star trek captain ransom

• Buy the Book…
• Reviews Hub

the m0vie blog

Following Us

• Adding Our RSS Feed to Your Gmail
• Following our Feed in Internet Explorer
• Millennium (Reviews)
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (Reviews)
• Star Trek: Enterprise (Reviews)
• Star Trek: The Next Generation (Reviews)
• Star Trek: The Original Series (Reviews)
• Star Trek: Voyager (Reviews)
• The X-Files (Reviews)
• X-Files Fandom Poll Form

Check out the Archives

Awards & Nominations

Star Trek: Voyager – Equinox, Part I (Review)

Equinox, Part I works better than it should.

Equinox, Part I is sustained by three important factors. The most obvious is the premise itself. Equinox, Part I and Equinox, Part II tell a story that is baked into the DNA of Star Trek: Voyager , and it is surprising that it took the production team five years to tell it. Secondly, Equinox, Part I and Equinox, Part II have the luxury of a fantastic supporting cast with John Savage and Titus Welliver playing the two most senior officers on the eponymous ship. The third factor is a sense of momentum, with Equinox, Part I and Equinox, Part II moving at a tremendous pace.

A Captain’s Ransom.

These three factors compensate for a lot of potential flaws. Equinox, Part I is an episode of television that spends forty-five minutes consciously building towards its cliffhanger. There is nothing wrong with this approach. Many of the best Star Trek cliffhangers, especially season finales, are structured as relentless build-up. The Best of Both Worlds, Part I builds to Picard’s assimilation and Riker’s command. Call to Arms builds to the Dominion retaking the station and war being declared. Equinox, Part I builds to the reveal of what Rudolph Ransom did.

Equinox, Part I is an episode that works as sheer and unrelenting build-up.

Too many captains.

Equinox, Part I and Equinox, Part II flow from the premise of Voyager in a number of interesting ways. Most superficially, Equinox, Part I features the first mention of the Caretaker since Night , which provides an interesting book-end to the fifth season. It is surprising that the Caretaker has been such a fringe figure in the mythology of Voyager , given his introduction in the first episode of the series and his importance to the overall mythology. The Caretaker is only mentioned on a handful of occasions across the seven-year run of Voyager .

The Prophets occupy an equivalent position in the mythology of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine , and they served as major players from Emissary through to What You Leave Behind . The Prophets play a key role in the core arc of Deep Space Nine , in episodes like Rapture , Sacrifice of Angels ,  The Reckoning , Image in the Sand , Shadows and Symbols and Penumbra . However, the Prophets also play important roles in episodes that are not explicitly about furthering that arc. They play a part in episodes like Prophet Motive . They are always present.

A Rudy good Captain.

In contrast, the Caretaker seems like an underutilised aspect of Voyager ‘s core mythology. The character’s mate was discovered in Cold Fire , but his actions are only fleetingly mentioned as background material in episodes like Projections , The Voyager Conspiracy , Muse and Endgame . There is a reason for this. In A Vision of the Future , writer Stephen Poe acknowledges that the Caretaker was originally intended as a “get out of jail free” card for the series:

In the corporate world this is known as CYA – Cover Your Ass. The “entity” is a nice little “out” to have lying in the weeds out there somewhere, just in case they need it. If viewer feedback, surveys, and focus groups indicate the series needs to make a fundamental shift, well, they can make contact with this other entity and get home faster than viewers can switch channels.

This explains the production team’s reluctance to explore the implications of the Caretaker, although it seems at odds with the use of Q as a recurring character in episodes like Death Wish , The Q and the Grey and Q2 ; it is well-established that Q is just as capable of getting the ship home with a click of his fingers, but it seems like Janeway never bothers to ask him.

A conversation with himself.

At the same time, the Caretaker seems like a bit of a wasted plot device. The entity plucked Voyager out of the Alpha Quadrant and dumped it in the middle of the Delta Quadrant. What else did the Caretaker abduct? Where else did the Caretaker abduct these aliens from? Just how far could the Caretaker reach? Just what else is floating in the Delta Quadrant, lurking the darkness? The Caretaker is thousands of years old, so what else has the character done in those millennia? What consequences accrue from his actions?

Equinox, Part I uses the Caretaker as a convenient plot device, much like Dreadnought did in the second season. Still, it is an interesting acknowledgement of the show’s history, taking the audience (and the characters) back to the events of Caretaker . The fifth season of Voyager is arguably more focused on the series’ history than any other season; Night finds Janeway reflecting on her decisions since Caretaker , Extreme Risk deals with the destruction of the Maquis, Dark Frontier, Part I and Dark Frontier, Part II reveal the real first contact with the Borg, Relativity revisits Voyager’s launch.

A hole load of trouble.

As such, Equinox, Part I feels like a logical conclusion to the fifth season from a thematic perspective. When Voyager finds another Starfleet vessel afloat in the Delta Quadrant, it provides a strong connection back to Caretaker . This connection is affirmed when the two captains ask each other how they came to be stranded in the Delta Quadrant. They both land on the same name at the same time, “Caretaker.” The Equinox did not drop through a wormhole like the Ferengi in False Profits , nor did it wander into the unknown like the Klingons in Prophecy .

The Equinox has the same origin as Voyager, rendering its name (and the episode’s title) distinctly ironic. The word “equinox” suggests two oppositional forces in equilibrium; a perfect balance between day and night, between light and dark. As such, Equinox, Part I suggests that Captain Rudolph Ransom and the crew of the USS Equinox represent shadow counterparts to Captain Kathryn Janeway and the crew of the USS Voyager. Voyager represents the best in people, Equinox represents the worst. Thrown into the same situation, one prospers while the other collapses.

In darkness dwells.

Equinox, Part I stresses these similarities. “The Equinox is a Nova class ship,” Janeway explains to Chakotay and Seven. “It was designed for planetary research, not long range tactical missions.” This recalls the fact that Voyager itself was originally intended for a short-term recovery mission, a fact repeated as recently as  Relativity . Similarly, Janeway categorises Ransom as a scientist. “He was an exobiologist, promoted to Captain after he made first contact with the Yridians.” This recalls Janeway’s own history as a scientist-turned-captain, again emphasised in  Relativity .

This manifestation of the Equinox as Voyager’s shadow-self represents the culmination of another key theme running through the fifth season of Voyager . Closely connected to the nostalgia permeating the season, the fifth season is populated with alternative versions of Voyager and her crew. Dark Frontier, Part I and Dark Frontier, Part II reimagines the Borg Collective as a matriarchy designed to help Seven of Nine actualise, The Disease features a generational ship on a long journey, Course: Oblivion features a literal copy of Voyager and its crew.

It’s probably best not to force (field) the issue.

As such, Equinox represents the ultimate counterpart to Voyager. It is a ship that operated from the same core premise, that of a lone Starfleet science vessel lost in the Delta Quadrant. However, it developed in a completely different direction. As Brannon Braga explained to Cinefantastique , this was the hook from which Equinox, Part I evolved:

“We knew we wanted to do a cliffhanger,” said Braga. “We decided that we were not going to take the ship home, which is not precluded from happening. I had this image, a ship of people who were stuck in the Delta Quadrant almost as long as we have been, maybe a bit longer, but they have not responded the same way. They’ve done some very, very bad things, including mass murder.”

The Equinox crew have done horrific things in order to survive, made awful compromises in order to stay afloat. Equinox, Part I hints at these decisions quite early in the episode, consciously building toward a series of shocking revelations. The discovery of the Equinox is originally cause for celebration on Voyager, but that joy quickly turns sour as Ransom’s sins come to light.

Here there be monsters.

The contrast between Voyager and the Equinox draws attention to a central tension within Voyager itself. One of the big issues with Voyager from the outset has been the show’s narrative conservatism. Voyager is a series about two crews trapped on the opposite side of the galaxy, with Starfleet and the Maquis forced to work together to get home across seventy thousand light-years of potentially hostile space. This mix of officers and terrorists are embarking upon a long journey, with most estimates suggesting that it will take the ship around seventy years to get home.

In theory, this should make Voyager unique. It should serve to distinguish the ship from the other Star Trek settings. After all, Janeway is not a captain on a mission of exploration, she is a leader trying to get her crew home. That crew includes aliens and terrorists, people who never served in Starfleet and who washed out of the Academy. Combined with the fact that Janeway is a relatively inexperienced commanding officer, one with more experience in the science  than the command division, Voyager should be a very unconventional Star Trek series.

Was it really that hard, Rudy? I mean, you weren’t even the captain who got landed with a bunch of terrorists.

However, from the outset, Voyager has been very clear that it aspires to be “business as usual” in terms of Star Trek storytelling. By the time that Parallax began, the Maquis were wearing Starfleet uniforms and the holodecks were working. The first season made it very clear that the Maquis would be expected to fall in line with Starfleet discipline and that Starfleet’s principles would not be compromised. State of Flux revealed the character of Seska to be a subversive element, but immediately cast her off the ship. Learning Curve had the Maquis learning to be Starfleet officers.

Janeway has always followed Starfleet protocols, even in the depths of the Delta Quadrant. The Prime Directive prevented any hints of compromise in Prime Factors , while Janeway diverted Voyager off-course to follow through on a secret protocol in The Omega Directive . At the same time, Voyager very seldom gave its characters any reason to question their principles. Outside of plot-driving fuel shortages in episodes like Phage or Demon , or occasional references to “replicator rations” , the Starfleet crew never seemed to want for anything.

Commanding attention.

The writers pulled their punches, never throwing the ship into a crisis that required compromise or sacrifice. The ship was torn apart in Year of Hell, Part I and Year of Hell, Part II , but the damage was conveniently reset at the end of the two-parter. The mutiny in Worst Case Scenario was purely holographic. The plot always bent in such a way as to justify the show’s strange creative choices; Parallax insisted that the holodeck’s energy grid was incompatible with the rest of the ship’s systems, Prime Factors revealed the alien technology was incompatible with Voyager.

In some ways, Voyager had it easy. Equinox, Part I acknowledges this repeatedly through the survivors from the other vessel. “Such a clean ship,” reflects Gilmore as she tours Voyager. “I mean, I’m used to falling bulkheads and missing deck plates.” Later, Ransom bristles at Janeway’s indigence. “It’s easy to cling to principles when you’re standing on a vessel with its bulkheads intact, manned by a crew that’s not starving,” Ransom states. Janeway dismisses his criticism. “It’s never easy.” However, there is some sense of truth to Ransom’s argument. Janeway doesn’t know what desperate is.

“If I’d ended up on Battlestar Galactica, they’d understand.”

