Recap / Star Trek: Voyager S7E23 "Endgame"

It's been real, Delta Quadrant.

Janeway: You know what, I shouldn't be listening to details about the future.

Admiral Janeway: Oh, the almighty Temporal Prime Directive—take my advice, it's less of a headache if you just ignore it.

The story begins in the year 2404, when Admiral Janeway holds a reunion party for the crew of Voyager after they had successfully returned to the Alpha Quadrant from a 23-year journey through the Delta Quadrant. Miral Paris is an ensign in Starfleet Intelligence; her mother is the Federation liaison to the Klingon Empire, her father a famous holonovelist. Captain Harry Kim has just returned from assignment, and the Doctor recently got married — and, finally, named himself Joe. However, some things in the future are not that rosy: Seven of Nine and Chakotay are both dead, and Tuvok has been put into an institution for mental instability.

Admiral Janeway obtains a temporal rift projector from a Klingon, installs it onto her shuttlecraft, and heads back to "the present" to Set Right What Once Went Wrong. She has a plan to get Voyager home by the end of this Series Finale, as opposed to taking an additional 16 seasons. The Voyager of the present day is a busy place: B'Elanna is due to deliver Miral any day; Neelix, keeping in contact with the ship through subspace, admits he's thinking of proposing to his Love Interest; and Seven of Nine is having a Last-Minute Hookup with Chakotay. But this explains his Death by Despair in 2404, and the seeds of Tuvok's Vulcan Alzheimers' have already been sown.

Though rather suspicious at first, Captain Janeway trusts her future self and has the crew modify the ship with futuristic armor plating and technology. However, Captain Janeway soon discovers what her older self intended to use in order to get Voyager home sooner — a Borg transwarp hub, which they use to travel to various parts of the galaxy instantaneously. Captain Janeway thinks that they should destroy the hub rather than let the Borg continue to use it, but with Admiral Janeway's help she modifies that plan to the Alpha Quadrant and destroy the hub at the same time.

