RETROACTIVELY MAKING STAR TREK: VOYAGER GOOD, Part V
Looking back through the episodes of Voyager via the Library feature of startrek.com, I've reached the conclusion that the second season was the series's best. I mean, it was still Voyager, but definite progress was being made: "Maneuvers," "Alliances," "Investigations," and "Deadlock," plus the second/third season cliffhanger, "Basics, Parts I and II." In the third season, though, whatever progress had been made was reversed, and when "the Borg" were introduced at the end of the third season and Seven(th) of Nine joined the crew at the beginning of the fourth, all hope had to be abandoned. I say "the Borg," because although it would be logical for a Starfleet vessel lost in the Delta Quadrant to encounter the Borg, the creatures on Voyager were not the Borg. In my view, all "Borg" encounters on Voyager must be disavowed. They never happened. Or if they did, whatever aliens the crew were facing certainly weren't the Borg. But, enough of the past, foward to the future!

The Plot Thickens
Season Four - As with "Marooned," the mechanics of "Reign of Khan" are not my primary concern in this forum. Still, rest assured, I'd have the writing staff pull out all the stops and make it an episode for the ages. (A question: one thing I do know I want to see is the Ulysses fighting off several of Khan's spaceships. These are ships on a technical par with the sleeper ship seen in "Space Seed" [TOS], but designed for combat. In the aftermath, when the Ulysses returns to its proper place in space-time, does it have aboard a eugenic superman? He'd be forced by circumstance to join the crew. Hmm, that could be fun, but it requires some serious contemplation.) Nick proposes to Kes and the two of them are married; with Captain McKenna presiding, Dan serves as Best Man while Neelix, having accepted that he's truly lost Kes, serves as Father of the Bride. The ship encounters an alien communications network that seems to stretch across half the galaxy. Tapping into it, the crew makes contact with a Federation starship... in their own time! However, the ship is on a multi-year deep space mission and well out of communications range with Starfleet Command. The crew's use of the pan-galactic comm array draws the attention of the Hirogen, its builders, a race of big game hunters who remain basically unchanged. Banned from using the array to phone home, the Ulysses follows the Hirogen ship back to a recent kill, a Gorn ship from the Alpha Quadrant, also brought to the Delta Quadrant by the Caretaker. Tracking the sole survivor, Captain McKenna makes an enemy of the Hirogen by thwarting their effort to kill the last Gorn, who joins the crew before they make their escape. Since the second season, vague mention has been made of an enigmatic race known as the Shadows. (I know, the name is a tad melodramatic, but stay with me.) In "Resistance," the Ulysses comes across a planet bearing the telltale signs of assimilation: roads leading not to cities, but to large pits in the earth. Investigating a former city to determine how long ago it was assimilated, the ship is contacted by an alien vessel, a warship of the Tehlyri, the people known as the Shadows (see "The Good Samaritans"). While the two ships are traveling together, a lurking Borg cube approaches. The Tehlyri ship possesses stealth technology that gives it a fair chance of evading the cube, but the Ulysses is an easy target (if the Borg had ever seriously tried to assimilate the Enterprise-D, Captain Picard would have remained Locutus of Borg). The stealth ship beams over a single Tehlyri and then destroys the cube by ramming it at warp speed (give me one good reason why it wouldn't work). The Tehlyri identifies herself as Crown Princess Luca Rissa; her crew, unwilling to let the heir to their throne die, transported her to the Ulysses against her will. With the princess on board, the ship sets course for the hidden world from which the Tehlyri conduct their campaign to prove that resistance is not futile. A hunting party of the Hirogen seeks the Ulysses as their prey in the two-parter "The Killing Game" (which will have nothing to do with using holographic technology as a substitute for live prey). Both Elisabeth and Benicio have been afraid of their attraction to each other and even though they had one awkward date, they have tried to deny their feelings. However, when Benicio finds himself drawn to Princess Rissa, Elisabeth is spurned into action and fights to win the heart of her first officer. K'rena, on the tenth anniversary of completing the Klingon Rite of Ascension, tosses the fanboys a bone by dealing with her Klingon heritage. The crew frolic through the holographic adventures of Captain Proton, a Flash Gordon-type serial. (This was quite possibly Voyager's best idea.) The fourth season also brings us "Black Flag," the return of Cole, bwa ha ha ha ha! Now captain of a Vidiian attack ship dubbed the Revenge, Cole is still searching for the second Caretaker, but his primary goal is the destruction of the Ulysses. His pirate crew raids the ship for isolinear circuitry and photon torpedo technology, in the process damaging their new Tehlyri stealth modifications. Cole is beaten back, but not before causing havoc and convincing the Gorn to join him. Finally the Ulysses reaches the top secret Tehlyri homeworld, kicking off our season ending cliffhanger, "Kingdom of Shadows."

The Good Samaritans
Tehlyri - The Tehlyri Imperium was once a quarter the size of the Federation, a substantial chunk of space. Two hundred years ago, a single Borg cube attacked the Tehlyri capital, echoing the pattern established in "The Best of Both Worlds." The homeworld was assimilated and from there the Borg spread out and devastated the entire empire. But not all the Tehlyri were forced into the collective. Small pockets of resistance, spread out across the Imperium, opposed the Borg reign. For two centuries, they have been in a race between cloaking and detection technologies, desperately trying to stay one step ahead of the Borg. Their stealth ships have acted as defenders of all who the Borg threaten, hiding what worlds they could and leading the collective on innumerable wild goose chases. The Tehlyri are like Jedi, oddball experts who don't fit in with those they defend; they are an isolated society of zealots, but they still try to maintain some semblence of a normal life.
Borg - The mistake Voyager made was in trying to deal directly with the Borg. If you deal directly with the Borg, especially on their home turf, your ass is going to get assimilated. So, you need some kind of proxy. That's where the Tehlyri come in. For those of you who were paying attention, the Borg only appeared in six episodes of The Next Generation (and two of those were as the individualized Borg under Lore's thrall in "Descent, Parts I and II") and the movie Star Trek: First Contact. The Borg are simply too powerful to encounter as if they were normal aliens, like Ferengi or Breen. The Borg incursions into the Federation took place tens of thousands of light years from Borg space; in Star Trek: Odyssey, it is our Federation heroes who are far from home in unfamiliar territory. The way to handle the Borg is not to confront them, but to see the impact they have had on other cultures. And every once in a while, just for kicks, run like hell from a rampaging cube.

More to Come
Seasons five, six, and seven; guest stars galore (Tholians? El Aurians?); encountering another Starfleet vessel, the way it should have been; and I still haven't figured out how I'm going to get the Ulysses home. Star Trek: Odyssey fever, catch it!