In the words of the Immortal Harry Kim, "It's not the destination; it's the journey." For seven years and five thousand times more than that light years the good ship Voyager has been making their way home, with only the occasional stop for maintenance, shore leave, warfare, romance, violating the Prime Suggestion, supplies, parties, conferences, sporting events and sightseeing.

It's been a good run - as long as TNG and DS9 got - but, somehow, it always seems to leave us wanting.....

We open with newsreel footage of Voyager's return to Earth, to celebrate the Tenth Anniversary of their arrival (which was 16 years after we last saw Our Heroes in "Renaissance Man"). There's a party where we meet our old friends: Admiral Janeway, Captain Kim, Holonovel author Tom Paris and wife, newlywed Doctor Joe and Cmdr. Barclay.

Conspicuously absent are Chakotay, Seven of Nine and Tuvok- though we subsequently see Tuvok is still alive, an inmate at a Home For "Voyager" Screenwriters.

However, the ever-restless Admiral Janeway isn't resting on her laurels going to parties; she's negotiating with a Klingon for a technical doohickey. The Klingon inexplicably welches on their deal, demanding (on top of the political favors Janeway has already done for him) some new shield tech Janeway has on her shuttle.

Janeway refuses, but then appears to relent- only to steal away the doohickey from the Klingon.

Captain Kim intercepts Janeway before she can instigate her cunning plan- but, predictably, backs down before the force of Janeway's personality.

Fortunately he's still around for his starship to run interference for Janeway when the Klingons decide to show her how dishonorable shoplifting is.

But not too much: when Admiral Janeway arrives back in Voyager's timeline Voyager has to close the rift to prevent a Klingon ship from following her through. Captain Janeway (normally so trusting of aliens they've only just met) is distrustful of her future self- only there's a reason this time: Admiral Janeway wants Voyager to reverse course and go back to a Borg-infested nebula Voyager passed three days previously, claiming that it's the way back home.

Admiral Janeway invites Captain J to have her crew inspect the shields and weapons on her Bat-shuttle, and to upgrade Voyager to be able to get through the Borg in the nebula. They are going to have more trouble than a near-miss on their second attempt, as the Bored Queen is so desperate for entertainment she's actually watching the "Voyager" Series Finale and knows about Admiral Janeway's cunning plan.

During Seven's next regeneration cycle the Queen contacts her using AIM (AOL Internet Mindmeld) to warn her that the nebula is Borg territory, and that they'll assimilate Voyager if they come back.

For once Captain Janeway takes the threat of the Borg Collective seriously and is looking for another way home. Instead of mentioning her targeted wormhole opener she stole from the Klingons, Admiral J prevails upon her to take the shortcut for the sake of her crew.

She's going to lose a lot more people over the next 16 years it will otherwise take to get home - though, significantly less than she lost in her first seven years - including Seven of Nine, who will die in her husband's (Chakotay's) arms.

Captain J is as terrified and revolted about the prospect of a Chak/7 romance as the audience is, and agrees to go back through the nebula.

This time the Borg do take notice of the one small ship, but the upgraded Bat-armor Admiral J brought back is shrugging off weapons and tractor beams from three Battlecubes. Of course, with two Janeways on the Bridge they have to wait for their armor to be seriously compromised before crying havoc and unleashing the dogs of war - in this case, "trans-phasic torpedoes" that can blast a Battlecube the way Voyager does Trek continuity.

After two cubes get blown to digital bits the third one adapts to the super torpedoes by running away, and Voyager is left unimpeded to get to the center of the nebula: A very bright thing with a darker, spider-web-looking thingy floating nearby.

Seven identifies it as a Transwarp Hub, basically a Borg Grand Central Station. The Borg have only six of them in the galaxy, but the system allows them to deliver huge numbers of Battlecubes anywhere in the galaxy in minutes.

Despite having just fought their way in, and staring right at a conduit that would take them to within a lightyear of Sol, Janeway orders the ship back out of the nebula - the long way.

Captain J is furious that her future self withheld information about the nature of the "wormholes" in the nebula. Admiral J is adamant that getting Voyager back home safe is the paramount issue, and that telling Captain J too much would lead her to a suicidally silly idea ... which is what happens now. While braving throngs of Battlecubes to get Voyager home was too dangerous, Captain J decides to go back into the nebula yet again, only this time to destroy the Transwarp Hub.

While the crew work on means to destroy the Borg Subway system, the Janeways celebrate the moments of their life by arguing again over opportunities lost and how the elder Janeway has adopted the (perfectly natural) trait of allowing youthful idealism to mature into cynicism.

Seven is pulling back from her relationship with Chakotay for fear of splinters- oh, okay, she's worried how she'll deal with the emotional pain if she allows herself to fall in love, and then loses him.

