Endgame (Star Trek: Voyager)

In the year 2404, the Federation is celebrating the tenth anniversary of Voyager's return to Earth from 23 years in the Delta Quadrant. An older 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 her younger self, ordering Voyager to emit an anti-tachyon pulse that collapses the temporal distortion and prevents the Klingons from following her through.

Aboard her old starship, the Admiral tells her younger self to return to a nebula filled with Borg that they passed by a few days before. She provides advanced technologies that allow Voyager to bypass the massive Borg defenses and enter a transwarp corridor. Despite spying on the ship and preparing for its attack, the Borg are unable to penetrate Voyager's new adaptive hull armor or to capture it with tractor beams, while Voyager destroys two Borg cubes with transphasic torpedoes. Voyager then comes upon a Borg transwarp hub. Transit through the hub will save the ship sixteen more years of being stranded in the Delta Quadrant.

The Admiral's efforts to get the crew home are hindered by the desire of her younger self to use the technology from the future 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.[note 1] The hub can only be destroyed from the Delta Quadrant terminus because 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 and 22 other crew members will die if they do not take the transwarp conduit home, and that Vulcan Tactical Officer Tuvok will become mentally unstable from a neurological condition that could have been treated in the Alpha Quadrant had they had made it back soon enough. Deeply troubled by the knowledge that she is effectively ordering the deaths of her crew, 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 her 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 and the home of the Borg Queen. Janeway appears in the Queen's mind, claiming she wants Voyager towed back to the Alpha Quadrant (apparently in defiance of the younger Janeway's plans) in exchange for Voyager's armor and torpedo technologies. However, the Queen detects 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 her bloodstream that devastates the Borg and causes the queen's cyborg components to 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 fired torpedoes at the unprotected manifolds while traveling back to the Alpha Quadrant. They are pursued by a Borg sphere that has managed to withstand the pathogen's effects and assimilate Admiral Janeway's adaptive armor upgrades. The sphere is under orders from the Borg Queen to destroy Voyager so that the Admiral (and her sabotage) will not have occurred. Unable to fight back against the sphere's defenses, Janeway takes her ship inside the sphere, where, upon its arrival one light year away from Earth's solar system, she detonates a torpedo that destroys the sphere from the inside.

In the show's final minutes, the crew stand dumbfounded that they have finally returned home after spending seven years in the Delta Quadrant and are greeted by a fleet of Starfleet vessels that had arrived to fight the Borg. Settling down in her chair, Captain Janeway issues her final orders with the same words she used at the start of Voyager's journey from the Delta Quadrant: "Set a course... for home."

It was originally expected that a character would die in order to return Voyager to Earth, with Kate Mulgrew saying in an interview that one of the characters would die in one of the final frames of the series finale – but added that it didn't mean she was saying that it would be Janeway who would perish.[1] In 2015, Brannon Braga stated on Twitter that he felt that it should have been Seven of Nine who died in the finale,[2] and that he had written the episode "Human Error" specifically to set this up.[3]

This episode won two Emmy Awards. Only four other Star Trek episodes have won this many. It won for Outstanding Music Composition For A Series (Dramatic Underscore) (Jay Chattaway) and Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Series, in both cases beating the Voyager episode "Workforce", which was also nominated in those categories. "Endgame" was also nominated for Outstanding Sound Editing For A Series.[4]

In 2015, SyFy ranked "Endgame" as one of the top ten episodes of the series.[5]

In 2016, The Hollywood Reporter rated "Endgame" the 54th best television episode of all Star Trek franchise television prior to Star Trek: Discovery, including live-action and the animated series but not counting the movies.[6] They also ranked "Endgame" the 6th best episode of the Star Trek: Voyager series.[7] SyFy ranked "Endgame" as the third best finale of Star Trek series up to 2016.[8]

SyFy recommend this episode for their Seven of Nine binge-watching guide.[9]

In 2016, Empire ranked this the 48th best out of the top 50 episodes of all the 700 plus Star Trek television episodes.[10]

In 2016, Radio Times ranked the return of the USS Voyager to Earth as the 30th greatest moment in all Star Trek, including films and television up to that time.[11]

Also in 2016, SyFy ranked "Endgame" as the 8th best time travel plot in Star Trek.[12] Captain Kathryn Janeway in "Endgame" was rated as one of the top seven time-traveling characters, in the whole Star Trek franchise by Nerdist in 2019.[13]

In 2019, Nerdist also suggested watching "Endgame" as part of an abbreviated binge-watching guide featuring USS Voyager's confrontations with the Borg.[14] That same year, they also ranked it as the 5th best time-travel episode of all Star Trek, in between “Tomorrow is Yesterday” (#6) and "All Good Things..." (#4). [15]

A novelized version of this television episode, was adapted by Diane Carey, and published in 2002.[16] Some related Star Trek episode's were also novelized, including the Star Trek: Voyager television premier "Caretaker", which was released as a 278-page novel likewise called "Caretaker", and also as an audiobook in 1995 by Simon & Schuster.[17]

In addition to the "Endgame" novel, two additional novels that were based on Voyager's return are Homecoming and The Farther Shore, both by Christie Golden.[18]

• Endgame (Stargate SG-1) (this was also the title an episode of a similarly named TV series that aired the following year)

Wikiquote has quotations related to: "Endgame"

• "Endgame" on IMDb
• Endgame title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

• "Endgame" at Memory Alpha (a Star Trek wiki)

• "Endgame, Part I" at StarTrek.com

• "Endgame, Part II" at StarTrek.com