Headscratchers / Star Trek: Voyager - Anomalies

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Time Travel:

The Planet Out of Time

• In the Voyager episode where they are stuck around orbit of the strange planet displaced in time, after they are broken free, why didn't they just stay nearby, and wait an hour or so for the inhabitants of the planet to invent transwarp, or some other technology, and ask for it? Legends of the Skyship would obviously have continued, and the people of the planet would likely have been happy to help, or if not, they could have waited another few minutes.
  • For that matter, given the rate at which they were progressing... well, it was a fun episode, but Fridge Logic (if that) has me really grasping for an explanation as to why they weren't in a league of their own, breaking free of their planet's confines, and going galaxy-hopping in the space of maybe a few more days. (Best guess, nuclear war, anomaly over. But I really hope there's a cleaner reason than that.)
  • I don't remember if it was addressed at the end of the episode, but the fast-people synching with the normal time was fatal in most cases (at least, initially). It might also be that sending anyone out to do exploration would be near pointless, as within a few normal-time days, the fast-time planet would have made vast improvements on the travel systems and the older ships would be useless. OR, after the ships have gone out and done field testing, everyone that worked on them an understood their systems would have already died (unless they were on the ships), and the knowledge would have to be passed to people who only know the theory of the ships but weren't there for the application. Still, I would have preferred a ship from that planet showing up at the last minute and taking Voyager all the way back to Earth before they evolved into Q-like forms over the real ending of the series.
  • At the end of the episode, the inhabitants of the planet have worked out how to synch with normal time without any ill effects.
    • But only for short periods.
    • By the time Voyager left their star system, they'd already had decades to refine that technology though...
  • I always assumed they realized that if they wanted to become an interstellar empire, they couldn't do it with the seat of their civilization being out of sync with the territory they'd be colonizing. So they either had to get their whole planet to sync up or figure out how to become permanently synced with no ill effect and leave their homeworld behind. In either case, they'd be nothing special anymore. The only other option would be to leave well enough alone and content themselves to live on their one planet. And if your question is "Then why not wait till they developed into superbeings and then leave the planet behind?" I'd assume there's only so much development that can be done with only one planet. Earth poured everything it had into the NX-01, and it was nothing special compared with even modest local powers like the Vulcans and Andorians. And while the temporally displaced people knew enough about antimatter to shoot down Voyager, we never even saw them test a Warp 1-capable vessel.
  • Their super-speed development only gets them up to interstellar travel. Space travel technology requires research and testing in space, meaning they move as slowly as everyone else (or more slowly given the reluctance any potential astronaut must feel once they know that by the time they get back everyone they know will be dead).
• I have a problem with their description of being in orbit. Tuvok stated that the planet rotated 58 times per minute and then later stated they were in a geosynchronous orbit. First, establishing shots of the ship never showed them to be in such orbit. Second, they would have to be orbiting around the planet at the same speed, which was not possible as they were not traveling that fast heading to the planet. There is also a problem with the scenes of the sky from below. A day would be less than 30 seconds, meaning the first inhabitants shown outside should have gone through a full day or two in that conversation. The same thing at the end with Gotana Retz at the end. He is watching the night sky with a fairly static starfield instead of a darkening and lightening of the sky due to the quickness of the day/night cycle.
  • "A day would be less than 30 seconds, meaning the first inhabitants shown outside should have gone through a full day or two in that conversation." All the planet-bound scenes shown are, of course, slowed down for our benefit. For the inhabitants of the planet, their sun moves slowly across the sky in approx. 12 hours.