Captain J confronts Tuvok about a neurological disease which can only be cured in the Alpha Quadrant (the one that has Tuvok as crazy as a Trek Continuitist in Admiral J's time), but Tuvok brushes off his need to get home by quoting the only famous person the planet has ever produced, Ambassador Spock: "The needs of the many stockholders at Paramount outweigh the needs of the few Trek fans who still care."

Finally the plan is hatched: The destruction of three treknobabble manifolds in the transwarp network will crash the whole thing (structural integrity is irrelevant).

Voyager is planning to have their cake and eat it too (a time-honored Trek tradition to rescue CO's from ever having to make a really hard decision) by flying through to Sector 001, and firing a series of transwarp torpedoes programmed to detonate simultaneously.

Even this cunning plan isn't enough, so Admiral J takes the Bat-shuttle to Borg HQ, Unimatrix 01, to offer the Bored Queen a deal: let Voyager get home and she'd tell the Queen how to adapt against the transphasic torpedoes. While they're dickering the Queen discovers where the Bat-shuttle is hiding, beams Admiral J aboard and assimilates her.

The Queen and her unimatrix suddenly start falling apart: they've taken in a treknobabble virus as well as assimilating the kooky and unstable Woman Of Ten Thousand Personalities, Katherine Janeway. Her last act before her part of the Unimatrix blows up is to send an unaffected Sphere to take Voyager.

Said sphere does indeed capture Voyager before exiting the transwarp network (just as the network is collapsing) at Sector 001, where a Starfleet Armada gets revenge for Wolf 359 by blasting away at the ship.

Between the attack without and Voyager firing from within, the Sphere explodes and Voyager comes sailing out of the debris. We close on a shot of the armada escorting Voyager to Earth.

A few polyphasic nits made it through the plot:

With their record for crashes, WHO in the hell ever allowed Voyager to do aerobatics over a populated city like San Francisco? Wouldn't that make a hell of a homecoming: returning from the Delta Quadrant as heroes - only to crash doing stunt-flying over San Fran and killing millions of civilians in the resulting inferno?

As easily as Janeway stole the Klingon's time doohickey, the Klingons must have been taking lessons from Starfleet Security. In the world of Trek, I wouldn't consider anything "safe" without a treknobabble field to scramble transporter beams.

And did this episode need so much padding? Starfleet ships regularly time-travel, but now of a sudden Admiral Janeway needs that Klingon's doohickey to do what Starfleet officers have been doing for a hundred years - at least? Maybe that doohickey was useful to cross galactic distances as well as time- in which case, wouldn't repairing it to get Voyager home be just a bit less dangerous than taking on a few dozen Battlecubes?

Janeway's Bat-shuttle carries shield tech that can brush off fire from multiple Borg Battlecubes, and weapons that can destroy a Battlecube with one torpedo - yet she has to yell to Captain Kim for help against a couple of Klingon ships?

I loved Admiral Janeway's line about "The easiest way to deal with the Temporal Prime Directive is to ignore it!" With her experience in ignoring Prime Directives.....

Why would the Borg give an isolinear chip that uses their transwarp subway system? And if they did care, why wouldn't they have some kind of code signal needed to open the thing? IIRC, a code signal was required in TNG's "Descent," which introduced the Borg transworm warpholes in the first place, but here we see first the Bat-shuttle and then Voyager just fly into the appropriate openings and go.

And with a transwarp system that can put a Borg Battlecube within one lightyear of Sol, every time they send one it always has to blast its way in from the hinterlands all the way to Earth?

Destroying three manifolds will destroy the whole transwarp network? Given that Species 8472 was blowing away whole planets, how many manifolds did they ever take out?

Potentially a fascinating idea, this episode suffered from being produced as a Voyager episode. Janeway's intermittent concern for her crew's safety just didn't jibe with what we've seen for the past seven years, the relationship between Seven and Chakotay was sabotaged by Beltran's conviction that he's "above" stooping to actually act in a sci fi show, and the plodding pace in the beginning contrasted badly with the rushed, sudden arrival home in the end.

I would have liked to have seen them get home in the penultimate episode, and the finale deal with the aftermath (Janeway's explaining away her Prime Suggestion violations, the Maquis Question, Paris and his father) and giving more closure than just fading to black with Voyager approaching Earth..... but then, what we'd want from this series will be argued even after "Enterprise" takes "Voyager's" place on UPN.

A decent enough episode - but for the finale, we fans (if not the Voyager crew) deserved better.

He-Who-Will-Be-Around-In-The-Fall

(c) Bozo the Proctologist

Starfleet has a special section where they assign officers with absolutely no will to survive: Security.