Plot
In the year 2404, Earth is celebrating Voyager's 10th anniversary of its 23 year journey home. However, an elderly Admiral Kathryn Janeway acquires a chrono deflector from a Klingon named Korath and uses it on her shuttle to travel back to 2378 in the Delta Quadrant. She pulls rank on Voyager to emit an anti-tachyon pulse, collapsing the temporal distortion to prevent the Klingons from following her through.
On board her old starship, the Admiral tells her younger self to return to a nebula filled with Borg that they passed by a few days ago. She provides advanced technologies that would give Voyager the opportunity to get past the massive Borg defenses and enter a transwarp corridor. The Borg, despite spying on the ship and preparing for its attack, are unable to penetrate Voyager's new adaptive hull armour nor capture it with tractor beams while Voyager destroys two Borg Cubes with transphasic torpedoes. They then come upon a Borg transwarp hub at the center, which could save the ship sixteen more years of being stranded in the Delta Quadrant.
However, the Admiral’s efforts are hindered by the desire of her younger self to use the future technology to destroy the transwarp network instead of using it to return home. Trying to blast it from the inside is impossible, as the network adapts to any attack due to the control of the Borg Queen (Alice Krige, reprising the role for the first time since Star Trek: First Contact). It can only be destroyed from their end for the Alpha Quadrant contains only exit apertures. The two Janeways argue over the issue until the elder Janeway tells her younger self that Seven of Nine (then newly married to First Officer Chakotay), along with 22 other crewmembers, will die if they do not take the road home, and that the Vulcan Tactical Officer Tuvok will become mentally unstable from a neurological condition that could have been treated in the Alpha Quadrant if they'd made it back soon enough. Deeply troubled by the knowledge that she is effectively ordering her crew to their deaths, Captain Janeway discusses the issue with them, but they too decide that destroying the Borg’s transwarp hub is more important than returning to Earth, as without it, the Borg's ability to travel across the galaxy will be severely hampered and countless lives will be saved. On seeing the crew’s selfless reaction to the plan, the older Janeway rediscovers a piece of her old fighting spirit and with Captain Janeway, comes up with a plan to both destroy the hub and possibly get Voyager home.
Admiral Janeway takes her shuttlecraft and enters the transwarp hub, finally arriving at the Unicomplex—the center of all Borg activity, where the Borg Queen herself resides. She first appears to the Queen in her mind, claiming she wants Voyager towed back to the Alpha Quadrant (apparently in defiance of the younger Janeway's plans) in exchange for information on how to adapt to the armour and torpedo technologies. However, the Queen is quickly able to detect her shuttle and beams the Admiral to her chambers for assimilation into the Borg collective. A few minutes later, Admiral Janeway unleashes a neurolytic pathogen from within her bloodstream that devastates the Borg, physically making the queen fall apart. With the deactivation of the Queen, the Unicomplex suffers a cascade failure and explodes, killing the partially assimilated Admiral.
Meanwhile Captain Janeway and her crew have entered a transwarp corridor and fire torpedoes at the unprotected manifolds while traveling back to the Alpha Quadrant, but are pursued by a Borg sphere ship that has managed to withstand the pathogen’s effects and assimilate Admiral Janeway's ablative armor upgrade. It is now following the Borg Queen's final orders to destroy Voyager so that the Admiral (and her sabotage) will never exist. Unable to fight back against the ship’s exterior defenses, Janeway takes her ship inside the sphere, where, upon its arrival in Earth's solar system, she detonates a torpedo that destroys the sphere from the inside.
In the show’s final few minutes, the crew stand dumbfounded that they have finally returned home after seven years lost in the Delta Quadrant and are greeted by a fleet of Starfleet vessels that arrived to fight the sphere. Settling down in her chair, Captain Janeway issues her final orders, the same words that she used at the start of her journey: "Set a course...for home."
Read more about this topic: Endgame (Star Trek: Voyager)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)