Star Trek: Voyager Ending Explained

“Star Trek: Voyager” debuted in 1995, making it the third show of the franchise’s most prolific heyday. “Star Trek: The Next Generation” made a hugely successful run from 1987 to 1994, and had recently moved to the big screen with “Star Trek: Generations.” In 1993, a darker counterpart to “Next Generation,” “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” debuted, setting a lot of older Trek tropes on their ear. Feeling ambitious, Trek-makers Rick Berman, Michael Piller, and Jeri Taylor tried to keep the ball rolling with “Voyager,” a more traditional series about, well, Trekking.

The premise was fun: a super-powerful alien reaches out across the galaxy and magically whisks the U.S.S. Voyager — a brand-new, super-advanced vessel — 70,000 lightyears away from Earth, depositing it in the Delta Quadrant. By Trek’s own science, 70,000 lightyears would ordinarily take 75 years to traverse, so the Voyager is essentially stranded. The series follows their long journey home. To add drama, a cadre of Federation-hating terrorists called the Maquis live on board, and it’s up to Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) to keep the peace.

The series hinted at a lack of resources, but never really got too many stories out of its initially proposed austerity. Instead, it soldiered on, sometimes running into wormholes, superfast engines, and other means to shorten its trip back to Earth. After only seven years of adventures, the Voyager made it home, as dramatized in the series finale, “Endgame” (May 23, 2001). That episode employs time travel, and advanced portal-based Borg technology to shave off the final leg of the Voyager’s voyage. In true “Star Trek” fashion, it also presents an ethical dilemma, although Captain Janeway is so brazenly defiant of rules, it isn’t much of a dilemma after all.

/Film ranks it highly.

The plot of “Endgame” is a little unusual. The episode begins with a flash-forward to the year 2404, 26 years after the penultimate episode. The characters are now older, and had happily been living on Earth for the last decade. It’s explained that the Voyager took 23 years to arrive home, a marvelous feat unto itself. Janeway is now an admiral, Harry Kim (Garrett Wang) is a captain, and the holographic Doctor (Robert Picardo) has married. In this future, however, Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) has died, leaving her would-be lover Chakotay (Robert Beltran) emotionally destroyed. 23 other members of the crew died as well. Additionally, the Vulcan Tuvok (Tim Russ) has developed a rare neurological disorder on the voyage home, something he would have been cured of back on Earth. A pity. He’s the best Vulcan of them all.

Janeway is happy she got the U.S.S. Voyager back to Earth, but feels that she could have done much better. Using an illegal time-travel widget, Janeway goes back to the year 2378 — and back out to the Delta Quadrant — to offer high-tech, futuristic aid to her younger self. Future Janeways lets Present Janeway know about a nearby enclave of hyper-advanced Borg technology that can essentially form portals in space, more or less capable of teleporting the Voyager home. It would, she argues, save them 16 years of travel. Present Janeway refuses to exploit the knowledge, however, knowing that tinkering with timelines leads to nothing but headaches. Why alter the future?

Present Janeway says that destroying the Borg portals would be more helpful to the galaxy at large — the Borg have assimilated and killed trillions of people — and the two Janeways come up with a scheme to do both.

Future Janeway equips the U.S.S. Voyager with supra-defensive technology, and the ship charges into danger. In the fracas, however, Future Janeway is captured by the Borg Queen (Alice Krige, returning from “Star trek: First Contact”)who says she’ll let the Voyager go if Future Janeway gives her the secrets of her future technology. Of course, Future Janeway knows better than to trust a deal with the Borg. The Queen, perhaps predictably, goes back on her deal and begins assimilating Future Janeway into the Borg collective. Future Janeway, however, injected herself with an advanced pathogen that instantly works its way into the Borg’s central brain, destroying it from within.

As the Borg portal transwarp hub explodes, the Voyager flies through one of the portals. There is a final battle between the Voyager and a small Borg craft inside a transwarp corridor (!), but Present Janeway expertly dispatches the ship by flying inside of it. The Voyager is victorious, and arrives close to Earth. The Borg are defeated, the future timeline is erased, and the lost crew members are saved. A 75-year voyage only took seven years.

As mentioned, there was a brief ethical dilemma when Present Janeway refuses to use futuristic technology, knowing that it would taint the flow of history. It doesn’t take very long, however, for the two Janeways to reach a compromise. In a fun twist, Present Janeway is unimpressed when she sees her future self. She’s so focused on the present, and with keeping her crew safe, that the appearance of a time traveler is tiresome to her. Just another crappy thing to deal with.