---

This episode provides examples of

• Addiction Displacement: In 2404, Admiral Janeway replaced her coffee addiction with tea. She goes back to drinking coffee when her attempt to persuade Captain Janeway to use the Borg transwarp hub to get home fails.
• Affectionate Gesture to the Head: The Borg Queen to Seven of Nine.
• All Love Is Unrequited: The Doctor's affections toward Seven of Nine are again rejected.
• Always Save the Girl: Admiral Janeway's talk of a Bad Future makes little impression until she reveals that Seven is going to die.
• An Arm and a Leg: As Admiral Janeway's pathogen starts to take hold, the Borg Queen's limbs start breaking down and dropping off.
• Armor Is Useless: Averted—Future Janeway's armor can completely No-Sell Koroth's attacks and protects Voyager fairly well against the Borg. Even when the Queen learns the schematics and relays them to a Sphere, it holds up pretty well.
• Assimilation Backfire: Admiral Janeway infects herself with a bioweapon before meeting the Borg Queen. When the Queen assimilates her, it infects that entire collective. Admiral Janeway smugly says, "Must have been something you assimilated."
• Attack Hello: As soon as the Borg sphere emerges in the Alpha Quadrant, a Starfleet armada is there to greet it with phasers and photon torpedoes.
• Attack Pattern Alpha One: Uses the new transphasic torpedo, which is powerful enough to one-shot a Borg cube.
• Babies Ever After: Paris and Torres' last-minute baby, Miral.
• Bad Future: In Janeway's mind, as Seven and Chakotay are dead and Tuvok is suffering from Vulcan Alzheimer's. For everyone else, it's a perfectly good future. The Doctor is married and finally has a name (Joe), Tom is an accomplished author, B'elanna is a liaison to the Klingon Empire, and Harry Kim is a captain. Not to mention Reg Barclay is now a well-adjusted individual who has lost his stammer and is comfortable addressing crowds, Naomi had a daughter, Tom and B'Elanna successfully raised Miral, who is an Ensign in Starfleet, and Voyager actually made it home. Captain Janeway even points out that the future sounds pretty good. Admiral Janeway tries to handwave this by saying "it would take too long to explain."
• Back for the Finale: Neelix, having been written out during the events of "Homestead," appears solely over vidcomm. (Ethan Phillips retains his starring credit.)
• Big Damn Kiss: Seven and Chakotay. (For real, this time.)
• Birth-Death Juxtaposition: As the Borg Queen, Admiral Janeway, and part of the Borg collective die, Tom Paris and B'elanna Torres' daughter Miral is born right upon their arrival in the Alpha Quadrant.
• Bookends:
  • With "Caretaker" as Captain Janeway at the end of the episode says, "Set a course... for home".
  • Voyager's journey through the Delta Quadrant started with the destruction of the Caretaker array, and it ends with the destruction of the Borg transwarp hub.
  • Having scored the pilot episode, series composer Jay Chattaway likewise scores the finale.
• Brain/Computer Interface: Admiral Janeway's shuttle has one with a controlling microchip implanted into Janeway's brain.
• Break His Heart to Save Him: Seven, unused to emotion, attempts this on Chakotay. It doesn't work.
• Call-Back:
  • The future Starfleet uniforms were previously used in TNG's finale "All Good Things" and DS9's "The Visitor".
  • This isn't the first time the Borg Queen has walked in on Seven's regeneration.
  • Seven and the Doctor refer back to her romance with holo-Chakotay.
  • All of the Federation starships in the closing scene have appeared in previous episodes of Voyager: an Excelsior-class from "Flashback", the Prometheus, Nebula, Akira, and Defiant-classes from "Message in a Bottle", and a Galaxy-class from "Timeless".
    • Future Harry commands a modified Nova-class ship, just like the Equinox. He also fights off the same class of Klingon battlecruiser that appeared in "All Good Things".
  • Tuvok gets in one while explaining why he's hidden his condition from everyone else and supported the plan to stay in the Delta Quadrant, despite there being a cure back home.
    Tuvok: To quote Ambassador Spock, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."
• The Chains of Commanding: Despite her future self being higher in rank, Captain Janeway has to inform her that Voyager is still her ship.
• Change the Uncomfortable Subject: When one of the students that Admiral Janeway is giving a lecture to at Starfleet Academy asks about Seven of Nine, Janeway feels too uncomfortable to talk about her, given what had happened to her, and declines to answer.
• Character Overlap: In the Bad Future, TNG's Reginal Barclay (Dwight Schultz) mentions having officially transitioned into being a member of the Voyager Cast Herd. Appropriately, he also appears in the present at Starfleet HQ.
• Chekhov's Gun: Seven mentions that Admiral Janeway's shuttle has stealth technology which is incompatible with Voyager. The Admiral uses this to get close to Unimatrix One while she talks to the Borg Queen.
• Combat Pragmatist: When Voyager's new armor shrugs off Borg weaponry, the Cubes start scanning Voyager to adapt. Their solution is to focus all their fire on the ship's bridge, which would have worked if Voyager hadn't been equipped with weapons of equal effectiveness.