Future's End

• In "Future's End" Voyager ends up in Earth-in-the-past. Why didn't they just do the same slingshot-around-the-sun technique Kirk + company used in The Voyage Home? They could have warped back to their time and been home with a few freaky effects.
  • Good thought, but by the time the dust settled, Captain Braxton and company had a close eye on them. Since he refused to send them back to Earth-in-the-future, he probably wouldn't have taken kindly to them doing it on their own power, either.
    • But they'd already blown his dinky little ship out of the sky once, and he came back none the worse for wear. Why not just shoot him again, confident that he'll be fine in the future, then use the Light-Speed Breakaway before he got back? Or just do it the slow way; drop The Doctor on Earth with his new mobile emitter, tell him to wait 700 years then rise up the chain of command high enough that he can order Braxton to help, instead of being a useless jerk-ass.
    • I'd be willing to bet that if they shot his ship down more than once, Starfleet would stop screwing around and send an actual starship to put them in their place. Braxton was desperate the first time, and it was obvious no one sent him. They'd probably also catch on to the Doc messing with the timeline.
  • Based on what we've seen, the Starfleet time-cops seem only to get involved with incidents which do not resolve on their own, else they risk altering their own past timeline and unmaking themselves. As such, they ignore most time-travel incidents we see because they are fixed or supposed to happen - the Enterprise fixed the Borg's temporal incursion in First Contact, for example. As such, when Voyager was sent back to earth, it was because of events external to the native timeline (the future) and shouldn't have happened in the first place. Even so, they did give the crew a consolation prize in the form of the holographic mobile emitter.
  • In Trek Lit, the usual Hand Wave in reference to the slingshot maneuver as a common way to head back from the past is that in order to use it, you would have to have used it to travel to the past to begin with, that's it's effectively a method used for a round trip journey instead of something that can be used to send them back where they belong once they're already there.
  • Braxton didn't object to their being in the past per se - only to changing the past. So he shouldn't have objected to the Voyager crew saying, "We are going to travel to a nearby star, conceal ourselves in an inconspicuous asteroid, and "hang out" in suspended animation until we reach our desired time period.

Year of Hell

• What happened to the Borg during The Year of Hell? think about this: At the height of their power, the Krenim possessed a vast interstellar empire which was powered by their knowledge of temporal weaponry - the Time ship or the chroniton torpedo which is superior to the photon torpedo against probably 90% of all enemies (I.E. the ones not capable of creating decent temporal shields) so why exactly don't the Borg want a piece of that action? Borg space is close enough to Krenim space for them to send a fleet of Cubes and the Borg are smart enough to adapt to the weaponry (assuming the chroniton torpedo would even cause significant damage against a Cube's armor regardless of how ineffective it's shields are.) I'm going to make the WMG here that, if the Borg DID partially assimilate the Krenim during that timeline, the Borg would have won the First Contact battle and Voyager really was the last Federation starship OR the Borg should have completely destroyed the Krenim and Voyager would have spent a year fighting off Cubes instead of Krenim fighters. Time, as Annorax stated, is unpredictable like that.