Oh yes, and Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill) and B’Elanna Torres (Roxann Dawson) have a baby during all this.

“Endgame” illustrates what might be one of the unintended themes of “Star Trek: Voyager,” namely that the ends justify the means. Janeway was always a stalwart, commanding presence, leading by her instincts and having little tolerance for pushback. Her underlings rarely gave her static, as she would override their suggestions most of the time. Over the course of “Star Trek: Voyager,” Janeway became increasingly authoritarian, often making risky decisions and putting her crew in jeopardy just because it was her decision to make. She referred to her crew as her family, but the vibe was much more “My way or the highway.”

This was the captain, after all, who more or less doomed the Ocampa by destroying the Caretaker’s array in the “Voyager” pilot episode. She once pointed the Voyager at a sun and began flying it into the corona just to get infiltrators off the ship (in the 1997 episode “Scientific Method”). Infamously, she murdered Tuvix (on “Tuvix” from May 6, 1996), a being who was born when Tuvok and Neelix (Ethan Phillips) were merged in a transporter accident.

“Endgame” shows that Janeway has a very loose moral code, and will do pretty much whatever she wants if the result is positive in the moment. She gives brief lip service to retaining the timeline and warns against the deliberate alteration of the future … before just doing it. Janeway is a wonderful character, in that she masks her authoritarianism under Starfleet ideals. As was once said on “Deep Space Nine,” it’s easy to be a saint in paradise. When your ship is stranded, and retaining the lives of the people on board is your only goal, your moral cleanliness swiftly begins to vanish. Janeway, by “Endgame” had few lines she was unwilling to cross.

Not everyone loved “Endgame.” Garrett Wang once said that the final shot of the Voyager approaching Earth was unsatisfying; he wanted to see the characters actually set foot on terra firma. Many fans found “Endgame” to be mediocre in general, ending the series with an action/adventure story rather than something complex and clever. It was also disappointing to see the Voyager finally arrive back at Earth … only to end the episode only three minutes later. There is no dramatization of their reintegration, nor do we see how they were greeted. None of the characters’ story arcs really come to a close.

In an article in the Hollywood Reporterone of the “Endgame” writers, Kenneth Biller, admitted that the three-minute epilogue was paltry at best. He felt that the climax of the series should have been … more climactic. Perhaps someone could have died to raise the dramatic stakes. Indeed, co-writer and show co-creator Brannon Braga once said that he wished Seven of Nine, the show’s emergent star, should have been killed in the climax. In a 2013 interview with TrekCoreBraga said the character was more or less designed to be killed tragically.

Some of the writers and cast members felt that if the Voyager was to return to Earth, it should have been before the final episode. That way, more time could have been devoted to reintegration. It also would have allowed more soulful moments between Future Janeway and the friends who had died in her own timeline. One would think she would pause to hug Chakotay, Seven, or Tuvok, happy to see them well. Nope. It’s all plot, all action, all business.

Although “Endgame” ended abruptly, most of the “Voyager” characters would return to the “Star Trek” franchise many years later. Janeway would return twofold in the animated series “Star Trek: Prodigy.” Mulgrew played both a holographic tutor version of Janeway, as well as the real-life version. That series also featured the return of Chakotay, now a captain, and in command of the U.S.S. Protostar.

Seven of Nine, meanwhile, would return as a main character on “Star Trek: Picard.” By the events of that series, however, she had given up on Starfleet and become a bounty hunter. After another reckoning, however, she would become a Starfleet officer again after all, serving as the second in command on the U.S.S. Titan-A. After the events of the third season of “Picard,” Seven, too, would become a captain, commanding the Titan-A after it was rechristened as the Enterprise-G.

Tuvok also appeared in “Picard,” and several “Voyager” characters have had cameos on the reference-heavy “Star Trek: Lower Decks.” In that show’s final story arc, a gaggle of Harry Kims from alternate dimensions unite in an act of comedic villainy. One of the main characters on “Lower Decks” also has a Tom Paris collectible plate, like the one the Franklin Mint used to sell. B’Elanna Torres, Neelix, and the short-lived Kes haven’t had many returns to “Star Trek,” however. It seems clear who the favorites are.