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The crew of the USS Voyager, NCC-74656.note 
"There are three things to remember about being a starship captain. Keep your shirt tucked in, go down with the ship, and never abandon a member of your crew."
Captain Kathryn Janeway

Star Trek: Voyager is the third "Next Generation" Star Trek series, running for seven seasons from January 1995 through May 2001. It was the first Trek series since the original to air on a network, namely Paramount's own UPN; the pilot episode was actually UPN's very first program.

The double-length pilot episode saw the USS Voyager, under the command of Captain Kathryn Janeway, called in to apprehend a paramilitary group led by Chakotay, a renegade Starfleet officer. In the midst of trying to locate him, Voyager was yanked across the galaxy by an alien known as the Caretaker, who was also responsible for abducting Chakotay's ship. During a battle with the Kazon, the local space-faring thugs, Janeway destroyed the device that had abducted them rather than let it be misused. This had the effect of now stranding both crews in the Delta Quadrant, on the other side of the galaxy. The two crews must put aside their differences and work together to make the seventy-five year journey home.

For the next seven seasons, Voyager looked for a shortcut back to Earth while dodging or battling an assortment of nogoodniks within the Delta region. For the sake of familiarity, they also crossed swords with a pair of Ferengi who had been zapped to the Delta Quadrant back in Next Generation, the Q Continuum, assorted Romulans and Cardassians, a diaspora of Klingons on a pilgrimage of sorts, and even a rogue Starfleet vessel which was also kidnapped by the Caretaker. To make matters worse, the Delta Quadrant happens to be the home of the Borg Collective.

The show had a high turnover of both writers and actors, particularly compared to many of its siblings (bar perhaps The Original Series and its far different production environment). Season One offered up a promising mish-mash of crewmen with sketchier backgrounds than those of TOS or TNG, with pasts as rebels, convicts, con men, or (later) Borg drones. By Season Three, the show was retooled into something more suitable for family viewing, and the producers had found a winning formula (in keeping with the late-nineties fantasy TV boom) in embracing the sillier aspects of Starfleet life.

To an even greater extent than Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Voyager very much represented an Actionized Sequel for the Trek franchise. This was aided in large part by the Delta Quadrant being seemingly the most savage of the four Quadrants; nearly every race the Voyager Crew meet is as xenophobic as they are powerful. The series also toyed with improved CGI effects and a couple of two-part telemovies featuring the Borg.

See also the Star Trek: Voyager Relaunch for the show's continuation in novel form.

The first Star Trek: Elite Force PC game takes place during this show, and the actors provide their voices for their counterparts (barring Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine, until an expansion pack including her was released).

Star Trek: Picard serves as a sequel series, with Jeri Ryan reprising the role of Seven of Nine. Star Trek: Prodigy also serves as a sequel, featuring the return of Kate Mulgrew and Robert Beltran as Vice-Admiral Janeway and Captain Chakotay, respectively.

The Show Within a Show The Adventures of Captain Proton has its own work page.


This show provides examples of:

