Synopsis: Commander Chakotay and Ensign Kim return from the future to rescue Voyager and her crew.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of what can happen when the Logos-driven rational conscious ego incorporates bits of material from the Eros-driven irrational unconscious into itself, and how the unconscious operates differently than the conscious ego.
In “Timeless” the plot is set both fifteen years in the future and in flashbacks to what would be the current place in time for Voyager’s crew. For Voyager’s crew their timeline begins just before they use a new quantum slipstream drive to travel in a slipstream to the Alpha Quadrant. However, a phase variance is detected, which could render the drive useless. Ensign Harry Kim has an idea that if he is in the Delta Flyer in the slipstream in front of Voyager, he can send back the information to get Voyager through. Commander Chakotay and Kim enter the slipstream in the Delta Flyer, and Kim sends back to Voyager a miscalculation, which causes Voyager to fall out of it. Chakotay and Kim make it back to Earth, but Voyager is lost. Fifteen years in the future, Chakotay and Kim come back to a planet where Voyager has been buried in ice, her crew frozen inside of her. Chakotay and Kim beam aboard the ship, restore power and The Doctor’s program. The plan is to use Seven of Nine’s temporal transmitter to communicate to the crew in the past. This is against Federation and Starfleet temporal laws, but Kim is desperate to rectify his mistake from fifteen years ago which caused the death of the crew. They are aided in their plot by Tessa Omond, Chakotay’s lover. Chakotay and Kim are successful, and their current timeline, and Chakotay’s relationship with Omond, cease to exist.
In this episode what Chakotay and Kim are doing is absolutely against Federation and Starfleet temporal regulations, which can be seen here as illustrating how the conscious ego operates. Where Chakotay and Kim in other episodes would normally be embodying a representation of the conscious ego, here they symbolize how the unconscious operates by ignoring the rules the conscious ego sets down. Yet, because they are successful in restoring a past timeline, and therefore destroying one in existence for fifteen years, they are considered heroic for rescuing their comrades from death. Kim’s guilty feelings and their win by any means attitude is much more associated with how the unconscious operates rather than the conscious ego. But whether or not they should be doing what they are doing is barely alluded to at all, other than the acknowledgement that Chakotay will lose his lover, Omond. This acceptance of doing things that is not Starfleet standard can be seen as analogous to when the conscious ego acknowledges and integrates bits of unconscious material into itself to become stronger and the psyche more whole.
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