to a close, the Alliance began striking its first major offensives into Cardassian space, taking the highly contested Chin’toka system as well as Kalandra—which would eventually lead to the liberation of Betazed months later. Consolidating the new flashpoints on their fronts, the Klingons successfully managed to launch several deep-strike raids into Cardassian territory, destabilizing military infrastructure even further. Section 31, the secret intelligence wing of Starfleet, also successfully developed and laced the changeling homeworld’s great link with a morphogenic virus, greatly destabilizing their security and ability to conduct sabotage and intelligence gathering operations.

The Dominion, however didn’t go down without a fight. As the Alliance encroached further, Dominion command entered an alliance with the Breen Confederacy—something it had kept secret from its Cardassian allies, promising the Breen several Cardassian systems in exchange for their loyalty. As the Dominion ignored the Cardassian’s requests for support against the Federation and Klingons, fractures began to grow between the two entities. But the Breen’s surprise entry into the war in 2375—by launching an unprecedented shock bombardment on Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco, the first hostile assault on Earth in centuries—as well as the use of powerful new weaponry that allowed them and the Dominion to almost completely eradicate Alliance forces holding Chin’toka to put the Federation, Klingons, and Romulans on the defensive.

A Revolutionary End

Another lull in the war’s grander momentum after the second battle of Chin’toka allowed the Alliance to recover its lost military power and develop a counter to Breen weaponry—but it also gave the increasingly disenfranchised Cardassians a chance to undermine the Dominion from within. Left ignored after the Dominion’s pact with the Breen, Damar staged a rebellion against their former allies—one that, while swiftly put down, managed to put the Dominion and Breen on the back foot, withdrawing from much of their holdings to consolidate power directly around Cardassia.

Although Cardassian dissidence had been largely quelled, however, it wasn’t eradicated—with the Alliance sending operatives to help Damar respark a popular revolution on the world, distracting the Dominion long enough for the Alliance to gather its forces into one final effort, the plan that had been its dream the year prior: the invasion of Cardassia Prime.

The Final Battle

With the local uprising successfully putting Cardassian under a power blackout, Alliance forces entered Cardassian space in late 2375, engaging Dominion, Cardassian, and Breen forces. A Jem’Hadar attempt to quell rebellion on Cardassia, killing millions of civilians in targeted bombings, saw the Cardassian fleet break away from the Dominion and Breen, fracturing their tentative defensive lines and giving the Alliance direct access to the planet.

Forced to accept terms of surrender—in exchange for a cure for the morphogenic virus now ravaging the changelings and their homeworld—the Dominion stepped down, and several days later, its leadership signed the Treaty of Bajor on Deep Space Nine, formally bringing an end to the Dominion War. The remaining Dominion forces retreated back into the Gamma Quadrant, and Deep Space Nine’s Bajoran security forces officer, the changeling Odo, returned with them to deliver the morphogenic cure directly to his people’s homeworld.

The Legacy of the Dominion War

Meanwhile, while most perfunctory borders of space occupied by the Alpha Quadrant powers prior to the Dominion’s invasion in 2373 were restored by the Treaty of Bajor, the quadrant had undergone a significant rebalancing of power that would impact interstellar events for decades to come. The near-total destruction of the Cardassian Union created a power vacuum in its former territories, while the Breen, albeit humbled by the Dominion’s retreat, had established its expansionary goals as well as its significant military threat. The aftermath of both its initial war with Cardassia and then as part of the Alliance diminished the Klingon Empire’s own status as a major power in the quadrant for the next decade, as it looked internally to reconsolidate and rebuild—leaving the Romulan Star Empire and the Federation as the defining players in the Alpha Quadrant.

Although the Dominion War had brought with it a sense of uneasy diplomacy that was unprecedented in either faction’s history for centuries, tensions between Romulus and the Federation would renew shortly after—amplified first after the Reman commander Shinzon staged a military coup in 2379, attempting to attack Earth in the process, and then six years later, when a secret sect of the Tal Shiar dedicated to the destruction of synthetic life staged a terrorist attack on the Utopia Planitia shipyards at Mars, largely destroying a Federation taskforce intended to aid with evacuation efforts intended to save the populations of Romulus and Remus before their system’s star went supernova. After the attack the Federation decided to formally halt attempts to help the Romulans and Remans, leading to the near extinction of both sibling species when the Romulan star went supernova in 2387.

Although major conflict on the scale of the Dominion War would not return to the Alpha Quadrant for many years to come, its scars lingered for decades, especially as the Federation and Klingon Empires became the de facto remaining powers by the turn of the 25th century. For now, it remains what we know to be the bloodiest conflict in Star Trek ’s history—one that challenged the very ideals of its entire utopian dream to their very core.

‘Star Trek’ Origin Story Movie Will Be Set Decades Before 2009 Film

CinemaCon 2024: The new project will be produced by longtime “Star Trek” steward J.J. Abrams

Paramount Pictures is ready to boldly go (again).

After rumors circulated earlier this year, Paramount officially announced a new “Star Trek” prequel film on Thursday, this time taking place decades before the original 2009 “Star Trek” feature.

“Andor” director Toby Haynes will direct from a script by Seth Grahame-Smith (who is also writing another hotly touted CinemaCon title, the third “Now You See Me” film). J.J. Abrams is returning to produce.

But then again, we’ve heard about a new “Star Trek” movie before.

During the run-up to “Star Trek Beyond” in 2016, it was revealed that a fourth film would reunite Chris Pine’s Captain Kirk with his deceased father (played, once again, by Chris Hemsworth). A year later, Quentin Tarantino approached Paramount about doing a “Star Trek” movie – this time as an R-rated gangster movie (based, in part, on the 1968 episode of the original series “A Piece of the Action”). In 2018 S.J. Clarkson, a TV vet who would eventually direct “Madame Web,” was hired to direct the fourth film in the Abrams-verse, but salary disputes led to Pine and Hemsworth leaving the project. That version was canceled in 2019 and Tarantino stated in 2020 that he wouldn’t be making his “Star Trek” either.

In November 2019 “Fargo” creator Noah Hawley was hired to write and direct a new “Star Trek” film based on his version of the series. A year later, this movie was canceled by new Paramount Pictures president Emma Watts. In 2021 “Star Trek: Discovery” writer Kalinda Vazquez was hired to write a version based on her original pitch, but a separate script was being developed by Lindsey Beer and Geneva Robertson-Dworet. The studio even set a summer 2023 release date for a new “Trek” (which “Trek” was the question).

In 2021 that release date was pushed to Christmas 2023, under the direction of “WandaVision” director Matt Shakman. Josh Friedman and Cameron Squires were brought on to retool the script. In early 2022 it was announced that the stars of the three previous “Star Trek” installments in the Abrams-verse would all be returning, although it was later reported that the actors had not entered negotiations to return.

In 2022 Shakman left “Star Trek” to join Marvel Studios’ “The Fantastic Four.” But just last month Steve Yockey was hired to write a fourth “Star Trek” movie.

Now, we are finally getting word of another film in development, with another writer/director team. But it’s not the first time that a “Star Trek” prequel script has been floated, as Erik Jendresen, cowriter of “Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning,” had submitted a script for “Star Trek: The Beginning” before J.J. had taken over and pitched his 2009 version. It depicted the Earth-Romulan War.

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