Random Roar: Why Endgame Succeeded Where Endgame Failed

 

Long time readers might recall that I’m not fond of the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Endgame”.  I discussed many of its faults back in 2019, and I always intended to follow up on the article with my idea for a rewrite.

That never happened, partially because my rewrite attempt went out of control and currently spans the entire seventh season, along with the last few episodes of the sixth.  I abandoned the project after a while, but I’ve been thinking of “Endgame” recently thanks to watching the other, much more favoured Endgame.

Avengers: Endgame feels like not only a celebration of ten years of Marvel movies, but the culmination of ten years of plot threads all coming to a climax, and if this was where the Marvel Cinematic Universe was to end… well, it would be strange, since there were always intended to be more Spider-Man, Doctor Strange and Guardians of the Galaxy films.  However, it brings a satisfying end to the Iron Man and Captain America stories, and unlike the Voyager episode, this feels earned.

For those who don’t remember, the Voyager episode involves using time travel to make things better for a group of people who started out as a fractured group of individuals who did not have a lot in common with one another and who eventually bonded into a found family that had been through many years of adventures.  Admiral Janeway goes back in time in order to undo the deaths of many of her loved ones, and she ends up defeating her greatest nemesis in the process.

It turns out that Avengers: Endgame has a strangely similar plot, right down to using time travel in order to make things better for a group of people who started out as a fractured group of individuals who did not have a lot in common with one another and who eventually bonded into a found family that had been through many years of adventures.  The Avengers go back in time in order to gain the items required to undo the deaths of many of their loved ones, and they end up defeating their greatest nemesis in the process.

So if these two plots sound so similar when boiled down like this, how come the Avengers got away with it and Star Trek: Voyager didn’t?

The biggest elephant in the room when it comes to Star Trek is how often time travel is utilized.  It doesn’t happen as often as its critics, including me, claim it does, but it happens often enough that there are a multitude of time travel episodes to choose from.  Several different starships have taken so many trips through time that you literally can’t erase even part of the prime timeline without there being dire consequences to the fabric of time and space.

Star Trek is also very flippant in its disregard for preserving future (relative to our own frame of reference) timelines if the present sucks.  There’s a scene in an episode called “Timeless” where Chakotay and Harry Kim are confronted by Captain Geordi La Forge, who points out that he has a duty to keep his crew safe and to prevent the timeline from being changed.  No doubt La Forge was reminded of the time when a con man from the 22nd Century tried to steal technology from the Enterprise and change history by selling the technology as his own inventions.  The con man was stopped and the timeline was preserved.  Sadly for La Forge, he was unable to stop the timeline from changing in “Timeless”, so who knows if he ever became Captain of the Challenger in the new timeline that was created?

This is one of the ways in which Avengers: Endgame shows compassion for those whose lives would be erased if the heroes were to go back in time and simply stop Thanos from eliminating half of all life in the universe.  Five years later, Tony Stark and Pepper Potts have a daughter named Morgan, and Tony refuses to do anything that would erase her from existence.  Instead, the Avengers find another way, one which brings back everyone who was disintegrated five years prior and which also preserves all the new lives that came into being since then.

It’s true that the method of fixing everything involves time travel, but it feels like a solution they had to work for, and one which had limitations built into it.  For one thing, they couldn’t just keep going back in time if something didn’t work.  The disappearance of certain key allies meant that their method of time travel, which involved the Quantum Realm and thus necessitated the use of Pym Particles, was limited by their supply of said particles.  If they ran out of Pym Particles before they could secure what they needed to reverse what Thanos did, they would never be able to undo the damage he caused.  When one of the Infinity Stones does end up out of reach, Tony Stark and Steve Rogers take a chance and jump further into the past, risking everything on a Hail Mary that pays off.  This is a time travel story done right.  It shouldn’t be easy to go back in time and there should be risks involved.

In fact, this is probably the main reason why I prefer the Avengers’ take on the story.  Everything felt earned.  The Star Trek: Voyager version felt like cheating.  Not just because time travel had gotten to the point where you could just use a time machine, but also because Admiral Janeway had a couple decades worth of technology she was able to use against a Borg Collective that wasn’t ready for her.  Admiral Janeway from many years in the future was fighting the “present day” Borg Queen who had no way to look into the future and thus no way to prepare.  The final battle of Avengers: Endgame involved fighting a Thanos that was stronger than before and who had been armed with knowledge of his future, but the Avengers themselves had gotten stronger as well, and had all of their allies restored to life by that point (except for Vision and Black Widow, for obvious reasons).  They didn’t take with them any advantages that we hadn’t already seen ourselves.  For example, Steve Rogers used knowledge gained from Captain America: The Winter Soldier to earn the trust of people who would be revealed to be Hydra agents in that movie.  A well placed “Hail Hydra” in the right ear can do wonders.  He also was the only member of the Avengers (other than Vision) to have been shown to affect Thor’s hammer, Mjöllnir, in Avengers: Age of Ultron, so seeing him use it against Thanos felt right.

I don’t dislike time travel stories, and when done right, they can be entertaining.  There were some pretty good time travel stories in Star Trek: The Next Generation, for example.  Not all time travel stories are created equal, but my dislike of “Endgame” doesn’t prevent me from liking other stories in which time travel is a factor, and I think Avengers: Endgame is perfect in that regard.