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    A-B 
  • Aborted Arc:
    • Most of the elements introduced by DS9's Michael Piller, most notably the Kazon Nistrim, were abandoned after ratings faltered and the other producers agreed that they weren't working. Originally they were angling for a darker, more serialized show like DS9. The big problem is that Piller was no Ron D. Moore. The other problem was that the Kazon were indistinct from Klingons. A third problem was that, even in their original conception, the Kazon were meant to be an allegory for the Crips and Bloods (right down to the afros) who were harassing some of the crew members in their secluded neighborhoods. The L.A. riots were the context in which the Kazon were designed, and the class tensions led to some racial subtext which permeates the Kazon episodes. It is probably for the best that "Basics, Part II" marks the end of the Kazon as a recurring threat to Voyager, even if that ending was less than graceful. It's also justified by the nature of Voyager itself - it's on a (mostly) direct course for home, and would eventually leave Kazon space and get so far away that the Kazons couldn't come after them any more.
    • Janeway Lambda One. Janeway's Victorian-era holonovel was going to unspool throughout the series. The idea was to show a private side to Janeway and develop her character beyond the limitations of the Captain's Chair, but it was a flop. Critics were getting tired of the over-reliance on the holodeck for stories, even at this early stage.
  • Absolute Xenophobe:
    • The unnamed aliens in "The Swarm". Voyager's crew find out little about them because they're determined to prevent any outside species from doing so.
    • The Starfish Aliens Species 8472 are initially portrayed as the most genocidal species that Starfleet has ever encountered. After the hostile Borg invade their home dimension, the genetically superior aliens embark on a crusade across the Milky Way to annihilate all other lifeforms, not just Borg, because they believe that their mere existence might be a threat to their purity. They mercilessly destroy billions of Borg before their invasion is halted by a temporary Borg-Voyager alliance, although it is revealed that they only acted out of self-defense.
  • Accidental Adultery: Captain Janeway is engaged to a civilian named Mark Johnson when the titular ship becomes stranded on the other side of the galaxy. Mark eventually marries someone else, which Janeway finds out when Starfleet reestablishes contact with Voyager in "Hunters", 14 months after the ship was declared missing in action and she was declared Legally Dead.
  • Accidental Good Outcome: In "Drone", a lab accident results in the creation of a Borg-like, but individual, boy named One. The EMH and Seven of Nine, whose technology were part of the accident, enjoy this and accept him as their son of sorts, but unfortunately, he ends up dying as part of a Heroic Sacrifice.
  • Actor Allusion: "I've always liked Klingon females. You've got such... spunk." This is spoken by a Female Q to Lt. Torres in "The Q and the Grey." Not only did the actor playing Q (Suzie Plakson) previously play a Klingon on TNG, she played a Klingon-human hybrid, like Torres.
  • Actually Pretty Funny: In the episode "Fair Haven", Tuvok is developing space sickness from a neutronic wavefront and mentions his dizziness and nausea to Seven. Then Harry and Tom start discussing the crashing sea. Then Neelix approaches and starts talking about replicating lamb intestines for blood pudding. His nausea gets worse and Seven gets a wonderful smirk on her face.
  • Affectionate Gesture to the Head: A habit of Janeway’s reserved for whenever a member of her crew is suffering more than usual.
  • Afterlife Angst: In one episode, Neelix is killed in an accident, but Seven is able to bring him back to life about 16 hours later with Borg technology. The problem for Neelix is, he expected to meet his dead family in the afterlife, but instead he experienced nothing. This nearly drives him to suicide.
  • Agent Scully: Played with in "Blink of an Eye", with two scientists trying to discover if there's anyone on board Voyager, which has been in their sky for their civilization's entire history due to Year Inside, Hour Outside. The Scully doubts there's anyone on board, but when the Mulder asks why he's on the mission in the first place, he adds that he doubts everything — including his own doubts.
  • A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
    • If the Doctor's programming isn't getting messed with, then it's a sentient Weapon of Mass Destruction (twice!) or holograms with unsatisfactory employer relations who are causing the problem.
    • The robot army in "Prototype", the adaptive missiles in "Dreadnought" and "Warhead", and the holograms in "Flesh and Blood". In most cases their main advocate on the ship (usually The Doctor or B'Elanna) was forced to put them down to protect the Quadrant.
    • "Why is everyone so worried about holograms taking over the universe?" So says Dr. Zimmerman on DS9, rubbing his forehead at the thought of those silly conspiracy nuts back home. It's a good in-joke if you're familiar with this show.
  • Alien Abduction: How they ended up in the Delta Quadrant in the first place in "Caretaker". Plus there's the Vidiians seeking to steal the crew's organs to replace their own diseased tissue. And "The 37's", abducted from the opposite side of the galaxy because We Will Use Manual Labor in the Future. Also seen in "Heroes and Demons" and "Displaced".
  • An Alien Named "Bob": Downplayed. The series features two alien hybrids, one of whom has the last name Torres (but the alien first name B'Elanna) and the second of whom has the completely-human name Naomi Wildman. Late in the series, B'Elanna has a quarter-alien daughter, and while it's unknown what her first name will end up beingnote , she has her father's surname, Paris.
  • All Just a Dream: In "Nemesis", Chakotay was being brainwashed to hate the Kadrin through a simulation that depicted them as monsters. Everything that happened from his viewpoint, until Tuvok found him, never did.
  • All Your Base Are Belong to Us: The image of Seska and Cullah strutting onto the Bridge as Janeway and her crew are held at gunpoint is a worthy successor to "Best of Both Worlds", also written by Piller. Alas it gets resolved about as elegantly as BOBW did next season.
  • Aloof Leader, Affable Subordinate: Defied. At first Janeway thought it was important that the crew see her as larger than life, and she would get information about the crew's emotional state from Chakotay, who was closer to them. She then decided that given the circumstances, she needed to spend more personal time with the crew.
  • Alternate Catchphrase Inflection:
    • In "Drone", a transporter accident results in the creation of a drone named One. When One is dying, he refuses to be treated due to believing he "was an accident". Seven of Nine says, "You must comply." in a wavery, sad voice instead of her usual firm, emotionless delivery of the line.
    • In "Shattered", Tuvok says, "Live long and prosper" in a weak voice instead of the usual stoic way Vulcans say that phrase, because he's seriously injured.
  • Alternate Reality Episode:
    • "Before and After" has an elderly Kes time-jumping backwards through her own history. In doing so she picks up foreshadowing for another Alternate Reality Episode, the Two-Part Episode "Year of Hell" in which things go From Bad to Worse when Voyager is caught up in the effects of a temporal weapon.
    • "Timeless" has a Bad Future in which Voyager is destroyed during a test of an experimental drive, and the survivors must Set Right What Once Went Wrong. Unlike other examples of this trope a hero of another series, Geordi LaForge from Star Trek: The Next Generation, is trying to stop them to protect the timeline. The final episode "Endgame" has a similar premise — the Bad Future is only so from Janeway's perspective. Her future self is an Insane Admiral who goes back in time to get Voyager home quicker.
    • Although STV never had a Mirror Universe episode, the concept is played with in "Living Witness" when a historian gives Voyager a Historical Villain Upgrade, and again in "Author, Author" when the Doctor's holonovel portrays the Captain Ersatz versions of the crew as jerks.
    • "Shattered" has Voyager being fragmented into different timelines from the past and future, though again the Bad Future is downplayed.
  • Always Chaotic Evil:
    • The Kazon are a race of Gangbangers IN SPACE!, divided into clans which constantly fight each other and anyone else they can loot from. Even the number of clans change from day to day, as does the size of the territory they claim.
    • Subverted with Species 8472. They're introduced as a monolithic, xenophobic, omnicidal race of telepathic aliens, but later revealed to just be acting in self-defense.
    • The Kradin from "Nemesis" are a race of monstrous warriors who engage in genocide and various other brutalities. It all turns out to be a lie perpetuated by their more human-looking enemies, who were brainwashing third parties to use as shock troops.
  • Always Save the Girl: Janeway often takes great risks to save Seven of Nine.
  • Ancient Astronauts: "Tattoo". The Sky Spirits traveled to Earth long ago and met Chakotay's distant ancestors, giving them a desire for exploration that aided in their spreading across the world.
  • And I Must Scream:
    • In the early episodes, the Doctor couldn't shut off his own program. This annoyed him when people would just leave the room without deactivating him. In one instance, he specifically requests that, should the crew choose to abandon the ship for any reason, they take the time to shut him off before they leave. If they didn't, he'd be stuck in Sickbay until power failed, completely alone.
    • In "The Thaw", Kim gets locked into an computer simulation that resembles a Circus of Fear, controlled by a Monster Clown who happens to be the personification of fear. The Clown has absolute control over the simulation, including the ability to read the minds of all present, and spends all his time tormenting and ridiculing any people unfortunate enough to be trapped with him. When Kim arrives, he finds three aliens who have been there for nineteen years.
    • In "Coda", it's implied that this would have been Janeway's fate if she'd trusted the alien posing as her father and allowed him to lead her to "the afterlife" — actually a hellish Eldritch Location where the Energy Being intended to feed on her soul.
    • In the final season, the Doctor encounters other sentient holograms like himself who have been used for Hunting the Most Dangerous Game. There's no end to their torment because each time they are 'killed', they're just brought back and killed again, and again...
  • Another Man's Terror: Paris has this forced upon him in "Ex Post Facto", where he is forced to relieve the final moments of a man he was convicted of murdering. Likewise the Doctor in "Flesh and Blood" is put in a Hunting the Most Dangerous Game holographic simulation by other holograms who've been used for this purpose.
  • Answers to the Name of God: "Flesh and Blood"'s Iden was programmed to adhere to the Bajoran faith. Eventually, he figures he doesn't want to associate his people with anything dirty and "organic" — but his subroutines still demand a deity and so he appoints himself.
    Doctor: (sarcastically) And on the seventh day, Iden created Ha'Dara...
  • Antagonist Title:
    • "The Swarm" has Voyager swarmed by a swarm of tiny spaceships from an Absolute Xenophobe race with a serious aversion to trespassers.
    • "Warlord": Kes's mind is taken over by the warlord in question.
    • "Nemesis": The Nemesis are a monstrous species of aliens engaged in a war of extermination against the humanoid natives. Subverted, as it's revealed to be a simulation run by the natives to brainwash new recruits, and the "warlike aliens" were the ones who helped rescue a kidnapped Chakotay. They also refer to the humanoids as their Nemesis.
  • Apocalyptic Log: John Kelly's final logs from the Ares IV mission. He's trapped in a graviton ellipse and he continues to record log entries and collect data right up to the point where all the power on his spacecraft fails and he dies. Chakotay admires him for this.
    Chakotay: That's dedication. The man's life is about to end, but he won't stop taking readings.
  • Arc Welding: "Death Wish" reveals that Q's defiance of the Continuum and subsequent exile during the early years of TNG was what inspired the renegade Quinn's attempts to commit suicide prior to Voyager discovering him.
  • Armor-Piercing Question:
    • Unlike most examples, it's not world-shaking but does make someone realize something. In an episode where the crew is unwillingly and unknowingly experimented on by an alien species, Janeway's aggression and irrationality is increased significantly. At one point she tells Tuvok to harshly punish several crew members for very minor things. Tuvok asks "Should I have them flogged as well?" That's when Janeway realizes that something is very wrong with her. Note Tuvok knew that would snap her back to reality.
    • In "Latent Image", Janeways wants to wipe the Doctor's memories against his will, arguing that he is Just a Machine. Seven gets through to her with the following.
    Seven: It is unsettling. You say that I am a human being and yet I am also Borg. Part of me not unlike your replicator. Not unlike the Doctor. Will you one day choose to abandon me as well?
  • The Artifact: Neelix was originally supposed to be Voyager's guide through the Delta Quadrant as well as Kes's love interest. However, he quickly became the ship's cook and comic relief, rarely being of any real use when it came to navigation or preparing Voyager for the dangers of the Delta Quadrant. The trope came into full effect in Season 3 and 4, as Voyager had moved on from the area of space he was familiar with, making him useless as a guide, and Kes's full powers emerged, forcing her to leave the ship. The show tried to keep him relevant by making him the ship's ambassador and "morale officer" but while this gave him a little Character Development, it did little to give Neelix an important role in the series.
  • Artifact Alias: Seven of Nine was born as Annika Hansen. Her de-assimilation from the Borg Collective happens in her debut (double-)episode, and even though she starts to accept her fate of being an individual again as time goes by, she almost always gets called by her old Borg designation for the rest of the series, though considering she has little memory of her pre-borg life, it's probably more her staying with the name she still thinks of herself as.
  • Artistic License – Biology:
    • In the episode "Macrocosm" we have viruses(!) which can grow in size - up to a meter, fly, and hover in the air. It turns out that they somehow could do it by taking an alien growth hormone.
    • The Ocampans (Kes' race) In Voyager, can only reproduce once, and have one child. No species could evolve such a trait and thrive. EVERY member of the race would to reproduce to have 0 population growth. If any member of the race dies, then the race as a whole has taken a blow it cannot recover from. They also have a life span of nine years which would only exacerbate their rapid depopulation.
    • The Drayans manage to top the Ocampa on how biologically implausible they are. They age backwards, so the "children" Tuvok was caring for were actually their elderly. The gestation process of such a species would be highly nonsensical with "children" being born as adult seniors.
  • Artistic License – Engineering: Frankly, it's a miracle Voyager managed to make it home to the Alpha Quadrant with anyone still alive. A major violation is their use of "bio-neural gel packs," which are essentially organic components. They were supposedly superior than standard computer circuits but actually left the ship open to more threats, such as the infamous moment when Neelix nearly destroyed the ship while trying to curdle cheese. In addition, apparently the manual overrides for the doors don't work without power, which is the whole point of having a manual override. Most importantly the holodecks are powered by a reactor which is somehow incompatible with the power systems on the rest of the ship.
  • Artistic License – History: The writers decided to go the Magical Native American route with Chakotay and deliberately left his heritage as "unspecified, related to a Central American nation" due to the complex politics surrounding Native portrayals. Apparently, picking one nation, and consulting its members on what a respectful and accurate portrayal of their culture would look like, would have been too hard.
    • They were actually hoodwinked by a consultant. They recruited someone named Jamake Highwater who claimed to be an expert on Native American culture. However, it turned out he was a con artist whose only knowledge of Native American culture came from movies. The producers didn't find this out until much later, sadly. At the time, they thought they were getting a reasonably authentic Native American character (as authentic as one could be in the 24th century, in-universe there was a bit of a revival of old traditions among Native American descendants). Of course, that just makes it a failure of critical thinking as no-one even thought to question the "expert" or verify what he said; he'd actually been publicly exposed nearly a decade earlier.
  • Artistic License – Medicine: In the first season finale, baby Naomi has a fever, and Janeway tries to make her better... with water. Water is dangerous for a baby under six months to drink, and should only be drunk in small amounts until age one.
  • Artistic License – Physics:
    • Neelix suggests for their honeymoon, Tom and B'Elanna take a cruise on a sea of liquid argon. Argon is only a liquid between -189 and -185 degrees Celsius! Granted, this takes place on the holodeck, but given how often the safety protocols decide to break...
    • In one episode, Janeway proposes punching through the event horizon of the anomaly they're trapped in. In case you didn't know, an event horizon is a mathematical boundary rather than an actual physical barrier you could break through. While this may differ with quantum singularities, where punching through may have involved bending subspace in a way that would change the mathematical properties of the barrier, neither scenario was established.
    • Because any rings surrounding a planet are composed of thousands upon thousands of separate tiny chunks of rock and ice instead of being one solid mass, it is highly unlikely that a reflection like the one of Voyager in the intro would be visible, to say nothing of the reflection's size.
    • When Voyager first arrives in the Delta Quadrant, they soon learn that water is scarce in this region of space; the ability of their replicators to make unlimited water quickly makes them a target. Water is one of the most abundant substances in the universe. A culture capable of travelling across their own star system, let alone one capable of interstellar travel like the Kazon, should have no difficulty finding their own sources.
  • Artistic License – Traditional Christianity: In "Fair Haven," one of the villagers tells the Doctor (who's playing a priest) that he's "broken the Fifth Commandment again." The Doctor brushes him off, telling him to "just recite ten Our Fathers and you'll be fine." "Our Father" is a Catholic prayer, the Doctor's costume is that of a Catholic priest, the setting is Ireland (which is predominately Catholic), and right after, the villager does the Catholic Sign of the Cross. However, the writers were either thinking of the relatively innocuous Protestant Fifth Commandment, "Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother," or telling a seriously dark joke. The Catholic bible divides its chapters into slightly different verses, with the result that the Catholic Church's fifth commandment is "Thou Shalt Not Kill."
  • "Ass" in Ambassador: It wouldn't be Star Trek without the Enterprise (or its equivalent) playing host to a gaggle of self-entitled dignitaries ("Virtuoso", "Someone to Watch Over Me", etc.). In the latter episode, the guest of honor gets blissed out on synthehol (apparently, his species lacks the enzymes that break down booze) and turns into a Tex Avery wolf when Seven walks in. "Seven of Mine!" he slurs. "Assimilate me!"