This is a theme that echoes through the fifth season. The fifth season marked Brannon Braga’s first season as showrunner on Voyager , despite exerting a heavy influence on the direction of the show through scripts like Future’s End, Part I , Future’s End, Part II , Scorpion, Part I and Scorpion, Part II . Braga had long envisaged a gritty approach to Voyager , a storytelling style with more moral ambiguity and compromise than the earlier seasons had allowed. Although Braga never quite got to realise that vision, traces of it bled through in a handful of early fifth season episodes.

Indeed, traces of Rudolph Ransom can be seen in some of Kathryn Janeway’s decision-making in Nothing Human or Latent Image . In Nothing Human , Janeway subjects Torres to a medical procedure against her will for the good of the ship; Ransom does something similar to Seven of Nine in Equinox, Part II . In Latent Image , it is revealed that Janeway deleted some of the EMH’s memory files in order to preserve his utility to crew; it is revealed that Ransom did something similar to his own EMH near the climax of Equinox, Part I .

“Well, except for that time I forced a crew member to undergo surgery against her will and reprogrammed my EMH. But nothing that you could empathise with, Rudy.”

However, Equinox, Part I never acknowledges Janeway’s moral ambiguity. Indeed, the episode paints Janeway as a paradigm of virtue that is very much in keeping with her by-the-book characterisation during the Piller and Taylor years. “I’d like to ask you something, captain to captain,” Ransom inquires early in the episode. “The Prime Directive. How often have you broken it for the sake of protecting your crew?” Janeway responds, “Broken it? Never. Bent it on occasion. And even then it was a difficult choice.”

It should be noted that Janeway’s moral certainty is hard to square with the character as overseen by Brannon Braga. Janeway has been party to all manner of morally questionable decisions; from allying with the Borg in Scorpion, Part I and Scorpion, Part II , to providing the Hirogen with holodeck technology in The Killing Game, Part I and The Killing Game, Part II , to surrendering a weapon of mass destruction (and potentially genocide) to an alien species in Infinite Regress . As such, Janeway’s moral certainty in Equinox, Part I seems somewhat hypocritical.

Betraying core principles.

Then again, Janeway’s position is very much in keeping with the conservative streak that runs through Voyager . As Diana M. A. Relke argues in Drones, Clones, and Alpha Babes , it could reasonably be argued that the conflict between Janeway and Ransom in Equinox, Part I is in someways a metaphor for the culture wars waging in American popular consciousness during the nineties:

Similarly stranded in the Delta Quadrant, the Equinox has fared poorly – and not just because the ship is technologically less well endowed than Voyager. The Equinox has suffered terrible losses, not the least of which is the moral compass of its Captain, Rudy Ransom. Ransom remembers what the Prime Directive is – indeed, it still weighs on his conscience, although it no longer informs his leadership. He exploits his crew’s disciplined respect for the chain of command: like Doctor Crusher, they obey hem because he’s the Captain. Thus has he overriden their scruples and involved them in slaughtering aliens, whose corpses are then converted into a powerful fuel for enhancing the performance of their warp engines and speeding up their return to Earth. When Janeway discovers that Ransom has betrayed every Federation principle she has struggled to uphold, she is so furious that their argument degenerates into the polarised one of rigid moral absolutes versus complete moral relativism, the issue at the very heart of the American culture wars. In essence, theirs is a nasty conflict between humanism at its worst and postmodernism take to its amoral extreme – an interesting departure from Picard’s ongoing debate with Q in TNG.

Voyager tends towards rigid moral absolutes. One of the more consistent recurring anxieties running through the seven seasons of Voyager is a fear about the Holocaust slipping from living memory; this is a fear reflected in episodes like Remember and Memorial . Episodes like Distant Origin and Living Witness rail against postmodernist attempts at historical revisionism, insisting that the past is absolute, no matter how malleable it might appear.

“Don’t worry. Voyager has worked so hard to build a recurring cast that I am absolutely certain that we will be seeing these characters for years.”

Equinox, Part I and Equinox, Part II play as a broad condemnation of the very idea of moral relativism, structured as a retroactive defense of every decision that Janeway has made. Ransom is not a ghost of Christmas Past, but a spectre of Christmas Might-Have-Been. Ransom is a cautionary tale of the dangers inherent in moral compromise. Equinox, Part I and Equinox, Part II suggest that any moral compromise just paves the way for further moral compromise, and that the slippery slope is a sheer drop.

Equinox, Part I establishes that Ransom and Janeway deviated quite early in their journey. Comparing notes, Ransom admits that the Equinox crew “haven’t seen so much as a Cube since the day we arrived.” There is no mention of the Kazon, but it seems like Ransom was plagued by a different war-like species on his arrival in the Delta Quadrant. “Have you ever run into the Krowtonan Guard?” he asks. “That’s how we spent our first week in the Delta Quadrant. They claimed we violated their territory. I gave the order to keep going. I lost thirty nine.”

What the Burke is up with this guy?

In Equinox, Part I and Equinox, Part II , broken social norms are the twenty-fourth century equivalent of Pringles. Once Rudolph Ransom pops, he just can’t stop. Equinox, Part I and Equinox, Part II suggest that even the most harmless of deviations from standard operating procedure can lead to horrific consequences. Tellingly, Janeway’s first real sense that something is wrong on the Equinox comes when Lieutenant Maxwell Burke refers to him as “Rudy.” This is the first broken social norm, and Janeway makes a point to draw attention to it.

“I couldn’t help but notice your crew calls you by your first name,” Janeway observes. Ransom responds, “When you’ve been in the trenches as long as we have, rank and protocol are luxuries. Besides, we’re a long way from Starfleet Command.” Janeway is not convinced, perhaps because it runs counter to life on Voyager. “I find that maintaining protocol reminds us of where we came from and hopefully, where we’re going.” It is this conversation that sets Janeway and Ransom at odds with one another.

Note to self: execute Chakotay the moment he starts calling me ‘Kat.’ Need to send a strong message to the crew.

Equinox, Part I and Equinox, Part II suggest a weird equivalence between this relaxation of command protocol and everything that is exposed after that point. Equinox, Part I and Equinox, Part II suggest that a willingness to abandon a rigid chain of command leads to anarchy, suggesting that Ransom started down the path to mass murder the moment that he allowed his first officer to call him “Rudy.” In the world of Voyager , there can be no compromise. Even the slightest deviation from established procedure is a horrific transgression.

All of this plays as an implicit defense of the Voyager ‘s conservatism; as though, were Janeway to allow the Maquis crew to exist outside of the rigid Starfleet hierarchy, Voyager would only be a few weeks away from building an engine powered by dead aliens. By this logic, Voyager adheres so strictly to Starfleet (and Star Trek ) conventions because they are the only things that prevent human beings from acting like animals. This is arguably a much more cynical view of humanity than that suggested by Deep Space Nine .

Modelling alternatives.

Rudolph Ransom’s rapid descent into moral oblivion is very much in keeping with the outlook of Voyager as a television series. More than any other Star Trek series, Voyager is inherently conservative. The brutal condemnation of moral relativism in Equinox, Part I is in keeping with that conservatism. As Jonathan Merritt notes :

Moral relativism has been a conservative boogeyman since at least the Cold War. Conservative stalwarts like William F. Buckley claimed that liberals had accepted a view that morality was culturally or historically defined—“what’s right for you may not be right for me”—instead of universal and timeless. It’s true that the ethical framework was en vogue, particularly in places of higher education. Liberal college professors stocked conservatives’ arsenals with copious quotes to back up the claim that a squishy, flimsy understanding of morality had taken root in America.

Voyager tends towards an absolutist view of morality, a belief that any moral compromise will lead to disaster. This argument was reinforced in episodes like Alliances , where Janeway briefly considers bending the Prime Directive in order to make peace with the Kazon. Inevitably, all of Janeway’s worst instincts about the Kazon are validated and her earlier refusal to compromise is vindicated.

A panel of experts.

It should be noted that Voyager was broadcast during the late nineties, during a particularly heated phase of the culture wars. Equinox, Part I aired in May 1999, only a few months after the Impeachment of President Bill Clinton . This was a highly emotional period in American politics. Clinton himself has suggested that his impeachment was rooted in morality, a condemnation of his extramarital affair . Those conservatives prosecuting Clinton in the court of public opinion claimed to be acting on behalf of a “moral majority.”

When Bill Clinton survived the impeachment proceedings, some conservative activists were disheartened and claimed that this loss represented a slide in moral decay. Paul Weyrich contended that American culture “has decayed into something approaching barbarism.” However, other conservative voices were invigourated. Shortly after the impeachment hearings, Texas Governor George W. Bush was building his presidential campaign around a doctrine of “compassionate conservatism.”  Bush would go on to win the 2000 Presidential Election.

“And this is the best UPN reception you can get, Seven?”

It is interesting to contrast the absolutist morality of Voyager with the more relativist approach of Deep Space Nine . Although Deep Space Nine was never as cynical as most of its detractors would claim, its morality was a lot more nuanced than that of Voyager . Perhaps the most obvious example is In the Pale Moonlight ; the episode’s most chilling implication was that Sisko was only retroactively trying to impose moral certainty upon his actions, to cover for the fact that he had waded far deeper into moral compromise than he originally intended. Sisko did not know his own limits.

Often, Deep Space Nine confronted characters with tough moral choices that had no clear “right” answer. Sisko had to choose between murdering a squadron of Jem’Hadar in cold blood and sacrificing his own men in Rocks and Shoals , Bashir had to weigh the question of sacrificing more lives in the short-term to save more lives in the long-term in Statistical Probabilities , Worf had to choose between letting Dax die and saving a Cardassian defector in Change of Heart . These are harrowing choices, much more daunting than any choice that Janeway faces on Voyager .

“Why, you have a trustworthy face. Let me tell you about this really cool thing that may be of interest to you, member of unscrupulous and murderous crew.”

However, Deep Space Nine rejects the idea that these tough moral choices lead directly to a moral event horizon. The characters on Deep Space Nine might make moral compromises, but they pointedly reject crude utilitarianism. When Bashir discovers that rogue elements of the Federation have attempted genocide against the Founders in When It Rains… , the rest of the cast are horrified. In What You Leave Behind , the Dominion War ends with an act of compassion and reconciliation, with Odo delivering the cure to the Female Changeling.

As such, it is interesting that Voyager should produce Equinox, Part I just as Deep Space Nine reaches the end of its run. The season finale represents a firm rejection of the ethical nuance of Deep Space Nine . According to Equinox, Part I , the moral universe can be cleanly divided between Captain Janeway and Captain Ransom. There is no ambiguity between them, no shades of grey to divide them. The production team attempt to add some moral shading in Equinox, Part II , but the follow-up struggles in part because it runs so firmly counter to the moral certainty of its predecessor.

“I mean, have you even thought about the environmental implications of this fuel? You monster.”

