Star Trek: Voyager‘s First Brush With Getting Home Is One of Its Best

Star Trek: Voyager‘s premise was both its greatest boon and its biggest curse. Flinging the titular Starfleet vessel tens of thousands of lightyears away from Federation space into unchartered territory wasn’t just a fantastic evolution of the franchise’s original intent to boldly go where no man had gone before, but a vector for fascinating story ideas about resource management, ethics, first contact, and a million other Star Trek ideas that could be re-imagined in a context where the world established in The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine was completely inaccessible to our heroes. But it also meant that whenever Voyager would inevitably float a plotline about a shortcut that would get the crew back home ahead of schedule, the audience knew immediately: it was doomed to fail. Voyager wasn’t going to suddenly come to an end in a random episode in the middle of a season, let alone just six episodes in, as was seemingly the case 30 years ago today with the premiere of “Eye of the N ... Read full article.