Voyager Flashback: Shattered

Notoriously, one of the worst episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation was the made-on-the-cheap clip show "Shades of Gray." But revisiting the "greatest hits" of a TV series' past doesn't have to be terrible. Star Trek: Voyager found a way to make that clever indeed with "Shattered."

A temporal distortion splits Voyager into a dozen different time frames, and only Chakotay is free to pass between them. His efforts to unify and restore the ship are challenged by trials from the ship's adventurous history, including a Janeway who doesn't yet know him, a Kazon takeover, the threat of macroviruses, Tom Paris' holodeck characters, and more.

"Shattered" is basically pure adventure, and purely for the fans, though it's not wholly without moral quandary -- as a "pre-Caretaker" Janeway is faced with the classic theoretical dilemma: "if you had to do it all over again, would you?" (She really does have to be convinced that her future self hasn't made a series of dreadful mistakes.) This is the very rare Chakotay-centric episode that's actually good -- and even works best because it's him and not some other character, as he is truly the best option to struggle in trying to persuade a skeptical Captain Janeway to help.

The episode gets great boosts from both the actors and the production team. Subtle performance shifts by Robert Picardo and Kate Mulgrew really sell you on them playing earlier versions of their characters. Great visual effects appear throughout, including the weird aging distortion on Chakotay's face, or what passing through a time rift looks like. Blending performance and production: Jeri Ryan endures the Borg makeup again to take us back to her character's first appearance.

The fact that this comes in the seventh and final season of Voyager, rather than at the end of two generally weak Next Generation seasons (as "Shades of Gray" did), helps a lot to provide a wide variety of past episodes for this story to time travel back to. Just hearing Chakotay describe some of Voyager's adventures, and seeing Janeway's dumb-founded reaction, is enough to get you smiling. (In one part of the ship, Chakotay can't even be sure which of two different times the entire crew was knocked out they're actually in.) But it isn't all just fun and games, and it isn't all just about the past -- two of the more effective scenes involve an "alternate present" death of Tuvok, and an encounter with "possible future" versions of Naomi Wildman and Icheb

But the thing about a "greatest hits" episode is that it helps if you actually have great hits. Reach into a figurative bag and pull out an episode of Star Trek: Voyager at random, and chances are you're going to get a decent episode -- arguably better than the average you'd pull from a Star Trek: The Next Generation bag. But nowhere in the Voyager bag will you find a "Darmok," "The Inner Light, "A Measure of a Man," etc. Sure, none of those episodes I just named would work well in the context of a "part of the Enterprise has time-slipped back to when this episode was happening" story. But I think you take my point: I'm excited by the concept of "Shattered" overall, yet I'm not eager to revisit any one past episode in particular via that concept.

Other observations:

• Chakotay hides his liquor in the one of only two rooms on the entire ship where a child sleeps.

• Janeway's fiancé gave her a copy of Dante's Inferno as an engagement gift? Weird subtext on that.

• One of the unwritten rules of this scenario makes no sense from a story perspective, but perfect sense from a production perspective: each character appears in only one of the fractured time frames. (Isn't it just as likely that one person could appear in any number of time frames on the ship?)

• Dozens of time frames, no Kes. (But yeah, this also makes sense from a production perspective.)

• The resolution has one of the nitpicks you can level at most time travel stories. When time is restored and Chakotay has only seconds to prevent the ship from being split, there's no particular reason he has to be successful this time; he would seem to have as many attempts/cycles at this as required. 

• It's a bit funny, but Star Trek: Lower Decks did an episode that in many ways felt like this one. In showing Voyager turned into a museum, with different exhibits of "different episodes" installed throughout, "Twovix" is kinda-sorta this exact episode without the sci-fi conceit.
  

"Shattered" is a fun idea and enjoyable to watch. But essentially, a chef is only as good as their ingredients, and so "Shattered" can't be any better than the various episodes it revisits. I give it a B+.