RETROACTIVELY MAKING STAR TREK: VOYAGER GOOD, Part VIII
Dramatis Personae
Captain Elisabeth McKenna, Commanding Officer - There are only two choices to play the good captain: Tricia O'Neil or Susanna Thompson. Both are known to Star Trek fans. O'Neil played Captain Rachel Garrett of the Enterprise-C in "Yesterday's Enterprise" (TNG); Kurak, a Klingon scientist, in "Suspicions" (TNG); and Korinas, an agent of the Obsidian Order, in "Defiant" (DS9). Thompson had a minor role in "Frame of Mind" (TNG), but is most noted as the gorgeous Dr. Lenara Kahn in "Rejoined" (DS9). O'Neil brings to the table an undeniable command presence, as well as charm and guile. Thompson brings elegence, spunk, and incredible beauty. Thompson's McKenna would be younger, on her first command, and a better romantic fit with Torres. O'Neil's would be a veteran commander, given the Ulysses because she knows how to get the job done even without the resources of a Galaxy-class behemoth. My gut sez O'Neil, but a little nagging voice sez Thompson. A conundrum to be sure. And honestly, I don't know which way to go. Maybe O'Neil as McKenna and Thompson as the recurring Crown Princess Rissa? I'm torn.
Lieutenant K'rena Singh, Chief Engineer - I really had no idea who to cast as K'rena until I was home for Mothers' Day. Then, it hit me like a bolt from the gray, thundering sky: Lexa Doig, best known in the quasi-dual roles of Andromeda and Romi on Andromeda. Putting aside her beauty, which is considerable, she's just perfect. The ferocity in her voice, the kindness in her eyes, she is K'rena Singh.
Ensign Daniel Kim, Operations Officer - I'm not certain I have to replace Garrett Wong (who played Harry Kim on Voyager), but I do have reservations, i.e. I think he's a wuss. The other candidate I'm considering is the character's namesake, Daniel Dae Kim. I'll let you know if I make a decision.
Et Alii - I'm still looking for a Benicio Torres. Suggestions are welcome. I'm open to other actors, but for the time being Tim Russ will retain the part of Sovok (he played Tuvok). Robert Picardo as the EMH; Ethan Phillips as Neelix, though with different make-up; and Jennifer Lien as Kes all remain the same.

The Plot Thickens
Season Six - And so, above the Tehlyri's no-longer-secret base, Captain McKenna's armada hit the Borg with everything they have. The Krenim trap a cube in several different timeframes, ripping it apart with intense temporal fluctuations. The Vidiians, intrigued by the prospect of using Borg nanoprobes, the tip-of-the-spear in the assimilation process, against the phage, board several cubes, avoiding assimlation with their advanced quarantine fields. Several Hirogen hunting parties joined the armada on the promise of the ultimate prey and find the Borg to be just that in close quarters combat. While the battle rages, Benicio, security officer Neelix, Kes, a deputized Agrippa, and Princess Rissa beam down to the surface, finding it a nightmarish maze of battle-damaged and half-assimilated buildings. In orbit, the battle grows ever more desperate, as any head-to-head confrontation with the Borg is apt to do, while on the surface the away team finds the strongest keep of the imperial palace to have been breached. Where is Rissa's father, Emperor Vorei? The Vidiians overcome, the Hirogen assimilated, the Voth smashed, the armada has bought time for countless Tehlyri ships to disappear into the transwarp conduits, but at a terrible price. Benicio's team locates the Emperor and are beamed aboard, but not before a Borg pricks him with its assimilation nobules. The Doc's Vidiian tools slow the process, but cannot save him, their methods having been adapted to, and he requests to be beamed aboard the Borg cube in pursuit of the ship. Once on board, he waits until surrounded by Borg and, in his last act of free will, detonates himself. The fleet disappears into a transwarp conduit and the Krenim detonate a device that temporarily seals the entrance behind them. The various races are returned to their respective domains by Tehlyri guides and the Ulysses escorts Rissa to the new base of the Tehlyri resistance. Aboard the flagship, newly renamed the Vorei, the crew witness Rissa's coronation as Empress of the Tehlyri Imperium and then return to the long road home. In "History Project," Liz gets permission from the captain to interview Agrippa as part of a research project. She finds herself face to face with evil, an urbane and erudite man who gleefully killed millions without batting an eye. What makes a man a monster? Is he truly accountable if he is simply acting as he was genetically altered to act? Passing a barren world, long ago stripped of life by the Borg, only a few days after receiving a melancholy letter from Empress Rissa, Captain McKenna decides that the Borg must be stopped, no matter the cost. While K'rena, Dan, and Doc work on the Krenim wormhole technology not used since "Reign of Khan," McKenna enters the limbo in which the crew trapped the mad Krenim timelord Annorax at the end of "The Year of Hell." Making use of Annorax's expertise, they are able to scan the time-space continuum and locate a specific event: the birth of the Borg. Using the wormhole device, the Ulysses embarks upon a journey that violates every principle of Starfleet temporal ethics: their mission is to change the past. So begins "Perfection, Parts I and II." Welcome to an idealized world of tomorrow, a utopia not dissimilar from Earth, with technology on a par with the pre-Vulcan mid-21st century, had the Third World War not bombed the world back to the stone age. The Borg were once similar to humans;in the words of a disgusted Borg Queen, "We used to be just like them." The Ilani are a generous, prosperous people on the verge of a great revolution in their lives. Already they employ a high level of technology and many are cybernetically enhanced. Dr. Aevo Lumin (played by Alice Krige, the Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact) has developed a technology that will allow groups of individuals to act as a collective, thereby overcoming inefficiency and raising productivity in the workplace. However, some Ilani are against this process, feeling that by giving their minds over to a collective consciousness, they are losing their individuality, even when disconnected from the others. However desperate she is to stop the Borg, Captain McKenna is unwilling to commit genocide, rejecting Sovok and Agrippa's suggestion that the Ulysses destroy the Ilani homeworld from orbit. Posing as Ilani, the crew mingle among the population and try to sway public opinion to the side of those who oppose Dr. Lumin's company, Borg Enterprises, Ltd., "borg" being the Ilani word for collective. Captain McKenna confronts Dr. Lumin while Benicio and a surgically de-eared K'rena pose as activists on the Ilani equivalent of Oprah. They argue that members of a cybernetically enhanced borg will inevitably come to think that they have a duty to include as many people as possible in their hive mind, whether they want to join or not, believing the end, supposed perfection, to justify any means. Nick and Dan, trying to find proof of malevolent intent in Lumin's offices, are happened upon by a security guard and are soon on the run from the Ilani constabulary, branded as terrorists. Agrippa escapes from the Ulysses, determined to destroy the Ilani before they can become the Borg. The crew race to stop him before he can blow up the capital city's fusion power plant, ending Dr. Lumin's collective as well as killing ten million innocents. In the struggle, the eugenic superman is killed. Hearing news reports of a terrorist attack on the fusion core, public opinion begins to swing towards Borg Enterprises and the social order the collective would provide. Our heroes leave the distant past savoring the irony that in stopping Agrippa and saving millions, they may have inadvertantly contributed to the rise of the Borg. In his prison outside normal time, Annorax, who had only ever used time travel as a means of changing history, must be laughing his head off.