Of course, Equinox, Part I had a troubled production. It arrived at the tale end of a chaotic season. As Joe Menosky explains to Cinefantastique , the episode was written very quickly and against a very tight deadline:

Explained Menosky, “By the time we got to the end of the season, we were all really exhausted. We didn’t know what in the world we were going to do for the last episode. Brannon and Rick Berman worked out some of this episode. We probably had a week to go before prep, before Brannon came up with an idea that was workable. I just had no hope for it at all. It had the feeling of elements stitched together without a driving point of view [with a] haphazard and clunky structure and story.”

Television production is a tough business, particularly coming to the end of a twenty-odd episode season. The production team on Voyager knew these difficulties first-hand; the bulk of Someone to Watch Over Me was filmed before the ending had even been written.

Heart of darkness.

This haziness is quite apparent watching Equinox, Part I . The season finale is very much an exercise in mood and tone more than story. This is no bad thing. The writers on Voyager have a tendency to focus on plot and action ahead of concerns like theme and character, which can lead to some disjointed storytelling. Often, Voyager seems to cram too much plot into forty-five minutes of television, often twisting and turning along the way. Voyager very seldom allows its plot points room to breath, instead moving along to the next reveal or the next development.

Equinox, Part I is very much an exercise in mood and tone, something reinforced through David Livingston’s direction and Jay Chattaway’s score. The early sequences on board the Equinox capture a sense of unease and creeping dread, a feeling that something horrific has happened on this ship even before the details become clear. Equinox, Part I is ominous and claustrophobic, playing like a horror movie even when the aliens are off-screen. The sets are flood with dry ice, lit sparingly in shades of green, and shot from dutch angles.

Shedding some light on the matter.

Equinox, Part I introduces the Equinox as a ship of the damned, establishing a subtly different tone than the deep-space madhouse featured in Equinox, Part II . Despite the fact that it is a Federation ship, the Equinox looks and feels completely alien. It is dark and foreboding. Debris is everywhere. Even the touchscreens are smeared with dirt and grime. It is closer to the aesthetic of something like Alien or Battlestar Galactica than the usually sterile surroundings of Star Trek .

The plot of Equinox, Part I is fairly simple and straightforward, but the episode works in large part because of its tone. There is an immediate sense that something is “off” about the Equinox and her crew. It initially seems like post-traumatic stress disorder, but it keeps building. Even before the details of their atrocities are revealed, the Equinox crew are conspiring and scheming. “If Janeway’s any indication, these people will never understand,” Ransom warns Burke, without specifying exactly what it is the Voyager crew will not understand.

A Lessing well learned.

Indeed, this sense of tone causes more difficulties reconciling Equinox, Part I and Equinox, Part II . Most obviously, Captain Rudolph Ransom feels like a different character in either half of the two-parter, a plot function bent into whatever shape the story demands. In Equinox, Part I , Ransom is wholeheartedly committed to his cause and bitterly self-righteous. Ransom casually steals a chip from Burke’s lunch while being vague and sinister. Ransom rebukes Burke for eyeing up Voyager’s female crewmembers. “Once we get back to Earth, there’ll be plenty of women.”

Equinox, Part I uses Ransom as a way to establish tone and drive the episode’s central mystery. He is not a particularly nuanced character, in spite of John Savage’s performance. Ransom is a man hiding a secret, and a man willing to do whatever it takes to complete his mission. The version of Ransom introduced in Equinox, Part I has no time for self-doubt or introspection, even though his soul-searching would make more sense during the slow-burn investigations of Equinox, Part I than during the high-stakes chase of Equinox, Part II .

(Ran)som man for one man.

Watching Equinox, Part I and Equinox, Part II back-to-back, it is quite clear that the two episodes were never conceived as a single story. Equinox, Part I and Equinox, Part II both feel loose and improvisational. As Menosky explained to Cinefantastique , the episode was largely written on the fly:

“We clarified the structure halfway through the writing of it. Instead of sitting down and outlining it, and then writing it, we just wrote it. We didn’t even know really where we were headed. We would just write a scene and think what would be cool to come next. We wrote it in a way that was very satisfying creatively, in terms of how the episode and the story actually spun itself out. By the end of the episode, I was really happy with it. It completely surprised me.”

This loose approach to plotting is obvious when Equinox, Part I and Equinox, Part II are watched back-to-back, but are also quite evident even within Equinox, Part I . The very late introduction of evil! EMH in Equinox, Part I is quite clearly a desperate write-around to break Ransom out of captivity.

No need to get bent out of shape.

As a result, there are any number of plot threads seeded in Equinox, Part I that do not pay off in  Equinox, Part II . The relationship between Burke and Torres suggests an interesting source of tension in Equinox, Part I , but it disappears into the background for all but one short scene in  Equinox, Part II . The script for  Equinox, Part II needs to come up with a post hoc justification for why Ransom cannot simply warp away into the distance at the end of  Equinox, Part I . The overall plotting of the two-parter is inelegant to say the least.

However, Equinox, Part I is structured in such a way that it hangs together quite well. For the most part, the plot developments feel organic: the ease with which Burke suggests trapping the aliens in this dimension hints that the Equinox crew have a lot of experience in that area; Gilmore insists that certain technology could not be adapted for Voyager; despite Ransom’s casual allusion to a “wormhole” , it seems unlikely that the Equinox could have made it this far this quickly under its own power. As a result, the episode’s twists fit logically within the framework established.

“Computer, set lighting to mood.”

Production on Equinox, Part I was reportedly quite frantic. In an interview with Cinefantastique , guest star John Savage acknowledged that the on-the-fly nature of the scripting was part of the appeal for him:

They needed a captain. They didn’t have a story yet, and I was excited. It evolved, and every day, a new set of pages. I found quite an interesting moral struggle in the story. It wasn’t simple, and it was very supported.

There are cases where this approach to storytelling can be disastrous. Deep Space Nine had felt a similar crunch during the middle of its final season with Prodigal Daughter , Field of Fire and The Emperor’s New Cloak . However, Equinox, Part I seems energised by this seat-of-the-pants approach.

Where there’s alien residue…

It helps that writers Brannon Braga and Joe Menosky ported over a lot of the core elements from Scorpion, Part I and Scorpion, Part II . This makes sense. Scorpion, Part I and Scorpion, Part II provided the best season-bridging cliffhanger of the seven-year run of Voyager , if not the best two-parter of the entire series. If Equinox, Part I was to be produced under pressure and to a deadline, Scorpion, Part I and Scorpion, Part II could provide a fairly solid structural template for the story being told.

Equinox, Part I borrows a great deal from Scorpion, Part I . Both episodes feature a new computer-generated menace attacking from another dimension, creatures that seemingly have the capacity to kill with a single swipe. ( Equinox, Part I suggests that the touch of the aliens is fatal; the creatures become a lot less fatal in Equinox, Part II , once the primary cast start coming into contact them.) Indeed, the sense of dread permeating the away team mission to the Equinox in Equinox, Part I recalls the same tension during the mission to the Borg Cube in Scorpion, Part I .

Warped perspectives.

Although Equinox, Part I never matches the momentum or tension of Scorpion, Part I , it does have one key advantage. As Menosky conceded to Cinefantastique , the episode has the luxury of a great supporting cast:

For Menosky, the show’s saving grace was a bigger cast. Noted Menosky, “One of the things that is very typical to this series is two alien guest stars, two new sets, maybe a couple of opticals, or the exterior of the planet. When you see that over and over again, it gets really tiresome to watch, and tiresome to write. One thing this did have going for us is that we had four major speaking roles. We had John Savage, who is a really good actor, and other good actors.  As a result we could have interesting character dynamics. You could follow threaded, character arcs in a way that felt bigger than a single episode.”

To be fair, Gilmore and Lessing are pretty bland; the two disappear into Voyager’s lower decks at the end of Equinox, Part II . However, the two major guest characters in Equinox, Part I and Equinox, Part II are played by John Savage and Titus Welliver.

It’s a crewl world out there.

Savage and Welliver do an excellent job fleshing out characters that are not particularly well-defined by the script. Savage lends Ransom a more introspective quality than is typically afforded Starfleet captains, a stillness and a quietness that serves to distinguish him from actors like Shatner, Stewart, Brooks, Mulgrew and Bakula. Savage is also noticeably shorter than Shatner, Stewart, Brooks and Bakula; this particularly clear when he is standing next to Welliver. The result is to suggest that Rudy Ransom is quite different from most of the other  Star Trek captains.

Savage is essentially a character actor, as demonstrated by his long and distinguished career in supporting roles. Equinox, Part I and Equinox, Part II struggle to provide a clear sense of Ransom’s character. He spends so much of Equinox, Part I as an ominous and mysterious figure that his change of heart in Equinox, Part II comes out of left field. However, it is to the credit of John Savage that the character works as well as he does. Savage suggests that there is a lot going on inside Ransom, even if the scripts never convincingly externalise that.

A commanding performance.

Given both the quality of Savage’s performance and the intriguing concept driving the character, it makes sense that Rudolph Ransom has become a popular character outside of his two television appearances. Savage announced plans to reprise the role in a fan film, Equinox: Night of Time , in January 2014 . The fans even hoped to present the fan film to CBS as a potential pilot for a spin-off series . Ultimately, the idea went nowhere. In March 2016, it was announced that Savage would be reprising the role on audio rather than on film .

Equinox, Part I is a mess of an episode, but one held together by a quality supporting cast, an intriguing premise, and a sense of sheer momentum to the cliffhanger. It doesn’t work perfectly, but it works enough.

Share this:

Filed under: Voyager | Tagged: braga , equinox , janeway , john savage , moral absolutism , moral relativism , rudy ransom , star trek , star trek: voyager |

15 Responses

Reblogged this on O LADO ESCURO DA LUA .

Like much of Voyager, I’ve not seen these since they originally aired. At the time part one aired, I found myself thinking that it would have been nice if Voyager had acknowledged and faced some of the hardship that the Equinox alludes to. I’m not saying that we have Janeway and company abandon the Starfleet ideals they’re trying to live up to and maintain, but at least have given some lip service to the idea of when and if the Prime Directive can or should be broken.

Yep. The big issue with Equinox is that it makes this contrast binary, when it should be more nuanced and complex. Ransom isn’t a rogue or a renegade. Ransom is a mass murderer, and Equinox equates that with him allowing his crew to call him “Rudy.”

Two very good episodes. I wish that Voyager had showed us the crew and ship getting this battered and tested for a couple of seasons at least. Year Of Hell and these episodes give us a taste of what this series could have been like if done right.

I much prefer the first part to the second, but it is very much a tease of what might have been for Voyager.

This was the kind of obvious idea which fandom really responded to; it was Voyager’s last great gasp, the final time Trek fandom was actually enthusiastic about the program and talking it up (then part 2 aired).