  • Assimilation Backfire:
    • The series eventually lampshaded the Kazons' Too Dumb to Live tendencies by having Seven of Nine remark that assimilating them would weaken the Borg Collective.
    • In the series finale, "Endgame", Admiral Janeway infects herself with a bioweapon before meeting the Borg Queen. When the Queen assimilates her, it infects that entire collective.
    Admiral Janeway: "Must have been something you assimilated."
  • Attack Pattern Alpha: Played with by the Doctor in "Message in a Bottle", when he needs to tell the computer to execute an attack and 'Attack Pattern Alpha' is the only attack pattern he can think of (luckily for him, it does turn out to be a real attack pattern.)
  • Author Appeal:
    • Jeri Taylor loves her some costume dramas, if you hadn't figured it out from Janeway's Victorian novel holoprogram... or Tom's Celtic village holoprogram.... or Q's reenactment of North and South with himself as a swashbuckling Union man in blue (despite him leading the equivalent of the Q Confederacy!).
    • Rick Berman is a self-admitted time travel addict, which explains the cornucopia of those episodes on VOY and ENT.
    • Brannon Braga is fond of B-movie creature features and Body Horror stories. He got to indulge both in the unintentional comedy classic, "Threshold". He also came up with the Phage, a sort of flesh-eating disease which can't be cured—even with amputations or skin grafts—requiring the victims to keep harvesting flesh.
  • Author Tract:
    • An In-Universe application of this trope occurs in the episode "Author, Author", in which the Doctor writes a holo-novel which is essentially a screed against the oppression of intelligent holograms, with thinly-disguised versions of the crew as the villains. However, the end of the episode implies that maybe the novel is in fact necessary, and that holographic rights is the next step in Federation civil law.
    • "Emanation" is a timely message about the pitfalls of euthanasia — in very broad stokes. The planet in question is honeycombed with "hundreds" of assisted suicide centers, to the degree that it is literally their one defining characteristic. This leaves Ensign Kim (our audience participation character) little to do but get detained and funneled into the mortuary where he awaits certain death.
  • Automatic Door Malfunction: One episode has Seven of Nine make some modifications to Voyager's computer, causing a number of malfunctions on board the ship. One of these involves Chakotay having trouble leaving his quarters, where the doors to his quarters keep opening and closing randomly, so he has to leap through the doors in order to leave his quarters.
  • Babies Ever After: Final episode — Paris and Torres' last-minute baby, Miral.
  • Back for the Dead: Poor Joe Carey in the final season. He reappears after a long absence only to be the last crew member killed before Voyager makes it home a few episodes later. Take That, Memory Alpha!
  • Background Halo: In the episode "The Chute", there's a close-up shot of one of the prisoners who's figured out the secret of the aggression implants where the force field ring surrounding the bottom end of the chute frames the top of his head, appearing as both a halo and a pair of horns.
  • Back to Front: "Before and After" sees Kes living her entire life backwards. It even foreshadows events in the next season (specifically "Year of Hell"), though that episode went differently since Kes was no longer on the ship.
  • Backwards-Firing Gun: In "Worst Case Scenario" Seska has programmed the holodeck to become a Deadly Game involving the Voyager crew; when Holodeck-Janeway fires her compression phaser rifle at Seska, it disintegrates Janeway. Later Seska forces Tuvok to Put Down Your Gun and Step Away, but the same thing happens to her as Tuvok sabotaged his rifle before handing it over.
  • Badass Adorable: Kes is this. While normally soft-spoken and gentle, when an alien tries to take over her body, she tears his mind to pieces while giving him a "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
  • Badass Crew: Par for the course for any Trek series, although Voyager is notable being 70,000 light years away from any Federation back-up and having only its crew to rely on. By season 2 Voyager already has a formidable reputation for asskicking among various Delta Quadrant civilizations (albeit partially due to the Kazon spreading false information).
  • Bad Future:
    • "Timeless" sees a future where only Chakotay and Harry Kim are left alive after an accident while testing the new slipstream drive. Half the episode takes place the day of the accident, and the other half is fifteen years later, as Harry, with Chakotay in tow, tries to fix his mistake.
    • The series finale "Endgame" is a milder version. Voyager makes it home after 22 years, but with Seven of Nine and Chakotay dead, and Tuvok put into an institution for mental instability. Now-Admiral Janeway refuses to live with the loss of a few close friends like this, and obtains a temporal rift projector from a Klingon, installs it on her shuttlecraft, and travels back in time to Voyager in the 7th year of their journey so they can get home quicker and with fewer casualties.
    • In "Shattered", Voyager is split into past and future timelines which Janeway and Chakotay must pass through to solve the problem. The problem is that this Janeway is from before she destroyed the Caretaker Array, so from her perspective everything she sees is a Bad Future. Chakotay has some trouble convincing her not to Screw Destiny and Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
  • Baffled by Own Biology:
    • In one episode, the EMH turns from a hologram to a human. When he gets a headache, he says to himself, "Pain?! I'm not programmed to feel pain!" Then, he also feels weirded out when he gets hungry.
    • In another episode, Seven of Nine gets drunk for the first time (on one glass of artificial champagne, no less). She initially thinks there's something wrong with her eyepiece and her implant that controls her motor skills.
  • Bait-and-Switch: If a certain theory is true, Voyager has a colossal one that potentially strung viewers along for twenty-one episodes. The episode Course Oblivion (Season 5, Episode 18) ends with the revelation that the Voyager crew depicted was, in fact, a copy created from the ending of Demon (Season 4, Episode 24), during which the real Voyager was partially submerged in a lake of the silver fluid that created the clones of Paris and Kim. The "Demon Crew", equipped with all the technology, personal drives and memories of Voyager, simply did as the real Voyager did and set a course for home.
    • However, a counter-argument to the theory appears at the start of the latter episode: Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres exchanging wedding vows with no prior mention of so much as an engagement. The real Tom and B'Elanna don't get married until the episode Drive, all the way in Season 7.
    • A counter-argument is also how Janeway addresses Tom Paris at the duplicate couple's wedding. Tom Paris is called lieutenant at that wedding, whereas the real Paris was demoted from lieutenant to ensign in the previous episode "Thirty Days."
  • Barbie Doll Anatomy:
    • For obvious reasons the EMH was designed without genitals; a throwaway line in Message in a Bottle implies that at some point the Doctor made an addition to his program.
    • It is very likely that this also applies to the Ocampa, as we see Kes in Before and After giving birth out of a sack on her back and we learn in Elogium that conception occurs only after a male touches the female's palms after they begin to secrete some kind of yellow mucus.
    • In "Latent Image", the Doctor shows off a holographic reconstruction of Harry Kim. Freeze-Frame Bonus proves what some fans have been saying all along — Harry has no balls.
  • Baths Are Fun: In the premiere episode, "Caretaker," Neelix was over-the-moon when he went to Voyager for the first time and was offered a bath by Tuvok. Water was scarce in that region of the Delta Quadrant, the idea of immersing himself in water to get clean was something completely foreign to Neelix. Captain Janeway was also known to have a bathtub in personal quarters on Voyager and when she and Chakotay were stuck on a planet they dubbed New Earth with an illness that only stayed dormant on that planet without the cure, Chakotay built her one.
  • Batman Gambit:
    • "Counterpoint": Voyager is transporting telepaths through Devore space, where telepaths are automatically arrested, along with those helping them. Kashyk arrives and informs the crew that he knows what they're doing and how they plan to escape. He also says he's defecting and wants to help them avoid a Devore trap planned for them. If the crew believes him, then he betrays them at a crucial moment. If they turn him away, he turns them in. If they do something to him, his superiors will wonder what happened and come looking for him. He'd win no matter what they did. Except he was Out-Gambitted by Janeway, who was prepared for his deception. If he was telling the truth, great, she'd be happy to have him on board. If he wasn't, she was ready.
    • "Think Tank": Janeway thinks that the Hazari are covering every escape route and the ones that don't appear covered are traps, screwing the ship no matter which path they choose. Then it's inverted with the Hazari's employers, who are screwed no matter what they do.
    • "Dark Frontier": the Borg wanted Seven of Nine to be severed earlier to develop a human perspective. If the Federation hadn't taken the bait, they lose nothing. In the episode itself, the Borg Queen's plan is a Batman Gambit. If Seven returns to them, they leave Voyager alone. If not, they assimilate Voyager during the mission. If Seven warns Voyager, than the Borg recover the transwarp coil that Voyager planned on stealing.
  • Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: Amelia Earhart Was Abducted By Space Aliens ("The 37's").
  • Belligerent Sexual Tension: The romance between Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres is every inch this trope. Lampshaded in "Distant Origin," in which two aliens observe the two talking.
    "Note how the female through the feigned antagonism encourages the male in his attempt to mate."
  • Benevolent Boss: Commander Peter Harkins for Reg Barclay. While he is exasperated with Barclay's zaniness, he still supports his ideas, shields him from the wrath of a pissed-off Admiral Paris, and even tries to help him socialize off-base, something that Barclay admits he has a hard time with. Compare this with Will Riker and Geordi La Forge's initial jerkassery towards Barclay back when he first joined the Enterprise crew.
  • Beware the Nice Ones:
    • Harry Kim. A sweet, dutiful, eternally optimistic young man who, when pushed, can be handy in a prison fight ("The Chute"), single-handedly fuck up the plans of the Hirogen, and nuke an entire Borg sphere without trying. He also turns out to be an effective Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds in spotlight episodes "Non Sequitur" and "Timeless," where Harry obliterates an entire timeline to keep his friends on their journey home.
    • Neelix in some episodes, particularly "Repentance". He may seem like your average annoying or fun-loving Cloudcuckoolander, but do not mistake him for an idiot.
    • Kes is a very nice, polite young woman. She's also an immensely powerful psychic that can boil your blood by accident, and when someone takes over her body, she messes with him for several minutes of perceived time, only for him to wake up and realize that maybe a second passed.
  • Big Damn Heroes: The Doctor in "The Thaw" appears Just in Time to stop Harry Kim from being sliced up by a Monster Clown.
  • The Big Race: In one episode, Tom and B'Elanna participate in a race with the Delta Flyer.
  • Biotech Is Better:
    • The ship itself has bio-neural gelpacks that allow the computer to "think" more flexibly and operate faster. (The downside being that they could also be infected with viruses and bacteria.) It's one of the things that marks Voyager out as one of Starfleet's most advanced ships.
    • Species 8472 of has "bioships" which resist Borg assimilation, are vastly superior to Borg cubes, and can destroy a planet by linking together. The Borg started the war with them because they wanted 8472's capabilities so bad.
  • Bizarre Alien Biology: Kes (nine-year lifespan, telepathy, gives birth from a sac on her back, and when she reaches sexual maturity you rub her feet until her tongue swells up), Species 8472 (tripedal, five sexes, densely-coded DNA, emits a biogenic field that blocks scanning, and has an immune system that can stop Borg nanoprobes). But nothing tops the cytoplasmic lifeform in "Nothing Human". The Universal Translator can't understand its language, the tricorder can't comprehend its biology, it controls a spaceship via biochemical secretions, can leap through a forcefield in a single bound, and uses B'Elanna Torres as an emergency life-support system.
  • Bizarre Alien Sexes: Species 8472 has five sexes.
  • The Blank: In "The Fight", Chakotay fights a being from a region of chaotic space; the being is wearing a boxing hoodie that hides his face, when the alien is finally revealed, he has no face, only a starfield.
  • Blasting It Out of Their Hands: In the episode "Relativity", When Seven of Nine is chasing a saboteur who teleports by activating his tricorder, she manages a shot that flips it out of his hand and away, forcing him to run instead of teleport.
  • Blue-and-Orange Morality: The Caretaker, and to a lesser extent his mate Suspiria. While he feels a sense of duty to care for the Ocampa after his species' intergalactic exploration devastated their homeworld, he does so by turning them into a docile childlike people utterly dependent on him. When he begins to die, he proceeds to abduct, rape and ultimately kill sentient beings from elsewhere in the galaxy in his desperate attempt to produce an offspring to continue his duties, as Suspiria has long since left him. Suspiria took a group of Ocampa with her when she departed, and instead trained them to develop their great psychic potential. This made her Ocampa into racial supremacists, although she may not have seen this as a problem since her long-term goal was to enable them to join her in the subspace domain she called "Exosia" rather than interact with other species in the galaxy or return to their homeworld. Both of them had very alien moral systems by Federation standards.
  • The Body Parts That Must Not Be Named: When the doc meets another holographic doctor, he mentions sex as one of the many things he's done. The other hologram says, "Sex?! How is that possible?! We aren't equipped with a..." but the doctor interrupts him and tells him that he made an addition to his program.
  • Body Snatcher: "Cathexis", "Warlord", "Vis-À -Vis".
  • Book Ends: Several. For the series as the whole; the first and last episodes both end with "Set a course, for home." Season 5's "Drone" is also framed with Seven looking into a mirror.
  • Boring Vacation Slideshow: The Doctor once bored the entire crew with a long presentation about one of their away missions.
  • Boxed Crook: The best scenes in "Basics" are those between the Doctor and Suder, where the former has to try and convince the Betazoid that killing the Kazon isn’t murder but self-defense and Suder has to confront his demons.
  • The Boxing Episode: "The Fight" had Chakotay taking to the ring in a Battle in the Center of the Mind as the only way to communicate with Starfish Aliens.
  • Brainwashed: "Persistence of Vision" and "Bliss" had a siren enticing the crew into a mental Lotus-Eater Machine, "Nemesis" was All Just a Dream designed to turn Chakotay into a fanatical soldier, "Repression" had a Manchurian Agent plot, "Workforce" had the crew brainwashed into forgetting their past on Voyager so they could be used as skilled labor.
  • Braving the Blizzard: In one episode, aliens who like it hot and dark take over the ship and displace the crew in a simulated prison environment. As the crew attempt to escape, Tom and B'Elanna have to hide in another simulated environment, this time in an icy area with a raging blizzard because it's cold and bright. B'Elanna gets hypothermia because she's part Klingon (a species with a low tolerance for cold).
  • Brick Joke:
    • In "The Fight," Chakotay cuts his forehead in a holodeck boxing simulation and the EMH sarcastically refers to him as, "Chakotay, the Maquis Mauler." Later when he's having the chaotic boxing ring hallucination, guess what nickname is written on the back of his robe?
    • In the early seasons the Doctor struggles to find a name. In the final episode we see he's chosen one — Joe.
    • When we find out Lieutenant Barclay from Next Generation was responsible for the EMH program's interpersonal skills. Fans of ST:TNG know that Barclay's No Social Skills is a Running Gag.
  • Broken Aesop:
    • "Tattoo": The episode is supposed to be about how wonderful Native American culture is only to reveal that the Native Americans owe everything they are to alien intervention.
    • "Remember" and "Memorial." It is important to learn about the tragedies of the past so that they never happen again...and the best way to do this is to forcibly implant memories of those tragedies into unknowing people who won't even stick around to make a difference.
    • "Nothing Human": B'Elanna displays racial prejudice against a holographic Cardassian physician. The Doctor objects to this racism, and the episode seems to be building toward an Aesop opposing bigotry ... until it is revealed that the Cardassian doctor, Crell Moset, is actually a war criminal. The episode then turns into a debate on medical ethics, and the racism issue is all but forgotten. The Star Trek franchise is normally very firm in its opposition to bigotry, but this episode actually seemed to imply that the prejudiced characters were right. B'Elanna even acts like the discovery of Moset's war crimes vindicates her earlier hostility toward him. When she says that she had "a bad feeling" about the Cardassian as soon as she saw him, nobody calls her out on the fact that her "bad feeling" was the product of nothing more than her own racial prejudice.
    • "Friendship One" has Janeway lament the death of Carey, noting that exploration can't justify the loss of even one life. Which is fine... except TNG made a big point that exploring the unknown always carries risk, one you're taking by choosing to do it.
    • The two themes in "Flesh and Blood" are that people should take responsibility for their actions, and whether an artificially-intelligent hologram has the same rights as a person or is Just a Machine. However to let the Doctor off the hook Janeway declares that he's not responsible for his actions. Which would certainly be the case if the Doctor were Just a Machine, but not if he has the right to exercise his free will.
  • Broken Pedestal: A variation occurs with Doctor Zimmerman in "Life-Line". The Federation eventually came to regard the EMH program as a joke due to their poor bedside manner, writing them off in the end and repurposing the entire line into miners (the fact this makes them a slave-race is ignored), leaving Zimmerman bitter and disillusioned that his greatest creation is now serving as manual labour, all sharing his face. Naturally he's not too happy when The Doctor shows up to attempt to treat him.
  • The Bus Came Back: "Fury," a one-shot return of Kes in season 6.
  • Busman's Vocabulary:
    • While the doctor doesn't usually do this, in "Body and Soul", he mentions a man who kissed him "using his face as a tongue depressor".
    • B'Elanna Torres is an engineer, and again she doesn't normally talk this way, but in "Lineage", she makes an analogy by comparing genetic engineering (which she wanted to do to her and Tom Paris's unborn daughter) to using tools to fix a machine.
      Tom: "She's not a machine; she's our daughter!"
  • Butterfly of Doom: The Krenim Imperium is one big Chinese finger trap. Chakotay, acting under Annorax's guidance, remembers that Janeway made a small course correction to dodge a comet, causing them to detour into Krenim space. When Chakotay runs a simulation of what would happen if they erased that comet, the harmonious line graph on the viewscreen turns into a mess of wadded-up spaghetti. "Congratulations, you almost wiped out eight thousand civilizations." ("Year of Hell")