  • If they knew where the Borg homeworld was, a clever sneak attack might well have been one of Annorax's first moves. Not having to deal with the Borg later might simplify his calculations. (Additional note: the Borg are unlikely to think their homeworld is especially important, meaning it may well be only lightly defended or even completely abandoned, potentially making them a really easy target for the Weapon Ship.)
    • The problem with that is that the Borg have doubtless had a huge impact on everything in the region. The simulations that the Krenim run before they use their weapon seems dodgy at best, and a total crap-shoot at worst. How exactly are they able to account for every single variable in their calculations? Nobody seems to know much about the Borg, but what we do know is that Collective's sphere of influence is vast, and they have assimilated thousands of species. Even for the Krenim it must be nearly impossible to guess what would happen if you erased them from history.
  • The Krenim taking out the Borg would be comparable to a 21st-century American time traveller taking out the 11th-century Huns: It would NOT "simplify calculations." On the contrary, it would vastly complicate matters!
  • It's worth mentioning that in Infinite Regress we find out that the Borg did assimilate Krenim, and, if I recall correctly, a Krenim expert on temporal mechanics no less
  • Perhaps the Borg do have the Krenim technology, but unlike the Krenim themselves, they are aware that Reality Warping Is Not a Toy.
    • Also, the Borg don't want to wipe civilizations out of existence, they want to incorporate those civilizations into themselves. If Annorax's ship is any indication of what the Krenim do with their temporal know-how, chances are the Borg don't use it just because doing so would undermine their goal rather than aid them in achieving it.
• How come there is no recall of Kes's warnings about the Krenim from Before and After? After the first use of the Krenim weapon, the temporal shock wave ought to have put Voyager in a timeline in which they steered clear of Krenim space.
  • The original timeline involving Voyager's interaction with the Krenim was based on the assumption that Kes wouldn't be telekinetically throwing the ship 10,000 lightyears. Odds are, they originally encountered the Krenim on a much different date (likely years later) and Janeway didn't make the connection that these were the species that used time itself as a weapon until after the timeline had gotten fracked.
    • I always assumed that on Day 1, the crew did know about Kes's reports on the Krenim, but as their first encounters were particularly noteworthy, the Zahl guy even saying the Krenim were no threat, no one bothered to check Kes's details on them. Then just after the Zahl meeting, Voyager got hit by the incursion that wiped out the Zahl and increased the power of the Krenim, presumably wiping Kes, or at least her experience in "Before And After" out of existence. If Kes was wiped, it does raise the question of how Voyager got this far without her involvement in several key events...
• Wiping out Kes - and Neelix - would definitely have totally altered Voyager's destiny up to that point. It probably wouldn't have ever arrived at that particular location in space to talk to that particular uppity Kenim captain.
• A major plot point of "Before and After" involved Kes being present during the Year of Hell. Another major point was that she was going to live about as long as any other Ocampan (AKA nine years). This puts the year of hell, as well as Krenim space, less than 9 years after Voyager's position in season 3. At the beginning of season 4 (when Kes leaves the ship), she takes 10 years off Voyager's journey. My question is how did they still end up in Krenim space?
  • Timey-Wimey Ball. Between Before And After and Year of Hell Annorax decided to change the Krenim's borders once again.