This is good by Voyager standards (damning with faint praise) but would have been absolutely stellar if the writing had been willing to confront the fact that Janeway has (as Darren has noted) committed various immoral and anti-PD acts for the sake of her crew. Instead hiding behind the Prime Directive, I would have liked to see Janeway draw a line in the sand that, for all the compromises she had made, she would never go as far as Ransom. Instead, utter hypocrisy and absolutism. Much like ‘Alliances,’ the script makes the error of treating Janeway and the Prime Directive as infallible.

That’s fair. The concept is simplistic, to the point it’s surprising that it took the show five years to do this story. And you’re right about the moral simplicity here. It’s black and white. It’s either “all Prime Directive, all of the time” or “engine run on dead aliens.” There is no middle ground. It’s clumsy and it’s awkward. And it feels like the Voyager writers trying to justify their conservative approach to narrative. “See, Janeway couldn’t let the Maquis wear their own uniforms, or she’d be building an engine powered by dead aliens.”

Darren, have you seen ST: Discovery? I don’t want to spoil too much, but a major plot element that comes up in the series is eerily reminiscent of the plot of Equinox.

I doubt that the writers were using Equinox as inspiration, and I have a feeling that it’s more likely that it’s just a case of Star Trek having 800+ episodes and eventually every possible plot point has been done to some degree (for example, from the trailer, Ep 5 of Discovery looks like it will be quite similar to a well-known TNG episode).

Overall I liked Equinox, since it’s really a very clever premise. As always, it’s too bad that Voyager never really came back to it later on (for example, when they communicate with Starfleet, you’d think they could mention ‘By the way, most of Equinox’s crew never made it, just in case you were looking for them too. Did anyone else get pulled in by the Caretaker who we should keep our eyes out for?’).

Yep. I mean, I think the smartest thing that Discovery did was to shift focus away from the bridge crew and pick a focus character outside the clique. That means you can tell old stories in a new way. I mean, Magic to Make the Sanest Man go Mad is not an original concept by any measure, but the spin on it feels fresh within the Star Trek franchise, particularly the ease with which the show and the characters accept the trope and use it to tell a character-focused story. It’s not original, but it’s also a far cry from the awkward recycling that was so common on Voyager and Enterprise.

I haven’t seen the 2 most recent episodes, but Magic to Make the Sanest Man go Mad was the first Discovery episode that I would give an ‘A’, even if it’s a rehash of older concepts, since it’s a really creative and engaging episode that is fundamentally about the character relationships (the ‘magic’ in the title is (I think) Burnham coming to terms with developing feelings for someone). It reminds me of the DS9 time travel episodes, where the focus wasn’t on the ‘sci-fi’ element but instead on the character stories that it enabled.

Yep, the “O’Brien must suffer” episodes, in which the hook is not the high concept anomaly of the week, but how these strange science-fiction elements impact on the day-to-day lives of the characters who get caught in the middle of everything.

I have just been re-watching voyager due to lock down. and got really annoyed at the fact that BLT are not B’Elanna Torres initials.

Janeway is a huge hypocrite in this episode, considering she traded the murder of 8472 and the empowerment of the Borg, just so she could take a shortcut through their space. She’s made bargains and exchanges just as bad. She lives in a moral funhouse and the writers can’t even see the dilemma they’ve made in their own writing.

Through out this episode, I had the feeling that a show called “Star Trek: Equinox” would possibly have been far more interesting to watch, lol.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with Dungeons & Dragons, but I would frame the alignment of Voyager as a show to be Lawful Neutral, with order and organization more important than anything else. TNG (and to a lesser extent TOS) was more Lawful Good, believing in people’s inherent virtue while also believing in the virtue of the Federation as an ideal, and DS9 was Neutral Good, deeply suspicious of organizations but believing that people could strive for virtue, regardless.

Leave a comment Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

Recent Posts

• 375. Monsters, Inc. – Ani-May 2024 (#200)
• 373. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (#225)
• 371. Poor Things (#246)
• 370. Dune: Part Two (#12)
• 369. Memento (#57)

Recently tweeted…

• "I Simply Am Not There": The Existential Horror of Eighties Excess in "American Psycho"...
• Adding Our RSS Feed to Your Gmail
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (Reviews)
• "They Are Touching Things!" The Aviator, and the Yearning for Human Contact...

Available at…

Blogs Well Worth Your Time

• 1001 Must See Films
• Andrew at the Movies
• Anomalous Material
• Cut the Crap Movie Reviews
• Encore Entertainment
• Fandango Groovers
• FlixChatter
• Four of Them
• It Rains… You get Wet…
• Jameson Cult Film Blog
• Jar Watches Films
• Let's Go To The Movies
• M. Carter at the Movies
• Marshall and the Movies
• Movie News First
• Musings from a Man Lost in La Mancha
• Never Mind Pop Film
• Paragraph Film Reviews
• Roger Ebert's Journal
• Ross v. Ross
• Scannain.com
• Screenwriter (Donald Clarke, Irish Times)
• Strange Culture
• The Film Cynics
• The Pompous Film Snob
• The Projection Booth
• Things That Don't Suck
• Too Busy Thinking About My Comics
• Undy a Hundy

Film Nerd Resources

• CinemaBlend (News)
• Internet Movie Database
• Rope of Silicon
• The Guardian Film Blog
• James Berardinelli
• Roger Ebert

Email Subscription

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address:

Sign me up!

Blog at WordPress.com. WP Designer.

• Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
• Subscribe Subscribed
• Copy shortlink
• Report this content
• View post in Reader
• Manage subscriptions
• Collapse this bar

Star Trek: Voyager (TV Series)

Equinox (1999), john savage: captain rudy ransom, photos .

Quotes 

Captain Rudy Ransom : It's easy to cling to principles when you're standing on a vessel with its bulkheads intact, manned by a crew that's not starving.

Captain Kathryn Janeway : It's never easy, but if we turn our backs on our principles, we stop being human.

Captain Kathryn Janeway : I'm putting an end to your experiments, and you are hereby relieved of your command. You and your crew will be confined to quarters.

Captain Rudy Ransom : Please, show them leniency. They were only following my orders.

Captain Kathryn Janeway : Their mistake.

Captain Rudy Ransom : When I first realized that we'd be traveling across the Delta Quadrant for the rest of our lives, I told my crew that we had a duty as Starfleet officers to expand our knowledge and uphold our principles. After a couple of years, we started to forget that we were explorers, and there were times when we nearly forgot that we were human beings.

Captain Rudy Ransom : Starfleet Regulation 3, paragraph 12: "In the event of imminent destruction, a captain is authorized to preserve the lives of his crew by any justifiable means."

Captain Kathryn Janeway : I doubt that protocol covers mass murder.

Captain Kathryn Janeway : I couldn't help but notice, your crew calls you by your first name.

Captain Rudy Ransom : When you've been in the trenches as long as we have, rank and protocol are luxuries. Besides, we're a long way from Starfleet Command.

Captain Kathryn Janeway : I know the feeling.

Captain Rudy Ransom : You seem to run a pretty tight ship.

Captain Kathryn Janeway : We've been known to let our hair down from time to time, but I find that maintaining protocol reminds us of where we came from, and hopefully where we're going.

Captain Rudy Ransom : [before being led away]  It's a long way home, Captain.

Release Dates | Official Sites | Company Credits | Filming & Production | Technical Specs

• Full Cast and Crew
• Release Dates
• Official Sites
• Company Credits
• Filming & Production
• Technical Specs
• Plot Summary
• Plot Keywords
• Parents Guide

Did You Know?

• Crazy Credits
• Alternate Versions
• Connections
• Soundtracks

Photo & Video

• Photo Gallery
• Trailers and Videos
• User Reviews
• User Ratings
• External Reviews
• Metacritic Reviews

Related Items

• External Sites

Related lists from IMDb users

Recently Viewed

• Show Spoilers
• Night Vision
• Sticky Header
• Highlight Links

Follow TV Tropes

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/StarTrekVoyagerS5E25S6E1Equinox

Recap / Star Trek: Voyager S5 E25, S6 E1: "Equinox"

Edit locked.