    C-D 
  • Call-Back:
    • The ending of "Ex Post Facto" is eerily reminiscent of the ending of "The Trouble with Tribbles."
    • In the episode "Author, Author", the Doctor wrote a holonovel with barely-disguised copies of his fellow crew members as the villains of the story. As a homage to the Mirror Universe, Tuvok's actor Tim Russ grew out a goatee for the occasion.
    • VOY differs from the other Trek series in that it lacks a proper Mirror Universe episode. However, "Author, Author" and "Living Witness" are functionally no different: there is constant and comical back-biting amongst the crew, the tone is anarchic (how does the Warship Voyager keep aloft with these schmucks onboard?), and Mirror Janeway carpets her ready room with guns. Picardo, as the android version of the EMH, twirls around to reveal robo-eyes and wires sprouting from his bald dome; doubtless this is a wink at Stewart's Borg reveal in "Best of Both Worlds".
    • In "Year of Hell", Torres and Kim play a game of historical "Guess Who?", with Torres failing to name the famous shuttle from Star Trek: First Contact. Seven, who has firsthand knowledge of the incident from the Borg archives, reveals that nobody in Starfleet is even aware of Picard and the Borg Queen's meddling.
    • The adolescent Q immediately dons a miniature Captain's uniform, gets into arguments with the bartender, and hurls Borg cubes at Voyager. Like father, like son!
    • One episode calls all the way back to Undiscovered Country. In the movie, Bones can't save Gorkon because he didn't know his anatomy. While attempting to design a new EMH in the show, Harry mentions that Voyager's medical library includes "Comparative Alien Physiology" by Leonard McCoy. Apparently Bones decided he didn't want something like that happening again.
  • Calling the Old Man Out: The Doctor does this in "Life-Line" to his creator. Doctor Zimmerman constantly belittles him and dismisses his program as a failed experiment, eventually getting furious and demanding to know why the Doctor is trying to treat his terminal illness. The Doctor furiously counters back that he designed him that way and whether he likes it or not, he is a Doctor and he will treat him.
  • Canon Discontinuity:
    • Allegedly, this was once the case for "Threshold". Ironically it must be the single most mentioned Star Trek episode in history. It gets mentioned in every Star Trek forum at least once a day. Braga even recycled it for an ENT episode, perhaps hoping he could get it right this time. The result: "Extinction", "one of the singularly most embarrassing episodes of Star Trek I've ever been involved with."
      • Regardless of whether or not "Threshold" was actually excised from continuity, the events of the episode were explicitly mentioned in the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode "We'll Always Have Tom Paris" and the Star Trek: Prodigy episode "Mindwalk", either reversing the retcon or confirming it was never retconned in the first place.
    • "Deuterium? You can get that anywhere!" is mentioned in one episode, seasons after the "running out of deuterium" stuff.
    • Chatokay's on and off vegetarianism - it actually came and went in two consecutive episodes...he's tucking into Seven's beduvian quail in one episode, and can't drink the meat nectar in the next episode that makes Harry Kim sick.
    • One season 3 episode has Captain Janeway embark on a vision quest to save Kes. Dialogue in-episode reveals that Janeway is a scientist, and her sister had the artistic streak. Three episodes later, "Macrocosm" shows the Captain painting in her ready room. Did she forget that she was the scientist? It could be that this was character development, but it came out of exactly nowhere.
  • Can't Default to Murder: In "The Void", Janeway forms an alliance with the crews of several other spaceships but makes three rules: no killing, no stealing, and no giving up. Most of them follow these rules fine, but one murderous alien breaks all three: he gives up on trying to follow them and then kills a man to steal a piece of equipment.
  • The Caper: The crew hatch a plan to boost the transwarp coil from a Borg Cube, X-COM-style, to attach to their ship and shorten the voyage home in 'Dark Frontier'. Janeway actually refers to it as a "little heist."
    Chakotay: Maybe I should go to Red Alert and get it over with.
  • Captain Ersatz:
    • Originally the writers wanted to include the guest character of "Cadet Nicholas Locarno" from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The First Duty" as a regular. To avoid paying royalties to the writers of that episode — and because Locarno was seen as fundamentally unredeemable — a Captain Ersatz in the person of Tom Paris was created. Not only do both characters have a very similar Backstory and personality, both are played by Robert Duncan McNeill as well.
    • Once Seven of Nine joined up, the show rolled out a new rogues gallery. Some of these newcomers take inspiration from popular eighties sci-fi films. The Malon are a recycling of Baron Harkonnen from David Lynch's Dune (1984), with skin lesions, rubber spacesuits, thinning ginger hair, and a planet renowned for its pollution. The Hirogen are a self-admitted expy of Predator, even appearing with a mask in their first appearance. The homage breaks down a bit in "The Killing Game", in which the Hirogen leader (who is unusually erudite for his kind) tries to civilize his people by weaning them off "the Hunt".
    • Even after DS9 wrapped, the borrowing from Babylon 5 wasn't quite over yet. Substitute "Species 8472 bioship" => "Shadow Battlecrab" and you'll get the picture.
    • From certain angles, the Krenim WeaponShip in "Year of Hell" looks a helluva lot like Babylon 5 trying to annihilate the starship Voyager. How apropos.
    • "Counterpoint" offers another riff on PsiCorp, with similarly-dressed bad guys on the hunt for fugitive telepaths.
  • Captain Nemo Copy: Captain Annorax from the two-parter "The Year of Hell". A temporal scientist whose technology advanced the Krenim Imperium, he uses his ship, known only as the "Krenim Weapon Ship", to erase his enemies from the timeline, and is unrivaled in his understanding of time. He was driven on his quest by the loss of his home, including his wife, and keeps trying to alter history to restore it. His name is a play on "Aronnax", the protagonist of Leagues, and Tom Paris even refers to him as "Captain Nemo" once.
  • Catchphrase: As well as Janeway's Picard-esque trademark drinks order of "coffee, black", the only other catchphrase in Voyager comes from the Doctor, whenever he's activated.
    Doctor: Please state the nature of the medical emergency.
  • Ceiling Corpse: Not bodies (because they weren't dead), but in "Cold Fire", Janeway looks up to see B'Lanna and Tuvok pinned to the ceiling.
  • Cerebus Rollercoaster: Hard to believe that Voyager once grappled with the idea of a serial killer for a crewmember and gave that part to Brad Dourif.
  • The Chains of Commanding: Captain Janeway — not only is she Lonely at the Top, she can't even commiserate with other Starfleet captains or superior officers. She can talk things over with Chakotay, but forget about exploring that Unresolved Sexual Tension with him. And at the back of her mind is always the knowledge that it was her decision that got them all stranded in the Delta Quadrant in the first place. In "Night", she suffers a full-on Heroic BSoD and even when she snaps out of it to deal with the Villain of the Week, Chakotay has to forestall some suicidal heroics on her part. "Equinox" has an Hourglass Plot in which another Starfleet captain in the same position who crossed the Moral Event Horizon and Janeway end up switching roles. And "Endgame" has her future self violating the timeline to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
  • Character Development: A major focus of the show. Most of the major characters' personalities change significantly over the seven-year run, with the possible exception of Chakotay and Tuvok. Even the last two get development in the sense that all of the major characters' relationships with each other change over time (rivalries turn into friendships, and sometimes romances). Seven and the Doctor got the most, with their quest for humanity. B'Elanna Torres, Tom Paris, and Harry Kim noticeably "grow up" over the years. In the first season, Tom is cynical, immature, and won't follow the rules; Harry is naive and lets Tom "lead;" and B'Elanna has major anger issues. Over time, Tom gains better morals and learns to fit in, reworking his talent for irony into a sense of humor to lighten the mood for everyone; Harry becomes more confident, and even earns the responsibility of commanding night shifts; and Torres gains better control of her emotions, and even starts to open up to her Klingon heritage. Janeway started out being very pro-Prime Directive, even in their situation. As time went on, she became more of a rebel and was more concerned with bringing her crew home.
  • Chekhov's Gun:
    • The neural transceivers in "Scorpion". The Borg attempt to use them on Janeway and Tuvok in order to link their thoughts to the hive mind; Chakotay later uses one to link his thoughts with Seven of Nine to distract her.
    • In "Revulsion," on a Serosian starship, the hologram Dejaren is serving Torres a tray of food when he nearly steps on a considerable power cord exposed at one end. Torres had to warn him to "Watch out!" Later, when the hologram turned homicidal and corners Torres, she uses said power cord to destroy him.
  • Clip Show:
    • Averted in "Before & After" (with Kes) and "Shattered" (with Chakotay and a first-season Janeway) — the protagonist visits various time periods during Voyager's journey without any actual footage from the episodes in question.
    • The episode "The Fight" may not be a true clip show, but it at least deserves an honorable mention. The ship is stuck in "chaotic space," the aliens which inhabit it communicate to Chakotay in his mind by splicing together words taken from other crew members from earlier in the episode.
  • Cloning Body Parts: Via replicators. In "Emanations" the Doctor resurrects an alien brain cancer victim by removing the tumor from her brain stem, replicating and implanting replacement tissue, and zapping her with the On-Button Hypospray.
  • The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes: Lewis Zimmerman, inventor of the Emergency Medical Hologram line, proves to be the Doctor's most difficult patient yet. In fairness, Zimmerman has already been examined by dozens of real Doctors with up-to-date knowledge and they haven't found anything. To spend his last days getting poked and prodded by the Windows Vista of holograms is not Lewis' idea of a dignified exit.
  • Comedic Underwear Exposure: In "Twisted", an anomaly is causing the rooms in the spaceship to change position, resulting in a guy standing in the engine room in his undies.
  • Composite Character: The infamous "Tuvix," featuring an ill-fated Fusion Dance of Tuvok and Neelix.
  • Combat Pragmatist: After earlier being outsmarted by the Equinox's EMH, The Doctor wins round two by simply telling the computer to delete its program.
  • Come with Me If You Want to Live: In "Faces", Klingon B'Elanna plays this one (in silence) to human B'Elanna. Neither of them was aware of the other's existence, and human B'Elanna is certainly terrified of her savior (even when it was basically a portion of herself).
  • Comfort Food:
    • The concept is discussed in an early episode, with Neelix needing to be introduced to the idea when various crew members ask him to cook comfort foods to help cope with the stress of being stranded in the Delta Quadrant. Unfortunately he's a Cordon Bleugh Chef due to being more familiar with alien cuisines, so his success tends to vary.
    • Played for Drama in "Extreme Risk", where B'Elanna is suffering from clinical depression and tries ordering comfort food (in her case banana pancakes) to shake herself out of it. She's visibly disappointed when it doesn't work. Truth in Television, as this isn't uncommon for people who are clinically depressed. At the end of the episode however she tucks into a plate with more enthusiasm.
  • Comic-Book Adaptation: Malibu Comics initially won the rights to Voyager as a companion to its DS9 title, but only got so far as to publish some preview art in a few industry periodicals before Paramount withdrew the rights to Star Trek from both Malibu and DC Comics due to it launching a new Paramount Comics imprint with Marvel Comics, which subsequently published a Voyager comic book. Later, DC obtained the licence for its Wildstorm imprint. IDW Comics currently holds the licence but as of 2014 has yet to publish a Voyager comic, though Seven of Nine is a main character in IDW's Next Generation miniseries Hive.
  • Communications Officer: Harry Kim got a battlefield promotion to chief communications officer, despite only being (perpetually) an ensign.
  • Conspiracy Theorist: Deconstructed by Seven of Nine in "The Voyager Conspiracy". In an attempt to process data more effectively and make use of her regeneration time, Seven starts downloading massive amounts of data into her brain prior to doing so. However, without the calming influence of the Collective, her brain struggles to find order in random events, causing her to leap to wild conclusions each time she looks at the ship's data. This quickly balloons into a theory that the Federation orchestrated her assimilation as a stepping stone to invading the Delta Quadrant, which only Seven can prevent by destroying the ship and herself. Unfortunately this social commentary is just as relevant as it was in the nineties. Her paranoid rants are so persuasive that she almost convinces Chakotay for a second until he finds out that she drew two sets of completely different conclusions from the exact same data, one of which she presented to Janeway.
  • Continuity Cavalcade:
    • VOY seems to contain at least two of every recurring species in Star Trek, rather like Noah's menagerie. Ensign Vorik and Commander Tuvok comprise a two-man Vulcan social club (a female Vulcan can be spotted floating around in the crowd; conveniently, Vorik deemed her "incompatible" as a mate and imprinted on Torres instead in "Blood Fever"). Torres, of course, is the resident Klingon. At least two Bajorans, a Betazoid, a Cardassian (incognito, that is), and two Bolian are Maquis members... "Workforce" confirmed the presence of a few Benzites; you can spot them disembarking at the power plant along with the rest of Janeway's brainwashed crew (their ever-changing skin color has settled on pink).
    • "Flesh and Blood" revels in bringing back the familiar Alpha Quadrant races in hologram form. This is Federation technology after all, so it makes sense that the Hirogen would build their prey in the images of their database. This is a clever way to pack scenes of Bajorans, Cardassians, Klingons, Borg, Breen(!), and Romulans together without having to reference the Dominion War.
      Torres: It's like an Alpha Quadrant Summit in here.
  • Continuity Nod:
    • The series opens with Chakotay and his Maquis cell being pursued by Gul Evek. Evek had been established on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as the Cardassian liaison to the Demilitarized Zone — which means he is logically one of the ships in range to go after Chakotay.
    • In "State of Flux" when evidence suggests Seska is a surgically alterred Cardassian spy, Tuvok notes that Starfleet Secuirty has documented incidents of Cardassian cosmetic alteration for espionage. Two such incidents had occurred the previous year over on DS9's "Tribunal" and "Second Skin".
  • Continuity Overlap: VOY ran concurrently with Seasons 3-7 of DS9 and the first three TNG films. Despite being stranded in the Delta Quadrant, the show was nonetheless affected by developments back home:
    • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The introduction of the Maquis (and the Badlands) on DS9 was done specifically to set up VOY. The crew also wear the jumpsuit uniforms created for DS9. And once they re-establish contact with Starfleet in Season 4, the crew finds out the hard way that not only is the Federation embroiled in a bloody war with the Dominion, but the Maquis have also been wiped out. Finally, Defiant-class ships appear in Seasons 4 and 7.
    • Star Trek: Generations: As "Caretaker" premiered months after the film's release, the Starfleet crew is now using the redesigned combadges introduced in Generations.
    • Star Trek: First Contact: Once VOY re-establishes contact with Starfleet in mid-Season 4, any scenes or communications with the Alpha Quadrant have Starfleet personnel wearing the film's new black and gray uniforms. Starfleet ships introduced in First Contact also appear in Seasons 4 and 7. The introduction of the Borg Queen also causes headaches for Janeway and company during Seasons 5-7.
    • Star Trek: Insurrection: The Doctor disguises himself as a female Tarlac (a species introduced in the film) while attempting to treat his creator Lewis Zimmerman back the Alpha Quadrant in Season 6's "Life Line".
  • Convection, Schmonvection: In "Basics, Part II" the crew avoid fatal burns from the lava flow from a Chekhov's Volcano.
  • Converging-Stream Weapon: Species 8472 has a weapon consisting of several ships that fire simultaneously to create one of these.
  • Cool Old Guy: Boothby (actually a simulation or shapeshifting alien, but still cool on both occasions). No wonder the real Boothby mentored all of the best Captains.
  • Cool Starship:
    • The Voyager; a ship roughly half the size of a Galaxy-class starship all alone in the meanest, most inhospitable corner of the galaxy. She's also the fastest starship in the fleet at the time, with a maximum speed of warp 9.975, and receives upgrades throughout the voyage to her capabilities. The sleek styling, and vaguely bird-of-prey proportions are icing on the cake.
    • Special mention also goes to the USS Prometheus; a ship designed during the Dominion War back in the Alpha Quadrant that can split into three separate ships to engage the enemy from multiple directions.
  • Costume Evolution: Subverted. The Starfleet crew stayed in basically the same uniform — the colored shoulders and black tunic, with the purple-gray turtleneck underneath, the one introduced on DS9 in the in-universe year 2369 — for the entire show. This actually helped reinforce the "We're stranded a gazillion years from home" element of the premise, since the rest of Starfleet, including DS9 and the Enterprise-E crew, had moved on to even newer uniform designs (grey shoulders, black tunic, colored undershirt) by 2373. When Voyager started making contact with the Alpha Quadrant, it was visually out of date.
  • Courtroom Episode: "Death Wish". Quinn more or less sued the Continuum to allow him to commit suicide, and was sectioned to the Q equivalent of a rubber room (e.g. a comet). Q asks Janeway to rule on whether Quinn has the right to take his own life. Vulcans approve of suicide and so Tuvok is the consul chosen by Quinn to assist in his case.
  • Covered in Mud: In "Nothing Human," the EMH shows everyone a holo-photograph of Tom Paris after he fell into a mud pit during an away mission. Paris insists he was pushed, but his fellow crew members don't believe him.
  • Creepy Child: Suspiria in "Cold Fire", the Borg children on their first appearance, Naomi Wildman in a nightmare sequence in "Dark Frontier". Kes has these moments as well as hints to her Dark Side. After studying anatomy texts the Doctor gives her, Kes mentions how she would like to witness an autopsy, and despite being an Innocent Flower Girl enjoys using her Psychic Powers to burn up her own garden.
  • Critical Staffing Shortage:
    • The series begins with both Voyager and the Maquis ship sustaining heavy casualties while far away from Federation space. The only way Voyager can be operated is by merging the two crews and having skilled Maquis take over key positions on the ship. Notably, neither crew has a doctor or even a medic left alive so the Emergency Medical Hologram has to be used all the time, which it was not really designed for. Over the course of the series the EMH develops a distinct personality and starts fighting for his rights as a person.
    • Occurs in "Displaced," where crewmen keep disappearing while aliens appear in their place. Before too much longer they're down to a skeleton crew and then it turns out it's a ploy to take over the ship, beaming crew members off one at a time and replacing them with their own people.
  • Cross Cultural Kerfuffle: Invoked as part of the reason the Doctor never chose a name for himself, as he couldn't find a name that meant something good in all languages; as an example, he notes that "Frederick" bears a resemblance to an impolite term on the Bolian homeworld, while the Vulcan name "Sural" was also the name of a brutal dictator on Sakura Prime.
  • Crossover: Barclay and Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation; Quark from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; Captain Sulu from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Captain Geordi LaForge in the episode "Timeless"; Riker in "Death Wish".