Forgot Q can time travel?

This is a very minor point, but in "Death Wish", Tuvok argues that Cmdr. Riker couldn't have met the suicidal Q because Q had been imprisoned for the past 300 years, i.e. during Riker's entire life. But...doesn't he know that the Q can travel in time? In fact, hadn't Tuvok himself (along with the rest of Voyager), already traveled back in time to the Big Bang via the very same Q? Seems strange that he would try to make that argument at all.

• Yeah, that seemed stupid. I assumed they included some means to time-lock him so he couldn't affect the periods he was imprisoned just to explain that Plot Hole.
  • The objection was based on the belief that Q (the suicidal one) couldn't have had an impact on a modern person's life due to having been confined for the last three centuries. In fact, the impact on Riker's life took place in the 1860s, when Q saved his ancestor's life in battle. Tuvok's mistake wasn't forgetting that Q can time travel, it was forgetting that Q is immortal, omnipotent, and omniscient.
  • We seem dangerously close to invoking Doctor Who conventions to explain away Voyager plot points.

Alternate 1996

• In the plot arc where the crew ends up in 1996, why does no one seem to notice that this is an altered timeline? It's made very clear multiple times that this 1996 is due to a 29th century vessel going back to the 1960s and being found, altering the course of technological development. However, the writers indicate they "left out" the Eugenics Wars because they simply didn't want to address it, when it would have made no sense whatsoever for the Eugenics Wars to happen, given the divergence in history. Even the fans seem to totally ignore the change to the timeline. This is not the same 1996 that would normally apply to Trek's history- no Khan, no Eugenics Wars. It's something a lot of people overlook.
  • If I'm not mistaken, the writers realized that the majority of their viewers weren't big Star Trek fans. They simply didn't want to confuse the audience with Star Trek history.
  • The Eugenics Wars taking place in the 1990s has been all but officially retconned. Spock says in Space Seed that it was the last world war [no, Spock does NOT equate the Eugenics War with WW III!], but then TNG goes and establishes that WWIII happened during sometime shortly before 2063. Star Trek: Enterprise never mentioned any year for the Eugenics Wars to my knowledge.
  • Wasn't the Eugenics War in 1999, and focused mostly in Asia/Middle East? And with WW3 in the 2050s, odds are that a large number of records were lost, leading to inaccurate reconstructions of what happened in the past.
    • From "Space Seed": KIRK: Name, Khan, as we know him today. (Spock changes the picture) Name, Khan Noonien Singh.
    • SPOCK: From 1992 through 1996, absolute ruler of more than a quarter of your world. From Asia through the Middle East.
    • MCCOY: The last of the tyrants to be overthrown.
    • I suppose the idea in "Future's End" is just "ah, that's happening a world away. Easier to ignore it than to rewrite our own present." Whether it's really believable that the fall of a tyrant who controlled a quarter of the world is something that just happens off camera, unmentioned, is a matter of perspective. Of course, one wonders why they didn't just make it a bit further into our future to cover this problem; presumably UPN insisted that their big two-parter be framed around "Voyager visits present-day L.A."
  • Khan and the Eugenics Wars weren't completely forgotten in "Future's End"; Rain has a model of the Botany Bay (or at least a DY-100 class ship) in her office.
• Something I don't get about this one: okay, they've made it back to Earth, but they're a couple centuries early. Given how easy time travel seems to be for Starfleet, why is this a problem? Even if, for some reason, they can't pull off the slingshot maneuver that the TOS crew used a couple times, what's to stop them from heading to an area they know won't be explored before their own time and tooling around at high relativistic speeds for a few (subjective) months? It'll get them home a lot quicker, they'll be within easy range of Federation space if something goes wrong and they have to come back "early," and they're unlikely to encounter anyone technologically superior to them.
  • No, "tooling around" would make them too visible! They would be easily discovered, thus contaminating the time line. Rather, they would have to conceal themselves in a remote, inconspicuous asteroid or such and wait it out - perhaps in suspended animation / stasis.
  • The Star Trek universe operates under completely different physical laws to our own, and one of them is clearly relativistic time. We can handwave the Enterprise as having a technobabble field [inertial dampening field?] to protect it, but why didn't the Phoenix affect Cochrane, Riker and Geordi when they went warp 1? And whilst we are never told this, is seems that there must be something that prevents the slingshot. My personal opinion is that only Spock knows how to do it safely - he is a genius after all.
    • The whole point of the warp drive is that it does not have relativistic effects when traveling over the speed of light, that's even the hypothetical case in real life if the Alcubierre drive can be developed.
    • Even if the Cochrane's ship did experience relativistic effects, it wouldn't have been significant to him or the other two because they didn't go very far. After their small trip, the Earth was still easily visible so at most they went a few light seconds or minutes. If they went that distance out and back at any relativistic speed, they would only be those seconds or minutes younger than the people on Earth.
  • Yeah, Trek has never established any relativistic speeds. But the point stands: it's silly that they don't ever even seem to think about exploiting time travel in this situation. Or how about something that requires no time travel, like putting all of the crew in stasis and stashing the ship somewhere safely out of the way for four centuries (say, inside of some dull asteroid that they records say will be ignored for all that time)? Surely this is a "where there's a will, there's a way" situation, and there's no will.
  • Simple answer: they never got the chance. They could have also sought civilizations that were advanced in the XX century and help them with time travel, or go native and simply try to establish themselves on Earth, and get used to the new timeline. But, before doing any of that, they had to fix the crisis over that guy that stole futuristic things. And, when they did that (right afterwards), they were sent back to their previous date and location. They were not allowed to be sent to their timeline but in Earth, and surely they wouldn't be allowed to try any of this other stuff. Remember also that the episode started with that guy in a mere flyer curb-stompping the whole Voyager with its advanced technology, so they can't really do anything but obey him or be obliterated.