This episode provides examples of

• Action Prologue : Equinox under attack.
• Burke calls B'Elanna " BLT " (her initials) and she calls him " petaQ ". When Tom shows symptoms of jealousy over this, Harry calls him "Turkey Platter" (TP being his initials).
• Ape Shall Never Kill Ape : The nucleogenic lifeforms don't believe that humans would really attack other humans, although a quick perusal of any era of human history could clear up that misconception.
• Armor-Piercing Question : After Ransom okays operating on Seven and tries to cover with I Did What I Had to Do . Seven: You destroy lifeforms to attain your goals, then claim that they left you no choice. Does that logic comfort you?
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking : Seven forgives the Doctor for turning evil and doing unauthorised brain surgery, but gets a little of her own back by claiming that his rendition of My Darling Clementine was off key. The Doctor challenges her to a duet.
• Asshole Victim : The Equinox crew that mutinied against Captain Ransom following his Heel–Face Turn , including B'Elanna's old flame.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership : Turns out that there's a Starfleet regulation (specifically Regulation 191, Article 14) stating that in combat situations, the captain of the more heavily-armed ship has overall command. In real-world militaries, it's usually the senior captain who would make the final call, based on date of promotion. (Although the episode's novelization reveals that Janeway only quotes half the regulation, and it doesn't actually allow her to order Ransom and his crew to Abandon Ship .) As Reviewboy summarizes, "When you're flying Brute Force One , you call the shots."
• "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word : When asked, Janeway tells Ransom that she's never broken the Prime Directive , just... "bent" it on occasion.
• Bond One-Liner : After the Doctor deletes the Equinox ' EMH and shuts off the transmission to Burke. Doctor: I'm afraid your physician is no longer on call.
• Broken Pedestal : Ransom is famous in Starfleet for rediscovering a species thought to be extinct and making first contact with them; as a fellow scientist, Janeway always wanted to meet him. Be Careful What You Wish For ... And it turns out that he's been killing sentient lifeforms to use as fuel, violating his oath as a Starfleet officer. Janeway's ensuing Death Glare is almost as deadly as the nucleogenic lifeforms.
• The Chains of Commanding : Ransom cites these for his actions, maintaining that getting the paltry survivors of his crew home necessitated using sentient creatures as fuel. Janeway doesn't buy it for a minute.
• Change the Uncomfortable Subject : When Janeway asks Ransom about his Prime Directive violations, he says something ambiguous about "walking that line once or twice" before drawing attention to the fallen dedication plaque on The Bridge .
• Cliffhanger : An alien swoops down on Captain Janeway... To Be Continued .
• Recognizing that Equinox is otherwise no match for Voyager , Burke has his EMH transmit information about Voyager's Deflector Shields , allowing Equinox's torpedoes to penetrate those shields and damage Voyager directly.
• After earlier being outsmarted by the Equinox 's EMH, The Doctor wins round two by simply telling the computer to delete its program.
• According to Star Trek: Insurrection , thermolytic reactions are very bad for organic beings. This episode shows why — anyone who gets hit by one of the subspace aliens suffers a thermolytic reaction that leaves their body desiccated like a mummy.
• To Star Trek: Generations , wherein an enemy vessel knowing a Federation starship's deflector shield frequencies can shoot right through them and inflict damage directly, which is what led to the end of the Enterprise -D. Here, the Equinox EMH takes a less subtle approach of directly reporting Voyager 's shield frequencies straight to his vessel's bridge, at least until the Doctor returns to his sickbay and deletes his Evil Counterpart to put a stop to it.
• Much as in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan , the protagonists' ship fatally disables their target (also Starfleet) vessel by destroying its port warp nacelle, from behind, using a torpedo.
• A random line near the end of Part 1, stated from Captain Ransom, asking is his alternative to being destroyed, "Thirty years in the brig," seems to be a major easter egg to a line Janeway says in a dream sequence in the episode, "Thirty Days", earlier in that season. Coincidence, I think not!
• The regulation that Janeway quotes which gives her overall command is apparently the same one that allowed Captain Picard to take command of the Starfleet armada in Star Trek: First Contact , as the new Enterprise -E was the most powerful Starfleet ship on the battlefield.
• Critical Staffing Shortage : Equinox is running on a skeleton crew, especially since they went through over half of their Red Shirts only a month after getting pulled into the Delta Quadrant. On the other hand, the survivors help alleviate Voyager 's problems in this area, once they've been knocked down a few pips.
• Cuteness Proximity : Everyone's general reaction to "Captain's Assistant" Naomi Wildman introducing herself to Ensign Gilmore.
• Cutting the Knot : Rather than fight the Equinox EMH for control of his sickbay, The Doctor simply tells the computer to delete him.
• Distinction Without a Difference : When Chakotay says that she's getting a little vendetta-y, Janeway says that she's simply going to hunt Ransom down "whatever it takes, no matter the cost" as though that's not the very definition of the word "vendetta".
• Don't Make Me Destroy You : Ransom would prefer Seven to voluntarily give up the codes she used to lock the Equinox crew out of their alien-powered propulsion system rather than watch the Doctor dissect her brain for them.
• Dressing as the Enemy : The Equinox EMH poses as his Voyager self to free his crewmates in Voyager's brig.
• Seven forgives the Doctor for his actions, and they make a date for some Duet Bonding on the holodeck. This one at least has the excuse of Seven knowing the fact the doctor was more or less brainwashed.
• Despite spending most of the second half baying for his blood, one conciliatory hail from the deposed Ransom is all it takes for Janeway to decide he's acting in good faith again.
• Janeway and Chakotay also resolve their falling-out after a short discussion about their actions and the symbolic way the ship's nameplate fell off the wall. This in particular is said to be one of the things that soured Ronald D. Moore on writing for the show, as he just found it completely ridiculous, even going so far as to write on the episode's script "This is a total betrayal of the audience. This is wrong. You can't end the show like this. If you are going to do all this other stuff, you can't end the show like this, because it's not fair, because it's not true, and it just wouldn't happen."
• Averted with the survivors of the Equinox . They all become stripped of rank and with limited privileges aboard Voyager . Janeway makes it clear that she regrets trusting them off the bat and that it'll probably take a long time and significant effort on their part for her to deem them trustworthy.
• End of an Age : "Equinox: Part I" was the last Voyager episode to air concurrently with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . "Equinox: Part II" was the first time since the 1992 Star Trek: The Next Generation two-part episode "Chain Of Command" where only one Star Trek series was on the air at a given time.
• Energy Beings : The nucleogenic lifeforms; in fact it was because of this trope they were used as a sort of Living Battery by the Equinox crew.
• Even Evil Has Standards : As ruthless as he is, even Ransom is so disturbed by the EMH singing in harmony with a half-lobotomized Seven that he has to leave the room.
• Evil Counterpart : The Equinox has its own Mark One EMH without ethical subroutines , and who seems as loyal to his crew as Voyager ' s Doctor is to theirs. Of course, given how Ransom treated his EMH, it's doubtful that the Equinox Doctor developed genuine loyalty as Voyager 's did, and more likely that it was programmed into him, making the dark inversion even greater.
• Expository Hairstyle Change : Roxann Dawson gets a new wig which is more wavy than her previous straightened 'do.
• Fallen Hero : Captain Ransom of the Equinox went from a respected Starfleet captain to a man authorizing the systematic murder of sentient beings for the benefit of his crew.
• Finish Dialogue in Unison : Janeway: We've been stranded in the Delta Quadrant for five years. We were pulled here against our will by an alien called— Ransom/Janeway: ...the Caretaker.
• First-Name Basis : Janeway notices that Ransom allows the Equinox crew to address him by his first name. (She is also on first-name basis with her senior staff, but they haven't entered first-name basis with her except for Chakotay.) Ransom: When you've been in the trenches for as long as we have, rank and protocol are luxuries.
• Frictionless Reentry : Averted. When Voyager catches up to the Equinox in orbit of a planet, Ransom has the ship fly into the atmosphere so Voyager will have to pursue. With Voyager still being harassed by the aliens, they can't afford to stress their shields trying to keep up, allowing Ransom to make a getaway.
• Going Down with the Ship : Ransom dies piloting his ship a safe distance away from Voyager as the aliens breach the warp core.
• Good Cop/Bad Cop : Janeway and Chakotay interrogate Lessing. Janeway wants Lessing to give her the tactical status of the Equinox 's captain, Ransom. She threatens to lower the shields in the room, which would allow the aliens an opening to get through and attack him, while she and Chakotay leave the room. Lessing demonstrates his familiarity with this trope, looking at Chakotay and asking "I suppose the plan is that you're going to come to my rescue now, right?" Chakotay, however, admits that "There's no plan as far as I know. The Captain's on her own." When Lessing continues not to talk, Janeway and Chakotay leave the room and Janeway proceeds to do just what she said she was going to do, shocking Chakotay, who thought she was only bluffing. Chakotay ends up going in there to rescue Lessing. (He does crack, but not before being badly spooked.)
• Hallucinations : Ransom tries to escape his conscience in his Happy Place , a personal holoimager, but keeps running into a hallucination of Seven of Nine there that acts as his conscience. It eventually turns into one of the nucleogenic aliens for a Jump Scare .
• Ransom after seeing hallucinations of Seven and a nucleogenic alien.
• Janeway admits at the end that Chakotay had good reason to oppose her as she was slowly becoming Ransom (The end justified the means).
• Hell Is That Noise : The extra-dimensional aliens have to open portals into our universe to attack. When a portal forms, the first thing people hear is a high-pitched, whining hiss. It's pretty creepy for the characters, who are asking, "WHERE IS IT? WHERE IS IT?". If they aren't fast enough, it's the last sound they'll hear.
• He Who Fights Monsters : Janeway slides down the rungs as she relentlessly pursues Ransom.
• Hope Spot : In the penultimate act of part I, the crimes of Ransom and his crew are exposed and they've been locked up, Janeway and her officers are looking for a way to communicate with the creatures, and a peaceful resolution seems imminent. Then the Doctor is disabled by his Evil Twin who releases Ransom and the others from confinement, and then they escape on the Equinox with Seven as their prisoner, leaving Voyager under attack. To Be Continued ...
• Hourglass Plot : Ransom and Janeway swap roles in the second episode, with Janeway feeling the pressure and compromising her ideals, while Ransom rediscovers his humanity.
• Humans Are Bastards : The Equinox crew systematically capture, kill and process the nucleogenic aliens to speed the ship and crew's flight home. As a result, it's understandable why the aliens end up with a massive grudge towards them and their ship.
• Hyde Plays Jekyll : The EMH from the Equinox forcibly trades places with the Doctor on Voyager . In Part I, he helps free his shipmates under the guise of the Doctor, and in Part II, he periodically advises them about Voyager 's plans. After he's brought back to normal on Voyager , the Doctor lampshades this, saying "It's quite disconcerting to know that all someone has to do is flick a switch to turn me into Mr. Hyde.".
• Hyperspeed Ambush : Voyager catches up to Equinox during the climax and destroys one of her nacelles with a couple of torpedoes.
• I Can't Feel My Legs! : Noah Lessing when Harry and Seven find him. Fortunately, his legs are still there, and he's later seen moving under his own power.
• Ice Queen : Seven becomes one of these as she remains Defiant to the End towards Ransom, Burke and their crew. Burke: You might try letting your shields down, or it's going to be a lonely trip.
• I Did What I Had to Do : Janeway doesn't buy it when Ransom tries to justify his actions via the Starfleet rulebook. Ransom: Starfleet Regulation 3, Paragraph 12: "In the event of imminent destruction, a captain is authorized to preserve the lives of his crew by any justifiable means." Janeway: I doubt that protocol covers mass murder. Ransom: In my judgement, it did. Janeway: UNacCEPTable !
• I Have You Now, My Pretty : Captain Ransom is clearly taken by his beautiful captive, and offers to replace Janeway as a role model, but Seven coldly refuses him and continues to appear as a hallucination to needle Ransom's conscience.
• Insignia Rip-Off Ritual : The Equinox survivors are stripped of rank and turned into ordinary crewmen. Janeway: The last time we welcomed you aboard, you took advantage of our trust. You betrayed this crew. I won't make that mistake again. Noah Lessing, Marla Gilmore, James Morrow, Brian Sofin, Angelo Tassoni, you are hereby stripped of rank. You'll be expected to serve as crewmen on this vessel. Your privileges will be limited, and you'll serve under close supervision for as long as I deem fit. This time, you'll have to earn our trust. Dismissed.
• I Owe You My Life : Averted. While Lessing expresses his gratitude to Seven of Nine, his "Angel of Mercy." he doesn't make a quip about her predicament even though it more than likely the fact she about to be dissected is common knowledge on the Equinox crew.
• It Can Think : The first sign that the aliens are intelligent is when they deliberately focus their attacks on a single area of Voyager's shields, collapsing it in seconds and nearly breaking through if not for some quick thinking by Harry.
• Ransom and the Equinox crew have been doing this for a while, starting from using the remains of a nucleogenic alien that died due to bad luck, and moving to systematically capturing and murdering the beings to supercharge their warp drive for a quick(er) flight home.
• Janeway then does this in response, with her Roaring Rampage of Revenge on the Equinox and her crew leading to progressively darker places.
• Just Following Orders : Ransom pleads for leniency for his crew, saying they were only obeying their captain. Janeway's response: "Their mistake." She does show some leniency towards the survivors — that is, stripping them of rank and putting them to work under close supervision for the foreseeable future rather than throwing them in the brig.
• Karmic Death : Certain crew members of the Equinox , prominently Lt. Burke, got seriously owned by the very aliens they were using.
• Knockout Ambush : Tom and Chakotay pull this on Lessing and an Equinox Red Shirt in order to capture them for interrogation.
• Know When to Fold 'Em : Since Equinox isn't built for combat, Ransom's trademark is a willingness to hide and wait out his opponents rather than risk a direct confrontation. This is entirely sensible, considering the only chance he has against Voyager is when they have a mole on board sending the shield frequencies so their attacks can get through.
• Last Words : Ransom: You've got a fine crew, Captain! Promise me you'll get 'em home! Janeway: I promise.
• Loophole Abuse : Ransom, when called out by Janeway on his killing the aliens, invokes a Starfleet regulation permitting a captain to take any justifiable action to stave off the imminent destruction of their ship. Janeway quickly points out that no sane person would consider mass-murder a "justifiable action".

