Trek-a-Week #40: Timeless

Ben:

Timeless begins with one of the best cold opens of any Trek episode. We see Kim and Chakotay in a polar waste, we get the amazing image of Voyager frozen beneath the ice, then finally Kim announces, “We’re here to change history.”

…And then, at our house, you would have heard a lot of flustered sighing and huffing from Katherine because Timeless has now been revealed as (not entirely surprisingly, given the title of the episode) a time travel episode.

So, before delving into any evaluation of this episode’s merits, it seems like this is maybe a good time to address a long-running Trek-a-Week elephant in the room: time travel.

Grousing about time travel in Trek-a-Week has obviously been a continued back-and-forth between Katherine and me throughout this project. And, look, I get it: time travel is often used as a lazy plot device to create cheap novelty setups. Case in point: A Piece of the Action… or any number of questionable Trek time travel episodes we didn’t watch. (Don’t even get me started on Assignment: Earth.) More to the point, most time travel stories don’t hold up well when subjected to even the most minimal narrative scrutiny. In Timeless we get the classic Trek problematic conceit: the characters in the altered timeline somehow remembering all the events in the previous timeline or — as here — otherwise being able to interact with the other timeline after-the-fact. Hence, we get the head-scratching final scene of Timeless where “reset timeline Harry Kim” gets to hear a message from “now-eliminated timeline Harry Kim.” (Yeah, I get how this is supposed to work in the episode, but still…)

But, here’s the thing: time travel is an essential part of the SF genre and it has been since 1895 when Wells’ The Time Machine was published. Can you like SF without liking time travel? Maybe. And I guess you can like rock music without liking guitar solos… but I feel like this stuff is kinda baked into the genre. As I argue in other other Trek-a-Weeks with time travel elements, you just kind of have to accept that things aren’t going to make total sense and then dive in and enjoy the story. We even get this exact advice from Janeway in-episode: “My advice in making sense of temporal paradoxes is simple. Don’t even try.”

And with Timeless, it’s easy to see what the appeal of time travel is. Who hasn’t fantasized about being able to go back and have a second chance to redo bad decisions they’ve made in the past? That’s a big part of the appeal of time travel stories and it’s the core of the narrative here. Kim screwed things up royally — with catastrophic consequences — the first go-round and he’s spent his life since then in an obsessive drive to correct his mistake.

I’m not sure, though, Kim makes as compelling an “Ahab” character as someone like Annorax does— or even Janeway once their roles flip in Year in Hell. Kim’s status as perpetual ensign throughout the run of Voyager is a running gag among Trek fans, but this episode demonstrates why he’s probably never taken center stage: he’s not really that compelling as a lead character, even with a pretty convincing amount of plot motivation piled on him, grey hair or no.

Even besides Harry though, Timeless focuses on an odd bunch of characters. I’m not quite sure why Chakotay (and “Tessa” for that matter) are even on this do-or-die mission with Kim in the first place. It was fun to see Geordi in this episode and the writers do a nice job of establishing the classic “we’re in opposition now, but we’re both kinda Starfleet bros” understanding between adversaries bit. The conversation he and Chakotay have during their stand-off is particularly great, with Geordi admitting, “I understand and I might be doing the same thing if I were in your position…” Again, though, really any TNG character could have played this role — or really any Starfleet captain.

I really enjoyed the bits with Seven at the beginning of the episode and it reminded me of how great the dynamic becomes between her and the Doctor, with the Doctor as her go-between/mentor in understanding humanity. Isolated and out of that particular context however, as it is here, it seems a bit out of place. I’m curious to know if Katherine will bring up this particular scene. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it in other entries, but it’s ironic that Seven was clearly a character brought in for cheap T&A value but who then quickly became one of the most interesting characters on Voyager.

Despite being a fun, well-executed episode, there’s not a ton going on below the surface in Timeless. There’s of course the whole issue of the morality of Harry Kim eliminating an entire timeline to correct his mistake and bring his friends back… but this is really only addressed obliquely in Timeless and it’s tackled more thoughtfully in other Trek episodes, most recently in Year of Hell. Also, the ending of Timeless is unfortunately derailed by the afore-mentioned ham-handed and unnecessary final Kim/Janeway scene where Kim sees the message from his older/alternate timeline self — his “guardian angel,” as Janeway puts it. In addition to the recording bit really exacerbating the already dubious mechanics of the time travel here, the whole scene seems like a bit of unnecessary over-explaining.

Despite my few misgivings, Timeless works well as a really solid “popcorn episode,” and a rare Harry episode that’s not a complete dud. I did, though, definitely miss the meatier philosophical underpinnings that we often get with Trek, especially right on the heels of last weeks excellent Living Witness.

