Star Trek: Voyager - Plot Overview

Plot Overview

See also: List of Star Trek: Voyager episodes

In the pilot episode, "Caretaker", USS Voyager departs station Deep Space Nine on a mission into the treacherous Badlands to find a missing ship piloted by a team of Maquis rebels, which the Vulcan Lt. Tuvok, Voyager's security officer, has secretly infiltrated. Suddenly, the starship is enveloped by a powerful energy wave, which ends up damaging the ship, killing several of its crew, and stranding the ship on the far side of the galaxy, more than 70,000 light-years from Earth.

Voyager eventually finds the Maquis ship, and the two crews reluctantly agree they must join forces in order to survive their long journey home. Chakotay, leader of the Maquis group, becomes first officer. B'Elanna Torres, a half-human/half-Klingon Maquis, becomes chief engineer. Tom Paris, whom Janeway released from a Federation prison to help her find the Maquis ship, is made Voyager's helm officer. Due to the deaths of the ship's entire medical staff, The Doctor, an Emergency Medical Hologram designed for short-term use only, is employed as the Chief Medical Officer. Neelix, a Talaxian scavenger, and Kes, a young Ocampan, natives of the Delta Quadrant, are welcomed aboard as the ship's chef/morale officer, and The Doctor's medical assistant respectively.

Due to the great distance from Federation space, the Delta Quadrant is unexplored and Voyager truly is going where no man has gone before. As the ship sets out on its projected 75-year journey home, the crew passes through regions belonging to various species indigenous to the Delta Quadrant, such as the barbaric and belligerent Kazon; the organ-harvesting, disease-ravaged Vidiians; the nomadic hunter-race the Hirogen; the fearsome, scorpion-like Species 8472 from a fluid-space realm; and most notably the Borg, as Voyager has to move through large areas of Borg-controlled space in later seasons. They also encounter perilous natural phenomena such as a nebulous area called the Nekrit Expanse (episode 5x01), a large area of empty space called the Void (episode 7x15), wormholes, dangerous nebulae, and other anomalies.

However, Voyager does not always deal with the unknown. It is the second Star Trek series to feature Q on a recurring basis (Q made only one appearance on Deep Space Nine). Also, Starfleet Command learns of Voyager's survival when the ship discovers an ancient interstellar communications network that the crew is able to tap into. Starfleet develops a means to establish regular audiovisual and data contact with the ship using this network, thanks to the efforts of Reginald Barclay (who was featured more prominently on The Next Generation).

In the show's fourth season, Kes is replaced on the ship by Seven of Nine, a Borg drone (known colloquially as Seven), who was assimilated as a six-year-old Human girl but liberated from the collective by the Voyager crew. Seven begins to regain her humanity as the series progresses, thanks to ongoing efforts by Captain Janeway to show her that the perfection the Borg seek is not compatible with the imperfection of humanity; however emotions such as love and care are more important to happiness. The Doctor also becomes more human-like, thanks in part to a mobile holo-emitter the crew obtains in the third season, which allows the Doctor to roam freely whereas he was previously confined to the sickbay. He starts to discover his love for music and art, which he demonstrates in the episode Virtuoso. In the sixth season, the crew discovers a group of adolescent aliens assimilated by the Borg, but prematurely released from their maturation chambers due to a malfunction on their Borg cube. As he did with Seven of Nine, The Doctor re-humanized the children; three of them eventually find a new adoptive home while the fourth, Icheb, chooses to stay aboard Voyager.

Life for the Voyager crew continued to change over their seven-year journey. Traitors (Seska and Jonas) were uncovered in the early months; loyal crew members were lost late in the journey; and other wayward Starfleet officers were integrated into the crew. During the second season, the first child was born aboard the ship to Ensign Samantha Wildman; as she grew up, Naomi Wildman would become great friends with her godfather, Neelix. Early in the seventh season, Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres married after a long courtship, and Torres would give birth to their child in the series finale. Late in the seventh season, the ship finds a colony of Talaxians on a makeshift settlement in an asteroid field, and Neelix chooses to bid Voyager farewell and live once again amongst his people.

Over the course of the series, the crew of Voyager found a number of ways to shorten their journey by many decades, thanks to shortcuts (in the episodes "Night", "Q2"), technology boosts ("The Voyager Conspiracy", "Dark Frontier", "Timeless", "Hope and Fear"), subspace corridors ("Dragon's Teeth"), and a mind-powered push from a powerful former shipmate ("The Gift"). There were also other transportation and time travel opportunities the crew were not able to use ("Prime Factors", "Future's End"). All these efforts shorten their journey from 75 years to 23 years. However, one final effort (involving time travel) brings them home after 7 years as shown in the series finale, "Endgame".