RETROACTIVELY MAKING STAR TREK: VOYAGER GOOD, Part IV
The Plot Thickens
Season Two, Part II - After nearly two years of abuse, K'rena diagnoses the warp nacelles as being on the verge of failure. She can save one by cannibalizing the other, but the ship cannot form a stable warp field with just one nacelle. The Ulysses spends several weeks (and episodes) in a highly advanced system that serves as a crossroads of commerce and cultures. The emir, a gambling man, is holding a starship race. In "The Race," Neelix and Nick overcome their enmity about Kes and work together to prepare and race Neelix's ship, the Talax Falcon (Millennium Falcon anyone?). The race is won, the prize money claimed, and the Ulysses repaired and restored to better condition than since her arrival in the Delta Quadrant, including an all-new custom-built nacelle. Upon leaving the civilized enclave of the emirate, though, the Ulysses is swarmed and overwhelmed by the Kazon, unified under Seska. After a savage fight, the ship is boarded and seized, and the crew marooned on a savage planet. The Ulysses has been seized as Seska's flagship and the season ends with the image of the crew watching their ship fly off, leaving them "Marooned."

Season Three ñ The marooned crew survives the savage planet and the Ulysses returns and picks them up (thrilling stuff, but the mechanics of the episode aren't important). Both the Vidiians and the Kazon-Trabe are now in the past and shan't be seen again. Of course, in the course of their travels, the crew is constantly scavenging, especially looking for exotic alien technologies that might be able to get them home. They encounter numerous species, some friendly, more hostile, including the time-twisting Krenim. The single best episode of Voyager was "Before and After," in which Kes jumps backwards in time from some point in the future. Same thing, deja vu all over again. The fourth-season two-parter "Year of Hell" will be brought to the third season and vastly improved. (Good idea, poor execution.) Basically, a recurring villain and temporal hi-jinks that will leave the Ulysses outfitted with a jury-rigged ìchronometrics labî and some interesting ideas about wormholes. The third season finds Nick and Kes growing increasingly serious about their relationship fueled by an awareness of how little time they have together given Kes's short lifespan. Captain McKenna, after performing several weddings among the crew, finds herself longing for companionship. Her affections fall on Cmdr. Torres, who reciprocates her feelings, but they each remain unwilling to take any action. This is to the consternation of K'rena, who still carries a torch for Benicio, but decides to distract herself with a brief fling with newly promoted Lt. (j.g.) Kim. (As I said in "The Big Picture, Part II," on Odyssey everybody gets some.) Kes's powers continue to expand, now encompassing powerful telekinesis, tactile telepathy, and limited pre-cognitive abilities. Neelix finds the Ulysses to have traveled to the edge of his knowledge; Captain McKenna helps him redefine his role on-board from that of guide to quartermaster, since he is, after all, a natural scrounger and black market businessman. Using the Krenim hardware, modified and "interspliced" with other alien devices, the crew activates a device intended to create a stable, artificial wormhole. In "A Single Seed," the crew activates the wormhole device and sends through a probe. The probe is damaged in transit, but when it emerges on the other side it's visual sensor reports a clear image: Earth. The stresses inside the wormhole are extreme; so, Captain McKenna does not want to take the Ulysses through until they have more information. The Captain's Yacht, manned by Benicio and Nick, is sent through. Encountering the same obstacles as the probe, the Penelope (Odysseus's wife in The Iliad, twit) is severely damaged and makes a crash landing on Earth. The final image of the episode is Benicio and Nick crawling from the wreckage of the yacht, looking up at a banner bearing the face of Khan Noonien Singh.

ìReign of Khan.î The chronometrics lab reveals that things are worse than they seem: in a classic case of cultural contamination, Nick and Benicio crashed on Earth in the final stages of the Eugenics Wars (1992-1996; remember, wormholes are rips in space-time, not just space), when Khan's forces were in full retreat. However, the technology salvaged from the Penelope allowed Khan to turn the tide of the war and bring the entire Earth under his dominion. (The Krenim's goal was to rewrite history; so, it allows the Ulysses to view changes in the timeline, even while isolated from those changes by their proximity to and causation of the offending wormhole.) Up to the challenge no matter the odds, the Ulysses plunges into the wormhole bound for mid-1990s Earth to make sure that history unfolds as it should, thus allowing "Space Seed" and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan to happen as they did. (My inspiration here is the Voyager two-parter "Future's End, Parts I and II." The ship traveled back to Earth in the year 1996... an Earth that looked exactly like you'd walked off the Voyager soundstages. Listen, you twerps, in Star Trek history 1996 was the year the Eugenics Wars, a global conflict, ended; even if America - "Future's End" took place in, ugh, Los Angeles - was largely spared, as in the Second Word War, there should still be some evidence! Jerks.) The third season ends with "Reign of Khan, Part I." I want "Reign of Khan" to be the "The Best of Both Worlds" of Odyssey.

Re-Cap
First season: "Caretaker, Parts I and II" ñ "The Mutiny, Part I"
Second season: "The Mutiny, Part II" ñ "Marooned, Part I"
Third season: "Marooned, Part II" ñ "Reign of Khan, Part I"