A couple of miscellaneous items:

• The crash scene here is really nicely done… but these crashes are maybe starting to get a little threadbare at this point. This is now one of many eye candy “the ship blowed up real good” scenes that began back in 1984 with Star Trek III.
• Timeless features a paltry one instance of “some kind of.” SAD.
• Trek writing often includes references to 20th century stuff that logically no one in the future would remember, and we get two here: Paris mentioning the Edsel, and the Doctor’s Bonnie and Clyde reference. The Paris one at least makes sense if you know the character’s interest in 20th century “history.” (This dumb thing where Trek always has to have someone interested in 20th century cars, movies, jazz, or whatever is a whole other bag of worms though…)

Katherine:

Timeless is an episode that is full of suspense and is all about regret and redemption. It is also, as the title suggests, about time travel. I’ve given up on Ben not having selected even more time travel stories for future episodes because he defends it as a common sci fi plot device. Indeed time travel is commonly used as a gimmick in TV shows and, as defined in this list of seven categories of TV time travel tropes, the particular theme used in Timeless is #3 “Set Right What Once Went Wrong.”

I don’t mean to sound critical as I do think Timelessis a solid episode. You get to see the Voyager ship fully encased under ice and, previously, crashing down onto the planet, a possible alternate future for Kim and Chakotay, and even a cameo from Geordi LaForge as the captain of his own ship. Even better, you see characters faced with difficult decisions being forced to make a call and then accept the consequences. There’s good character development and action so it’s hard to argue with the entertainment value of this episode.

A bit of a synopsis: Timeless begins with Kim and Chakotay in cold weather gear beaming aboard a frozen Voyager where we see the officers on the bridge, minus the two of them, having perished in ice. They find Seven’s body and transport it, as well as the EMH program, back to their small flyer. We get some flashback scenes of Janeway celebrating the deployment of a new slipstream drive. She announces that this new technology will allow them to make it back home. Paris and Kim are still running simulations, however, all of which end in disaster.

All the crew are so eager for the new technology to work that the reluctance in giving up a chance to try it is palpable. Kim proposes that a shuttle running a few seconds ahead of Voyager could transmit information about the changing slipstream back to the main ship as it forms and secure a safe passage. This is all theoretical but Janeway makes the decision to go forward. Ben will go on here about how Janeway is always making bad decisions. And, in this case, it certainly ended in disaster. This aversion to sunk costs, though, the inability to recognize a failure and cut your losses, is human nature. No one on Voyager is more eager than Ensign Kim, “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I didn’t do all this work just to be stopped by a point four two phase variance.”

I also really like that Janeway often chooses a risky path. Standard opinion seems to be that women are generally more risk-averse than men. This is often cited when looking at investment behavior, which, as it turns out, may benefit from a patient mindset rather than trying to outsmart the market. However, when researchers look at less traditionally masculine activities, it becomes evident that women take risks frequently. In fact, women are more likely to take social risks, to bring up an uncomfortable issue in a meeting, or to change careers late in life.While Captain Janeway’s call to go ahead with the slipstream drive was ultimately wrong, I applaud her, and the show, for having a woman lay down a risky choice and get everyone behind her.

The last thing I want to address are the future versions of Kim and Chakotay. Most interestingly, how does fifteen years of survivor guilt affect someone?Chakotay has moved on in some senses and even has a girlfriend whom he expresses a fleeting reluctance to leave when it comes time to alter history. Kim, however, who bears the brunt of the decision to go forward with the shuttle-preceding-the-ship-into-the-slipstream plan, has obviously taken it very hard. I don’t know why, but Kim’s persona in the future, wearing a long, dark coat and possessing a desperately sad and angry disposition, reminded me of Dylan Klebold, one of the shooters at the Columbine massacre which occurred less than six months after the air date of Timeless. The self-loathing that is expressed through dress and attitude, trying to physically hide oneself from the excruciating knowledge that you’ve caused harm to other people — or that you yourself have been harmed — is common to both characters.

Harry Kim gets a chance to redeem himself and correct his mistake through the magic of time travel. In real life, we obviously never get this chance. While his tireless efforts to find the crash site and a way to communicate in the past are commendable, the harder task would be learning to live with the consequences of a poor decision. The device used to contact the crew in the past turns out to be an “interplexing beacon” in Seven, a cranial implant used to communicate with other Borg. Not only is this attempt at giving a scientific explanation weak, let’s also not forget that it was already used in the TNG Cause and Effect episode in which they create a “dekyon emission” that Data is able to perceive in his positronic subprocessors. Thank goodness for cyborgs and androids, otherwise these cross-time communications wouldn’t be possible! Humans only get one timeline. But the countdown created by the eminent attack from a Federation ship, bound to try and prevent Kim and Chakotay from altering history, made for an exciting climax for Timeless.

Next week: Bride of Chaotica!