Episode Review - Shattered
Reviewed by Andy Taylor

Synopsis
Everything is relatively quiet on Voyager: Icheb is teaching Naomi the finer points of genetics, whilst Chakotay sits down to his regular dinner with Janeway. However, their bubble is burst when the gravimetric force from a special rift hits Voyager. Chakotay quickly heads to Engineering, where he finds the warp core destabilising. However, when he tries to maintain containment, he is knocked out as he is hit by an energy blast. Suddenly, he and the ship quiver with an odd patchwork-like effect. Torres checks Chakotay to see if he is alright – strangely, half of his face appears youthful whilst the other has aged. She has him beamed to sickbay. When he wakes up, The Doctor informs him that he was in a state of temporal flux. However, he managed to create a chronoton-infused serum that has brought him back to normal. However, when Chakotay asks The Doctor to come with him to treat other injured crewmen, he replies that he cannot leave sickbay – Chakotay asks about his mobile emitter, but The Doctor has no idea what he’s talking about. Sensing something is wrong, Chakotay leaves sickbay.

When he travels to the bridge via the turbolift, he passes through a strange distortion wave – the medkit he was carrying from sickbay suddenly disappears. When he reaches the bridge, Kim does not recognise him. However, Janeway does – he is the very leader of the Maquis that she is currently on a mission to find. She tells the security guards that he caused sabotage on behalf of the Maquis, and to take him into custody. Chakotay realises that somehow he has been thrown seven years into Voyager’s past. In another turbolift trip however, his security guards vanish like his medkit did. He then travels to Engineering – however here, Kazon and his old lover Seska are found. They knock him out, in order to capture him. When he wakes, he realises that this time period is set five years ago when Seska and the Kazon managed to take over Voyager. When he tries to tell Seska what’s happening, she does not believe him – he is able to bluff his way out of captivity, however, and makes it to an upper part of Engineering that is in a different time period, vanishing from Seska’s viewpoint.

Chakotay manages to return to sickbay to tell The Doctor about the ship being ‘shattered’ into different time periods, yet it appears that the injections The Doctor gave him earlier have given him the ability to travel through these different periods with no change. He asks The Doctor for more serum to be put into a hypospray so that he can travel throughout the ship and try and put it back together again. He travels back to the bridge and approaches the Janeway from the past, telling her things about herself that he certainly should not know. Janeway begins to believe him, but is sceptical – he therefore forces a serum injection upon her and takes her through one of the temporal barriers – Janeway’s staff see her disappear, but cannot ascertain how she did so. She becomes more trusting of him, so Chakotay takes Janeway to the Astrometrics Lab – it has temporal sensors and can aid them in mapping how the ship has been temporally divided. On their way, they find an injured crewman, in the tie frame of one of Voyager’s predicaments – Janeway becomes increasingly worried about these haunting renditions of the troubles she is to face.

Finally in Astrometrics, Chakotay and Janeway find Icheb and Naomi, albeit 17 years into the future. They tell Chakotay and Janeway that they were killed in the accident that caused the ship’s space-time continuum to shatter. Janeway theorises that if they get to a part of the ship that has not been affected by the earlier chronokinetic blast, they could perhaps counteract the problem. They could use the help of Seven – someone else Janeway knows nothing of. Chakotay suggests finding her in another time frame.

In the Cargo Bay, the time period is that of when the Borg had assimilated part of it during their short alliance with Voyager. Seven is still a full drone, though she says that a chronoton field generated by the warp core, projected throughout the entire ship should force the entire ship back into temporal sync – Chakotay would then have a few seconds to intercept the original problem. Janeway then comes up with a plan to inject The Doctor’s special serum into the bio-neural circuitry, which should then generate the chronoton field. Chakotay and Janeway therefore get The Doctor to replicate more of his serum – unfortunately, he reveals to Janeway that Voyager and her crew will become stranded in the Delta Quadrant. As the two traverse the ship, injecting the serum at different points, they suddenly encounter the macrovirus from another one of Voyager’s hostile encounters. Trying to escape, they enter the monochromatic environment in the ship’s holodeck – a Captain Proton simulation has been initiated. Doctor Chaotica himself appears, and tells his henchmen to restrain them. Unable to deactivate the holodeck, Chakotay tells Janeway to fall ‘back’ into the role of Arachnia she played/will play. Whilst unsure of the entire escapade, Janeway convinces Chaotica that she is loyal to him, and actually gets him to inject the gel pack in the holodeck himself.