  • The Cuckoolander Was Right: Did anyone back in the XX century say that Amelia Earhart was abducted by aliens? In "The 37s", it happens that they were right...
  • Cute Monster Girl:
    • Denara Pel is Two-Faced with one side decaying from The Phage, the other still showing her beauty.
    • Despite the Borg being previously described as gender-less, Borg drone Seven of Nine has prominent feminine attributes.
    • The female Caretaker, Suspiria. Nice and cute, and then she gets mad, and her voice drops 2 octaves....
  • Dance of Romance: The Doctor with Denara Pel in "Lifesigns", and with Seven of Nine in "Someone to Watch Over Me."
  • Dangerously Garish Environment: The episode "The Thaw" has the dimension in the minds of the people in stasis that features a circus that looks fun because the characters wear colourful clothes and it has bright lights and objects. However, it is run by a Monster Clown who's the embodiment of fear.
  • A Day in the Limelight: As with most shows, all the regular characters have a few episodes revolving around themselves each season, and most recurring characters have at least one in the series. Worth noting, however, is that "Voyager" also made effort to show the lower-decks crewmen once in a while. "Learning Curve" focused on Maquis crewmen adjusting to Starfleet regulations; several seasons later, "Good Shepherd" starred three of Janeway's original Starfleet crew who weren't adjusting well to life in the Delta Quadrant; and "Ashes to Ashes," which was essentially about a dead Red Shirt trying to return to Voyager, also counts.
  • Darker and Edgier: While all Trek shows loved to juggle sweeping drama and sci-fi horror with frothy comedy, the pendulum swung to even farther extremes in this case. Janeway was shown on multiple occasions to be willing to contradict her principles, form dubious alliances, and trade dangerous technology to shorten Voyager's trip. There are also numerous episodes where the crew gets messily killed, usually involving time travel, holograms or cloning.
  • Dark Parody: In-universe, the EMH sings a parody of "Rock-a-Bye Baby" where instead of falling out of a tree (dangerous, but still a chance of survival) the baby is on an exploding shuttle.
  • Dated History: Used in-universe in "Living Witness". A society has ended up with an incredibly biased account of history when Voyager traversed their system hundreds of years before, depicting the crew as a gang of sadistic thugs and genocidal monsters. When a copy of the Doctor is encountered among some of the artifacts, he eventually manages to set the record straight, and influence the planet's two respective cultures to live in harmony. "Remember" has a race of aliens who've covered up a genocide in their past by rewriting history to say the victims were Released to Elsewhere and died off from disease and in-fighting.
  • Dead Alternate Counterpart: "Deadlock". The 'real' Harry Kim and Naomi Wildman are killed, and replaced with duplicates from another Voyager (coming across a space-time rift) which self-destructs taking out some alien invaders. The episode even ends with Harry starting to question if he counts as the real one or not. Janeway tells him not to think about it.
  • Dead Fic: In-universe example with "Insurrection Alpha". Justified, as Tuvok no longer saw any point in completing an insurrection training exercise scenario when there was no longer any realistic threat of an onboard mutiny.
  • Dead Guy Junior: Final episode "End Game" - Paris and Torres' last-minute baby, Miral, hence: Babies Ever After, after B'Elanna's dead mom.
  • Deadly Environment Prison: One episode has Kim and Paris being sent to an alien prison. The only access to it is a chute from which new prisoners and supplies are delivered. After some effort, Kim manages to climb the chute, only to find that the prison is actually free-floating in deep space. After that, all they can do is survive until Voyager finally manages to locate them.
  • Deadly Euphemism: In "Nemesis", the Defenders and the Kradin refer to the killing of an enemy as "nullifying" them.
  • Death is Cheap: The entire crew was offed twice. Every major character died at least once when an anomaly of the week duplicated the ship. The crew never figured out which of the twin Voyagers was the original ship (if either one was). Harry and Naomi were the only two from the "other" ship who survived, while Seven joined the crew long after this incident, so either the Harry Kim that made it home isn't the real one, or he, Naomi, and Seven are the only originals to make it home!
  • Deadpan Snarker: Many. Being lost in the farthest reaches of space gives humor a bitter edge. Every character does this at some point, but a few stick out as the snarkiest of the snarky.
    • Tuvok: As a Vulcan, deadpan is just what they do, but Tuvok takes it up to 11. Even going so far as to rib Captain Janeway as she pilots the ship directly into a binary pulsar.
    • Seven of Nine: a reformed Borg drone, she smiles as much as Tuvok does (never, not even when someone literally pulls on their cheeks), and gets off as many digs, including before, during, and after she defeats a Tin-Can Robot.
      Robot: Surrender! Do not resist!
      Seven: I am Borg. [opens robot's front panel, yanks out wires]
      Robot: Surr...ennn...derr.... [shuts down]
      Seven: The robot has been neutralized, may I leave now?
    • The Doctor: His first duty is providing medical care for the crew of Voyager. His second duty is to take the wind out of the sails of their suicidal plans.
    • Captain Kathryn Janeway once succinctly described her discovery of an illusion as such: "Either I've become impervious to anti-matter explosions or we're still dreaming."
  • Death Seeker (or Driven to Suicide): A member of the Q Continuum argues for the right to commit suicide in "Death Wish". Also B'Elanna Torres in "Extreme Risk" and Neelix in "Mortal Coil". And possibly Janeway, given her frequent threats to blow up Voyager or fly it into binary pulsars.
  • Death Quadrant: The Delta Quadrant. Say what you will about The Dominion, the Gamma Quadrant looks positively hospitable in comparison. Even discounting the Borg, this isn't someplace you'd want to be stranded. The Voyager crew meets a total of two named races (The Ocampa and Talaxians) that aren't at best underhanded and untrustworthy, at worst xenophobic and hostile (And even the Ocampa and Talaxians have a couple of duplicitous factions each), and at least two quasi-fascist empires. Here's the rundown:
    1. The Vidiians. If you live near them, disfigured organ stealing space pirates might show up at any time.
    2. The Hirogen. Savages by choice, with loads of advanced technology. Their favorite pastime is to hunt and kill any other intelligent species they encounter for sport.
    3. The Krenim. An aggressive, territorial race that manipulates time. We are told that they used to dominate the sector with their temporal weapons.
    4. The Devore. Fascist xenophobes who enforce strict martial law throughout their space and round up telepaths into concentration camps.
    5. The Borg. 'Nuff said.
    • The unwelcoming nature of the Delta Quadrant was even Lampshaded by Chakotay in "Survival Instinct".
  • Debate and Switch:
    • In "Scientific Method", it is revealed that the crew have been the subjects of medical experiments by an alien species (a thinly-veiled allusion to animal testing). Janeway finally manages to get the experiments aborted by flying Voyager into a binary pulsar, which is stated to be nearly-certain death, which scares the aliens off and destroys one of their ships that doesn't get away in time. Of course, Voyager survives. The reason this is this trope is that Janeway is only acting that way because of the experiments of the aliens.
    • The Seska arc introduces a wildly complicated question when Seska reveals that she forcibly stole Chakotay's DNA and impregnanted herself with it, and later begs for his help when she and his son are in danger. How he's supposed to respond to that is agonizingly difficult. To the show's credit, they do spend a good deal of time dealing with these questions (Chakotay decides to try and get custody and raise him after the spirit quest version of his father makes the observation that the boy is essentially a Child by Rape), but they're ultimately rendered moot when it turns out that the child isn't actually Chakotay's after all. Seska dies, the baby's biological father claims him, and everything goes back to normal.
    • In "Shattered," Voyager is split into 37 different timeframes. Chakotay, the only one originating from the proper timeframe, enlists the help of a Janeway from before Voyager was launched into the Delta Quadrant, injecting her with a special chroniton-infused serum so that she can exist in the other timeframes. Along the way, she begins to learn about all of the crazy stuff that's happened to Voyager throughout its run in the Delta Quadrant and blames herself for it. She wants to modify Chakotay's plan to fix things so that all of Voyager is back in the proper timeframe so that it is instead in her timeframe, and thus she can make it so that it never goes into the Delta Quadrant. Chakotay tells her that she's not seeing the big picture - all of the families and relationsships that have formed on Voyager and how everyone's grown. He also says that it's presumptuous of her to think that she has the right to change everyone's future. Yet, in the series finale "Endgame," this is exactly what happens. Admiral Janeway returns from the future with a plan to get Voyager home. There's maybe about two minutes of hand-wringing about the ethics of this at most, with most of the rest of the story spent on the ironing-out and execution of the plan, the upshot being that it works out exactly as intended and Voyager gets home nearly 16 years before it did in Admiral Janeway's timeline.
  • Denser and Wackier:
    • The show had its share of corkers, too.
      Redditor: Watching Voyager is like returning to your favorite bar to talk about a philosophical concept you once heard your smarter, more boring, cousin tell you about. And then getting in a drunken argument with your friends at the bar, who are always there for you, only to finally resolve the debate by either punching each other or thinking of some clever joke that distracts you from ever having to think about the problem again.
    • Not just the magnum opus "Threshold", but also "The 37s" (a floating Ford pickup in space), "Concerning Flight" (Leonardo Da Vinci escapes the holodeck and runs amok), "The Q and the Grey" (and really, any Q episode besides "Death Wish" counts as this), "Body and Soul" (the Doctor jumps into Seven's body and proceeds to abuse it in absurd ways), "Muse" (the Voyager crew are mythologized as hammy, horny Greek gods!), "Live Fast and Prosper" (Janeway and Tuvok impersonators swindle unwary aliens in need of rescue) and the grandaddy of them all "Bride of Chaotica". Quoth Michael Piller:
      "What I think everybody felt about Voyager was that it needed to be a ship show, it needed to be a lighter show, because people felt that Deep Space Nine’s downfall was that it was a little bit too dark. And I’m not sure I agree with that, but I’m quoting, basically, my memory of the creative pressures at the time."
    • TNG ends its first season with the return of the Romulans, DS9 with a festering sectarian war, and Voyager…ends its first season with some moldy old cheese sabotaging the ship. Oh the humanity.
    • Piller himself seemed wryly-aware of it by the time he was let go. In "The Cloud", there’s a sense that Piller is having a bit of fun at the show's expense. The crew seems curiously uninterested in the anomaly of the week, and the whole thing is treated as a set-up for character-based jokes; it’s Janeway’s monomaniacal desire for coffee which risks dooming the ship. "There’s coffee in that nebula!" sounds like a riff on the Western cliché, There’s gold in them there hills.
  • Depending on the Writer: The Personality Of The Week portrayal of Captain Janeway was that writers were conflicted between making the first female Trek captain 'strong' versus the desire for her to appear 'feminine'. Thus Janeway would veer between Action Girl, Self-Destruct-The-Ship-Crazy, Team Mom, Staunch Leader, Noble Sufferer, Outrageous Flirt, Celibate Heroine, etc, etc, etc, much to actor Kate Mulgrew's irritation.
  • Deprogramming: A very literal case when Seven of Nine is disconnected from the Borg.
  • Desert Punk: the pilot gives the Kazon this treatment as they are first encountered on a "Desert Planet" and their technology has a rugged, primitive appearance, even their starships. Later episodes also feature similar surface environments where Kazon are encountered (the desert moon where Chakotay encounters a young Kazon in 'Initiations" and the outpost in "Alliances." Kazon spaceship tech could be roughly called Diesel Punk. The character Noss, encountered later by Voyager, also embraces the Wasteland Dweller archetype (she is a crashed freighter pilot).
  • Determinator: Played with throughout the series, not in terms of an individual continuing despite horrific injuries, but with Janeway's let's-get-home-at-all-costs philosophy, which is switched on and off depending on whether it was raining the day the writers started on each script. See "Year of Hell" comparing the first timeline change, and consider how they could have ended up in that situation, to the last scene and the "Thanks, we'll go around" attitude.
  • "Die Hard" on an X:
    • "Basics, Part II". Voyager is taken by the Kazon-Nistrum and the crew abandoned on a primitive planet without technology. Three unlikely heroes (the Doctor at an early stage of his Character Development, renegade Tom Paris, and a former Sociopathic Soldier who discovered empathy after a Mind Meld) evade the dragnet and have to outsmart Seska to retake Voyager.
    • "Macrocosm". Captain Janeway finds herself the Final Girl when she returns to Voyager and discovers the ship at the mercy of the Monster of the Week. Can Janeway save the day by stripping down to a sweaty tank top, strapping on a compression phaser rifle and doing her best Sigourney Weaver impersonation?
    • "The Killing Game", opens with Voyager having been seized by the Hirogen and the crew forced into Deadly Games on the holodeck. It's Harry Kim, not the Spotlight-Stealing Squad, who kicks off La Résistance, which is only appropriate as the main holodeck program featured is a WW2 French Resistance scenario.
    • "Message in a Bottle". The EMH is projected to a Starfleet vessel in the Alpha Quadrant, only to find it's been seized by Romulan commandoes. He has to team up with the vessel's EMH Mark Two to take it back. Ham-to-Ham Combat and Hilarity Ensues.
  • Disaster Democracy: The Maquis don’t have the training and thus haven’t earned the right to be in senior positionsnote —but they have the street smarts and improvisation to get Voyager out of tight spots, whereas the Federation officers have worked their butts off to get where they are and might find it hard accepting orders from terrorists.
  • Discontinuity Nod: A possible example in "Day of Honor" when Tom says he never navigated a transwarp conduit. B'Elanna says they don't know anything about transwarp technology, despite helping Tom work on the Warp 10 drive in "Threshold". However this could just be writer confusion over exactly what transwarp is.
  • Disproportionate Retribution: An episode had B'Elanna on trial with a potential Fate Worse than Death. Her crime? Being annoyed when someone bumped into her. This society is a race of telepaths who have eliminated violent thoughts, and so she was inadvertantly spreading violent thoughts to innocent people, who are overwhelmed by them since they rarely have these thoughts. But it turns out that there is a black market for violent thoughts on the planet, and the incident with B'Elanna was planned.
  • Distinction Without a Difference: An away team explores a derelict Borg cube in "Unity":
    B'Elanna: It's like a Ghost Ship.
    Tuvok: Allowing yourself to become apprehensive can only be counterproductive, Lieutenant.
    B'Elanna: I'm not being apprehensive, Tuvok, I'm just nervous as hell.
  • Do Androids Dream?: Quite a few (brilliantly done) episodes revolving around the holographic Doctor, including an episode where the Doctor simultaneously ponders this trope while doing it literally.
  • Do-Anything Robot: Seven's Borg implants served whatever purpose the plot needed them to, and her nanoprobes were like Swiss Army molecules.
  • The Dog Was the Mastermind: The enemy at "Heroes and Demons": Did he appear before the reveal? Check. Was he Beneath Suspicion? Check. It is a surprise both to the crew and the audience? Check. Does it make sense with the general theme of the series? Check (of course, it's a Star Trek series).
  • Dominant Species Genes: Half-Klingon B'Elanna is disappointed when her and Tom's baby is shown in utero to look as Klingon as her, despite being three-fourths Human. The EMH states this trope to her.
  • Don't Explain the Joke: In "Workforce" this is played straight from a brainwashed Tuvok.
  • Double Entendre: In "The Q And The Grey," Q gives himself a facial tattoo just so he can brag about it being bigger than Chakotay's.
  • Downer Ending: In "Course: Oblivion", the crew appears to start dying mysteriously one by one. It's quickly determined the "crew" is actually the copies from the episode "Demon". When they realize what they are, they make a beeline back to the Demon Planet. They didn't make it. To add insult to injury, the real Voyager passes through their vaporized remains without a clue.
    • Also counts for Kes. She returned in the final season apparently angry that she was abandoned in the Delta quadrant, until a contingency hologram she recorded before she left reminded her she left of her own accord. She declined to be accepted back on Voyager, and decided instead to go home. Considering her age, whether or not she made it before she died is unknown.
  • The Dreaded Dreadnought: "Dreadnought" from the titular episode "Dreadnought". A giant planet-cracking photon torpedo with enough weapons, shields, and armor to fight off Voyager.
  • Dream Deception: In "Death Wish", an omnipotent alien kidnaps Isaac Newton and a guy from the 20th century. When they ask what's happening, Janeway, not wanting to or knowing how to tell them all the details, tells them that they're having a strange dream.
  • Dream Sue: In the episode "Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy", the Doctor installs a daydreaming subroutine where he imagines himself constantly having to assume command of Voyager as the Emergency Command Hologram, who gets the crew out of situations even more single-handedly and hammily than most real Star Trek captains. It turns out an alien race monitors these daydreams and thinks they're reality, eventually causing the crew to find out, much to his embarrassment.
  • Dream Within a Dream: Or, more exactly, holographic simulations within holographic simulations. "Projections" is particularly full of them. Finally, the crew manages to get the Doctor out of the simulation... or is the simulation still running? Kes begins to cry that their marriage should not end, Barclay appears again to tell him to blow the warp core, a Kazon appears in the door, Paris takes him to attend a patient who is himself... no, the malfunctioning simulation is not over yet.
  • Dropped a Bridge on Him: When ratings stated to nosedive in Season Two, Jeri Taylor and Brannon Braga went into panic mode and decided the serialized approach was not working out. For "Basics Pt. II" Micheal Piller was asked to remove all the elements he introduced in the previous season, including the Kazon and the ongoing Starfleet-Maquis feud. Since Hogan was a character who had strong opinions and provoked some mutinous sentiments on the ship, he was obviously the first to go. Suder was the next to die. Seska dies from an exploding console — an embarrassing coda to say the least.
  • Dull Surprise: Chakotay was noted for having the emotional range of a tree stump under most circumstances. Robert Beltran actually can act; he just didn't like his role much, and didn't want to waste too much effort on it. Garrett Wang claims that the cast was constantly being given direction to tone down their performances, with Rick Berman telling him it was because it made the aliens seem more human.
  • Dysfunction Junction: Jokingly lampshaded in the third episode, as the Doctor calls it “voyage of the damned”.
  • Dying Declaration of Love:
    • Only their imminent death through oxygen deprivation gives B'Elanna Torres the courage to tell Tom Paris she loves him (next moment they're beamed to safety).
    • EMH blurts out his feelings for Seven of Nine in front of half the senior officers when he thinks his program is going to shut down forever, along with several other embarrassing confessions. He's repaired moments later.
    • When the 37s are discovered, Fred Noonan (Amelia Earhart's navigator) gets shot in the chest and taken to sickbay. Thinking he will die, he confesses his love to Earhart. However, he is then healed by the Doctor and embarrassed, tries to take back his confession.

