Captain Janeway finds herself in a repeating loop of time that always seems to end with her death. Soon, a manifestation of her father appears to help her face the truth: she has died, and now she must let go and move on to what comes next.
There's a fun origin story to this episode. According to show runner Jeri Taylor (who also wrote this script), there had been several pieces of story ideas kicking around the writers' room, but not quite working out. Then the inspiration came to pull them all into one episode, with the "time loop" conceit to contain them all. I think the result is smoother than "five or six episodes mashed together." But I do think there are two episodes here.
First, you have a compelling little sci-fi problem: Janeway is stuck inside Happy Death Day (over two decades before that movie would actually be made). This tees up a number of great vignettes, including an unusually fast space battle, a creepy "Remember Me"-adjacent scenario where only Janeway perceives that space/time is changing, and a fantastically unsettling scene in which the Doctor decides to euthanize the captain against her will. I can imagine a version of this episode where the back half continued to feed us more increasingly bizarre deaths, fluctuating tone wildly between mystery and horror and science, and ultimately maybe having Janeway question whether "fate" can be beaten.
Meanwhile, the back half of this episode serves up some of the most emotionally affecting scenes of the series to date. Chakotay's failed attempts to revive Janeway with CPR yield some of Robert Beltran's best work. (He even makes the cliché line "don't you die on me!" sound credible in the moment.) Watching characters grieve Janeway really lands, from Tuvok's stoic log entry to B'Elanna's eulogy to the words from Harry Kim that move Janeway to tears. Without all the mysterious time loop stuff of the first half, you could almost believe Janeway's death was real. (At least, as much as you could ever believe that the #1 star on the call sheet was being written off their show.)
I can imagine a version of this episode that skips the first 15-20 minutes, starts with the failed attempt to revive Janeway, and is simply an extended meditation on "letting go," with more time allowing for even more characters to express their feelings. You could even keep the twist involving Janeway's "father" in that version of that episode. Guest star Len Cariou (most famous for originating Sweeney Todd on Broadway) is great as the understanding and welcoming father... and equally great as the insistent and sinister alien trying to coax Janeway "toward the light" (his light). And offering an explanation of near-death experiences is just the sort of "what if?" premise that Star Trek does well.
The thing is, it's not like the two halves of this episode don't work together. The throughline of "not accepting death" runs from beginning to end. Look at the whole critically, and you can conclude that the evil alien tried first to pose as a Vidiian, then The Doctor, and perhaps even Chakotay all in sequence -- attempting to invoke fear, helplessness, and hopelessness -- before finally trying Janeway's father as a messenger for embracing death.
Other observations:
- There are a lot of details about Janeway's background in this episode: how her father died, that she has a sister. Jeri Taylor took most of these details from the novel Mosaic, which she'd already written, bringing quasi-canon Star Trek officially inside the tent.
- At the funeral, the declaration that "the captain wouldn't want us to be sad" is immediately followed with the news that "Neelix has prepared some food." So much for that.
- It's pretty frustrating that during Tuvok and Kes' attempt to contact Janeway, she remains mostly silent. Nor does she try the one thing we've seen work for awakening Kes' perceptions, physical contact (or the attempt at it).
I think "Coda" is actually a pretty good episode, and I'd give it a B+. I just can't shake the feeling that either half, broken out onto its own and fully developed into an hour, might have been among the very best of the series.
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