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| Janeway, alone on the bridge of the crippled starship Voyager! |
THE PLOT
"Past, present and future: They exist as one. They breathe together..."
Voyager has entered a region of space belonging to the Zahl, an advanced civilization whose claim is disputed by the Krenim, a once-formidable enemy whose weapons technology relies on temporal science. But the Krenim are a shadow of their former selves, one the Zahl ambassador describes as merely an "annoyance."
Then a wave of temporal distortion hits, and everything changes...
There are no more Zahl, and Voyager is being pummeled by the suddenly highly advanced Krenim ship. The Krenim captain sneers that Janeway's vessel is in their space, which is all the justification required to attack. Voyager manages to escape, but is heavily damaged - and this is only the beginning of a string of attacks that will see the starship pushed to the brink of destruction.
The change in the timeline was the work of Annorax (Kurtwood Smith), a Krenim scientist in command of a weapon ship that exists outside time. Annorax has been methodically wiping civilizations out of history, trying to restore the Krenim Imperium that existed before his first use of the weapon. This latest "incursion," the elimination of Zahl, has restored the Imperium to 98% of its full glory. But that last 2% includes his own world, his own family, which he is determined to restore. When he sees Voyager, and recognizes it as a rogue element throwing off his calculations, he makes it his next target - Determined to not just destroy the ship and its crew, but to make it so that they never existed at all!
CHARACTERS
Capt. Janeway: At the start, she is determined to keep her crew together at all costs: "We're stronger as a team. One crew, one ship... I say we make our stand together." But reality forces her to split the crew up by the end of Part One, so that at least some of them might survive. "Asking you to stay would be asking you to die." As the situation continues to worsen, she makes rash decisions that even Tuvok admits are logically flawed. One incident leaves her burned and visibly scarred - and when the Doctor threatens to relieve her of command, she snaps that she'll switch off his program. She is finally left alone on the bridge of an empty ship, fighting with what is quite literally her last breath. Kate Mulgrew gives the best performance she has yet given, her work even better because she doesn't ask for the audience to side with her as Janeway becomes rawer and rasher - She simply makes sure that this emotionally on-edge woman feels consistent with the more collected Janeway we are used to seeing.
Chakotay: Part One sees him once again approaching Janeway in private to offer an alternative to her current course. He presents the option of splitting up the crew, an idea she summarily dismisses at this point - but which she will reluctantly follow by the end of the episode. Part Two gives him more good material, as he is paired with the tortured Annorax. Seeing that the Krenim scientist is an intelligent man who has full appreciation of the power at his disposal, Chakotay decides that he can reason with him. He even begins to taste a bit of Annorax's obsession with finding the perfect calculation to undo all the damage of the past year. Robert Beltran is surprisingly excellent, particularly opposite Kurtwood Smith. Given the strong run of episodes he's had over the past half-season - with [B]Coda, Scorpion, Nemesis[/B] and now this - I'm forced to revise my opinion of both Beltran and Chakotay, both of whom have come into their own in a big way.
The Doctor: There's a fine moment in Part One, when an attack causes an overload in sickbay. The Doctor has to rapidly evacuate his patients before the entire deck is destroyed. In a nod to classic submarine movies, he must close a hatch to seal the explosion within that deck - which means closing that hatch on two crewmen who are simply too far away to make it in time. It's a nonverbal beat that lasts mere seconds, but Robert Picardo insures that the moment is unforgettable.
Tuvok/Seven: In one of the few scenes that shows the writers even remember Before and After, Seven is in the Jeffries tube with an unexploded Krenim torpedo, exactly as Kes had been in the earlier episode (Seven very literally replaces her in this instance). She is able to scan it for information they are able to use to create temporal shielding... but when the torpedo finally goes off, Tuvok is blinded while shielding her from the blast. Tuvok and Seven are paired for the remainder of the two-parter, Seven acting as Tuvok's sight guide to enable him to continue performing his duties. Thanks to some modified instruments, he remains effective at his post - his determination and self control such that he even continues to do his own shaving, with a straight razor. In a story with many fine moments for many characters, Tuvok's farewell to Janeway just before the final battle is a standout.
