Startrek Voyager

Star Trek: Voyager is a science fiction television series set in the Star Trek universe. Set in the 24th century from the year 2371 through 2378, the series follows the adventures of the Starfleet vessel USS Voyager, which becomes stranded in the Delta Quadrant 70,000 light-years from Earth while pursuing a renegade Maquis ship. Both ships' crews merge aboard Voyager to make the estimated 75-year journey home.The show was created by Rick Berman, Michael Piller, and Jeri Taylor and is the fourth incarnation of Star Trek, which began with the 1960s series Star Trek, created by Gene Roddenberry. It was produced for seven seasons, from 1995 to 2001, and is the only Star Trek series with a female captain, Kathryn Janeway, as a lead character.Voyager aired on UPN and was the network's second longest-running series....

Production

Voyager was produced to launch UPN, a television network planned by Paramount. This was the second time that Paramount had considered launching a network anchored by a Star Trek show: the studio planned to launch a network showcasing Star Trek: Phase II in 1977.

Initial work on Voyager started in 1993, and seeds for the show's backstory, including the development of the Maquis, were placed in several Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episodes. Voyager was shot on the stages The Next Generation had used and the pilot, "Caretaker", was shot in October 1994. Around that time, Paramount was sold to Viacom, making Voyager the first Star Trek TV series to premiere after the sale concluded.

Voyager was also the first Star Trek TV show to eliminate the use of models for exterior space shots and exclusively use computer-generated imagery (CGI) instead. Other television shows such as seaQuest DSV and Babylon 5 had previously used CGI exclusively to avoid the huge expense of models, but the Star Trek television department continued using models, because they felt models provided better realism. Amblin Imaging won an Emmy for the opening CGI title visuals, but the weekly episode exteriors were captured using hand-built miniatures of the Voyager, shuttlecraft, and other ships. That changed when Star Trek: Voyager went fully CGI for certain types of shots midway through Season 3 (late 1996). Paramount obtained an exclusive contract with Foundation Imaging, the studio responsible for special effects during Babylon 5's first three seasons. Season 3's "The Swarm" was the first episode to use Foundation's effects exclusively. Deep Space Nine started using Foundation Imaging in conjunction with Digital Muse one year later (season 6). In its later seasons, Voyager featured visual effects from Foundation and Digital Muse.

Plot overview

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 The Doctor, an Emergency Medical Hologram designed for only short-term use, 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.[4]

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, a large area of empty space called the Void, 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 and situation, initially when the ship discovers an ancient interstellar communications network that Voyager taps into, and eventually after Starfleet develops a means to establish regular audiovisual and data contact with the ship thanks to the efforts of Reginald Barclay, who was featured more prominently on The Next Generation.

In the show's fourth season, Kes leaves the series after experiencing a transformation due to her increasing psionic abilities, while the crew grows to include Seven of Nine, a Borg drone, assimilated as a six-year-old Human girl but liberated from the collective by the Voyager crew. Seven begins to expand (or rather, regain) her humanity as the series progresses - as does The Doctor, 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 sickbay. 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 cube-ship. As he did with Seven of Nine, The Doctor de-assimilates 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 find a number of ways to shorten their journey by a number of 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"....