• Distant Prologue: Inverted, as the story begins in the year 2404.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: After seven years in the Delta Quadrant, Voyager finally returns home. Additionally, thanks to Admiral Janeway's Assimilation Backfire, they managed to deal a potentially crippling blow to the Borg Collective by bringing down the transwarp network, as well as destroying Unimatrix One, killing the Borg Queen and all the drones within.
• Eat Me: The assimilation version.
• End of an Age: Apart from being the end of Voyager, "Endgame" was the end of an age in other ways:
  • "Endgame" concluded the 24th Century era's 14-year consecutive TV run (which had begun with Star Trek: The Next Generation's pilot episode "Encounter at Farpoint" in 1987). While Star Trek: Nemesis would begin shooting shortly thereafter, televised Trek would not return to the 24th Century until Star Trek: Picard premiered in 2020.
  • It was also the final outing for the VOY shooting sets, which had occupied the Paramount sound-stages since 1978 (during development of Star Trek: Phase II before being used for the TOS films and then later redressed for both TNG and VOY). The 20+ year old sets would be dismantled after "Endgame" to make way for the construction of ENT's sets.
• Fast-Forward to Reunion: How the episode starts, with the surviving members of Voyager gathering together for the tenth anniversary of their return to the Alpha Quadrant after a 23-year trip.
• Grandfather Paradox: The Queen attempts to invoke this by killing Present Janeway, thereby Ret-Gone-ing Future Janeway and undoing all the changes she made. She doesn't succeed, of course, nor is it clear it would have worked even if she had, since Future Janeway and Present Janeway explicitly have different pasts because of Future Janeway's intervention.
• Grand Finale: This is the series finale for Star Trek: Voyager. However, much of the crew has since re-appeared in other media: Star Trek: Nemesis includes a Janeway cameo; Star Trek: Prodigy features Janeway, Chakotay and The Doctor as supporting characters; Paris appeared in an episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks; and Star Trek: Picard features Seven as a member of the starring cast, with along with brief appearances by Tuvok and Voyager herself. The only characters who have yet to be revisited as of 2024 are Torres, Neelix and — of course — Harry Kim.^note Per Word of God, an arc was planned for him in PIC, but dropped because PROD is the VOY sequel and therefore "owns" the character.
• Hard-Work Montage: Voyager being upgraded with Admiral Janeway's technology.
• Holosexual: The Doctor and his human wife in 2404.
• I Didn't Tell You Because You'd Be Unhappy: Tuvok made no mention of his disease to Captain Janeway. Of course he frames this as a logical decision.
• I Hate Past Me: Admiral Janeway does not think highly of her younger self, whom she feels was nowhere near pragmatic enough and could have gotten Voyager home a lot sooner. Inverted for Present Janeway, who thinks her future self has grown too cynical.
• Insane Admiral: Future Janeway. She launches a carefully-crafted conspiracy, working only with those that she has strong personal relationships with, because she has decided that she is unhappy with how the timeline played out and she intends to go back and change it, even though doing so entails commandeering top secret Starfleet research, meddling in Klingon politics in violation of the Treaty of Alliance between the Klingon Empire and the United Federation of Planets, and actually going back in time with specific intent to change history, which violates the Temporal Prime Directive.
• Insane Troll Logic: Elderly Tuvok, because of his mental condition. He insists to Janeway that because she's visiting on the wrong day of the week, she logically couldn't be Janeway.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: The Queen calls off the remaining Cube after Voyager destroys the first two, and from then on does not engage Voyager until she has a counter for their new technology.
• Last-Minute Hookup: Seven and Chakotay. Admiral Janeway reveals that because Seven died on an away mission during the original 22-year journey home, Chakotay would eventually die heartbroken upon the crew's return to the Alpha Quadrant.
• Locked Out of the Fight: Janeway does it to herself.
• Madness Mantra: Tuvok in the institution keeps repeating, "5331... 7153... 5331... Her disappearance remains a mystery!"...something which nobody understands but the Doctor, as he realizes that Captain Janeway went missing on stardate 53317.1 while she was still commanding Voyager, a clue to what Admiral Janeway is planning on doing.
• Maligned Mixed Marriage: Jokingly Discussed when Paris is surprised that Doctor Joe's wife is flesh-and-blood and not a hologram. Joe points out that they're beyond caring about such things.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": Naturally, the bridge crew's reaction when Voyager almost collides with a Borg cube in the nebula.
• Meanwhile, in the Future…: The first half alternates between 2378 (the present time of Voyager's journey to the Alpha Quadrant) and 2404 (Admiral Janeway's time).
• Morality Pet: Chakotay, Seven, and Tuvok for Future Janeway.
• Moving the Goalposts: Korath raises the price for his temporal gizmo once he's scanned Admiral Janeway's shuttle and learned about its goodies. Janeway responds by stealing the gizmo when he refuses to honor his original agreement after some scolding.
