The Intrepid-class starship U.S.S. Voyager is suddenly thrown seventy thousand light-years off course to a far corner of the galaxy in the Delta Quadrant. It is the region of space from which the fearsome Borg Collective emanates. The ship undergoes extensive damage. Many of its officers and crew members, including First Officer Lt. Commander Cavit, played by Scott Jaeck; helmswoman Lt. Stadi, played by Alicia Coppola; the Chief Engineer; Chief Medical Officer Lt. Commander Fitzgerald, played by Jeff McCarthy; and the entire medical staff are killed. The cause of the momentous cross-galactic displacement are the coherent tetrion scanner beam and alien energy wave transport technology belonging to the Nacene Caretaker, played by Basil Langton in its holographic incarnation as the elderly country bumpkin Banjo Man.
The Caretaker is a super-advanced protector being of the Ocampa, a humanoid species with only a nine-year lifespan that leads a passive underground existence two miles below the surface of its planet. The rebellious Kes, played by Jennifer Lien, who becomes Voyager’s sick bay medical assistant, is an Ocampa.
The Caretaker, who hails from another galaxy, is dying. For decades, it has been using its massively spacetime distorting, trans-warp speeding, spaceship-snaring technology to capture specimens of intelligent species from around the Milky Way. It “samples” them for bio-molecular or genetic compatibility with itself, in the hope of copulating and giving birth to an Offspring Caretaker. The successor provider would carry on the Caretaker’s self-proclaimed indispensable work of nurturing the helpless Ocampa. It would continue to honor or ease the burden of a “debt that can never be repaid.”
More than a thousand years ago, technology belonging to the sporocystian energy-based life-form known as the Caretaker accidentally caused an environmentally catastrophic warming and drying up of the Ocampa homeworld. The mishap arrested the ability of the planet’s atmosphere to sustain elementary nucleogenic particles, which are meteorologically essential to the production of rain water.
Before expiring, the Caretaker explains to Captain Kathryn Janeway that the possibility of a procreatively fertile match with the genetic code of a human, Vulcan, or other Alpha Quadrant species member was its last hope. Following its demise, Captain Janeway is obliged to destroy the Caretaker’s giant power Array space station, using tri-cobalt weapons, to prevent the technological hub from falling into the hands of the ruthless Kazon. An aggressive and deceitful species that mines ore deposits on the desert-like surface of this star system’s fifth planet, the Kazon would surely use the energy Array’s potent capabilities to annihilate the docile Ocampa (according to the warning of the dying Caretaker).
The nomadic Kazon become staple hostile aliens on Voyager during the show’s first two-plus seasons. They have settlements on several nearby planets, and are divided into a number of rival sects: the Nistrim, Ogla, Oglamar, Pommar, Hobii, Mostral, and Relora.
The purposeful demolition of the Caretaker’s power grid, which is the outcome of Captain Janeway’s unselfish and extreme decision, brings about the eradication of the galactic-range catapulting technology possessed by the mighty guardian entity. The razed transport system, which brought Voyager to the Delta Quadrant, had still, for a brief moment, represented the Federation vessel’s best chance of returning home. With the elimination of the Caretaker’s polarized magnetic variation technology, the general premise of the third major Star Trek spinoff television series is established. The starship Voyager is definitively stranded so far away from the United Federation of Planets’ Alpha Quadrant that it will take at least seventy years to get back, traveling intermittently at maximum warp speed, or warp factor 9.975.
The surviving officers and crew of Voyager face a permanent exile, far removed from the amassed back-story collections of catalogued Starfleet vessels, cozy Federation homeworlds, and well-known alien species populating the Alpha Quadrant. For steady intimate company, they have only the outlaw Maquis, whose small ship Voyager was chasing, in an area of space with heavy concentrations of turbulent plasma fields known as the Badlands, when the trans-galactic conveyance to the Ocampa planet system occurred. The Maquis ship was also grabbed by the Caretaker from this Bermuda Triangle-like stretch of space within the Federation-Cardassian demilitarized zone. It was subsequently blown up in the deliberate three-way collision with the mammoth Kazon mother ship and the Caretaker’s power Array orchestrated by Captain Janeway. At the very last second before his ship’s destruction, the felonious Maquis Captain Chakotay beams over from disintegrating matter to the compact, high-performance starship equipped with bio-neural circuitry. Chakotay is reinstated to his last Starfleet rank of Commander, which he held as an instructor in Advanced Tactical Training at the Academy. He is given immediate assignment by Janeway as Executive Officer or Second-In-Command of Voyager.
Due to the prevailing emergency conditions and the tragic deaths of many officers and crew, Captain Janeway has no choice but to join forces with the renegade Maquis. These “freedom fighters” are a ragtag confederacy of rogue former Starfleet officers; hired mercenary commandos; and Bajorans, Volon, and Amerind (transplanted Native Americans) at war with the brutally colonizing Cardassians. The Maquis oppose the Federation-Cardassian Peace Treaty, whose significance was underscored in The Next Generation episode Journey’s End. Several former Federation colonies are caught within the DMZ that the accord implemented. They are directly exposed to Cardassian oppression, cruelties, and harassment.
