“Year of Hell” is episode eight of season four of Star Trek: Voyager.
Day 1 opens with a strange ship hovering above a city. It fires an energy beam and the city vanishes. Not destroyed, but erased. On the ship, one person reports that the temporal incursion is complete and all organisms and manmade objects have been eradicated. A voice requests the continuum be probed to see if the target event has been achieved. It hasn’t. The leader, Annorax (Kurtwood Smith), says that time is patient and they must be patient with it. Eradicating a single Zahl colony was not enough for total restoration. They must work on a larger scale and head to the Zahl homeworld to erase the entire species from time.
On Voyager, Captain Janeway is making a speech about and in the new astrometrics lab that Harry and Seven of Nine have been working on. Their map is now ten times more accurate and a new course home, saving 5 years, has been plotted. There are a lot of M-class planets in the region, Sector 005, and the primary species is the Zahl. According to Seven, they are technologically advanced, non-confrontational and have a resistant quotient that’s quite low. The Doctor starts making a, long, speech when the bridge interrupts. They’re being hailed by a vessel of the port bow.
‘Hailed’ meaning ‘fired upon.’ Tuvok states the vessel is no threat. When contacted, the ship’s commander, the same species as the crew of the ship at the beginning, tells them they are in Krenim space. He takes the statement that this is Zahl space quite badly. His threats are empty. Now, back in “Before and After”, Kes warned Voyager about the Krenim. Odd that no-one seems to remember that now.
Day 4, and Voyager is meeting with the Zahl. The Krenim used to claim the region and dominated it for many years due to deadly weapons based on temporal science. A generation ago, they were defeated and the planets they had annexed were taken back. Their ships travel the territory making grandiose claims.
Harry informs them that the Krenim ship is back, making more threats. Then Harry detects a huge spatial distortion coming from a vessel near the Zahl homeworld. There’s a spacetime shockwave incoming, and when it hits, all the Zahl vanish and the Krenim ship grows significantly. Voyager is under fire and already damaged; they have no recollection of what just happened. The Krenim ship is still commanded by the same person but he’s much more confident. He tells them to submit to the Krenim Imperium and he will forgo execution of the crew. The Krenim torpedoes are passing through Voyager‘s shields because they are chroniton based and in temporal flux. The captain orders them to warp away and see if they can modify their shields.
On the ship from the beginning, Obrist tells Annorax that there is complete temporal restoration. Annorax says it will never be complete. But the Krenim Imperium has been restored to power. 849 inhabited worlds across 5,000 parsecs. 98% restoration. Annorax asks about a specific colony. That hasn’t been restored. He considers their mission to have failed and they need to calculate the next incursion. He isn’t willing to accept that they will never restore 100% of what they had.
Voyager is under attack and, though the aft shield of the Krenim vessel has been damaged, they have no weapons. They need to evacuate the deck sickbay is on and Janeway orders that photon torpedoes be deployed like mines. This destroys the Krenim ship, but nearly an entire deck of Voyager blows with lots hurt and killed.
The captain heads to her ready room, which is trashed, when Chakotay enters. Their temporal shielding isn’t working. Janeway says that every attack gets them more information but Chakotay warns that soon there won’t be a ship left to protect. He suggests breaking up the crew into smaller vessels and leaving the ship, rendezvousing on the other side of Krenim space. Janeway isn’t breaking them up; they will be more vulnerable and be picked off one by one. Chakotay admits he wasn’t fond of the idea.
Day 47 and Voyager is extremely battered. Harry and B’Elanna are stuck waiting for rescue and she’s injured. They are doing a trivia quiz to pass the time. The last question of Harry’s before Seven of Nine gets them out was the name of Zefram Cochrane’s ship. B’Elanna couldn’t remember and Seven of Nine answers afterwards. No, she isn’t a student of that sort of history. The Borg were present for the events described. It’s complicated (a reference to Star Trek: First Contact).
Annorax is still trying to fix time for a 100% restoration. There’s a definite feeling that it’s not 100% restoration he wants so much as a specific colony be restored. Voyager is getting increasingly battered. Could the timeline alterations have made everyone forget Kes’s warning? Seven of Nine and Tuvok share a combined moan about the untidiness of humans.
The story continues in “Year of Hell, Part II”.