• Men Are the Expendable Gender : Subverted in that out of the entire Equinox crew, only five of them survive, and out of those five, only one of them (Marla Gilmore) is a woman.
• The Mole : The Equinox EMH poses as our Doctor on board Voyager , sending information on Voyager ' s Deflector Shields to Burke during their final battle.
• Mood Dissonance : Ransom is disturbed by Seven Strapped to an Operating Table , mindlessly singing a duet with the Mad Doctor who's operating on her brain.
• Morality Chip : Both the Equinox and Voyager EMH's have their ethical subroutines deleted by the Equinox crew.
• Moral Myopia : Ransom calls out Janeway's moral preaching over his escalating to mass murder against a sentient species to convert their corpses into warp drive fuel, completely overlooking the consequence of his forsaking any sense of morality being that said sentient species members are now out for all his crew's blood, and have been terrifyingly effective at exacting their vengeance.
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate : The EMH aboard the USS Equinox had his "ethical subroutines" removed so he would gladly experiment on the extradimensional aliens to turn them into a fuel source. The Doctor likewise becomes fully willing to dissect Seven's brain to get access to the codes stored there when Ransom does the same to him, despite their being friends (and his unrequited love for her).

• Names to Run Away from Really Fast : Captain Ransom? Sound like a character our heroes can trust !
• New Old Flame : For BLT. Too bad he turns out to be a treacherous jerk who'd rather let her become a victim of the aliens that were attacking them.
• Noodle Incident : Early in their voyage, the Equinox encountered a species called the Krowtonan Guard. Nothing is mentioned about them except that they are very territorial, and Ransom's decision to cross their space cost the lives of over half his crew.
• The Oner : One of Trek's greatest, clocking in at 2 minutes and 40 seconds; for the entire final scene, the camera follows Janeway from the conference room, where she scolds the Equinox survivors and strips them of their rank, into the bridge, where she reconciles with Chakotay before they notice that Voyager's commemoration plaque has fallen off its place on the wall.
• Perp Sweating : Captain Janeway threatens to let the aliens have their way with an Equinox crew member she captured to make him start talking. Chakotay thinks this is going too far and ends up getting the information out of the crew member without letting the aliens get at him.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child : Or in this case, dead aliens.
• Redemption Equals Death : Captain Ransom beams Seven and all but his bridge crew to Voyager before allowing the aliens to destroy his ship. Since Equinox has disabled Voyager , his last act is to pilot the ship far enough away so Voyager isn't caught in the blast.
• Red Shirt : In addition to all the casualties on the Equinox , several nameless crewmembers on Voyager bite the dust, one of whom flatlines in Sickbay before the EMH can be brought back online.
• Revealing Cover Up : The Equinox crew deliberately flooded the science lab where they conducted experiments on the nucleogenic aliens with harmful radiation to keep the Voyager crew from learning about their crimes. However, B'Elanna and Tuvok see through the ruse, and send the Doctor over to poke around and find out what they're so desperate to hide.
• Revenge Before Reason : Janeway fully admits that she's going to get Ransom no matter what it takes. She eschews Chakotay's suggestion that they prioritize communication with the aliens in favor of hunting down the Equinox , which is what they have to resort to in the end anyhow.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge : The aliens mercilessly attack the Equinox for killing several of their own. When Voyager flies in to help, her crew become targets as well.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale : The Equinox met the Ankari more than 10,000 light-years from where they meet Voyager , but Janeway is later able to meet with them within 50 light-years. It is stated that the Equinox met them on their home world. They are a spacefaring race, and Voyager meets one of their ships. But the group Janeway meets seem to know all about what has been going on (though given that they can communicate with the nucleogenic aliens, that's not surprising)
• Shell-Shocked Veteran : Marla Gilmore panics in turbolifts because they have no escape route in case fissures open up.
• Soundtrack Dissonance : In-Universe — while lobotomizing Seven, the Doctor sings "Clementine" and an improvised variant of "Dem Bones." Ransom is clearly disturbed by it.
• Status Quo Is God : Ronald D. Moore was furious over how the Janeway/Chakotay conflict was just dropped at the end of the episode and never brought up again. Neither do we hear about the former Equinox crew who are on probation, even in "Good Shepherd" which deals with several problematic crewmembers.
• Subverted Catchphrase : The Equinox EMH posing as the Doctor, seeing Voyager 's sickbay littered with casualties. "Please state the nature of the... [looks around] don't bother."
• Tastes Like Friendship : At the end of the episode, Janeway and Chakotay reconcile by agreeing to bring salad and croutons to Neelix's potluck.
• Temporarily a Villain : The Doctor is reprogrammed to perform unethical-at-best medicine by Ransom.
• Too Dumb to Live : When the Doctor makes his way back to Voyager (with his return restoring his ethics), the Equinox -EMH threatens to destroy him by saying he's planted explosives throughout the holomatrix and all it will take is a signal — "Computer, delete the Equinox Emergency Medical Hologram." Whoops.
• Touch of Death : The aliens desiccate any living being they manage to touch, though Plot Armor saves Janeway and Chakotay from glancing blows at the start of the second half.
• Tranquil Fury : Janeway as she informs the Equinox survivors that they're being stripped of rank for their crimes.
• The Unfettered : Evil!Doc enjoys no longer having morality subroutines, as it makes him more efficient.
• Villain Has a Point : Ransom, when he calls Janeway out on judging him for his breaking of Federation principles. While it's ambiguous whether Ransom is telling the truth about his ship's supposed hardships before they began provoking the aliens (he makes the above statement right after Janeway has called him out on multiple Blatant Lies , and the episode gives us naught but Ransom's word on this particular matter), his point still stands, if only in a hypothetical context. "It's easy to cling to your principles when you're standing on a vessel with its bulkheads intact, manned by a crew that's not starving."
• Wham Line : The line that reveals just how far gone the Equinox crew is, before Equinox's EMH disables Voyager's and the Equinox crew retakes their ship: Equinox's EMH : They deleted my ethical subroutines.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human? : The first alien was killed solely by accident, but the Equinox crew began doing it on purpose to get home. When continuing their practices means operating on Seven, Ransom realizes how much he's devalued sentient beings.
• What Happened to the Mouse? : The five surviving members of the Equinox crew are absorbed into Voyager's crew...and we never hear from any of them again.
• What the Hell, Hero? : Chakotay confronts Janeway multiple times over the course of the two-parter, calling her on her vendetta-level pursuit of the Equinox crew. She just removes him from duty to put a stop to it. She threatens to do the same to Tuvok, who wisely shuts up.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him? : Rather than argue with or fight the Equinox EMH, the Doctor simply has the computer delete his Evil Counterpart and moves on to stop the transmission of Voyager 's shield frequencies.
• With Due Respect : When Ransom announces his intention to cooperate with Janeway. Burke: Rudy, with all due respect, have you lost your mind? Ransom: Just the opposite.
• Writers Cannot Do Math : In the space of the same conversation between Janeway and Ransom, it's first implied that harvesting the aliens would hardly be of any benefit to the Equinox at all (increasing their warp efficiency by 0.03%), then that just one alien gave the Equinox the same kind of 10,000 light-year jump that Voyager got from the slipstream drive earlier in Season 5, and then that they'd have to harvest 63 more aliens (meaning that each alien would provide around 500 light-years' worth of fuel), which would shorten the journey home to about a year.
• You're Cute When You're Angry : B'Elanna says Tom is cute when he's jealous.
• Star Trek Voyager S 5 E 24 Warhead
• Recap/Star Trek: Voyager
• Star Trek Voyager S 6 E 2 Survival Instinct

Important Links

• Action Adventure
• Commercials
• Crime & Punishment
• Professional Wrestling
• Speculative Fiction
• Sports Story
• Animation (Western)
• Music And Sound Effects
• Print Media
• Sequential Art
• Tabletop Games
• Applied Phlebotinum
• Characterization
• Characters As Device
• Narrative Devices
• British Telly
• The Contributors
• Creator Speak
• Derivative Works
• Laws And Formulas
• Show Business
• Split Personality
• Truth And Lies
• Truth In Television
• Fate And Prophecy
• Edit Reasons
• Isolated Pages
• Images List
• Recent Videos
• Crowner Activity
• Un-typed Pages
• Recent Page Type Changes
• Trope Entry
• Character Sheet
• Playing With
• Creating New Redirects
• Cross Wicking
• Tips for Editing
• Text Formatting Rules
• Handling Spoilers
• Administrivia
• Trope Repair Shop
• Image Pickin'

Advertisement:

Memory Beta, non-canon Star Trek Wiki

A friendly reminder regarding spoilers ! At present the expanded Trek universe is in a period of major upheaval with the continuations of Discovery and Prodigy , the advent of new eras in gaming with the Star Trek Adventures RPG , Star Trek: Infinite and Star Trek Online , as well as other post-57th Anniversary publications such as the ongoing IDW Star Trek comic and spin-off Star Trek: Defiant . Therefore, please be courteous to other users who may not be aware of current developments by using the {{ spoiler }}, {{ spoilers }} OR {{ majorspoiler }} tags when adding new information from sources less than six months old (even if it is minor info). Also, please do not include details in the summary bar when editing pages and do not anticipate making additions relating to sources not yet in release. THANK YOU

The Fate of Captain Ransom

• View history

• 2.1 Characters
• 2.2 Starships and vehicles
• 2.3 Locations
• 2.4 Races and cultures
• 2.5 States and organizations
• 2.6 Other references
• 3 Chronology
• 4.1.1 Timeline

Summary [ ]

Captain Rudolph Ransom is trapped on his ship, the Equinox , to allow the Voyager to get away. He believes that he will pay for his horrible crime of abuse towards the nucleogenic lifeforms he used as fuel to get home, and will pay it with death. All of a sudden, from an unlikely source, he is offered to chance to either die in peace, or to live forever in an immortal dream-like state with visions of the past.

