Star Trek: Endgame Fiction Vs. Reality

If there are three things in the Star Trek Universe that Kathryn Janeway hates: it's time travel, The Borg, and an empty coffee cup.

Sure enough, when the time came to bring Voyager's 7 year journey through The Delta Quadrant to an end, two of these three affronts to her good mood would be brought to bear. Admiral Janeway (a now devout tea drinker) travels 30 years into the past to make contact with her younger self, in a bid to bring Voyager's long trek to an early finish. Encountering The Borg and their Queen (a welcome return for the icy cold villainy of Alice Krige), the Admiral is successful in guiding the crew back to The Alpha Quadrant, and her timeline is erased.

Prior to such temporal shenanigans, we get a glimpse of life in Admiral Janeway's future in the year 2404 and, although many of the crew have found their happiness back in The Alpha Quadrant, Janeway cannot help but feel a deep pang of sadness and regret over how long their journey took, and how many were lost on the way. Owing to the divergence caused by the Admiral's unique interpretation of The Temporal Prime Directive, Voyager's crew would experience completely different lives upon their return, and these are how things played out.

What Happened In the Episode:

Taking its cue from the similarly time-twisty Next Gen finale All Good Things, Admiral Janeway's future in Endgame takes Trek uniform back to its earlier iterations. Gone are the duo-chrome styles of Next Gen and Voyager, with alternating black shoulders or bodies, to be replaced by single colour tops. The red, gold and blue colour designations remain the same, but the insignia pips have now moved down to the chest, and a flap is incorporated across the body in a similar style to those seen in the Original Series movies.

What Really Happens:

Taking a similarly back to basics approach in a more truncated timeline, Starfleet seem to have moved through their phase of simple grey with coloured collars, as seen in the Next Gen movies and later seasons of DS9, to the coloured shoulders that Voyager wore for their entire voyage.

Although not quite as far in the future, Star Trek Picard is the closest chronologically to Janeway's time of 2404, and shows the only real difference on these uniforms to by a more upright collar and insignia pips down to the chest, similar to the alternate timeline.

Time seems determined to make these Endgame/All Good Things uniforms not happen - even if a similar set appear in Star Trek: Prodigy.