• Must Have Caffeine: No longer applies to Future Janeway.
• My Future Self and Me: Captain Janeway with Admiral Janeway.
• Never Mess with Granny: Admiral Janeway.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Admiral Janeway allows herself to be assimilated in order to infect the Queen with a deadly pathogen, but the Queen points out that she now knows how Voyager's armor technology works and can relay that to a Sphere she is still connected to, nearly destroying Voyager. Fortunately, Present Janeway thinks up an alternative on the fly.
• Noodle Incident: What happened on Stardate 53317; Tuvok rescued Janeway from some Kellidians, but nothing else is said about it.
• The Oner: There are a couple scenes set on present-day Voyager that utilize a single panning camera. The first scene of Act 4, in particular, is 32 seconds long and ends on the only cut (a reaction shot of a disgruntled Harry Kim). This isn't particularly long as Oners go, but is pretty long for the show's editing style.
• Other Me Annoys Me: Both Janeways feel this way.
• Pardon My Klingon: Miral Paris, at only one-quarter Klingon, out-cusses a full-blooded Klingon for challenging Admiral Janeway.
  Miral: Welcome to the House of Korath, Admiral.
  Janeway: I love what he's done with the place.
  Klingon: Kuva'kor li'ju!Q mah!
  Miral: PetaQ! DabeQ chu'magh an'noQ!
  (the Klingon leaves)
  Janeway: What was that about?
  Miral: He said your demeanor was disrespectful.
  Janeway: I hope you told him I didn't mean to be rude.
  Miral: I told him if he didn't show you more respect, I would break his arm.
  Janeway: You are your mother's daughter.
• Pet the Dog: From the Borg Queen of all people; the Collective did in fact detect Voyager's initial intrusion into the nebula, but she makes the decision to let them go on their way once they go scampering off after almost crashing into a Cube. She even later delivers Seven a direct warning that she is fully aware they are heading back to the nebula and to keep out or else she'll destroy them, seemingly because she still has something of a soft spot for Seven. She is repaid for this highly atypical act of mercy by quite possibly having the entire Collective destroyed by Admiral Janeway...
• Pinocchio Nose: Reginald Barclay manages to overcome his stuttering by 2404. However, when he gets pressed for information of Janeway's whereabouts by the Doctor, he begins to stammer, which makes the Doctor realize he's hiding something.
• Portal Network: The transwarp hub discovered in the nebula, one of six that allow rapid deployment of Borg vessels across the galaxy.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner:
  Admiral Janeway: Must be something you assimilated.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: Admiral Janeway changes the future for the sake of three people, even though her actions likely had negative consequences for millions.
• Pun: Chell's proposed menu including "Chicken Warp Core-don Bleu" and "Plasma Leek Soup".
  Chakotay: If his cooking's as bad as his puns, we're in trouble.
  Janeway: I don't know. I wouldn't mind giving his "Red Alert" Chili a try.
• Pyrrhic Victory: When Voyager arrives back to Earth in the future timeline there is much celebration as it marks the end of a 23 year-long journey across the Delta Quadrant, one of the longest in Starfleet history. But as Admiral Janeway points out to her younger self, it was at a heavy cost. From the day they passed the transwarp hub she lost a further 23 crew members including Seven. 24 if you count Tuvok's fall from sanity. 25 for the widowed Chakotay who later died of a broken heart.
• Ridiculously Difficult Route: In fairness this one goes all the way back to Earth, cutting a seventy year journey down to a mere tenth of that as long as you're willing to brave a nest of Borg.
• Rousing Speech: By Ensign Harry Kim to the present-time Voyager crew, telling them that it's not the destination that matters but the journey, and that there's nowhere he would rather spend 23 years in the Delta Quadrant than with them.
• Running Gag: Future Doctor finally puts one to rest by choosing a name for himself: Joe.
  Paris: It took you thirty-three years to come up with "Joe"?
• Screaming Birth:
  Doctor: Try to relax, Lieutenant.
  B'Elanna: If you tell me to relax one more time, I'm gonna rip your holographic head off!
  Doctor: I hope you don't intend to kiss your baby with that mouth.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: basically, the whole plot of the episode. Zig-Zagged in that, as present!Janeway points out, the Bad Future isn't actually that bad.
• Screw Destiny: When Admiral Janeway starts revealing the future to her younger Captain-self, who is uninterested for the most part for fear of violating the Temporal Prime Directive, until that is, she hears about Tuvok's deteriorating neurological condition:
  Captain Janeway: What about Tuvok?
  Admiral Janeway: You're forgetting the Temporal Prime Directive, Captain——
  Captain Janeway: To Hell with it!
• Shame If Something Happened: The Borg Queen tells Seven to make sure Voyager stays out of the nebula or they'll be assimilated.
• Shipper on Deck: Seven is this for Neelix and Dexa. During their long-distance chess game, Neelix announces his plans to propose to Dexa, and Seven answers, "She would be wise to accept."
