A Brief Guide to Star Trek

intention to set out to explore new frontiers and introduce new ideas into
Star Trek
,
Voyager
had come to rely pretty heavily on some very old concepts and characters for its storytelling.
    For the finale, Alice Krige returned from
First Contact
to take over the role of the Borg Queen from Susanna Thompson. Although she didn’t want to watch Thompson’s take on the role, Krige did read the scripts of previous Borg Queen episodes in order to get up to speed on story developments. ‘I read all of the
Voyager
episodes that the Borg Queen was in’, she told startrek. com, ‘but I didn’t watch them. I didn’t want something in my head, in my imagination. I needed my performance to happen in the moment, and I didn’t even watch
First Contact
again.’
    ‘Endgame’ had an unusual structure, beginning in a future in which
Voyager
has already successfully made its way home to Earth. It’s now 2404 – the tenth anniversary of the ship’s return from its twenty-three-year journey back to the Alpha Quadrant. The older Admiral Janeway uses adapted Klingon technology to travel back in time to a period when
Voyager
was still lost in space, hoping to help her younger self use stolen Borg technology to speed up
Voyager
’s return home. She’s trying to change the past because in her original return, Seven of Nine, Chakotay and twenty-two other crewmembers were killed while Tuvok suffered an irreversible neurological condition. The younger Captain Janeway prefers to use the technology from the future her older self has provided to destroy a major Borg transwarp hub (a kind of Borg transit station that will allow them to spread across the galaxy). In an attempt to achieve both aims – destroy the Borg and get the ship back home – Admiral Janeway allows herself to be assimilated by the Borg Queen, only to infect theBorg with a neurolytic pathogen she has been carrying in her bloodstream (an echo of the climax of the Founders story arc on
Deep Space Nine
). At the same time, Captain Janeway uses the Borg’s transwarp corridor to blast the ship back to Earth, destroying the last Borg sphere in the process.
    Alongside that main story, several other characters have varying degrees of closure with the birth of a daughter for Paris and Torres, and a late-blossoming romance for Seven of Nine and Chakotay, while Tuvok continues to suffer from a degenerative brain disease. In the aborted future shown at the beginning of the episode, Harry Kim is in command of his own starship, the USS
Rhode Island
, while the holographic Doctor has finally chosen a name for himself: Joe. In an echo of
The Next Generation
, the series ends with the same line delivered by the same character that closed the pilot episode, ‘Caretaker’. Captain Janeway says: ‘Set a course . . . for home.’
    Actor Robert Beltran was an outspoken critic of the way
Voyager
ended, and was clear where – in his view – the responsibility for the relative creative failure of the show lay. ‘Frankly, I don’t think [the writers] really cared what happened at the end.
Voyager
has been the ugly stepchild of the
Star Trek
family, and that’s the way we’ve been treated. From mid-season onwards I kept waiting for them to start making a move towards wrapping up some of these story arcs, but they didn’t. [This] was meant to be about nine people on the ship, trying to get through some really extraordinary circumstances. Frankly, I’m not sure what it ended up being about. [They] had a whole year to prepare, but they waited until the final two episodes to fix things. To me, that’s just a symptom of their uncaring cavalier attitude towards the show.’
    Although it has its followers and fans – as do all the individual incarnations of
Star Trek
, even the once-derided
The Animated Series
–
Voyager
is largely regarded as a creative failure. Ratings-wise, the show did all right and managed to support an entire network for seven years.
    So what went wrong?
Voyager
quickly abandoned so much that had been set up in ‘Caretaker’. The rebel Maquis faction wasquickly assimilated into the crew, while the vast, unexplored region of the Delta Quadrant managed to feature many friends and foes from
Star Trek
’s collective past. Beltran was probably right to complain about the poor development of his character. Despite his rebel origins and ethnic difference, Chakotay became – in the long run – simply another Starfleet officer. In Gene Roddenberry’s utopian