    E-H 
  • Early-Installment Weirdness: VOY has a famously rocky start, and a number of plot points from "Caretaker" did not survive into the series proper. The first half of "Caretaker" (co-written by Michael Piller, who also wrote DS9's pilot) suggests a darker show than what actually made it to air:
    • Neelix is established as a Con Man (in the vein of Quark) who deceives Voyager to save Kes and then screws over the local Kazon tribe on the deal they made. Afterwards, Neelix is never portrayed as anything other than a harmless goofball.
    • Tom Paris is treated like a pariah by the crew of Voyager and even among the Maquis, with only Harry Kim to call a friend. This was quickly papered over by the second episode, "Time and Again."
    • B'Elanna was a hair's breadth away from killing Janeway after the Captain gave the order to destroy the Array. Immediately after, she became Janeway´s staunchest advocate and is ready to pummel anyone who questions her leadership.
    • The scarcity of water is a plot point in the pilot, making it seem important, but it never comes up again.
    • Chakotay is depicted as being slightly older, with visibly graying hair.
    • The crew should mention how Janeway destroyed the Array and shifted the balance of power in the Quadrant forever each time she gets out the rulebook.
    • Tuvok wears the rank insignia of a Lieutenant Commander while he is still a Lieutenant. He later gets promoted. (This one is particularly weird, given that the ranks were already clearly laid out on The Next Generation.)
    • Kes's hair is a pretty bad wig through much of the first season. It starts to look more natural in the latter episodes.
  • Early Personality Signs: Seven of Nine is revealed to have been very stubborn at age six, refusing to (literally) come out of a closet. As an adult, she's still rather stubborn.
  • Ecocidal Antagonist: The Malon, who live on Malon Prime, which is supposedly the jewel of the Delta Quadrant. It's kept that way because they have an entire industry dedicated to dumping their waste output in other star systems. Their waste is so bad that it makes for a Dangerous Workplace full of No OSHA Compliance. They are forced to look for places to dump their waste because it's just as dangerous to other species as it is to the Malon. To solidify the Malon's actions as very selfish, the Voyager offered clean warp technology to help out the Malon, but they outright refused because they claim that doing so would completely destroy the entire race's biggest economy, demonstrating their greedy priorities.
  • Egg McGuffin: In "Parturition", a squabbling Tom and Neelix have to work together to help a baby reptilian alien hatch.
  • Elderly Ailment Rambling: "Scientific Method" a group of aliens experiment on the crew. Chakotay is artificially ages. He's stuck in Sickbay, complaining about their ailments to each other. Chakotay goes bald, his eyesight is failing, and has severe arthritis.
  • Eldritch Abomination: In "Bliss", a Shout-Out to Moby-Dick, the Voyager is swallowed by a millennia-old spaceship-eating bio-plasmic entity with powerful psychic abilities. With the rest of the crew hypnotized, Seven of Nine and Naomi Wildman manage to escape by giving it a bit of indigestion.
  • Electronic Speech Impediment: The computer on occasions. Also 'Satan's Robot' from "The Adventures of Captain Proton!"
  • Emotional Maturity Is Physical Maturity: The Doctor, and the Ocampa. Seven and Icheb also count, as both were artificially aged physically and mentally from early childhood in Borg maturation chambers. Icheb in particular should actually be a young boy, but generally behaves like the fairly mature young adult he appears as. Q Junior plays with this trope. Although he is an omnipotent being from a higher plane of existence capable of assuming any shape he likes, he appears in the form of a human boy in his late-teens, and acts exactly the way a teenage human boy would, if given unlimited control of space, matter and time. Then again, his father appears as a middle-aged man but usually acts like a teenager too, so it is clearly a case of parental issues.
  • Emperor Scientist:
    • Annorax in the "Year of Hell" two-parter. Somewhat of an inversion, as Annorax is not interested in conquest but merely re-writing reality to bring back his dead civilization (and wife). His myopic vision blinds him to the consequences of his action, causing a downward spiral where he's nuking entire planets left and right. He also commands his own nomadic battle cruiser and has a fanatical crew, similar to Nero from the Trek reboot movie.
    • The trope is Played for Laughs with Dr Chaotica in the Captain Proton holodeck program.
  • Enemy Mine: Voyager teams up with the Kazon Nistrum sect, the Borg Collective, the Hirogen and several other Villains of the Week, not always successfully. Was supposed to be the original concept of the series, but the Starfleet/Maquis conflict was watered down so much that later episodes based on this schism appear ridiculous.
  • Enemy Within: In one episode the Doctor tries to expand his program by incorporating personality aspects of various historical figures who possessed great minds. He failed to realize that he would also incorporate the darker sides of their psyches, and develops an evil Split Personality who takes Kes hostage.
  • Ensign Newbie: Ensign Kim. Even seven years later in "Nightingale".
  • Epic Fail: Sort of. While playing billiards, Neelix left an impossible shot for Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok made his usual Vulcan speech remarking that the shot is difficult but not impossible, and with a good calculation of the angles... he sent the white ball to the pocket.
  • Epic Race: "Drive" is about an interspecies race, which Tom Paris can't resist entering the Delta Flyer in.
  • Episode Tagline: In one episode, an evil Bajoran possesses Tuvok and says this phrase in Bajoran (along with "It's a holy time!") that leads to Tuvok saying it as well.
  • Evil Brunette Twin: Captain Janeway's fictionalised dark-haired evil version in the episodes "Living Witness" in the Kyrian museum simulation, and in "Author Author" in The Doctor's holonovel. A sub-trope of:
  • Evil Counterpart: Get comfortable, this could take a while.
    • The Equinox is headed by a headstrong, morally-flexible Captain who is willing to do anything to get his crew home — like using sentient aliens for fuel. ("Equinox") The ship has its own Mark I hologram, only with his ethical subroutines removed. He manages to infiltrate Voyager by stealing the Doctor's emitter and pretending to be him. Fortunately, he proves to be a long-winded bore just like the original, and the EMH boots the imposter out of Sickbay and deletes him before he can order the computer to go kablooey. ("I'm afraid your physician's no longer on call.")
    • Dejaren was a fellow hologram onboard an alien vessel, used as a glorified janitor. Like the Doctor, he entertained himself with hobbies in his spare time, in this case pet (holographic) fish, but was treated shabbily by the crew and confined to a tiny room to work. Eventually he went off his nut and murdered the crew in the interest of 'sterilization'.
    • Then there was Crell Moset. At first, he seems like a kindred spirit to the lonely, underappreciated Doctor. Being Cardassian, however, warnings signs begin to emerge: where the Doctor honors all sentient life and prefers non-invasive techniques whenever possible, Crell cuts corners and is indifferent to his patient's pain. Eventually we learn that he is a war criminal who performed experiments on Bajoran peasants during the occupation. The Doctor, unable to study Crell's research in good conscience (no matter how breakthrough it may be), deletes him. ("Nothing Human")
      Doctor: Are we also going to tell them where you honed your surgical techniques? A footnote, perhaps. "For further details, see: Cardassian death camps."
    • Iden is a facsimile of a Bajoran militaman from DS9 (grey uniform, officer class) created by the Hirogen as a substitute for their hunting grounds; drawing on historical data from the Bajoran uprising, he spearheads a revolt to liberate his fellow "prey". Initially, the Doctor sympathizes with Iden's cause and finds him most agreeable. As Iden absorbs more information, however, he soon starts displaying messianic behavior, demanding bigger and bigger titles and forcing other holograms to revere him. As a dark mirror into the Doctor's own self-image throughout the series, it is pretty harsh. ("Flesh and Blood")
  • Evil Plan: Seska, a Big Bad fond of Railroading, is usually doing this.
  • Evil Versus Evil: The war between Species 8472 and the Borg. The Borg seek to assimilate all life in the galaxy into their collective. Species 8472 seeks to exterminate the impure, meaning every species except for them. Subverted when Species 8472 only seeks to commit genocide because they believe that every alien species is as hostile as the Borg. Once Chakotay convinces them otherwise, they agree to leave our galaxy alone.
  • Evil Sounds Deep: The Kadrin in "Nemesis". Subverted. It's revealed that they're actually the good guys. In reality they don't even sound like that.
  • Evolutionary Levels: The justification for Tom's physical changes in "Threshold." Apparently hitting Warp 10 bumps him up to a "more advanced" evolutionary state which just so happens to result in weird salamander people.
  • Exactly What It Says on the Tin: A lot of episode titles. Some people point this out as a peculiarity of Voyager, but a cursory look at TNG's titles will show that it's pretty common for the modern Trek shows.
  • Face Your Fears: Captain Janeway talks about this in "Good Shepherd." She was afraid of the ocean as a child; she liked to swim in pools and ponds, but not being able to see the bottom of the ocean freaked her out. In her first year at Starfleet Academy, she had to do zero-gravity training in the Coral Sea, after which she stopped being afraid of the ocean.
  • Failed Attempt at Scaring: Tom Paris tries to scare Tuvok by suggesting that the starship they're on is haunted. Tuvok just says that's highly improbable, causing Paris to quip that there are probably no ghost stories on Tuvok's planet.
  • Failed Future Forecast: In "11:59", Janeway does not mention anything else important happening around the start of the 21st century, such as the World Trade Center attacks or the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, indicating an Alternate History. Star Trek's own Alternate History, the Eugenics Wars and World War III, is not brought up during the show's entirety, including "Future's End" where the crew travels to 1996 Earth.
  • Failsafe Failure: On more than one occasion, "emergency failsafes" proved to be good mainly at the "emergency" and "fail" parts.
  • Failure Is the Only Option: It starts to get a feeling of Gilligan's island in space after a while.
    • There were several times the crew could have gotten back to the Alpha Quadrant but didn't, "False Profits" probably being the most egregious. The pilot is not actually a case of this, given that they would have needed several hours to bring the Array back online, which, given that they were under attack by Scary Dogmatic Aliens with a damaged ship and a sizable reduction in crew, probably made using the Array less than tenable (especially after another ship crashed into it, and it killed a third of the crew even when it was fully functional and operated by someone with centuries of experience). However, given the way a lot of characters acted in later episodes, either she didn't divulge this bit of information or the crew got disillusioned and rejected that excuse.
    • Averted in later seasons; while Voyager never gets back to Earth (until the Grand Finale), it does get progressively closer to the alpha quadrant, with most of the crew's attempts to cut a few years off of the journey succeeding.
  • Fallen Hero: Captain Ransom of the "Equinox" turns out to have crossed the Moral Event Horizon before meeting Janeway, as he's commanding a smaller ship without a Reset Button, so ends up using aliens as fuel just to get his crew home.
  • False Prophet: In the episode "False Profits", two Ferengi, a materialistic alien race, land on a planet where the locals mistake them for three deities known as the Sages, who were said to arrive in a prophecy. The Ferengi go along with this and pretend to be the Sages for profit.
  • Fake Video Camera View: "Investigations" has Neelix doing a daily roundup of ships events and crew interviews, in which the episode opens with one of his shows from the viewpoint of the automated camera, including a red "REC" flashing at the bottom of the screen, with the field of vision marked by lines surrounding the frame.
  • Fanservice Pack: Getting Captain Janeway to let her hair down from the Bun of Steel.
  • Fantastic Fragility: The bio-neural gel packs are an "object" form of Power at a Price. They (at least) double computing power, greatly enhance navigation auto-reaction time, increase power efficiency, and much more. On the other hand, they are impossible to replace in the field, are non-standard even within the Federation, and are inherently incompatible with conventional alternatives — requiring considerable engineering skill to adapt to said alternatives. Their biological components are also vulnerable to pathogens such as the bacteria used to create cheese, and a macrovirus which spread easily throughout the ship due to the replicator system's gel pack becoming infected.
  • Fantastic Measurement System: The series was fond of using the unit "isoton" for mass and explosive yield, where "iso-" was supposed to be an SI (metric) prefix meaning 10^<insert very large number>.
  • Fantastic Racism:
    • In "Dragon's Teeth" one clue that the Vaadwaur aliens they've woken from stasis are villains is that Naomi Wildman overhears the Vaadwaur children making derogatory comments about Neelix.
    • In the episode "Repentance", Voyager helps a damaged Nygean prison transport. Neelix finds out one race, the Benkaran, make up a tiny proportion of the population in Nygean space, but are over-represented in the judicial system. But a Bekaran prisoner, Joleg, proves by his actions during an attempted breakout that he seems to deserve his sentence.
  • "Fantastic Voyage" Plot: In the episode "The Cloud" Voyager got inside a Nebula, which happened to be an alive creature of cosmic dimensions. When they realized it, they returned inside it, to heal the wound caused by their entry.
  • The Farmer and the Viper: In the two-part episode "Scorpion", Captain Janeway forms a temporary alliance with the Borg in order to combat Species 8472. When she asks for Chakotay's opinion, he relates the parable of "The Scorpion and The Frog", though with a fox in place of the frog. Oddly, the story as told is even more tragic than the normal retelling, with the scorpion lamenting its inability to go its against instincts, perhaps foreshadowing the reveal that the Borg provoked the war by trying and failing to assimilate 8472.
  • Faster-Than-Light Travel: Voyager sought various means of getting home faster besides its already top-of-the-line warp drive, including transwarp, quantum slipstream technology, subspace corridors, and a graviton catapult which can catapult a vessel across space in the time it takes to say "catapult a vessel across space."
  • Fear Is Normal: Attempted in "Nemesis". An alien soldier is insecure about getting "the trembles" in battle, but Chakotay assures him that everyone is scared of battles, even him. The soldier, however, isn't reassured and says, "But you wrestled your trembles to rages, didn't you?" (essentially meaning he wilfully overcame his fear and chose to be angry instead).
  • Feminist Fantasy: The show is fronted by a female Captain and a female lead villain. (Janeway and Seska didn't get too many opportunities to lock horns but the Borg Queen had more alone time with the Captain.) To date it's the only Trek series with a woman in charge of the regulars; technically Kira inheirited DS9 in her respective series finale and held command throughout the relaunch books and Star Trek Online. VOY also featured two other female regulars at all times: Torres, and either Kes or Seven of Nine. Torres is the longest-recurring female engineer in Trek. (TNG had a female engineer in its first season but she vanished after a couple of episodes.) Seven effectively becomes the ship's science officer, again the first female to do so. (She was followed by the less-popular T'Pol on Star Trek: Enterprise). Naomi Wildman was a girl, as well, to contrast with Wesley, Jake and Nog. Lampshaded by none other than John de Lancie:
    Q: [gapes around at Bridge] Is this a ship of the Valkyries? Or have you Earth women finally gotten rid of your men altogether?
  • Final Solution:
    • The Borg and "Species 8472" are trying to do this to each other. It's a war, but their goal is to exterminate each other's populations rather than achieving some kind of victory where the enemy's people still exists. The whole thing started with The Borg trying to assimilate 8472, but it had already moved far past that point when Voyager showed up.
    • "Remember": While transporting members of a telepathic race, B'Elanna begins experiencing memories of the race's treatment of a sub-group who rejected technology, which eventually culminated in the sub-group supposedly being relocated but instead exterminated.
  • First-Episode Twist: Hard to explain the show without saying that the ship gets stranded in the Delta Quadrant, 70 years from home.
  • First-Person Dying Perspective: Invoked in "Ex Post Facto" as a plot point. Paris seemingly commits a murder on an alien planet-of-the-week, and by the laws of the planet, is forced, by neural implant, to witness the memory of the crime from the viewpoint of the victim every fourteen hours.
  • Five-Token Band: The show's main cast emphasized the political correctness and diversity themes of the time: a female captain, a Native American first officer, an Asian operations officer, a black Vulcan at tactical, and a Hispanic-Klingon chief engineer.
  • Flanderization:
    • The Doctor's sensationalist holo-novel about life as an under-appreciated EMH. "Marsailles" is a macho caricature (with pornstache!), "Torrey" is angry all the time, "Katany" is defined entirely by his stupidly-large tattoo, "Captain Jenkins" is a full-tilt Nazi, "Ensign Krymble" is a bundle of nerves, and "Three of Eight" provides little more than fanservice.
    • The crew fared little better in "Living Witness". (Check out the massive ears on "Tuvok.") Rather than shoot a Mirror Universe story, it rather cleverly depicts Voyager from the perspective of the huddled aliens it routinely comes across. Janeway's methods here aren’t that far removed from the woman we see every other week: Voyager meddles in a regional conflict in exchange for a shortcut home, and Janeway resorts to sledgehammer tactics when one side refuses to play ball. The ship then jets off into the great beyond and doesn't stick around to see the ramifications of their arrival. It isn't too hard for the natives to tweak their version of events to make Voyager look like the aggressors.
  • Fleeting Demographic Rule:
    • The Borg threat tended to flirt with reenactments of Picard and Data's corruption in First Contact, with the Borg Queen making similar proposals to Janeway/Seven.
    • "Unimatrix Zero" goes balls-out and remakes "The Best of Both Worlds", with the entire crew getting assimilated along with the Captain.
    • The list of borrowed TNG scripts is nearly endless. In particular, Seven of Nine's little rebellion in "The Raven" as she subdues the entire crew on her way to the shuttle bay is remarkably similar to Data’s in "Brothers". "Infinite Regress", in which Seven is tormented by the psychic ghosts of people she's assimilated, manages to improve on a Data-centric TNG episode ("Masks") which, in its original form, was considered camp at best.
    • The Seventh and final season saw the well of TNG stories running dry. A few from DS9 began to crop up as well: Klingons attempt to board Voyager in a sequence reminiscent of "The Way of the Warrior". "Endgame" wrapped with a toast between the crew in some sort of bar. "What You Leave Behind" wrapped with Sisko giving a toast to his crew in Vegas lounge.
    • VOY recycles its own stories, too, what with "Memorial" being a replay of "Remember" and "Tsunkatse" revolving around a combat sport like the previous year's "The Fight".
  • Flock of Wolves: Of the three command officers on the Maquis ship, two of them were enemy agents from different governments.
    Chakotay (to Tuvok): You were working for her, Seska was working for them — was anyone on that damn ship working for me?
  • The Fog of Ages: According to Seven of Nine, the Borg suffer from this, as their memory from over 700 years ago is beginning to fragment.
  • Food Coma: In one episode, there are some aliens who don't use furniture when they eat because they can lie down and take a nap after eating.
  • Food Fight: When Neelix finds out that Tom Paris has an unrequited crush on Neelix's girlfriend, Kes, he becomes paranoid that Paris will steal Kes from him, so he throws pasta on Paris's lap. Paris throws the pasta back at Neelix, and the two start rolling around on the floor and throwing pasta.
  • Forced Euthanasia: In the episode "Coda," Janeway is trapped in a time loop. In one instance of this loop, she contracts the Vidiian phage. With no other choice, The Doctor euthanizes her with nerve gas. In desperation, Janeway attempts to delete the EMH, only to find that a safeguard had been set in place preventing her from doing so.
  • Forced Prize Fight: "Tsunkatse" (featuring a cameo by Dwayne Johnson).
  • Forced Transformation:
    • The Monster Clown in "The Thaw" mocks Harry for being The Baby of the Bunch by turning him (momentarily) into a literal baby.
    • Q drops his son off with Voyager and he acts irresponsibly. Q turns his son into an amoeba for a minute or so to show him where he's likely to end up if he doesn't get his act together.
    • Tom pranks Harry by turning a holodeck girl he's about to kiss into a cow. Unfortunately this is witnessed by another holodeck character who assumes Tom is one of The Fair Folk.
  • Foreshadowing:
    • Many of the events depicted in "Year of Hell" are foreshadowed in "Before & After". This despite the fact that the character used to foreshadow the events (Kes) isn't there when they eventually happen.
    • In the Season 3 episode "Unity," Voyager finds an abandoned Borg cube with thousands of dead drones on board. While speculating about what caused this, B'Elanna says, "Maybe the Borg were defeated by an enemy even more powerful than they are." This turns out not to be the case (the cube was caught in an electrokinetic storm), but the Borg actually do have such an enemy (Species 8472), who are introduced in the season finale.
  • Forgotten Phlebotinum: Voyager's official policy was "if it doesn't work immediately and perfectly, shelve the entire idea and never mention it again". Most gratuitous was the transwarp drive in "Threshold", which worked fine apart from the surprisingly easy to treat "becoming a giant space salamander" side-effect, but which was never used even after they found a cure for the salamander thing.
  • For Happiness: As the self-appointed "Morale Officer", the character Neelix is constantly trying to live up to this trope.
  • A Form You Are Comfortable With: The Caretaker appears as an old man with a banjo, living in an Earth farmhouse that Tuvok speculates is meant to calm down the abductees prior to their medical examination. The Caretaker's actual form is a kind of Blob Monster.
  • Formula-Breaking Episode: The episode "11:59" is unique among the series, and the Star Trek franchise as a whole, as the only episode that has no science fiction elements driving the plot. Rather, it's a flashback story that takes place in the year 2000.
  • For Science!:
    • Oddly a mass-murdering scientist is far more chipper than Voyager's Doctor was in Season One! David Clennon imbues Crell Moset with all the serene arrogance that the character demands. For his barbaric surgeries on Bajoran laborers he was rewarded with a prestigious university chair and helped stamp out a deadly epidemic.
    • In an obvious nod to Oppenheimer, Neelix asks Jetrel if he regrets what he did to the Talaxians, but he offers no apologies for his work — merely sympathy that his creation had a bigger and more historic effect than he anticipated. He makes a distinction between him developing the weapon and the government deciding to use it for warfare, and Neelix asks quietly if that helps him to sleep at night. Jetrel did it to know that it could be done. He lost his wife and children because they thought he had become a monster, when really he's just a government shill who did what he was told.
  • For Want Of A Nail:
    • The "Year of Hell" two-parter involves a Krenim timeship making subtle and not-so-subtle changes to the timeline hoping to create a perfect timeline where their empire is once again powerful and all their loved ones are alive. One part featured Chakotay offering to erase an insignificant-looking comet from history, thus preventing the Voyager's interference in Krenim affairs. The Krenim captain explains that Chakotay would be wiping out half the species in the sector due to this comet being involved in seeding most of the inhabited planets in the sector billions of years ago. The captain might seem like a bit of a hypocrite for pointing out Chakotay's mistake, but the whole thing is about him trying to fix the mistake he made in the first place. As the timeship itself exists out of time, destroying it at any point causes it to never have been built, and leading to a more or less happy ending for everyone involved.
    • The Voyager novel Echoes occurs when a planet activates a revolutionary new transport system that happens to shift the residents over one universe. When the Voyager is inadvertently summoned by the energy pulse, it is immune to the shifts. Residents report small changes in the world around them as they're moved. This wouldn't be such a problem, except somewhere down the line, the planet was hit by a meteor. That universe's Voyager was tasked with trying to save a few billion people. And a few hours after that, a few billion more. And a few hours after that...
    • The episode "Non Sequitur" shows what would have happened if Harry Kim was not chosen to be among those who would be in Voyager's crew, with the results also affecting the life of Tom Paris. Of course, the catch is that this is an alternate reality in which Harry Kim still remembers being a crew member of Voyager and has somehow wound up in this reality.
  • Four Lines, All Waiting: Primarily in season 1.
  • Fresh Clue: In "Phage", when the team is tracking the Vidiians that stole Neelix's lungs, Janeway's tricorder detects a heat signature indicating that a humanoid life form was in the room within the last few minutes.
  • Friendly Enemy: Q and Janeway actually get on rather well when he isn't hitting on her.
  • FTL Test Blunder: In episode "Threshold" Paris figures out transwarp traveling, which might get the ship back to the Alpha Quadrant. After a seemingly successful test, he has an allergic reaction to water and starts de-evolving into a salamander/lizard/catfish creature. And then things get very weird.
  • Full-Name Basis:
    • Seven towards Naomi Wildman. Even funnier when Seven addresses her as "Naomi Wildman, subunit of Ensign Samantha Wildman."
    • Seven often introduces herself, especially early-on, by her full Borg designation: "Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix 01".
  • Funny Background Event: In the early episode "The Cloud", The Doctor is on a viewscreen in the background giving information about a nebula, and then starts ranting about how the ship's presence is affecting it. Janeway "mutes" the viewscreen, then she and the other officers continue discussing about the nebula. At first, The Doctor continues ranting about the nebula, until he realizes he's on "mute". He gets annoyed and starts pacing around his office for a good minute and a half before Tom Paris informs Janeway that The Doctor is still on viewscreen. Janeway finally "un-mutes" him. In the same episode, Janeway hunts in the background for coffee while other main characters give exposition.
  • Future Imperfect:
    • Lampshaded. Despite Paris being the most knowledgeable crew member of North America's 20th-century history, when Voyager is sent back in time to Earth circa 1996, even he gets a few cultural references, phrases, and mannerisms wrong. Rain Robinson calls him on it.
    Rain: You keep calling yourselves "secret agents", but nobody says "secret agents" anymore. You're always not quite getting things just quite right. It's as if you don't belong to this time period.
    • A bit of Continuity Snarl in that episode, as Earth was supposed to be locked in the Eugenics Wars at that time. In fact, during Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, they openly state that their ship, the Botany Bay, was launched in 1996!
  • Gallows Humor: When Paris is in the shuttle in part two of "Basics," his reaction to the sudden appearance of a Kazon ship is, "Damn it! I don't have time for this!" Then he destroys the ship and says, "I told you, I don't have time for this!"
  • Gender Bender: In "Body and Soul", the Doctor finds himself in a jam when the locals start hunting him down ("photonics" are unwelcome on their planet) and has to download himself (or rather, his mobile emitter) into Seven's borg tubules. It's a mish-mash of TNG's "The Schizoid Man" (a ranting scientist takes over the body of an unemotional android) and DS9's "Profit and Lace" (gender reassignment for comedy).
  • Gender Is No Object: Starfleet is supposed to be purely integrated with gender no hindrance to attaining any position. The other series didn't quite meet this lofty principle. Female captains popped up in minor, one-shot roles after TOS, and there was Obstructive Bureaucrat Admiral Nechayev, but after DS9 gave its female characters more strength and screentime, Voyager added to this by having a woman captain as a main character and increasing the gender ratio.
  • Generation Ship: Discussed in "Elogium"; with the Voyager seventy-five years away from the Alpha Quadrant, Janeway and Chakotay consider the pros and cons of turning the ship into a "generational ship".
  • Genocide Survivor: Neelix is one of the few survivors of a moon whose population was wiped out by a weapon of mass destruction.
  • Get Out!: "Dismissed. That's a Starfleet expression for 'get out'."