• Take a Third Option: One final use of this trope, per VOY tradition. Upon finding the transwarp hub, their initial options are use it to get back to Earth, or destroy it. The crew initially opts to destroy it, which will leave them stuck in the Delta Quadrant, but they manage to work out a way to both destroy the hub and get back to Earth.
• That's an Order!: Admiral Janeway uses this to get her past self to collapse the temporal gateway before the Klingons come through.
• Timeline Altering Macguffin: The final episode leaves the possibility of this trope rather alarmingly dangling overhead. Future Janeway comes back over a decade to bring the crew home, decking out the ship in all kinds of future tech and eventually infecting the Borg Queen with a super nasty future virus. Now, given the Borg's ability to adapt, one can speculate that if they manage to overcome that virus, they would then have adapted to technology and programming the Federation hasn't yet invented. Not only that, but they had already assimilated her shuttle from the future by then, including the armor and the torpedoes. In the Expanded Universe novels, specifically Star Trek: Destiny, this comes back to bite them. However Picard season 3 reveals that the Borg were decimated by Admiral Janeway's pathogen, so clearly they were unable to use the future tech to threaten the Federation.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: So wait, did Admiral Janeway actually erase and replace the future that she came from? Or did she create a new timeline? In keeping with the inconsistent depiction of Time Travel in the Star Trek universe the answer is not really made clear. Plus, in addition to getting Voyager home years earlier than it would have, it arrives back at Earth rigged out with early-25th Century technology provided by Future Janeway, as well as intelligence about Borg technology, such as how the Transwarp Conduit network works. Various possibilities of dubious canon have been put forth in other media; when Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Lower Decks and Star Trek: Discovery aired, they declined to comment.
• The Time Traveller's Dilemma: Unfortunately subject to Debate and Switch.
• Time Travel: Admiral Janeway does this to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, with a little help from a Klingon scientist who builds the tech.
• Took a Level in Badass: Voyager, thanks to Future!Janeway.
• Trojan Horse: Future Janeway let herself get captured by the Borg Queen and assimilated to infect her and the Borg at the transwarp conduit with a neurolytic pathogen that she had infected herself with beforehand, giving Present Janeway the chance she needs to make it back to Earth.
• Uncertain Doom: It's not clear in the episode whether the Borg are defeated for good or just set back. Star Trek: Picard eventually confirms it was the latter.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: When Voyager is stuck in the collapsing transwarp network with a Borg Sphere at its back and the only safe passage leading back to the Delta Quadrant, Janeway's entire plan consists of, "Mr. Paris, prepare to adjust your heading." This is so nebulous that the plan itself — involving Voyager is hiding inside the Borg Sphere — isn't actually clarified to the audience, much less the specifics of how it is going to be achieved.
• Wham Line: "Seven of Nine is going to die."
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • From all indications, Seven never contacted Neelix again to finish their game. What did Neelix do when he tried to call her and waited for her, and only got silence? Mitigated somewhat by the Subspace Ansible activated in "Author, Author" will presumably remain in use since Neelix is the Federation ambassador to the Delta Quadrant so he won't be completely out of contact.
  • Naomi Wildman, the first child born on Voyager, has a father she's never met back home in the Alpha Quadrant, who was arguably the most memorable recurring character on the show... not a single appearance in the finale. Not even mentioned, except in the alternate future where we see her daughter.
  • Future Janeway mentions that almost two dozen other members of the crew would die en route to Earth, but they are quickly shuffled aside to focus on Seven's fate.
  • With future-Captain Kim and the crew of the Rhode Island, their effort to Hold the Line failed to stop at least one of the Klingon warships from entering the temporal rift in pursuit of Janeway's shuttle (which the past Voyager must then seal immediately). It's left unrevealed whether the Klingons simply slipped past the Starfleet ship, or whether Harry and his crew were either killed in battle or immediately wiped from the timeline.
• What Would X Do?: Harry trying to convince Tom to fly into the Borg nebula to investigate the possible wormholes, something that Tom is not eager to do.
  Harry: Captain Proton wouldn't walk away from a mission like this.
  Tom: Captain Proton doesn't have a wife and a baby on the way.
• Wrote the Book: According to Future!Reg, Admiral Janeway "literally wrote the book on the Borg." The novelization has the Admiral fight back an eye roll and muse whether Barclay knows what the word "literally" actually means.

---

Janeway: Mr. Chakotay, the helm.

Chakotay: Aye, Captain.

Janeway: Set a course... for home.