Starlings Plan

• Henry Starlings plan from Futures End suffers the exact same problem as Berlinghoff Rasmussen had back from A Matter Of Time namely that he is going too far ahead in time for someone who is just trying to make a little money reverse-engineering stuff. Even if he went forward about a 150 years to Captain Archer's time and stole a couple of hand scanners or phase pistols, he would already have doubled his money to say nothing about trying to get hold of the blueprints to something larger like a shuttlepod or a photon torpedo. Also common sense would make it pretty obvious that if he turned up in the 29th century flying a stolen government-owned craft in the orbit of said government he would last maybe five minutes before he is hunted down and arrested whereas back in the 22nd century that timeship would easily still be advanced enough to avoid Earth's one or two assorted ships it has in orbit. His belief that he had completely tapped out the next 800 years of technological advancement just because of the few things he had cannibalized from the timeship really is veering into Idiot Ball territory.
  • Starling has a spaceship and Teleportation, technology that many governments would give anything for. The fact that he can't make that work and that he doesn't care what happens with the time line also means he's got the Villain Ball.
  • Yeah, for all his bluster, Starling was an idiot every step of the way. He had in his possession at one point the Emergency Medical Hologram - a piece of software that contains the cures to hundreds of twentieth century diseases and conditions (which we know from previous Trek episodes includes cancer, radiation and the common cold) as well as potentially the design specs to all of that lovely Federation medical technology such as the dermal regenerator. And that's just the small time stuff: How about using the technology he is based on to build the ultimate worker? or use the fact that he is an A.I. to render every 1996 era computer on Earth obsolete? Or sell him to the army as the ultimate drone weapon? Starling could have made more money than God.
  • Not everyone that comes into possession of alien technology is going to be some creative nerd who's sat around pondering the sort of applications they could put sci-fi tech to in the modern day if they could get their hands on it. Starling's not meant to be the perfect guy to get his hands on the stuff, because among other things if he was a super ultra omni genius who used everything perfectly, he'd win.
  • Hey, give the guy a break. You say that he can take advantage of the technology that he stole and get more money than God? HE ALREADY DID THAT! He kick-started the whole computer industry boom, he's Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Tony Stark merged into one! So what if he couldn't go even further and reverse-engineer the teleporters, or the ship itself? He's still a XX century man dealing with technology from centuries ahead of his time, what he already did is already remarkable. And, besides, he had to still keep an eye on preparing defenses for the day when The Men in Black from the future arrive. Being paranoid doesn't mean they won't come after him, as they did... As for the Doctor, he was a bit busy dealing with those future men, he never got the chance to actually study him in full detail.

Night

• So after four years in the Delta Quadrant, dealing with the Kazon, the Vidiians, the Borg, the Q, time travel, and everything else trying to kill them, they find a region of space that literally has nothing and the crew freaks out. Why?! With four years of crap behind them and at most 60 years of crap in front of them, they get two years where they can turn on the cruise control and aim the ship towards the Alpha Quadrant with the only standing orders being "1. Keep the ship running. 2. Don't use up all our power, supplies and food. And 3. Don't get too drunk in case we come across some light-sensitive aliens and an Aesop for why dumping pollution is bad to local wildlife." Okay, the lack of stars may be creepy, but put some blinds up then. You want action? Go to the Holodeck and pick any scenario you want. Live in the Holodeck for two years! Read a book. Read all the books! Take up a hobby. Update your outdated uniforms by hand. Have a shipwide orgy. Go fishing. The same Gods and Fates that stuck your asses in the Delta Quadrant has handed you a two-year long bye week. Just enjoy it!!!
  • Whilst I don't disagree that the opening conflict in this episode borders on Wangst it is debatable that Voyager could make it two years without supplies given just how often this ship breaks down because 'X' system has malfunctioned. For a ship frequently shilled as the best Starfleet had to offer at the time of its launch, it really is an unreliable barge at times. One dose of space flu infecting those gel packs is all it would take to stop them in their tracks in the middle of nowhere.
    • But is that actually what concerns them in the episode? Anxiety over resupplying? I don't recall this being mentioned.
  • Jim "Reviewboy" Wright addresses this in his review of this episode.
    When the chief enemy is boredom, they should be fully staffed at all times, running drills like the dickens, cross-training, studying, testing out some of those alien propulsion technologies and other "speed up the trip" crackpot ideas, and generally staying too dang busy to think about what is or isn't Out There.
  • Because they are alone, they do have to worry about supplying their ship with fuel (deuterium and dilithium). We see many times that Voyager has to stop for supplies at ports, planets, and space stations. In addition, it had only two holodecks for 150 people. One hour of entertainment every three days is not much entertainment at all, especially considering literally nothing has happened to the crew for over two months. Compare their situation to people who have recently retired or been out of work due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It doesn't take long to go stir crazy. Not to mention, if there is nothing to do and nobody to visit, there is also nobody to help them if something goes wrong.

