Plot
Fifteen years in the future, Chakotay and Kim discover Voyager frozen on the surface of an ice world. They recover the body of Seven of Nine and collect The Doctor via his mobile emitter, and return to the Delta Flyer, joining Tessa Omond (Christine Harnos). Kim restores the Doctor and explains that fifteen years prior, the crew had attempted to use the slipstream engine technology to bring Voyager home, with Chakotay and Kim in the Delta Flyer leading the larger ship. However, the slipsteam became unstable due to a phase variance, causing Voyager to fall out of the slipstream and crash in to the ice world, its position in the Alpha Quadrant lost. Chakotay and Kim have spent the last nine years, after Starfleet called off the search, looking for Voyager. Kim explains that he can send a message back in time to Seven via her interplexing beacon using a stolen Borg temporal transmitter, which would then prevent the accident, allowing Voyager to have arrived home safely. They brought aboard the Doctor to help extract the chronometric node from Seven and identify the exact time when her cybernetic systems disengaged as to know when to send the corrections.
As the Doctor and Kim work, they discover themselves being followed by USS Challenger, commanded by Captain Geordi La Forge. La Forge warns them, as fugitives from Starfleet and wanted for stealing the Delta Flyer, that he knows they are trying to alter the past, a violation of the Temporal Prime Directive. Chakotay offers Tessa, whom he has become romantically involved with, the opportunity to be safely transported to the Challenger but she offers to stay with them.
The Doctor successfully discovers the correct Borg time index, and Kim sends the information. In the present, as Chakotay and Kim take off into the slipstream with the Delta Flyer, they lose communications with Voyager. Seven does receive the new calculations from the unexplained source. Captain Janeway believes the information to be from Kim, and orders them to be implemented, but this ultimately has no effect on the slipstream, and Voyager is still lost. In the future, Kim realizes the changes haven't worked and blames himself for destroying Voyager twice. The Doctor convinces him to try again, but with a less optimal solution: to have the changes collapse the slipstream, keeping Voyager stranded in the Delta Quadrant but with all hands alive. As the Challenger begins to fire on the Delta Flyer, an overload starts to build in the warp matrix. The Borg temporal transmitter starts to lose power and the Doctor allows Kim to use his mobile emitter to power the transmitter and send the new signal. Kim successfully sends out the signal before the Delta Flyers warp core breaches.
In the present, Voyager once again enters the slipstream, losing communications with the Delta Flyer. Seven receives the new calculations, and Janeway orders them to implement them. As planned, this causes the slipstream to fail, leaving Voyager and its crew safely in normal space. Janeway orders the crew to dismantle the slipstream technology believing it not to be ready yet, while pondering where the signal that Seven received originated from, given that Kim denies having sent it from the shuttle. Janeway provides Kim with an encoded message in the signal, a recording that future Kim had sent to himself in the past, giving him confidence in his abilities.
Read more about this topic: Timeless (Star Trek: Voyager)
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