VOYAGER
Beginner’s Guide: The Top Five Episodes
A Long Way Home
Voyager premiered in 1995 and ran for seven seasons. On its very first mission, the starship USS Voyager is flung across the galaxy to the Delta Quadrant, tens of thousands of light-years from home, and its crew has to make its way back across a journey that will take decades. Captain Kathryn Janeway, the franchise's first female lead, commands a crew made up of Starfleet officers and former Maquis rebels who have to learn to trust each other. Other standouts include the holographic Doctor, played by Robert Picardo, and Seven of Nine, a former Borg drone who joins in Season 4.
The premise offers the writers a fresh alien every week, and a ship that cannot call for help. The early seasons can be uneven, but the best Voyager episodes are inventive, emotional and surprisingly bold with big science fiction ideas. Because it is mostly episodic, you can dip in anywhere.
Crew advisory: Yes, the ship takes enormous damage every week and is fully repaired by the next one. Please do not ask Starfleet Engineering how.
1. Year of Hell
Voyager runs into the Krenim, a people whose powerful time-weapon ship erases entire civilizations from history to restore what their commander, Annorax, believes was lost. Over the course of a year, Voyager is battered into a floating wreck, its crew is scattered, and Janeway refuses to give up the ship. Kurtwood Smith is chilling as Annorax, and the story plays as a long, grim test of endurance. It ranks first because it is the series' most ambitious epic and the best argument that Voyager could do dark, serialized storytelling when it wanted to.
2. Blink of an Eye
Voyager is caught in orbit of a planet whose strange properties make time pass there much faster than it does on the ship: roughly a day for every second aboard. The crew watches an entire civilization develop around their ship, from the first superstitions about the new star in the sky to a space program and a war. It becomes a poignant story about a world that looks up at Voyager and has to decide what it is. It earns its place because it is a perfect, self-contained science fiction idea, and it is often called one of the best Voyager episodes by fans and critics alike.
3. Scorpion
A terrifying new species called 8472 is tearing apart the Borg, and Voyager finds itself caught in the middle. To survive, Captain Janeway makes a deeply risky deal with the very enemy the Federation fears most. The second half introduces Seven of Nine, who would become one of the best characters in the franchise. This is a thrilling blockbuster and a major turning point, and it is the right moment to jump in if you want the series at its most exciting.
4. Living Witness
Seven hundred years after Voyager passed through, a hologram of the ship's Doctor is activated in a museum on a distant world. There, the Voyager crew is remembered as a pack of violent invaders. The Doctor has to correct the record before the conflict between two peoples restarts. Robert Picardo gets a chance to show how great the Doctor can be, and the story is a clever look at how history gets written. It is a perfect gateway episode for newcomers, as it requires no knowledge of the series.
5. Timeless
Fifteen years in the future, Chakotay and Harry Kim find Voyager frozen beneath the ice of a distant planet, its crew dead, and they set out to rewrite history. The reason is Harry's mistake, which cost the lives of his friends, and the episode is a story about guilt, regret and redemption. LeVar Burton, Geordi La Forge himself, directed it and appears in a cameo, and it gives the often-overlooked Harry Kim his finest hour. It makes the list as the best example of a time-travel thriller that is also a human story.
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More of the beginner’s guide: The Original Series • The Animated Series • The Next Generation • Deep Space Nine • Enterprise • Discovery • Picard • Lower Decks • Prodigy • Strange New Worlds • Short Treks • Starfleet Academy.
Not sure what order to watch in? Try our chronological watch order or the Star Trek timeline. Want people to talk Trek with? Enlist and join the crew at one of our Star Trek events around Atlanta.
