Star Trek: Voyager and it’s finale should’ve had a bit more to it

Star Trek: Voyager ended 20 years ago today.

Today is the 20th anniversary of Star Trek: Voyager ending. A series that saw the small and agile starship Voyager sent into the Delta Quadrant with two sets of crew, forced to survive and thrive with one another and find a way home. It was a brilliant series that is only recently finding its legs among fans as the epic franchise that it was.

That doesn’t mean it was perfect.

Specifically, it doesn’t mean the ending was perfect. The opening of the episode saw the ship return to Earth decades later, and sometime later, the surviving crew met up for a reunion. We find out that Seven of Nine died on the way back and Chakotay has since passed away as well. It starts a time-travel episode where the now Admiral Janeway goes back to try to write the wrongs and get everyone else back in one piece.

It’s a fine episode, but not one that fits the grandiose nature of the series.

Voyager and its finale lacked a lot.

A lacking finale isn’t the worst thing. After all, the crew got home in one piece. Quantum Leap’s finale episode was a regular episode with text that followed saying despite leaping from reality to reality, the main character never got home. How I Met Your Mother’s finale was literally the main character falling for someone who wasn’t the mother.

There are some god-awful finales, but Voyager’s finale isn’t among that tier. It’s fine. It could’ve been great. Voyager had a chance to have a sendoff similar to Battlestar Galactica reboot, where the final five or six episodes really tied into their finale, which was a three-parter. Voyager had the makings of such an event, with Islanded in “Homestead” where Neelix stays behind to help his people.

Instead of using that episode and its follow-up, “Renaissance Man” to properly build to the finale, it gets shoehorned into the first scene of the second-to-last episode. A wasted opportunity but still watchable.

The series could’ve said goodbye to another beloved character, maybe destroyed the Borg Queen with a bit more oomph. Had the ship land on Earth after just seven years to start the first-parter and follow around the crew as they deal with the loss of their friends, and missed years with family.

It could’ve seen Janeway reaching out to her old boyfriend, the former Marquis being shunned/or accepted into the Federation, and any number of emotional moments one could have after being astray for seven years.

They gave Tom Hanks more time in Castaway to explore his feelings about being home and he was only on an island. The crew deserved to explore the emotional impact such a traumatic experience would have had on them, but instead, we got two Janeways.

Yippie.