Voyager Re-Watch: Shattered

It's down to the wire. I watched eight episodes of Voyager yesterday and I have tonight and tomorrow to get through the last seven. I'm doing my best but there's plenty of other, actual, life stuff I need to do as well. Like, you know, eat and sleep and see Star Wars: The Force Awakens for the sixth time.

Anyway, yesterday I re-watched Shattered and thought I absolutely had to write about it because, in many ways, I feel Shattered should've been Voyager's finale.

SitRep: Voyager gets caught in a temporal rift (with Chakotay getting a good dose of it) and the ship is split into several slices of Voyager's past and future. Chakotay (thanks to the The Doc's treatment) can slip between each section of time while the rest of the crew is stuck in their respective eras. Eventually Chakotay and Janeway team up in what becomes a sort of tour through Voyager's past, present, and potential futures. It's a greatest hits album for Janeway & Co and even goes so far as to include the macro-virus, Seska's brief takeover, and the Captain Proton program.

Shattered has all the elements of a good Trek: rompy fun, sciency calamity, adventure, danger, and heart. And it has, in spades, what sets Voyager apart: Shattered is about what makes the crew a family. Season Seven Chakotay introduces Pilot Episode Janeway to the next several years of her life and, naturally, she questions whether or not she should ever have made the choice that stranded Voyager in the Delta Quadrant and it's easy to question the choice along with her. Chakotay points out how many lives have been changed for the better because of Janeway's choice.

I love Endgame and I'm looking forward to it but I remember that, watching it in 2013, I felt that it suffered from the too-easy comparison to the somewhat superior All Good Things. Shattered is also similar but it's smaller in scale, sweeter, and, in many ways, more representative of what sets Voyager apart from the rest of Trek. Voyager's crew is thrown together because of a choice Janeway made seven years ago. They've been through so much, seen so much, they've changed and grown and become a family together in a way that no other Trek crew has and Shattered makes this difference palpable. And beautiful.