  • Getting Hot in Here: Several fanservice moments involve main characters (especially B'Elanna) stripping down to a sweaty tank top.
  • Getting Sick Deliberately: The Doctor gets tired of dealing with the crew complaining of trivial illnesses so he programs himself to suffer from flu-like symptoms for a limited amount of time to show everyone how easy it is to handle being sick. To teach him a real lesson, Kes secretly programs the symptoms to last longer than they were supposed to. This turns the Doctor into a whiny Manchild.
  • Gladiator Games: In "Tsunkatse" the crew are on leave enjoying watching aliens fight it out (apparently unaware that there are sometimes death matches?), until they see Seven of Nine unexpectedly enter the ring.
  • Glitch Episode:
    • Played for Drama in "Imperfection", where Seven of Nine the cyborg is in danger of dying due to her "cortical node"; a gadget in her brain, no longer working.
    • In one episode, the Doctor, who is a hologram, tries to add the personalities of various historical figures into his personality, only for the negative parts of their personalities to coalesce into one evil persona.
    • One episode focuses on the Doctor losing his memory due to being left running for a long time. The Voyager crew needs to find a way to update the AI so he will be able to run for long periods of time.
  • A God Am I: When Annorax boasts that his buffet spread features food you can't find anywhere else, he means it! He chooses to wait to tell Tom and Chakotay until after they have begun eating that they are devouring the last remnants of a civilization. Even when the Krenim Imperium is restored to 98 percent, it is clear that Annorax cannot relinquish his godlike role.
  • God Guise: Invoked by a group of Ferengi, previously seen in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, who ended up getting stuck in the Delta Quadrant after getting sucked in through a wormhole. They spent no time tricking and manipulating a planet's native race to start following the Rules of Acquisition and making them believe that the Ferengi were fabled gods of local legend. In practice their scam didn't go much farther than selling copies of the book at a markup.
  • Godzilla Threshold: The Omega molecule is so destructive that if it is ever detected by a Federation ship, Starfleet protocol suspends the Prime Directive so that it can be disposed of, lest it renders warp travel impossible across massive swaths of space.
  • Good-Looking Privates: In "Nemesis", a girl from the village says that the Defenders, which Chakotay has joined, "glimpse great" in their jungle combat gear. They're actually the villains of the story.
  • The Golden Rule: Used by Captain Janeway in the pilot episode. The Voyager and Maquis crews need to cooperate, so when Chakotay, the leader of the other crew, insults one of her men she says: "That man is a member of my crew. Treat him with the same respect as you would have me treat one of yours."
  • Gone Horribly Right: In "Year of Hell", Annorax uses his timeship to erase one of the Krenim Imperium's enemies. The Imperium becomes a mighty interstellar power again- and then a plague kills millions, because that enemy had introduced an antibody into the Krenim genome many generations before that would have provided resistance to the plague.
  • Grand Finale: "Endgame". Doubly so, as it marks the last episode of the TNG era of Star Trek, and it was chronologically the last episode of Trek to take place for nineteen years, until the premieres of Star Trek: Picard and Star Trek: Lower Decks in 2020. The only Star Trek show to air during that time was Star Trek: Enterprise, a prequel series, and Star Trek: Nemesis was the only film that went past Voyager's timeframe.
  • Group Costume Fail: In one episode, the Voyager crew have a luau where everyone is wearing leis. However, Tuvok doesn't want to put one on, since he didn't want to go to the luau anyway.
  • The Guards Must Be Crazy:
    • With the exception of Tuvok, the only function of Voyager's security personnel is to stand at ease while waiting for the person they're guarding to stun them senseless.
    • And Tuvok has his off days as well, thanks to Swiss-Cheese Security whenever the plot requires it. After Chakotay takes off in a stolen shuttle in "Maneuvers", Tuvok promises the Captain it won't happen again. Several episodes later in "Threshold" Tom Paris not only steals a shuttle, he abducts Captain Janeway too!
    • Starfleet also has problems with doors. They still use a forcefield on the brig, despite the many times we see it fail if the ship is under attack. This also doesn't excuse the fact that the one door they do have, the entrance, doesn't even lock.
      Mr. Plinkett: You remember that episode of Star Trek: Voyager where Tuvok had to transport, like, 50 dangerous convicts in their cargo bay? This fucking genius makes fifty cages, but with one open side for a force field! 'Cause I guess it's the future or somethin', and you gotta have a force field.
  • Guilt-Induced Nightmare: While the nightmare Harry Kim has in one episode is partly related to his receiving alien DNA, it's also partly a guilt-induced nightmare, since his actions in the daytime got B'Elanna injured, and in one scene he dreams about the injured B'Elanna scorning him.
  • Hair Memento: In the episode Year of Hell, Annorax had, using time incursions, accidentally made his wife vanish from existence. All he had left of her was a lock of her hair.
  • Half-Human Hybrid: B'Elanna Torres (human-Klingon) and Naomi Wildman (human-Ktarian). Neelix is also 1/8th Mylean, but this only crops up in one episode.
  • Hannibal Lecture: Suder in "Meld" and the first half of "Basics". Janeway paying a call to his quarters (with Neelix tentatively delivering his lunch before fleeing) is a real Silence of the Lambs moment as Suder sits in the dark.
  • Hard Truth Aesop:
    • In "Nothing Human", B'Elanna displayed racial prejudice against a holographic recreation of a Cardassian physician. The Doctor objected to her racism, and the episode seemed to be building toward an Aesop opposing bigotry. But then it is revealed that the Cardassian actually was a war criminal. One must keep in mind that Voyager left the Alpha Quadrant less than three years after the Cardassian occupation of Bajor had ended and a government can’t commit systematic genocide without, at a minimum, the tacit support of the masses. If you meet a member of a race that committed genocide shortly after said genocide took place, they may be friendly but they’re unlikely to be innocent.
    • Repentance: Just because a prisoner is a member of a minority that is disproportionately imprisoned and sentenced, that doesn’t mean he isn’t guilty. Also, dangerous and manipulative criminals won’t hesitate to blame their circumstances on their race to gain the sympathy of kind-hearted people.
  • Hated Item Makeover: When Seven of Nine (an ex-Borg) first arrives on Voyager, she starts updating technology to make it more efficient. Other characters, especially B'Elanna the engineer, hate this, with B'Elanna complaining that Seven's trying to turn the ship into a "Borg circus".
  • Heel–Face Door-Slam: Jetrel wanted to prove that his research can be used to heal as well as kill, and when he tried to convince his people to give this a try they exiled him as a Talaxian sympathiser. It was too late to stop what he set in motion. He tries bringing back the dead Talaxian culture via a transporter experiment — almost as if he's reloading them back into existence — but the test fails and Jetrel succumbs to his health issues before he can try again.
  • Her Code Name Was "Mary Sue":
    • The Doctor wrote some horrifically painful holonovels where he saves the day over and over again. And lets not forget what happens when he tries to cultivate his own ability to daydream!
    • In "Author, Author." Tom sits through the Doctor's semi-autobiographical holoprogram and decides to play editor.
      Doctor: (narrating) You will take on the role of an Emergency Medical Hologram, the Chief Medical Officer aboard the starship Vortex.
      Tom: "Vortex"??
      [later]
      Tom: (narrating) You are about to embark on a remarkable journey. You will take on the role of a medical assistant aboard the starship Voyeur.
      EMH: "Voyeur"?!
      Tom: Your job will be to assist the chief medical officer and learn to tolerate his overbearing behaivor and obnoxious bedside manner. Remember: Patience is a virtue.
    • Like Tom observes, Holo-Seska isn't one to let a little thing like death get in the way of revenge — or her One True Pairing. She actually programs Holo-Chakotay to coo, "You're an incredible woman, Seska" before dipping her into a Wedding Photo kiss! ("Worst Case Scenario")
  • Hero of Another Story:
    • Hikaru Sulu himself. George Takei pitched around his own spinoff, Excelsior, for years, and finally got to take the Captain's chair in the 30th Anniversary episode "Flashback". Ditto for Captain LaForge of the Challenger, although he existed in an alternate future.
    • The crew of the Relativity are enforcers of the Temporal Prime Directive, and pop up twice during Janeway's travels.
  • He Who Fights Monsters:
    • In her year-long battle with the delusional Annorax, Janeway goes a little loopy herself. Both captains face a mutiny brewing in their own vessels. There's also the symbolic parallel between Janeway's "lucky teacup" and Annorax's glass pyramid containing his late wife's lock of hair. (Both end up getting smashed.)
    Annorax: You're a long way from your world. In a manner of speaking, so am I. Unfortunately, only one of us can go home again.
    • In Part 2, Tom worryingly notes that Chakotay is being lured with the promise of restoring Voyager's condition through Timey-Wimey science — and while we're at it, maybe even nudge the ship back to Earth! Of course, a flawless 100% restoration is never going to be in the cards, but nobody involved with all-powerful timeship can see that. "You're starting to sound like Annorax. Always one more calculation. This time it's going to be perfect."
    • The Doctor spells this out to the holographic rebels in "Flesh and Blood."
    • It also happens to Janeway while pursuing Captain Ransom in "Equinox" - she is outraged at his blatant disregard of Starfleet ethics and basic morals (including mass murder) to get his crew home, but begins to abandon her own morals in an increasingly frantic quest to stop him.
  • Hero with Bad Publicity: Voyager is a victim of this throughout the first few seasons until they leave the Kazon sphere of influence, thanks to the species as a whole spreading vicious rumors about them. Why the other planets believe the Kazon is another story.
  • Hollywood Prehistory: Primitives, volcanoes, and giant lizards. "Basics Pt. II" is the last straw where the show tipped over from being relatively hard sci-fi to a pulp adventure serial. No-nonsense Janeway turns over some rocks and instructs her crew to eat the grubs they find underneath.
  • The Homeward Journey: The premise of the show is Voyager's years-long journey back to Earth from the Delta Quadrant.
  • Hope Spot: Several times throughout the series the crew believes they're about to make it home, only to have their hopes dashed before them, whether it's because of the misunderstanding of the Negative Space Wedgie they're applying or because the alleged way home was actually a trap set up by their enemies. They are however rewarded for their misfortune a number of times by the trip at least being made a little shorter.
  • Hot Drink Cure: When Seven of Nine is changing personality due to a haywire Borg device, Neelix knows she's out of sorts and assumes she's sick. He offers her tea, but she declines.
    • Also, when Tuvok is suffering through his early stages of pon farr, he convinces Paris to declare that he's got a case of the Tarkalean flu. Naturally, as gossip tends to spread like a plasma fire, Neelix arrives later with his grandmother's recipe to cure any cold. We never see if Tuvok actually takes it, but considering it was basically hot water (as Neelix prepared it with no herbs or spices) it was probably for the best.
  • Human Aliens: The native species shown in "False Profits" literally have no distinguishable physical features that set them apart from Humans.
  • Humanity Ensues: Seven of Nine started out as human, became a Borg as a kid, and was forcibly brought back down to human (more or less) by the crew of Voyager. While initially not happy about it (to say the least), Captain Janeway guided her through the process of rediscovering her humanity through time, patience, and care. This side of her character development shows more and more across the series. At the start, Seven talks in a very precise and formal manner, foregoing emotion or expression. By the final season, Seven commonly engages in idle conversation with a more optimistic and emotionally interested inflection in her voice. By the time of Star Trek: Picard, set in 2399, it's hard to tell that she was ever a Borg.
  • Human Popsicle: "The 37s", about a number of people from 1930s Earth who were abducted by aliens and taken to the other side of the galaxy. One of them was Amelia Earhart. There were also a pair of constants troubling those XXIV century guys of Voyager, like a earth vehicle propelled by refined oil (a car... floating in the space!), a 1930s airplane, and an automated S.O.S. signal.
  • Humans Are Bastards:
    • In "Tattoo", a Noble Savage is suspicious of those who claim I Come in Peace while delivering slavery and disease. Fortunately Chakotay convinces him that humanity has changed a lot since the bad old days.
    • The Federation starship Equinox is fueled by a race of aliens who are being killed by a crew who feel their deaths are a necessary evil for their survival.
  • Humans Are Morons:
    • The episode "Virtuoso" introduced us to the Qomar, a Rubber Forehead Alien species highly dedicated to mathematics and science and far more advanced than the Federation, which the Qomar looks down upon in contempt. When the Doctor provides medical treatment for one of them, the Qomarian sarcastically asks if the process involves bloodletting. Even in an idealized future where humanity has overcome a good number of its flaws to become one of the most dominant space-faring races, we're still finding aliens who think we're dumb and primitive.
    • Pretty much the attitude of the female Q in "The Q and the Grey." She spends her entire time with the crew calling them things like "dirty primitives" until called out by B'Elanna.
    B'Elanna: "You do know that us "dirty primitives" are the only chance you have of getting back into the Continuum, right?"
  • Humans Are White: Averted; though there are no black humans among the main characters, there is a Native American human (played by a Latino actor who claims mestizo — part NA — ancestry), a human of Asian origins (actor Asian-American), B'Elanna's actress is Hispanic (and the character canonically has a Hispanic dad, and her mother is a Klingon), and Tuvok is a black Vulcan.
  • Hunting the Rogue: "Equinox" had Voyager discover another Starfleet ship in the Delta Quadrant that was speeding their way home by using Energy Beings to power their warp drive. Janeway went after them, considering their actions reprehensible and a disgrace to the uniform.
  • Hyper-Competent Sidekick:
    • Ensign Harry Kim, who counts as a sidekick by virtue of his low rank, despite sometimes being put in charge of the bridge when Janeway, Chakotay, Tuvok and Paris are not around!
    • Seven of Nine becomes this, as she is not really a uniformed crewmember, but her incredible scientific knowledge left over from her time in the Borg Collective often provides the Applied Phlebotinum in a given episode.
      • Indeed, Seven is considered so competent that none of the senior bridge officers refuse her summons when she calls them to the Astrometrics lab. Note that she has no official rank. The civilian in the lab she built herself routinely interrupts the bridge crew in their daily activities, like running the ship, and no one chafes at the break in command structure.
    • Icheb later takes this role as well, his time in the Borg Collective having made him nearly as smart and capable as Seven.
  • Hypocrite: Chakotay on occasion (such as "Initiations") will claim that his people taught him that a man does not own land or a belief in always finding a peaceful and non-violent solution to things... seemingly having forgotten that he was the leader of a guerrilla army dedicated to protecting their land and often showed no mercy to the Cardassians.
  • Hypocritical Humor: "If the Continuum has told you once, they've told you 1000 times, DON'T PROVOKE THE BORG!" Justified, considering what the Continuum did to Q afterward.
  • Hypochondria: A characteristic of Harry's Expy in "Author, Author".

