Top 10 Deaths and Resurrections in Star Trek History
Star Trek Voyager The Mortal Coil
#10 – Mr. Neelix
He may have had multiple specialties but who knew returning from the dead would be one of them? That’s exactly what he did in the episode Mortal Coil.
Admit it, at one point or another Neelix drove you nuts, you were hoping something would happen to him, right? It’s ok, you can say it, I won’t tell.
Ok, maybe not, or maybe you just won’t admit it. But either way Neelix had an up and down relationship with fans, he could be seen at any time as either an expert or a fish out of water, as a chef or a disaster, as an ambassador or a liability. Maybe that was his quiet charm, maybe it was poor writing and development, but every now and then he had a really good episode, and The Mortal Coil was one of them, it marked one of the several times Neelix would die during the run of the series, the other most notable one that we won’t cover here was Tuvix, which was a far superior episode, but we’re classifying it as an alteration rather than a death, so it doesn’t apply to this list.
How it happened:
During a voluntary mission to check out a nebula, something Neelix claimed early in the series was a danger the Captain had no right to subject him to, a protomatter transport goes wrong and Neelix is struck and killed by an energy discharge.
In an interesting parallel Protomatter is the reason the Genesis device was able to reanimate Spock in Star Trek III The Search for Spock, yet counter to that parallel its the reason Neelix dies and cannot be immediately revived.
How he returned:
Amazingly assimilation has its benefits, eighteen hours after his death Seven of Nine injects Neelix with nano probes from her own bloodstream and uses them to revive him, he spends the rest of the episode questioning the afterlife, scaring a child and believing that he will become a Borg drone.
It’s actually some of his best work, even though it can be a little over the top at times, leaving us to rank this revival as number 10 on our list.