Time and Again (S1E04)
Airdate: 30 January 1995
Written by: Directed by: Les Landau
Running Time: 46 minutes
Star Trek: Voyager's pilot had established, with considerable dramatic finality, that the voyage of its protagonists towards their home in the Alpha Quadrant would take approximately seventy-five years. Even with the eventual seven-year series run taken into account—and the reasonable assumption that the crew would not spend the entirety of that time crawling through interstellar space at maximum warp—it was evident that anomalies, wormholes, and similar phenomena would be extensively employed as plot elements to shorten this grand voyage. This narrative necessity became apparent near the very beginning of the series, with Time and Again, the second episode in a row to feature time and space anomalies following the quantum singularity escapade of Parallax. The audience could already discern a pattern forming, and one wondered whether temporal distortions and spatial oddities would become the recurring crutch upon which Voyager's journey home would periodically lean.
The episode begins with a deceptively ordinary scene that feels almost jarringly mundane in the context of a starship stranded decades from home. Lieutenant Tom Paris is pressuring Ensign Harry Kim to accompany him on a double date with the Delaney sisters, twins serving as crew members in Stellar Cartography. Their discussion—charming in its ordinariness, and serving as an early indication that life aboard Voyager would not consist solely of crisis management—is abruptly interrupted when Voyager is struck by a shockwave of "polaric" energy. The source is traced to a nearby planet, where the crew discovers, to their horror, that the entire population has been wiped out. An away team, which includes Captain Janeway and Paris, examines the ruins and estimates that the catastrophe occurred very recently, and that its sheer scale has generated numerous temporal anomalies in the surrounding area.
Janeway and Paris are caught in one of these anomalies, inadvertently transported back in time, and suddenly find themselves within the very civilisation that has been wiped out. Seeing no alternative, they play along with their new circumstances, only to discover that the catastrophe is scheduled to occur the following day. They also learn that the entire civilisation is powered by "polaric" energy, a technology that has become a source of considerable discontent among certain sections of the populace. Before long, Janeway and Paris are apprehended by militant environmental activists, two of whom—Pe'Nar Makull (Nicolas Surovy) and Ny Terla (Joel Polis)—take them prisoner, operating under the assumption that they are government spies. The activists force Janeway and Paris to accompany them to a polaric power plant, which they intend to sabotage.
Meanwhile, aboard Voyager, Kes—who possesses the nascent psychic ability endemic to the Ocampa people—senses that Janeway and Paris have vanished into the past. Chakotay, B'Elanna Torres, and the rest of the Voyager crew develop a method of creating a short-lived temporal rift of their own, hoping to locate the captain and Paris and bring them back into their own time.
The two saboteurs utilise Janeway and Paris as a diversion to gain access to the polaric plant, leading to a violent incident during which Paris is shot and wounded whilst attempting to protect Latika (Brady Bluhm), a young boy who has followed them. As the sabotage commences, Janeway makes a crucial realisation: it is Voyager's attempt to create the temporal rift that has actually caused the catastrophe at the plant. In a moment of decisive action, she uses her own phaser to close the rift, thereby altering the timeline.
The future thus changes, and Voyager is now shown travelling near the same planet, with the pre-warp civilisation still very much intact and continuing to use polaric energy. Kes appears on the bridge, experiencing a sense of déjà vu but visibly relieved that the catastrophe has not occurred. Voyager, in strict accordance with the Prime Directive, refrains from making contact and continues on its journey home.
The episode was originally conceived by Jeri Taylor, who contemplated the fascinating question of how someone might interact with a civilisation whilst knowing that it would soon be obliterated. It is an undeniably interesting high-concept premise, one that mixes the issue of the Prime Directive with the imperative to prevent a time paradox. Unfortunately, the execution is handled less than satisfactorily.
David Kemper's script attempts to play with the premise by introducing red herrings in the form of the environmental militants, who appear as though they might be the very cause of the catastrophe they ostensibly wish to prevent. This is a reasonably effective narrative device, though it is somewhat undermined by the script's simultaneous efforts to create emotional stakes through the introduction of a child character who bonds with Paris. The relationship between Paris and young Latika ends up looking a little too syrupy, a touch too calculated in its emotional manipulation, and one cannot escape the feeling that the audience is being rather heavy-handedly guided towards caring about the outcome.
But the greatest problem with the episode is the complete lack of consequences. Janeway effectively sacrifices herself in one timeline to create another in which nothing has happened, turning the entire affair into yet another variation of the "it was all a dream" narrative copout. The audience has invested forty-five minutes in events that, by the episode's own logic, never transpired. There is no lasting impact, no character development, no residual consequence—merely a reset button pressed with phaser-fire precision. This is a structural weakness that afflicts many time-travel narratives, but Time and Again falls into the trap with a particularly conspicuous lack of grace.
Directed by Les Landau, the episode was apparently affected by budget issues that forced the production staff to recycle many of the alien world's props and costumes. The aliens look completely human-like, with no prosthetics or distinctive features to set them apart from any number of guest characters encountered on Earth. Most notably, the production utilised the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in California as a filming location—a site that has been extensively used throughout Star Trek history and would continue to be employed in the future. The aliens even use actual twentieth-century firearms, which, whilst perhaps justifiable on a pre-warp world, does rather strain the audience's willingness to accept this as a genuinely alien civilisation rather than a thinly disguised Earth analogue.
Despite all of this, and despite the production staff reportedly expressing disappointment with the final result, Time and Again remains a solid episode. It serves its purpose not so much in plot but in character exposition. The Delaney sisters, who would become a recurring motif of discussion before finally being depicted much later in the series, serve as an opportunity to establish that Harry Kim had a girlfriend waiting for him on Earth—a small but meaningful character detail. Kes is also depicted as possessing psychic abilities that would be explored in greater depth later in the series, planting seeds for future development. The episode also reinforces the dynamic between Janeway and Paris, showcasing their ability to work together under pressure whilst maintaining the slightly uneasy mentor-protégé relationship that characterises their early interactions.
In the end, Time and Again is an episode that promises more than it delivers. Its high-concept premise is intriguing, its character moments are valuable, and its place in the series' early world-building is secure. Yet its narrative shortcomings prevent it from rising above the level of competent but unremarkable television. It is the sort of episode that one watches with mild engagement and forgets with equal ease, which is perhaps the most damning criticism one can level at a story ostensibly about the annihilation of an entire civilisation.
RATING: 5/10 (++)
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