K'rena's mother defected from the Tal Shiar two years after the 2344 Romulan attack on the Klingon outpost on Narendra III. In "Warbird," to observe the thirtieth anniversary of her mother's arrival in the Federation, K'rena stages a dramatic interpretation of the Romulan myth of their arrival on Romulus and Remus after generations of travel from Vulcan. Once again we spend an hour with Captain Cole and his bloody pirates aboard the Revenge. Finally joining up with a Tholian ship, the Gorn's erstwhile companions, Cole and company find the wreck of the U.S.S. Xanadu, a Starfleet vessel that disappeared in the Badlands mere months before Benicio's Maquis ship and the Ulysses. The ship is flooded with an unidentified radiation which only the Gorn can withstand. Encountering the Xanadu's EMH, he learns that the crew were all killed by the radiation, which was emitted when they activated an experimental transwarp engine, which they had cobbled together using several distinct alien technologies and a form of dilithium crystals unlike any others ever seen by Alpha Quadrant science. Transferring his flag to the Xanadu once the Tholians have devised a way to eliminate the radiation, Cole takes the Revenge in tow and the small squadron resumes its search for the second Caretaker. "Xanadu" ends with Hunter Cole allied with a powerful Tholian warship and in control of an Ambassador-class Federation starship. In "The Most Dangerous Game," the crew, masking their transmission to pass themselves off as Hirogen, establish contact with a lurking Hirogen vessel. The hunters are stalking a prey unlike any other, a being with precognition, the ability to see the future. Warned off by the Hirogen, who assume fellow Hirogen will honor their claim to the prey, the Ulysses shadows the hunters, eventually locating the elusive prey. Making contact, the crew learns that the Hirogen have been hunting an Ocampa, one of Kes's people, not seen since "The Stars My Destination." An entire culture of Ocampa, calling themselves Presari, were transplanted this far into space by the second Caretaker. Eventually, this Caretaker left them to their own devices and the Presari have established an interstellar state. Even with the Presari's procognition, the wiley Hirogen locate them; the Presari sacrifices himself and his body is claimed as a trophy. Liz first regarded Neelix as her godfather (which he is), but as she grew up he became her best friend and confidant. Now in appearance the same age as her mother, and as old as Kes was at the beginning of the series, she finds herself attracted to the Talaxian, much to Nick's irritation. Neelix and Nick repeat the macho grandstanding that marked their battle over Kes, but this time it is Nick who realizes he cannot stand in the way of true love. At season's end, the Ulysses is intercepted by several heavily armed picket ships, who stand down once they see the ship's Starfleet markings. The Ulysses is escorted to a nearby system where the crew is greeted by "Captain" Felix Aeschliman of the Federation Starship Gulliver, lost in the Delta Quadrant since 2368, three years before the Ulysses. However, the crew of the Gulliver are no longer trying to make their way home, instead carving out a life for themselves where they are; having a ship as heavily armed as the extensively modified Ulysses would go a long way to making their life as tyrannical rulers of the native population that much better. "The High Road, Part I" ends with our heroes in the familiar position of having been boarded, but this time by fellow Starfleet officers. Bum-ba-dum!

More to Come
The conclusion of "The High Road" and season seven, plus a final decision on Captain McKenna: Tricia O'Neil or Susanna Thompson?