In a transporter room, Janeway and Chakotay find several Maquis members including Torres – she accuses Chakotay of collaborating with the enemy, yet he convinces her to trust him and injects another gel pack. Their next stop is the mess hall, where Paris has been able to set up a triage facility for injured crewmen at the original time of the accident. Janeway then sees her friend Tuvok afflicted with radiation burns – he then dies. Janeway’s had enough – she tells Chakotay that she wants to put Voyager together in her own timeline, and intends to change the future. Chakotay manages to set her straight – what she has seen today is just small portions of different events of Voyager’s seven year journey. What she hasn’t been able to see yet is the whole picture – Seven recovering her humanity, Paris and Torres getting married, the coming together of Starfleet and Maquis crews – all this under a unique captain who never stopped believing that the crew will get home one day.

Their final stop is the Kazon-occupied Engineering, meaning that he has to deal with Seska again. However, she actually believes his previous story as it is so preposterous – she lets him inject the gel pack, but realises that his presence means that Starfleet will retake control of the vessel in the time line she occupies. Therefore, she wants to bring the ship into temporal sync within her own timeline. When he refuses, she threatens to kill him. However, Janeway is waiting in the upper level, with Kim and Paris whom have also been injected with the temporal serum. They run at the group of Kazon, whom are then incapacitated by Icheb and Naomi rushing in from one side of the room, and Torres and a member of the Maquis from another. Seska manages to grab Janeway though and holds a phaser to her, demanding inoculation for herself and her people. However, Seven then enters the room – she is able to adapt to Seska’s phaser-fire and overwhelms her. Janeway orders everyone to return to their own parts of the ship, also noting that they will not remember anything that has gone on.

Chakotay works the warp core as Janeway returns to the bridge – the chronoton pulse is started and the ship is restored to its original time frame, albeit a few seconds earlier. Chakotay immediately tells Torres to reroute main power to the ship’s deflector so that it can serve as a lightning rod. Suddenly, the force from spacial rift hits the deflector dish, which is then burned out. However, the warp core is not damaged and the ship is now safe. Chakotay refuses to tell Janeway why he made that order, insisting that the Temporal Prime Directive applies. However, despite the strange occurrence, the two are able to finish their dinner together.

Summary
Wow! Well that was a lot of fun, wasn’t it? Not only did Chakotay finally get to do something other than murmur the occasional, “Yes, Captain,” but this episode treated us to an array of enjoyed moments from Voyager’s past (ah, this nostalgia is so overwhelming… ) Also, depending on how you want to interpret the scene, we could determine that with Icheb and Naomi still being on Voyager 17 years in the future, that either Voyager will still be lost in 17 years time (does that mean we get 17 more seasons? ) or that Icheb and Naomi will be serving on Voyager in 17 years time. Hmm, interesting.

Anyway, as mentioned this seems to be a Chakotay showcase, giving him perhaps more work than all his season six lines combined. Though whilst the episode was good, it didn’t seem to do much for Chakotay as a character. Whilst several scenes seemed to build upon the Chakotay/Janeway relationship, Chakotay himself just seemed to be visiting the different time periods of Voyager – if anyone was doing anything interesting, it would be Janeway (though she herself has been short on scenes this year! )

It was fun to see Seska again – she was a great villain and I miss her (and even the Kazon’s) presence on Voyager. I loved ‘Basics,’ and it's a shame we couldn’t have seen Lon Sudar or something in this episode though. Poor old Jeri Ryan gets to wear her original Borg uniform, though it was nice to see Borgified Seven again – though was it me or did Seven’s voice not used to croak when she was a Borg? Janeway’s bun was back to gain revenge upon everyone, as well as the Doctor Chaotica programme. Other time frames were the current one (of course), and the aforementioned Icheb/Naomi future period. Oh and of course I can’t forget the weird looking macrovirus giving a quick cameo – of all the things to reappear I wasn’t expecting that to!

Well, as mentioned this was a lot of fun all round – certainly the plot wasn’t up to much, though the continue use of chronotons as a plot point were obviously homage to all the times that the little particles have popped up before in Voyager’s tales. However, it was so entertaining that the plot never really mattered (how on earth would Janeway know if everyone would remember what happened? Obviously the more important point here is that no one cares. )

It obviously appears that the light-hearted stories are pulling more weight than other, allegedly more serious plots (other than the great ‘Critical Care’) – ‘Body and Soul’ was certainly entertaining to watch (and why is it something always happens to Tuvok in these light-hearted shows?) Certainly, this week’s offering was much more entertaining than the ‘Flesh and Blood’ two-parter that just aired – it was neither repetitive nor trying to force any contrived issues out. In fact this episode just had some fun (without being too taxing on the brain) and showed us a slice of what we’ve enjoyed over the years. It’ll be a shame when it’s gone.

Final Opinion
Lots of fun, lots of nostalgia

9/10