TrekCulture has some unique takes but this opinion is a bit bonkers. Star Trek: Voyager is an admittedly dark show. It has some terrifying moments like assimilation by the Borg, Vidiians stealing a person’s face to woo a woman, having your conscious stuck in a device where you’re tormented by an evil clown, killing off the entire crew on more than one occasion, and of course, Neelix’s cooking.
The crew of the Voyager suffered greatly.
Yet TrekCulture believes the episode “Extreme Risks” is the darkest episode of the series. It’s an episode that revolves around B’Elanna Torres dealing with significant emotional turmoil where she starts to push the boundaries more and more. Her former Maquis allies were massacred not long prior to the episode, and now Torres can’t deal with the news. Feeling guilty and angry, she gets more and more reckless throughout the episode, causing subsequent injuries. While it’s a poignant episode about depression and grief, it’s not dark.
No, dark is “Course Oblivion”, an entire episode about the crew of Voyager melting to death. After the death of, ironically enough, Torres, it’s revealed that she and the entire crew are nothing about copies of the original crew and unless they get to the real crew of the Voyager in time, they’re all going to die.
It’s a harrowing episode that builds up the tension of the crew and the mystery surrounding who and what they are, and once it’s revealed they’re not the real cast, we’ve been with the duplicates for long enough to assume they were. The audience begins to root for them and just when you think all is lost, as the duplicate crew is melting away, we find the real Voyager on the verge of arriving to save the day.
Only to realize they arrived too late and the duplicates have broken down so much there’s just grep blobs floating in space where the duplicate Voyager just was.
It’s heartbreaking, even though they’re not the real crew, you still feel for them. They think they’re real. They feel they’re real and they wanted to live. The real Voyager was just a hair too late. It was an episode that stayed with me the first time I saw it and it stays with me still to this day.
That’s why “Course Oblivion” is far darker than “Extreme Risks”.