Annorax: Speaking of standouts, veteran actor Kurtwood Smith gives a superb performance as Annorax, a character deliberately modeled after Captain Nemo from Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Like Nemo, he has cut himself off from his world - in his case, from time entirely - on a ship of his own invention, performing incursions that have devastating consequences on a world that he is no longer a part of. Like Nemo, he is a cultured and intelligent man, who strikes up a mentor/student relationship with Chakotay that mirrors the Nemo/Aronnax relationship from the book. The character's every appearance is spellbinding. I particularly love the scene in which he muses to Chakotay about time's intricacies: "Each time you pull out a new thread, another one begins to unravel. You can't imagine the burden of memory that I carry. Thousands of worlds, billions of lives - Gone, brought back, gone again..." Annorax is not just the villain of this story - He also provides it with its soul.
THE YEAR OF HELL THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
The shadow of what might have been hangs heavy over Year of Hell. Kes' glimpses of the Krenim attacks in Before and After were meant to serve as a teaser for an extended period of darkness that would push the crew to its limits. It was exactly what the show needed - A true test for Voyager and its crew, something that would make the triumph of their eventual survival that much stronger.
But this is Voyager, where lengthy arcs and challenging storytelling are frowned upon, and so Year of Hell ended up being produced as a two-parter with a reset button. For my own tastes, I don't know that I really would want a full year of this story. But just because a year passes for the characters, it doesn't mean the show had no choices beyond "season arc" and "reset button story." Writer Brannon Braga evidently was pushing for four episodes, which is closer to my own inclination (I would have gone for about six, with one or two standalone episodes within the arc).
Above all, I would have liked these events to have actually happened for the crew. They are pushed to the edge of their endurance, and for all their raw nerves, they end up rising to the occasion, pushing themselves ever further to keep their ship together. This is really the crew's finest hour - making it all the more frustrating that it ends up being reduced to an ultimately meaningless diversion.
THE YEAR OF HELL THAT IS
For all that I wish Year of Hell had been anything other than a reset button story, it must be said that Braga and co-writer Joe Menosky have done everything possible to make the reset work. Annorax's time meddling is made part and parcel of the story from the opening seconds, and his conversations with Chakotay about the nature of time weave the idea of altering events into the piece in a way that not only isn't intrusive, it actually becomes the focus. As much as I hate this being reduced to a reset, I will acknowledge that the reset is done well and will let it (and the many ways in which this two-parter doesn't line up with Before and After) go for the remainder of this review.
Braga and Menosky may be forced to rabbit through the story, but they do a fine job of keeping it focused. The story of Voyager's year of hell is framed (and caused) by the story of Annorax (Kurtwood Smith), the Krenim scientist manipulating time ostensibly to restore his empire to glory, but in reality for more personal reasons. Annorax's obsession wears on his crew, his mission dragging on for centuries within his time-shielded weapon ship. No result restores his home world, and he comes to believe that time itself is getting revenge against him for his hubris.
Part Two draws a parallel between Annorax's obsessive behavior and Janeway's. Voyager hides in the safety of a nebula to make repairs. But when B'Elanna reports that it will take weeks to bring the warp drive fully on-line, Janeway insists on leaving the nebula rather than staying to complete repairs, even though this leaves the ship all but defenseless. Seven of Nine tells Tuvok that the captain's logic is faulty; despite his defense of Janeway as someone he trusts completely, Tuvok acknowledges that Seven is "perhaps" right. Later, the Doctor threatens to relieve Janeway of command on the basis of her mental state - and her first instinct is to snap that she will deactivate his program, before simply settling for an Andrew Jackson-like, "You've made your decision; now try to enforce it."
The epilogue, in which the "normal" timeline is reset, manages to avoid falling completely flat, largely because the parallels between Annorax and Janeway persist even here. With the normal timeline restored, a relaxed Janeway responds to the initial Krenim warning that "this is disputed space," by simply agreeing to divert around the problem area. Meanwhile, a work-obsessed Annorax is drawn into a relaxed moment by his wife (Lise Simms), who well knows the man she married as she very accurately observes:
"There are always 'a few more calculations.' It's a beautiful day - Spend it with me."
Overall Rating: 9/10.
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