Agents Dulmur and Lucsly can't make time for Voyager?

• Basically all the times when the Department of Temporal Investigations don't show up when there's time travel causes a great deal of Fridge Logic. They do, after all, have time machines, it's not as if they can't find Voyager. After having been introduced, they're conspicuously absent from the two occasions when Voyager is saved by people deliberately breaking the Temporal Prime Directive in order to alter the past and, ironically, the only time they actually do show up it's to solve problems which they themselves are the cause of. The only explanation - not just for this but for why they don't pop up all over the franchise - seems to be that they're willing to turn a blind eye to anything that benefits the Federation
  • Actually, it makes perfect sense, once you think about it - the Department of Temporal Investigations is itself subject to the Temporal Prime Directive. Any time travel that occurred exclusively prior to the formation of the Department would not be in any way subject to alteration by them, as that would itself change the future, possibly screwing with their own timeline. While Voyager's regular temporal mechanical complications are difficult for the DTI to keep track of, they're also entirely built into the DTI's timeline, especially given that some things that led to the formation of the DTI were likely inspired by discoveries made by Voyager and events triggered by Voyager. Indeed, the big question is why the DTI don't consider Voyager to be kind of an essential part of their history, and thus worthy of real fascination (rather than simple frustration).
    • The Expanded Universe novels suggest that the organization was created by events much earlier than the era of Voyager and they never went easy on other ships and captains. It seems more likely that either the writers simply forgot that the organization existed or that the organization hadn't been thought up in DS9 at the time the Voyager episodes were being written.
    • It's possible that the majority of time travel Voyager was involved in was always meant to happen so they just ignore those cases. Stable time loops were even mentioned in the episode Seven and Janeway worked with them.
    • Should anyone be interested in the novel verse's take on this, some of the answers are given in the first book from Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations.
  • The reason the DTI never involved themselves with Voyager is because they couldn't. The Federation's understanding of temporal physics and technology is still very limited in the 24th century, liable to do more harm than good. Braxton is not from the DTI, he's from a more advanced and interventionist branch of Starfleet from the future. The DTI (which is civilian, not Starfleet) is concerned only with protecting the timeline from careless or malicious actors. Had Voyager's misadventure been instigated by someone's temporal tomfoolery, the DTI would attempt to reverse it, but since it was part of the normal course of history, the DTI would not only not intervene, but be obligated to stop anyone else who might attempt to (including future Janeway, see below).
  • More importantly, however, DTI could never step in with Voyager because DTI is in the Alpha Quadrant. Braxton and company are based in the 29th century, time travel involving people in the past going further in the past is out of their jurisdiction. DTI is a Federation organization, and Voyager is beyond Federation boundaries all through the series. After Voyager's return, there was likely a serious debrief with DTI (indeed, the first Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations novel does have Janeway being interrogated by Lucsly and Dulmur, who intend to throw the book at her for accepting Admiral Janeway's future tech, only to be halted by an agent from further up in the timeline who basically says "the future actually kinda depended on that, leave her alone).

Future’s End

• Voyager would not finally contact Earth until the next season. While Voyager is at Earth in 1996 and wants to return to its own time, there's nothing stopping them from leaving information hidden somewhere in Earth's vicinity or with Rain Robinson or a nearby race that they know will be meeting Earth eventually. The information would take The Slow Path to get to the Federation, but it would still get there. They could also see if they could put the entire crew in suspended animation and get there that way.
  • However we see in Star Trek: First Contact that there's still World War III to come, with all the devastation that promises. So there's no guarantees The Slow Path would be any safer.
  • Leaving information they know didn't exist in their original timeline would violate the temporal prime directive. They cleaned up the mess of a potential solar system exploding time ship going rogue, and that was it.
  • During the time they're there, they're focused on solving the problem directly in front of them. Once that's solved, they don't choose to be returned to their original time and place, they're immediately informed they will be returned there. And are. There's not really a point where they can take the time, effort, and risk of sitting down to rules lawyer out some overly complicated That Guy plan to serve themselves.