This episode really felt like a look back at the journey Voyager has been down which makes me think the writers knew they were coming to the end. In theory this episode is about Chakotay, but it isn't. Really the person it is about is the Janeway from the pilot seeing all the changes that have happened and how much of an impact it has had on all their lives. For quite a while she is, justifiably, thinking that she should change what she did and not trap her ship in the Delta Quadrant, and for all the dead crew I can see why, but she has clearly had a positive impact on at least some of their lives. I don't really think it is reasonable for Chakotay to be able to just walk through the timelines since the ship was at radically different locations during the different timelines, but that is a complaint about essentially all time travel in fiction so whatever.
We open with Chakotay interrupting Icheb and Naomi working on a puzzle together so he can get to his secret booze stash. He heads to Janeway's quarters for dinner but they are interrupted by the ship rocking suddenly. Janeway heads to the bridge and Chakotay to engineering where he is hit by some sort of energy discharge and wakes up in sickbay. He is surprised the Doctor doesn't come with him and has never heard of the mobile emitter. He heads to the bridge but passes through a distortion and finds himself under arrest as he is on the bridge before Voyager ends up in the Delta Quadrant. He is taken to the brig but the guards disappear on the way and he heads back to engineering where he finds that part is in the period where Seska controlled the ship. He escapes that to sickbay where he gets more time serum and heads to the bridge where he forces Janeway to take the serum and she starts moving through time with him.
They come with with a plan with adult Icheb and Naomi's help. They will inject all the gel packs with the serum and then do a thing with the warp core to fix it all. It goes mostly smoothly with some rather touching scenes that don't really add much to the plot but are a nice reminder of the good parts of VOY. Eventually they have a showdown with Seska in engineering and get an assist from full Borg Seven. The plan works and everything is back to normal other than Chakotay now joking with Janeway about the temporal prime directive any time he doesn't want to give her information.
Review: Episodes like this show that the writers really do get that not every episode is as good as the others. In this case they definitely carefully picked some more interesting time periods to jump back to. The only one I found kinda obnoxious was Seska, I was over her pretty early in her run and she is still kicking in season 7 despite dying quite a few seasons ago.
6 out of 10
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