References [ ]

Characters [ ], starships and vehicles [ ], locations [ ], races and cultures [ ], states and organizations [ ], other references [ ], chronology [ ].

• "The Fate of Captain Ransom" takes place at the end of " Equinox, Part II ".

Appendices [ ]

Connections [ ], timeline [ ].

• 1 USS Triumph (NCC-26228)
• 2 Ferengi Rules of Acquisition
• 3 Odyssey class

3 Star Trek Captains Broke The Prime Directive To Save A Planet

WARNING: Contains SPOILERS for Star Trek: Discovery, season 5, episode 6, "Whistlespeak"

• Captain Burnham breaks Prime Directive to save pre-warp planet from extinction, highlighting moral dilemmas in Starfleet.
• Starship captains like Captain Kirk have a history of bending the rules to save civilizations, challenging Starfleets non-interventionist policy.
• Despite facing consequences, Captain Pike and Burnham prioritize saving lives over adherence to the Prime Directive, illustrating ethical complexities.

Star Trek: Discovery 's Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) is the latest starship captain to break Star Trek 's Prime Directive to save a pre-warp planet from destruction. The Prime Directive represents Starfeet's most sacred principle; noninterference with other cultures and civilizations . Each officer swears to uphold Starfleet's Prime Directive . However, many starship captains and their crews have been forced to bend the rules when it comes to the Federation's non-interventionist policy. Sometimes, a moral obligation to save lives trumps Starfleet's ethical principles of non-intervention, forcing a number of starship captains to break the Prime Directive to save an entire planet.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2, episode 2, "Ad Astra per Aspera" revealed that Captain Robert April (Adrian Holmes) broke the Prime Directive twice: once to save the Perricans from an apocalyptic meteor shower, and again to reverse the effects of an extinction-level drought on Na'rel. Some Starfleet captains, like Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) would argue that this was interfering with the natural development of those societies, while others, like habitual Prime Directive rule breaker Captain Kirk (William Shatner), would argue that Starfleet should share their advanced technology to help others. And it seems that Kirk's predecessors, and his Kelvin Timeline counterpart, would agree with him.

10 Times Star Trek Was Right To Break The Prime Directive

Captain kirk broke the prime directive to save spock and the planet nibiru, star trek into darkness (2012).

The opening of Star Trek into Darkness saw Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) break the Prime Directive to save the life of Spock (Zachary Quinto), and the entire planet of Nibiru . The Enterprise crew were on Nibiru to deploy a cold fusion device inside a volcano, which would prevent a cataclysmic eruption that would wipe out the native Nibirans. While deploying the device, Spock is left stranded inside the volcano, and the planet's strong magnetic field prevents the Enterprise from beaming him out . The only solution, therefore, is to fly the Enterprise directly above the volcano and beam Spock aboard before the device detonates.

Star Trek Into Darkness

Star Trek Into Darkness is a 2013 movie directed by J. J. Abrams and starring John Cho, Alice Eve, and Benedict Cumberbatch. Part of the Star Trek franchise, this sequel sees Captain Kirk relieved of his duties as commander of the USS Enterprise.

Revealing the USS Enterprise, which was hiding under the sea on Nibiru, was a blatant violation of the Prime Directive because it displayed superior technology to a pre-warp species. Star Trek Into Darkness even teased that the Nibirans would begin worshiping the USS Enterprise as a benevolent deity. Despite having been saved by his crew, an ungrateful Spock reports this Prime Directive violation to Starfleet, leading to Kirk being demoted to being the first officer of Admiral Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) aboard the Enterprise, until the admiral is killed by Khan Noonien Singh (Benedict Cumberbatch).

Captain Pike Broke The Prime Directive To Save The Planet Kiley 279

Star trek: strange new worlds season 1, episode 1, "strange new worlds".

Captain Christopher Pike broke the Prime Directive in the very first episode of his spinoff series, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds . In the eponymous pilot episode, the USS Enterprise was sent to Kiley 279 to investigate the disappearance of Commander Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn) and the crew of the USS Archer. During their mission, it was discovered that the Kiley people had inadvertently become aware of the Battle of Control in the Star Trek: Discovery season 2 finale. The knowledge gained from this battle allowed the Kiley to reverse engineer the matter-antimatter reaction that powers most starships to instead build a devastating weapon.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

To convince the Kiley people that there was a better way, and because they had already been impacted by Federation technology, Pike revealed the USS Enterprise in an attempt to convince the planet's two warring factions to embrace peace . Pike delivered a stirring lecture about World War 3 and how it eventually led to the creation of Starfleet and the Federation. This made the desired impact on the Kiley people, who decided to work together to achieve space travel instead of working against each other. Although noble in his intentions, an enraged Starfleet hardened the Prime Directive because of Pike .

In Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2, episode 4, "Among the Lotus Eaters", Captain Pike had to fix another Prime Directive violation on Rigel VII, caused when his former yeoman Zac Nguyen used leftover Federation technology to seize control of the planet.

What Happened To Star Treks Phoenix Warp Ship After First Contact?

Captain burnham broke the prime directive to save tilly and the planet halem'no, star trek: discovery, season 5, episode 6, "whistlespeak".

Star Trek: Discovery season 5's treasure hunt brought Captain Burnham and Lt. Sylvia Tilly (Mary Wiseman) to the pre-warp planet of Halem'no, where the USS Discovery's captain broke the Prime Directive to save her friend, and the entire planet . At the climax of Discovery season 5, episode 6 , Tilly became trapped inside a Denobulan weather tower disguised as a mountain, with a young Halem'nite called Ravah (June Laporte), as the air slowly ran out. Because the tower was built out of tritanium, the USS Discovery's sensors were scrambled, making it impossible to beam Tilly and Ravah out of the tower.

It's possible that Star Trek: Discovery 's Red Directive supercedes the Prime Directive, meaning that Burnham may face no reprisals for her violation, as it was done in the pursuit of the Progenitors' treasure.

The failing weather towers were installed by the Denobulans to generate rain on Halem'no to mitigate the effects of the planet's dust storms and its naturally arid surface. Without the towers, the Halem'nites would become extinct. Captain Burnham, therefore, makes the decision to beam into the tower's control room to reveal the truth to the Halem'nites' spiritual leader, Ohvaz (Alfredo Narciso). While it was a breach of Star Trek 's Prime Directive, Burnham saved the planet from extinction while making sure that she still respected the Halem'nites' spiritual beliefs, keeping Halem'no's natural development largely on track.

Star Trek: Discovery season 5 streams Thursdays on Paramount+.

Star Trek: Discovery

Star Trek: Discovery is an entry in the legendary Sci-Fi franchise, set ten years before the original Star Trek series events. The show centers around Commander Michael Burnham, assigned to the USS Discovery, where the crew attempts to prevent a Klingon war while traveling through the vast reaches of space.

Screen Rant

Star trek makes enterprise’s doctor phlox species matter in discovery’s future.

Your changes have been saved

Email Is sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

Star Trek: Enterprise Cast & Character Guide

Star trek: discovery disappointingly avoids homeworld of enterprise’s dr. phlox, star trek: discovery season 5 episode 6 ending explained.

WARNING: Contains SPOILERS for Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 6, "Whistlespeak".

• "Star Trek: Discovery season 5 uncovers the vital role of Denobulans in Starfleet's future with Dr. Kreel's involvement in the Progenitors' treasure."
• "Entry of Dr. Kreel continues the legacy of Enterprise's Dr. Phlox, highlighting the importance of the Denobulans in the Federation's history."
• "Dr. Kreel's name check in Star Trek: Discovery reaffirms the presence of Denobulans in the 24th century, bridging the gap between Enterprise and the future."

Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 6, "Whistlespeak" reveals that Star Trek: Enterprise 's Denobulan species, popularized by Dr Phlox (John Billingsley), played a hugely important role in the future of Starfleet and the Federation. The latest clue to the Progenitors' treasure is located on the planet Halem'no, a pre-warp planet which has been given a subtle helping hand from the Denobulans. Discovery season 5, episode 6 , written by Kenneth Lin and Brandon Schultz, and directed by Chris Byrne, reveals that Denobulan scientist Dr. Hitoroshi Kreel was one of the five scientists who hid the Progenitors' treasure 800 years ago.

Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 6's revelations about the Progenitors' treasure and its link to the Denobulans is a welcome reminder of the species. Star Trek 's most notable Denobulan, Dr Phlox, was a hugely important figure in the 22nd century, serving as chief medical officer aboard the first version of the starship Enterprise . Phlox's adventures on the Enterprise NX-01 helped to establish the rules of the Federation that are still followed almost a millenia later in Discovery season 5. Discovery 's new Denobulan, Dr. Kreel, therefore, continues the legacy of Enterprise 's Phlox .

Star Trek: Enterprise introduced new faces to the prequel series set a century before the events of Star Trek: The Original Series.

Why It Matters Star Trek: Discovery’s Dr. Kreel Is Denobulan Like Enterprise’s Dr. Phlox

The Denobulans were one of several alien species introduced in Star Trek: Enterprise , and were popularized by the character of Phlox. Because Enterprise was canceled , and there were no Denobulan characters seen in Star Trek 's 24th century , there was a risk that the species may have faded into obscurity. Star Trek: Discovery 's Dr. Kreel is proof that the Denobulans were alive and well in the 24th century, and still played a vital role in the affairs of the United Federation of Planets. There is no better example of this than the Federation President's decision to recruit a Denobulan scientist for their top secret Progenitors mission.

Although Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 6, doesn't feature Dr. Kreel on screen, he's still an affirmation of Enterprise 's big additions to the canon of Star Trek aliens . The other alien scientists searching for the Progenitors' treasure were all members of iconic species who have played integral roles in shows like the Betazoids from Star Trek: The Next Generation and the Trills from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . It's fitting, therefore, that one of Star Trek: Enterprise 's Denobulans is also part of this vitally important research group.

Other Denobulans Besides Enterprise’s Dr. Phlox In Star Trek

Although sightings of the Denobulans are rare outside Star Trek: Enterprise , Doctors Phlox and Kreel aren't the only Denobulans who have appeared in the wider franchise . In Star Trek: Lower Decks season 2, episode 4, "Mugato, Gumato", two Denobulan researchers are attacked by a Mugato. In Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2, episode 3, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow", a Denobulan cadet accuses the Enterprise's transporter chief of stealing a ring, a dispute broken up by Lt. La'an Noonien Singh (Christina Chong).

