Star Trek: Voyager had a ready-made romance between Kathryn Janeway and Chakotay.
We talked recently about how Kathryn Janeway, the Captain of the USS Voyager, and Chakotay, her former Maquis turned second in command were a perfect match on Star Trek: Voyager. Yet, it never happened. It was never a huge loss to many fans, not like say Jean-Luc Picard and Beverly Crusher but it was still a missed opportunity due to the chemistry between the two.
It didn’t hurt that Janeway and Chakotay were played by two people in Kate Mulgrew and Robert Beltran, who had such great chemistry. The two were stars on the show and could carry a scene by themselves. A scene with both of them and you knew you were going to see something good.
So why didn’t the two ever get together? Well, Mulgrew appeared at the Denver Pop Culture Con in 2017 and she made it clear that it was herself who shut down the talks of being flirtatious with the crew.
"I said ‘I’m not going to sleep with Chakotay… not gonna happen. I said that you’re just going to have to go somewhere else for it."
According to Mulgrew, this was when the show cast Jeri Ryan. It was Mulgrew’s hope that she wanted to portray Janeway without a love story.
Mulgrew’s attitude has since changed, talking with GalaxyCon Online, and explaining a new perspective with Janeway and Chakotay’s lack of romance.
"We never actually had the kiss, because if we had, Jema, we never would have stopped! And that would have been a problem."
It was the right call to not have the Captain engaged romantically with the crew.
It may have been a tough call, seeing how good Beltran and Mulgrew were together, but it was the right call to not put them together. A captain engaging in a sexual and romantic relationship with a subordinate on an isolated ship would have been highly unethical. So keeping Janeway away from such a divisive idea was the right call, considering all the other issues the character had to deal with already by just being the first show captain in franchise history.
That doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t have been awesome to hint at it all series, and when the crew finally lands, the two finally reveal their feelings for one another now that their mission was over. But, that’s something for the fans to write about it.