A Brief Guide to Star Trek

Roddenberry universe. The fans would have been the first people to criticize us if we had not brought something new to it. But everything new was a challenge in the early stages of development of
Voyager
.’
    One of the early promises of
Voyager
was that due to being located in an unknown area of space, it would escape all the familiar trappings of
Star Trek
beyond the ship and crew. There would be no Federation, no Starfleet, no Klingons, Romulans or Borg. New alien species and menaces would need to be created. Co-creator Jeri Taylor noted, ‘[It’s] a new universe. We have to come up with new aliens, we have to come up with new situations. We knew we were taking some risks. We decided, in a very calculated way, to cut our ties with everything that was familiar. This is a dangerous thing to do. All that wonderful array of villains that the audience has come to love and hate at the same time will no longer be there.’
    Although setting out with these radical intentions, the production team clearly found them very challenging to achieve in practice. As the series progressed, more familiar
Star Trek
elements gradually found their way into
Voyager
: the crew itself included a (half-) Klingon and a Vulcan to start with, and Romulans had appeared by the series’ sixth episode. By the series’ end seven years later, the Cardassians and the Ferengi had appeared in the supposedly unknown and unexplored Delta Quadrant, while the show itself had come to rely very heavily on repeated reappearances by the Borg (and liberated Borg crewmember Seven of Nine).
    Another failing of the series was an unwillingness to seriously tackle questions of resources. The ship is essentially lost at sea, with no way of replenishing supplies or infrastructure, despite the presence of the seemingly magical replicator device – eventhat must get its raw matter and energy from somewhere. The episode ‘The Cloud’ paid lip service to this with the crew issued ‘replicator rations’, but it was never central to the series. The holodeck seemed to be in almost constant use, with no indication of where it was powered from and whether this was a good use of resources, given the wider situation. Across the series, there should have been a gradually worsening situation shipboard for the crew of
Voyager
, with the search for resources being part of the drive of the series (something both the revamped
Battlestar Galactica
– under
Star Trek
’s Ron Moore – and
Stargate Universe
would tackle head-on).
Voyager
addressed the concept in the radical season four two-part episode ‘Year of Hell’ (originally planned as a season-long story arc, but nixed by Paramount). By focusing on selected days across a period of a full year, the story explored the impact on
Voyager
of a conflict with a Krenim military scientist who uses time as a weapon. Although the use of the traditional reset button at the end restores everything to normal, the year in which
Voyager
and the crew struggle to survive provides an example of how the series might have tackled the question of dwindling resources in a more realistic and dramatic manner.
    Captain Janeway insisted from the moment the ship was lost in space that the crew would adhere to Starfleet rules and discipline, despite their circumstances. In the series finale, a time-travelling older Janeway would criticise her younger self for making this choice, but it was the only one the show could make if it was to remain recognisably
Star Trek
. A glimpse of what
Voyager
could have been if it had taken a harder-edge look at the ‘reality’ of the ship’s situation was seen in the two-part
‘
Equinox
’
. The fifth season finale saw
Voyager
encounter another lost Federation ship, the USS
Equinox
, captained by Rudolph Ransom (John Savage). Half the crew of the
Equinox
are dead and the ship is seriously damaged. Discipline and Starfleet protocol has broken down, with the remaining crew simply focused on their own survival. As a result they have set aside the ethical questions around using a nucleogenic life form as fuel for the ship in their efforts to returnhome. Resolving the story in the sixth season opener, ‘Equinox Part II’, Ransom and Janeway must cooperate to save the ships’ respective crews from the wrath of the aliens. In the process, Ransom is sacrificed and his ship destroyed, but many of his remaining crew are saved by transferring to
Voyager
. With another push of the reset button, the surviving