An extraordinary potential for poignant drama, vigorous internecine conflicts, provocative story-lines, and conceptual and performable advancements was seemingly built into the general premise or background narrative of Voyager. Deep into unknown territories of outer space; enmeshed in a precarious, life-threatening predicament; forced into close quarters with criminals and terrorists whom they were pursuing in the Badlands to bring to Federation justice — the prerequisites for audacious creative breakthroughs could not have been better established. In the words of Captain Kathryn Janeway at the end of Caretaker, Part Two: “We’re alone in an uncharted part of the galaxy. We have no idea of the dangers we’re going to face. As the only Starfleet vessel assigned to the Delta Quadrant, we’ll continue to follow our Directive, to seek out new worlds and explore space.”
Yet the much advertised freshness or renewal of originality, the inventiveness and “sense of the sacred,” remain almost exclusively confined to the overall premise of Voyager. In the individual episodes, on the other hand, a set of techno-cultural constructor principles of perpetual recombination and game-like reiteration is operative. This is not to say that Voyager is qualitatively inferior to The Original Series. It is, on the contrary, to make the claim that Voyager, on the level of its weekly instances, belongs to a different (and complementary) cultural order of alluring fascination for its viewers. The recombinant and reiterative nature of the later series is paradoxically coupled with, rather than opposed to, the paragon of originality of the earlier Star Trek series. The real captivation and seduction of Voyager is intrinsic to its object-oriented software program-like logic of the model and the series. These two elements of the contemporary techno-cultural code coexist in a mutually generative, interdependent, and ceaselessly recycling relationship to each other. Model and series are conjoined in a redundant and tautological two-way assemblage. As cross-supportive terms inclined to rescue each other at urgent moments through reversibility, the model and the series together comprise the cultural system of Star Trek.
In books like Stephen Edward Poe’s acclaimed A Vision of the Future: Star Trek Voyager (1998), Jeff Greenwald’s Future Perfect: How Star Trek Conquered Planet Earth (1998), and Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman’s Captains’ Logs Supplemental (1996), one reads endless asseverations from the show’s Executive Producers (Rick Berman, Michael Piller, Jeri Taylor, and Brannon Braga) and other principals of how Voyager is a literary epic on the order of Homer’s Odyssey. In these accounts, the producers and main cast actors discuss interminably their recurring struggles to infuse the aura of creativity and originality into single episodes. They go on, in almost every case, to express regrets over such and such an episode failing to meet expectations. In spite of the long hours and the ardent daily efforts of the production team to recapture the spirit or attain the level of sublimity of The Original Series, there is repeated disappointment. “That’s the one that would have been classic if it didn’t have that stupid scene with [Lt. Tom] Paris in it,” laments Executive Producer Jeri Taylor, speaking about the episode Lifesigns. If only we had done this detail a little differently in that segment, then we would have had an episode of the first rank, like The Original Series.
The fact that Voyager’s main players talk so much about their aspirations to make episodes embodying fresh ideas, or manifesting important new methods and forms; and the fact that most episodes admittedly fail to live up to these towering standards of innovation are of great relevance for understanding what is at stake in recombinant Star Trek. By insisting so much on the question of the presence or absence of originality in each separate televised cultural software instance, the producers conceal the permutational functionality and real combinatorial charm of the series. They also blatantly leave open to inspection the unsurpassable role that the constant invocation of the model plays. The alleged “authenticity” of the model distributes droplets of charisma onto each newly generated item in the serial media product array. Despite the franchise spokespersons’ emphatic statements about the rapturous objectives they have in mind, Voyager belongs to a different cultural order from the one that the Star Trek producers purport to believe in. The arena of the show’s success is the system of recombinant techno-culture.
Hurled across the galaxy and forced to survive on their own wits; flung unexpectedly into what should be a situation of high dramatic tension, the Federation and Maquis officers are surprisingly at ease with themselves and each other. It is an ensemble of characters without the inner turmoil or strife required to approach the literary resonance or level of significance of The Original Series.
Far from elaborating a classically humanist narrative or poetic composition of wandering and redemption — a futuristic Odyssey, Voyager turns compulsively towards an obsession with speed. It compiles a compendium of new super-supraluminal, or faster-than-warp speed, transport technologies. This fixation is both techno-culturally symptomatic and creatively seminal for getting back to the Alpha Quadrant.
There is the tiny traversable wormhole in the episode Eye of the Needle; the Sikarian instantaneous spatial folding trajector in Prime Factors; trans-warp drive in Threshold; Ocampa telekinetic, subatomically destabilizing hyper-speed in The Gift; Borg trans-warp coils, conduits, and hubs in Day of Honor, Dark Frontier, and Endgame; Benthan coaxial warp speed in Vis à Vis; the quantum slipstream drive in Hope and Fear and Timeless; the Malon spatial vortex in Night; nucleogenic antimatter-emitting alien life-form super-fuel in Equinox; and the super-speed Turei underspace corridor network in Dragon’s Teeth.