Most notably, Lt. Barniss Frex (Eric Bauza) from Star Trek: Prodigy was the first commissioned Denobulan Starfleet officer depicted on screen. The unfortunate Denobulan became a victim of Prodigy 's Vau N'Akat villains and their Living Construct weapon when the crew of the USS Protostar visited the subspace relay station CR-721. However, Frex blamed the young Protostar crew for his misfortune when he was recovered by Admiral Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) and the USS Dauntless. Hopefully, Star Trek: Discovery 's Denobulan scientist will lead to further appearances from Dr. Phlox's species in Star Trek 's future.

Star Trek: Discovery season 5 streams Thursdays on Paramount+.

Star Trek: Discovery

*Availability in US

Not available

Star Trek: Discovery is an entry in the legendary Sci-Fi franchise, set ten years before the original Star Trek series events. The show centers around Commander Michael Burnham, assigned to the USS Discovery, where the crew attempts to prevent a Klingon war while traveling through the vast reaches of space.

Star Trek: Enterprise

Star Trek: Enterprise acts as a prequel to Star Trek: The Original Series, detailing the voyages of the original crew of the Starship Enterprise in the 22nd century, a hundred years before Captain Kirk commanded the ship. Enterprise was the sixth series in the Star Trek franchise overall, and the final series before a twelve-year hiatus until the premiere of Star Trek: Discovery in 2017. The series stars Scott Bakula as Captain Jonathan Archer, with an ensemble cast that includes John Billingsley, Jolene Blalock, Dominic Keating, Anthony Montgomery, Linda Park, and Connor Trinneer.

Star Trek: Lower Decks

"Star Trek: Lower Decks" focuses on the support crew serving on one of Starfleet's least important ships, the USS Cerritos, in 2380. Ensigns Mariner, Boimler, Rutherford and Tendi must keep up with their duties and their social lives, often while the ship is being rocked by a multitude of sci-fi anomalies. The ship's bridge crew includes Captain Carol Freeman, Commander Jack Ransom, Lieutenant Shaxs and Doctor T'Ana. This is the second animated spin-off in the franchise after 1973-74's "Star Trek: The Animated Series," but has a decidedly more adult tone and humor.

Star Trek: Prodigy

Star Trek: Prodigy is the first TV series in the Star Trek franchise marketed toward children, and one of the few animated series in the franchise. The story follows a group of young aliens who find a stolen Starfleet ship and use it to escape from the Tars Lamora prison colony where they are all held captive. Working together with the help of a holographic Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), the new crew of the USS Protostar must find their way back to the Alpha Quadrant to warn the Federation of the deadly threat that is pursuing them.

• Star Trek: Discovery (2017)
• Star Trek: Enterprise (2001)

Maxwell Burke

• View history

Lieutenant Maxwell Burke was a male Human Starfleet officer who lived in the latter half of 24th century . He served aboard the USS Equinox as first officer , under the command of Captain Rudolph Ransom during the 2370s . ( VOY : " Equinox ")

Early career [ ]

Burke attended Starfleet Academy in the 2360s , along with fellow cadet B'Elanna Torres , with whom he was romantically involved and affectionately nicknamed " BLT ". During their time together, Burke expressed to B'Elanna his contemplation of resigning, although he ultimately chose to remain and pursue his commission .

By 2371 , Burke had been assigned to the Nova -class science vessel Equinox . In that year, the Equinox was forcibly transported to the Delta Quadrant by the alien entity known only as the Caretaker . ( VOY : " Equinox ")

The Delta Quadrant [ ]

During their time in the Delta Quadrant, the Equinox crew found that they were ill-equipped to deal with the dangers of the region. After five years, over half of the crew was dead, their food reserves were at a minimum, and their dilithium was all but gone. In an attempt to return to the Alpha Quadrant , the crew began engaging in criminal experiments to augment their warp drive , wherein they began murdering nucleogenic lifeforms and converting their remains into a crystalline compound which acted as a source of fuel, providing them with the opportunity to return to Earth in a matter of months.

In 2375 , the Equinox crew encountered the USS Voyager , another Starfleet vessel which had been stranded in the Delta Quadrant by the Caretaker, and Burke was reunited with his old girlfriend, B'Elanna Torres, who was serving as Voyager 's chief engineer . The Voyager crew assisted in making repairs to the Equinox , and in fending off attacks by the nucleogenic lifeforms, which were attempting to destroy the ship in retaliation for the Equinox crew's actions. Burke and the rest of the crew initially attempted to conceal their actions against the lifeforms from the Voyager crew, but they were eventually discovered and confined by Captain Janeway . Escaping, they were able to steal Voyager 's field generator , which had been modified to confine the lifeforms, and left Voyager to be attacked as they resumed course towards the Alpha Quadrant. ( VOY : " Equinox ")

Eventually, Captain Ransom decided to halt the experiments and surrender to Captain Janeway, leading Burke and a small group of Equinox crewmembers to mutiny and take control of the ship. Ordering Ransom confined, Burke took command and attempted to destroy Voyager , but was thwarted when Ransom and Ensign Marla Gilmore managed to beam the rest of the crew off of the ship. As the Equinox faced destruction by the aliens, Ransom revealed his actions and pleaded Burke to evacuate to Voyager , but he refused. Burke and the remaining crewmembers attempted to reach the ship's only remaining shuttlecraft , but was ultimately killed on the way to the shuttlebay . ( VOY : " Equinox, Part II ")

External link [ ]

• Maxwell Burke at Memory Beta , the wiki for licensed Star Trek works
• 3 ISS Enterprise (NCC-1701)

• More to Explore
• Series & Movies

Published Apr 29, 2024

To Captain Kathryn Janeway

How Voyager's captain helped one scientist-to-be fight for her dream.

StarTrek.com

I could finally see the end.

Months and months of PhD work were beginning to wind down, and I could see the light at the end of my dissertation tunnel. As I started writing out my acknowledgements to those who had helped me along the way, I looked back on the highs and lows of my studies. Even with the fruits of my labor nearly in hand, I found myself reflecting on the darkest days. There were celebrations along the way, but there were also moments of crushing defeat. On those days, when I felt most like dropping out and giving up, one person kept coming to the front of my mind.

The single woman who’d kept me going — Captain Kathryn Janeway.

Star Trek was not exactly a staple of my childhood. The show didn't enter my life until later, and even then, it was mostly at college parties where my fellow physics majors always had random episodes playing in the background. It became an anchor for our friendships and was the center of many of our favorite memories. Eventually, I would finish up at my Colorado undergrad and leave my friends and family behind to pursue a PhD in Scotland. As I embarked on my new adventure, a certain Star Trek captain would emerge as a close companion, mentor, and inspiration.

Kate Mulgrew's portrayal of Captain Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager was everything I needed at that time of transition. Searching for 'adventure' often results a mixed bag of experiences, mixing moments of exciting accomplishments with long bouts of loneliness. In Scotland, I felt isolated having to make friends from scratch in a new culture. Instead of reaching through Star Trek and its fandom to connect with friends, I dove inside, seeking companionship within the fictional realm. I was drawn to Janeway — a strong, passionate woman, who found herself burdened with responsibility while facing new and unknown cultures. In her, I found a friend who, like me, immersed herself in the passions of gothic romance and fantastical Irish villages while trying to maintain an external veneer of confidence and professionalism.

"Eye of the Needle"

I could share in her successes and failures, such as the persistence in solving a mathematical puzzle in " Counterpoint ," or the feeling of fate working against you just as in " Eye of the Needle ." The fact that Janeway came from a science officer background and had such evident passion for data and science only drew me closer to her. While doing research in a large collaboration, I had to balance data and the search for answers against personalities and politics, which sometimes left me ready to give up. My PhD became my Alpha Quadrant and I drew strength from Janeway's ability to continue fighting and standing by her decisions as she drove towards her end goal.

This strong and intelligent Federation captain was not only my companion, but also a mentor. Her roots in science drew me in, but watching her careful balance of femininity in a demanding environment, while managing respect from her subordinates but also maintaining trust and friendships, was awe-inspiring. At the time, women made up only around 10 to 20 percent of people within my field of expertise, and with few options, I struggled in finding women to connect with. I wanted role models who could help guide me in my career decisions, or provide me with an example of the type of professional scientist I wanted to be.

"Latent Image"

Yet, I saw myself in Captain Janeway's decisions, which gave me the strength to shape my own decisions. I learned a huge lesson in leadership when she made the decision to respect the Caretaker and destroy the array, along with any chance of getting her crew home. She did not waver in her order and was able to communicate her decision to the crew without being apologetic or requiring everyone to agree.

One of my favorite episodes is " Latent Image " where the Doctor finds that Janeway has been erasing a particular memory from him. The captain initially comes off as the villain of the story, until the viewer sees how that memory impacts the Doctor's ability to function and starts to side with Janeway's decision. She finds a compromise with him and, though it is difficult, she does what she can to help him through and stand by her actions every step of the way. I took note of her behavior — her way of standing by her decisions while still being open to suggestions — and incorporated it into my professional life which grew my own confidence and capabilities.

The final days of your PhD are not entirely unique; most people who've written a dissertation have similar stories of the burden of trying to distill years of research into a coherent demonstration of your capabilities. You feel overwhelmed, unworthy, and out of your depth. It can be isolating and frustrating. It's a dark time for many, and people start scrambling to find ways to cope. Janeway inspired me to the end; Voyager 's writers were not afraid to show how she handled stress and pressure. They weren't afraid to let her experience emotion. From allowing yourself to escape into a literary fantasy to sometimes just needing a cup of coffee, Janeway gave me that grace to realize what I needed and allow myself it. She reminded me of who I was and why I was chasing this degree. Her presence was a constant reminder that if I wanted to become even a semblance of who she was I had to keep pushing.

"The 37s"

I regularly came back to the episode " The 37s ," where Voyager 's crew is given an out — a planet to live on and peacefully spend their lives. That option was all too tempting and Janeway recognized that if she was tempted, her crew probably would be too. Many times, I thought things would be easier if I just went back home, reunited with my boyfriend, and pursued a different career among old friends and familiar settings. Her crew became my crew in that moment when they decide to stay behind and continue with her. Their loyalty and dedication to her and the mission they were on boosted me, and in that moment, the crew of Voyager became my rock.

Kathryn Janeway inspired me, mentored me, and held my hand through thick and thin. She drove me to be better, to be stronger, to not give up. So as I sat there reflecting on this moment the perfect words for my acknowledgements came to me. I wrote, "Finally, to Captain Kathryn Janeway. I cannot describe the level of inspiration she provided me right when I was on the verge of giving up."

This single sentence summed up everything I couldn't express or understand of what Captain Janeway had given me. I simply knew my relationship with her was significant and would stay with me forever.

How Warp Drive Could Actually Work

Get Updates By Email

This article was originally published on March 14, 2019.

Erin Macdonald PhD (she/her) is a west coast based astrophysicist and Star Trek science consultant.