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 While travelling together in the Type-6 shuttlecraft called Sacajawea, Janeway and Chakotay discuss the successful ship's Talent Night. The highlight was Janeway's dying swan dance which she learned when she was 6 years old - it was the hit of her beginners ballet class. They are hit by lightning during an ion storm and their shuttlecraft crashlands on a planet. Janeway is badly injured and unconscious, and Chakotay carries her out of the damaged shuttlecraft onto the stormy planet surface. Desperately he tries mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and manages to revive her.
 Finding phaser burns on the shuttlecraft's hull, he tells Janeway they were deliberately shot at, and parties of Vidiians are approaching. They take shelter in nearby caves but are cornered by a group of Vidiians. One kills Chakotay with phaser fire and another kills Janeway by throttling her.
Suddenly Janeway and Chakotay find themselves back on the shuttlecraft, having the same conversation about Talent Night as before! Barely do they start to assess the implications than they are attacked by a Vidiian warship and the shuttlecraft is destroyed.
Janeway and Chakotay back on the shuttlecraft. |
Attacked by a Vidiian warship. |
Janeway and Chakotay find themselves on the shuttlecraft discussing Talent Night! They realise they are caught in a time loop. They establish contact with Voyager and Janeway orders Tuvok to scan for temporal anomalies. They fire a tachyon burst which seems to dispel the temporal loop and two approaching Vidiian ships suddenly vanish. The shuttlecraft returns safely to Voyager.
 Back on board Voyager Chakotay unexpectedly refutes Janeway's claims about the time loop. Janeway visits Sickbay where the Doctor carries out a microcellular scan and diagnoses her as suffering from the Vidiian phage, perhaps contracted from the touch of the Vidiian whom she says was throttling her. He says hallucinations are a symptom of the disease. Fearing an evolved form of the phage which is more contagious than the previous strain, the Doctor confines Janeway to Sickbay and puts her behind a bio-forcefield. Some 40 hours later he informs her there is no cure and that the only humane thing to do is euthanasia to prevent her dying a lingering painful death. Despite her protests he fills the area inside the bio-forcefield with a neural toxin and watches her die.
 Janeway finds herself back on the shuttlecraft with Chakotay! They approach a spatial phenomenon and hypothesise this is what is causing the time loop and their strange experiences so far. But they are pulled in closer and closer to the anomaly, and then the shuttle explodes.....and suddenly Janeway finds herself suddenly back on the planet where she was "killed" by a Vidiian, but this time she is watching Chakotay who is crouched beside her prone unconscious body! Much moved, she watches as Chakotay desperately tries to revive her and watches him fail. He is totally unaware of her - for him the real Janeway is the one who has just died. He contacts Voyager and Tuvok tells him they are sending a shuttlecraft; Chakotay hopes they can revive Janeway.
Janeway returns to Voyager with Chakotay and her dead body. In Sickbay, the Doctor fails to revive her corpse. Janeway has Kes walk through her to jog her telepathic senses, and Kes reports to a senior staff meeting in the Briefing Room that Janeway is alive somewhere somehow; the others speculate on an alternate dimension. The staff resolve to scan the ship and try various methods to detect Janeway.
Janeway with her 'real' self in Voyager's Sickbay. |
Kes 'walks' through Janeway. |
As the Engineering crew start scanning the ship, her deceased father, Admiral Janeway, appears out of a growing light phenomenon! He tells her she really died in the shuttlecraft crash and he has come to help her adjust. Janeway is doubtful about his identity and refuses to accept that she is past being retrieved by her crew. Her hope of being detected by the crew vanishes when Kes, after mind-melding with Tuvok, accepts that Janeway is dead.
"Admiral Janeway." |
Janeway 'watches' Kes and Tuvok in a Vulcan mind-meld in an attempt to reach her. |
Janeway 'watches' her own coffin being sent into space. |
The crew hold a funeral service for Janeway, and she is moved by the tributes spoken by Torres and Kim. She watches as her body is sent into space inside its coffin, a photon torpedo casing. Despite this, she tells her father she is not ready to leave the crew yet to "cross over" and go with him. She believes that by staying around she can help her crew somehow, watch over them. When her father pressurises her to leave with him, she stubbornly insists she is staying put. |
 At that moment she senses that she is still in her corporeal body, and sees the faces of the Doctor, Tuvok and Chakotay bending over her. She can hear them, and learns that she is back on the planet surface and the Doctor is trying to save her life from a parasite in her brain. Her father insists what she just saw is an hallucination, but Janeway realises that her real father would not pressurise her in this way and surmises that he, the ship and the funeral service are the hallucination. In reality she is on a planet struggling for her life. She further surmises that her "father" is a hostile alien being which preys on the minds of the dying. Her "father" admits that he has assumed the form of the close kin of other dying people and only wants to help her into his matrix where she can experience everlasting joy. But Janeway realises that the alien cannot force her to leave without her consent and doubts that his matrix has anything to do with everlasting joy. Before giving up and leaving, the alien being tells her she has a dangerous profession and it will capture her one day. Janeway regains consciousness, finds herself indeed on the planet surface, surrounded by the Doctor, Tuvok and Chakotay.
The alien hallucination of Admiral Janeway tries to make her enter his matrix. |
Janeway in reality - being treated by the Doctor for shuttlecraft injuries. |
Back on board Voyager, a fully recovered Janeway is in her Ready Room. Chakotay enters and gives her a flower. To celebrate her cheating death, she set off for a midnight sail on Lake George on the Holodeck together.
 | | JANEWAY TO "HER FATHER": My father would never act like this. He always believed I had to learn my own lessons, make my own mistakes. He never tried to shield me from life. Why would he try to shield me from death? You're not my father. I could be imagining you, but I don't think so. You have such a specific agenda. You're determined that I go with you somewhere. Who are you? |
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