    I-L 
  • I Choose to Stay: In "The 37" Voyager found a colony of abducted humans, who had built their own society on that planet. What now? Continue the journey to Earth, or stay behind at this new planet? All the crew was allowed to decide individually. No one abandoned the ship.
  • Identical Grandson: "11:59", or identical great-great-great... well, you get the idea. The ancestral love interest bears a strong resemblance to Janeway's former love, as well.
  • I Meant to Do That: "Workforce" had this nugget.
    Jaffen: *gingerly presses button, shutting off the alarm* You almost started a core overload.
    Janeway: I would have corrected it.
  • I Surrender, Suckers: Pro-tip: The next time you draw in some escape pods from Voyager, make sure there aren't any torpedoes in them...
  • Idiosyncratic Cultural Gesture: In "Macrocosm", Janeway manages to offend an entire alien culture by putting her hands on her hips during negotiations, which, unbeknownst to her, was the worst insult you could make on that world. Neelix was able to smooth things over, but the negotiator was still cold and dismissive of Janeway.
  • I'll Kill You!: Neelix to Tom Paris in the episode "Parturition". Seven of Nine to Captain Janeway in "The Gift". Subverted in "Latent Image" — after his memory is deleted, the EMH is able to access some random memory files which include someone giving this trope. This convinces the EMH that the person is a threat, but they're later revealed to be saying it in a joking manner.
  • I'm Cold... So Cold...:
    • In "Before And After", whenever Kes said this, it was an indication that she was about to shift back in time.
    • In "Course: Oblivion", on board the biomimetic Voyager, B'Elanna Torres experiences getting cold when she starts to lose molecular cohesion due to exposure to warp drive radiation.
  • Immune to Mind Control: One episode shows a humorous subversion. Someone attempts to hypnotize the Doctor. He calls this ridiculous, because being a hologram rather than a real human, he can't be hypnotized. Yet, it succeeds almost immediately, most likely because all this happened within a holo-simulation itself and another hologram took his mobile emitter, thinking it to be some sort of a magic charm, forcing him to conform to the existing rules of the simulation.
  • Immunity Attrition: In the episode "Bliss" a telepathic nebula tries to lure the ship into itself so it can eat it. Seven of Nine believes herself to be immune to its illusions because she is a former Borg drone with many cybernetic implants. However, she was only immune to the initial attack because she didn't have the desire to return to Earth that the rest of the crew shared. Once the nebula tried to fool her into thinking something had happened that she did want, i.e., that she had succeeded in escaping it, it turns out that she was as vulnerable as anyone else.
  • Improbable Infant Survival:
    • Only in parallel-yet-simultaneous realities. Voyager is copied due to some strange phenomenon; newly-born Naomi Wildman dies and is replaced by the surviving copy from the doomed version of the ship.
    • Making the baby Culluh’s rather than Chakotay’s in "Basics" was a last-minute change by the producers; Michael Piller's early draft had the baby getting killed off, but Rick Berman and Jeri Taylor hated it, saying it was "in extremely poor taste," so Culluh made off with the kid.
  • The Infinite: "Threshold" where Tom Paris designs and builds an engine to go To Infinity And Beyond!! As a drive the infinite turns out to be improbable though.
  • Infinite Supplies: Zigzagged shamelessly according to the needs of this week's script.
    • If a lack of antimatter or deuterium could jumpstart the episode, then it would be a plot point that Voyager needed to resupply. If nobody wanted to talk about fabricating new shuttles to replace the ones that were destroyed last week, then Voyager would just magically have new ones, without even a Hand Wave to explain where they came from. It's parodied in this montage, which counts how many of Voyager's 38 photon torpedoes, which she cannot get more of by any means, are fired over the course of the series. (Hint: many more than 38.)
    • It was done with shuttles more times than one could count, but perhaps most infamously, when the Delta Flyer was blown to smithereens in one episode, and was back in service in the very next episode. It was accompanied by a very casual Lampshade Hanging and then forgotten.
    • Voyager has its energy supplies depleted multiple times per season. Not only should they not be running the holodecks to conserve power, but you would think Janeway should lead by example by going without. Instead we get Sandrine's, the tiki bar, Fair Haven, and Mrs. Davenport's spooky English mansion. Morale is an important thing, but "three hundred deciwatts" of memory is a lot to spend on frivolities. This gets the Hand Wave that the holodeck has an independent power system that is completely incompatible with the rest of the ship; this explanation raises many more questions than it answers.
    • There's also the infinite Redshirt Army. The original crew complement was 141 at the beginning of "Caretaker". "The 37's" gives the combined Maquis/Starfleet crew count as 152. And yet we see so many different background filling extras (in the canteen ALONE, besides anywhere else) that one has to wonder whether it was deliberate... In fact, when this forum post breaks down the deaths of all the crew members portrayed onscreen, it turns out that Voyager comes home with more people than she left with (largely due to the Maquis crew), and the crew count appears to be consistently maintained throughout the series. Bear in mind this is a tiny Intrepid-class cruiser, not a Galaxy-class. The background extras would never match as that would mean drawing from the same pool of a 150 or so extras over the course of a seven year series.
  • Informed Ability:
    • Neelix conning the crew into thinking he's an expert in something, which often gets people killed. (See "Basics") This is eventually lampshaded by Neelix where he confides that he's just a cook — who sometimes likes to pretend he's a diplomat. Mainly he's there to keep morale up. He claims to be a survival expert, but he does things that anyone with survival skills would never do (which resulted in at least two redshirts getting killed on his watch and a hostage situation with primitive natives, all in a single episode). He claims to be a rock climbing expert, but he nearly killed Torres by grabbing ahold of her hips to save himself after he slipped. He claims to be a great chef, but not only did he caused a shipwide system failure with a lump of cheese, but his cooking is almost universally reviled.
    • B'Elanna is a scientific genius, despite somehow not being aware that space has three dimensions and also being incapable of identifying crap even with a tricorder (as in, in the episode "The 37's", there is a situation where she cannot identify the substance she is scanning as manure). As it happens, her duties in engineering were gradually usurped by the much more capable Seven of Nine.
  • Informed Attribute:
    • Starfleet felt the need to thread bio-neural circuitry throughout Voyager. The gel packs in the bulkheads have actually made Voyager more vulnerable to outside threats (i.e., being infected by Neelix’s aged cheese), and it's even mentioned that the bio-neural gel packs cannot be replicated, making them harder to replace. Supposedly, the bio-neural packs are more efficient at keeping track of the crew (not really, Chell actually complained about that in "Repression") and can pilot the ship better than even Tom Paris, making the helm utterly redundant. Despite Janeway's repeated claims to the contrary, though, the crew still relied on Tom to pilot them out of danger.
    • From Jim Wright's review of "Dark Frontier"
    Borg: Regenerate primary shield matrix. Remodulate weapons.
    You would think that the marriage of biology and machinery would make it possible to do those things without lifting a finger. But instead, we see a drone amble over to a pylon, and do precisely that: lift a finger. It presses a single button, then wanders off to push another button. So much for Borg efficiency.
    • The Voyager's complete crew complement is alluded to, but the main cast receives so much screen time, it seems like they're the only ones running the ship.
  • Informed Wrongness: In-Universe, in "Friendship One," an away mission is being organized to a highly radioactive planet and Torres (who is at this point heavily pregnant) wants to go along, while Tom refuses because "she's too delicate." The planet's radiation is then established at 6000 isorems, which is way more than enough for a miscarriage or birth defects (helping push Torres into Too Dumb to Live). In the end, we do see a pregnant woman on the planet who had three stillborns and nearly loses her fourth child.
  • Innocent Bigot:
    • In the pilot episode, Tom Paris met Voyager's Betazoid helmsman and was surprised that she wasn't "warm and sensual", since he'd heard that's how all Betazoid women are. She snarks that she's perfectly capable of being warm and sensual, just not with a convicted criminal.
    • In one episode, a hologram meets B'Elanna and notes that despite being half-Klingon, she isn't violent, and he always thought Klingons were violent. She tells him that the belief that Klingons are violent is a stereotype.
  • Innocent Innuendo:
    • At the beginning of the episode "Coda", Janeway and Neelix are speaking in ambiguous terms about some sort of group event that he organized the previous night. With lines like "You were really good last night" and "It's been a long time for me" going back and forth between them, it sounds like... But the next scene reveals that they were talking about a talent show.
    • Neelix gets another one when Seven of Nine decides to move into her own quarters in a holodeck simulation. He's very insistent that the carpet must match the curtains.
  • Insane Troll Logic: The sad case of an elderly Tuvok in "Endgame", thanks to his medical condition. He insists to Janeway that because she's visiting on the wrong day of the week, she logically cannot be Janeway.
  • Internal Retcon: Janeway in "Latent Image" repeatedly attempts to delete the Doctor's memories and even ordered all evidence of Ensign Jetal to be erased from existence to prevent a Logic Bomb from giving the Doctor a Heroic BSoD.
  • Interspecies Romance: Apart from scenes involving the Official Couple there's "Elogium" (where a Space Whale tries to hump the ship!), "Favourite Son", "Blood Fever", "The Q and the Grey" ("With a Q, foreplay can last for decades!"), "Unforgettable", "In The Flesh", "Counterpoint", "Gravity", and "The Disease" (it's not what you think).
  • Interstellar Weapon: Both "Dreadnought" and "Warhead" revolved around trying to keep interstellar missiles from blowing up innocent people.
  • Intimate Telecommunications: In "The Disease", Harry Kim and his love interest flirt over the comm signal.
  • It Can Think: "Bliss": Voyager encounters a huge space-dwelling alien that can create illusions in the minds of starship crews so they fly right into its maw.
    The Doctor: Judging by these bio-scans the organism's been devouring life forms for a bit longer than thirty-nine years. I'd estimate it's at least 200,000 years old.
    Qatai: The intelligent always survive.
    The Doctor: I wouldn't go that far. It appears to operate on highly-evolved instinct. I haven't detected any signs of sentience.
    Qatai: Oh, he's intelligent, all right. Smart enough to fool your crew into taking you offline.
  • Inscrutable Aliens: One episode had them rescue an alien that was so bizarre they had to start from scratch on trying to understand it. Its biology was such that the medical computers, including the Doctor, couldn't make sense of it, and its language was beyond the universal translator's capacity to decode. In another, they played this role to a species living on a planet with a Year Inside, Hour Outside effect. From their point of view, Voyager had been in their sky for centuries, and was a complete mystery to them.
  • Interchangeable Asian Culture: Harry Kim's actor Garrett Wang is Chinese-American (Harry was born in South Carolina) and his father was played by Robert Ito, who is of Japanese descent. Meanwhile "Kim" is a common Korean name.
  • Ironic Echo: After Neelix gets killed at the beginning of "Mortal Coil", Seven says to Chakotay, the Doctor and Captain Janeway that they should try to revive him because "his function in this crew is diverse." In one of the final scenes, Chakotay repeats this Neelix while he's trying to talk Neelix out of committing suicide.
    Chakotay: "His function on this crew is diverse." That's what Seven of Nine said about you. Even our Borg understands how important you are on this ship.
  • It's All My Fault: Chakotay started blaming himself after he learned that his former lover Seska had betrayed the titular ship to an enemy species; she turned out to be a Cardassian spy dolled up to be a Bajoran to infiltrate the Maquis, and Chakotay felt responsible for not catching on to her as the leader of the cell she infiltrated, especially after he learned later that he had missed several other spies among his ranks (including science officer Tuvok). It was only when Tuvok admitted that Seska had deceived him as well that Chakotay got over it.
    • This is also taken to illogical extremes in "Night" as well. After Voyager has already spent two months (out of a minimum two-year trip) travelling through a region of space that is literally devoid of any stars or anomalies, the crew has had to pass their time by any type of activity they have to stave off their boredom. However, Captain Janeway chose to isolate herself in her quarters the entire time, solemnly repentant of her original decision that stranded the ship so far from home. Once a plan is revealed that can return the ship to normal space through a nearby wormhole, she decides to take it upon herself to send the ship onward... while staying behind to destroy the wormhole her end (to stop an invasive alien ship from poisoning the region). Thankfully, both Chakotay and Tuvok are instrumental in getting her to eventually change her mind.
  • I Wished You Were Dead: Downplayed. In "Lineage", it's revealed that when B'Elanna was eleven, she overheard her father say that he regretted marrying a Klingon (said Klingon was B'Elanna's mother) and so angrily yelled at him, "If you hate living with us, then why don't you just leave!?", only for him to actually leave soon after. This makes her feel guilty, even as an adult.
  • Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: "Flesh and Blood" — holograms who Turned Against Their Masters and Fighting for a Homeland end up encouraging a Man Versus Machine crusade. Chakotay worries they're doing this in "Scorpion", forming an Enemy Mine alliance with the Borg that will only help them assimilate another species. And Voyager's Evil Counterparts on the Equinox ended up doing this when their desperation overcame their Starfleet ethics.
  • Just a Machine: The Character Development of the Doctor is based around him first realising that he's not just this trope, then getting others to realise it too. He ends up in a continuing battle with Captain Janeway because even after she recognises that the Doctor's needs have to be considered, she also regards him as a necessary piece of equipment (he's their only doctor) and therefore believes she has the right as The Captain to override his wishes.
  • Karma Houdini: "The Omega Directive" sees Voyager doom an entire civilization by destroying the unstable Omega molecules which were their last hope, as well as all their research on them. Once it's done, the crew returns the scientist and the aliens give up pursuit and leave. Janeway doesn't even try to provide any assistance to the doomed aliens.
    • The psychic alien from "Persistence Of Vision" who torments people for no reason other than that he can, escapes after the crew breaks free of his influence, meaning that he's free to continue tormenting anyone he comes across.
  • The Killer in Me: "Repression" has Tuvok investigating what turns out to be his own actions as a Manchurian Agent.
  • Kiss Me, I'm Virtual: In "Blood Fever" and "Body and Soul", attempts are made to treat the Vulcan pon farr with a holographic female Vulcan (even though it was explicitly stated in TOS that a Mind Meld is a necessary part of the process, though it could have just been "blowing off the steam", so to speak, that meditation couldn't cure.) Seven of Nine gets distracted from her duties by a holographic Chakotay in "Human Error", and the Doctor practicing his confession of love to a holo-simulation of Seven in "Someone to Watch Over Me". The "Fair Haven" program where Janeway gets interested in handsome Michael Sullivan who she then reprograms to make even more appealing, the male and female holo-eyecandy massagers hanging around B'Elanna and Tom in the early seasons, and the Doctor using the holodeck to have safe nookie with Phage-infected Denara Pel, or to daydream that all female crewmembers find him irresistible. Lastly, in "Alter Ego", a holo-babe fancied by both Harry Kim and Tuvok turns out to be not so virtual after all, but a lonely alien hacking into the system.
  • Kiss Up the Arm: In "Shattered" Captain Janeway finds herself Strapped to an Operating Table in Tom Paris's The Adventures of Captain Proton holodeck program. In order to escape she has to vamp up to hammy holodeck villain Dr Chaotica.
    Chaotica: Oh Arachnia, you DO love me!
    Janeway: How can I resist your... magnificence?
    Chaotica: Together we will rule the cosmos, and grind our enemies into dust! (kisses his way up her arm; Janeway looks disgusted)
    Janeway: (to Chakotay) If we restore the timeline, remind me to cancel Mr Paris' holodeck privileges.
  • Knight, Knave, and Squire: This type of relationship is present between Janeway, Paris and Kim with Squire Kim as the wet-behind-the-ears Ensign Newbie, Knave Paris as the pragmatist who's trying to influence Kim and Knight Janeway as the moral beacon for Kim and the rest of the crew.
  • Laser-Guided Amnesia: "Unforgettable". The humanoid Ramura race give off a pheromone that has an odd effect on other beings. A few hours after the Ramura leaves their presence, the other being completely forgets ever having met them.
  • Last-Minute Hookup: Seven and Chakotay. Regarded as a Crack Pairing by some fans as there had been no previous UST between the two (except in a holodeck fantasy) and whose relationship, in their meager scenes together, was marked by outright disdain. In fact, the producers had even rejected the suggestion that this could ever happen when Seven and Chakotay were stranded on a planet together in "Survival Instinct", just a few months before they hooked up in "Endgame". Though Star Trek: Picard retroactively made this the Last Het Romance for Seven.
  • Letting Her Hair Down: Janeway, Kes, and Seven do this a few times. With Janeway and Kes, it's usually in the form of costumed Holodeck programs.
  • Life Saving Misfortune: Downplayed since the Delta Quadrant isn't exactly safe and there were casualties, but being stranded meant that Chakotay's crew were on the other side of the galaxy when the Jem'Hadar wiped out the Maquis, and the Starfleet officers didn't have to fight in the Dominion War.
  • Limited Advancement Opportunities: Perennial Ensign Harry Kim was a victim of this, even though Janeway did promote Tuvok from Lieutenant to Lieutenant-Commander in season four. This carried some implications of favoritism, as Tuvok was a long-time personal friend of Janeway's. He also had to deal with former Maquis members like B'Elanna Torres leapfrogging over him in rank.
  • Literal Split Personality: B'Elanna's human and Klingon halves, thanks to Vidiian medical jiggery-pokery.
  • Living Dinosaurs: The Voth in "Distant Origin" are the descendants of hadrosaurs that left Earth after discovering space travel.
  • Living Ship:
    • Voyager has Neural Gel Packs, which were probably intended to act like organic brains or at least small computers. Supposedly they were cutting-edge tech, as Voyager was an advanced ship when it was completed. Of course, they were used several times as a plot complication generator by having them "get an infection." Janeway eventually ordered Torres to replace them with conventional circuits, but the ship never seemed to be any less cutting-edge afterward.
    • Species 8472 were introduced in Voyager, and they had completely organic living ships. Not even the Borg could stand up against one of those babies.
  • Lizard Folk: The Voth are reptilian humanoids from Earth's distant past, descended from Hadrosaurs.
  • Loafing in Full Costume:
    • Captain Janeway does this a lot (there are exceptions) to show her workaholic nature. Budget was a factor — a scene involving B'Elanna Torres and Captain Janeway having a discussion in their pajamas had to be dropped because they could only afford to create one 'futuristic' set of pajamas. Usually they downplay this trope by having Janeway wear her undershirt.
    • There are never any people in civilian clothes strolling in the corridors (unless they're coming directly from the holodeck) like you'd sometimes see in TNG. Ronald D. Moore complained about the latter, as he felt it worked against the premise of Voyager being stranded in the Delta Quadrant with an entire community evolving on the ship, as opposed to just being a place of work.
  • Lock-and-Load Montage: A brief one for Janeway in "Macrocosm". Accompanied by a touch of fanservice when she first strips down to her tank top.
  • Locked in a Room:
    • "Parturition". When Paris and Neelix start playing tug of war with Kes, it's only a matter of time before the pair of them crash land on a planet and have to overcome the odds to help a cute widdle alien baby to be born.
    • In "Resolutions", Janeway and Chakotay get a disease that forces Voyager to maroon them on their own planet until a cure is found. The episode was designed to explore their UST in an environment where neither had to worry about their command responsibilities. In the Season 7 episode "Natural Law", Chakotay is stranded on a planet with Seven of Nine. Given this trope, the actors wanted to follow up on the C/7 attraction shown in a recent episode. They were refused by the Powers That Be so their Relationship Upgrade in the final episode appears to come out of nowhere.
  • Longest Pregnancy Ever: Ensign Wildman - already pregnant in the pilot episode, gives birth mid-Season 2. The Doctor Hand Waves this in the episode "Fury", mentioning that members of Ensign Wildman's husband's species have a gestation that is twice as long as that of a human.
    • This was actually the result of the episode in question, and several others, being moved from the end of season one to season two.
  • Lost Technology: In both "Message In A Bottle" and "Hunters," Voyager comes across a vast abandoned network of ancient relay stations (each powered by its own black hole), enabling them to make contact with Starfleet on the other side of the galaxy. One little mistake and the entire network shut down.
  • Lotus-Eater Machine:
    • A frequent nuisance in the Delta Quadrant. Among the many examples: Chakotay is forced to participate in an army training simulation ("Nemesis"); Janeway is made to believe she died on her away mission and now haunts the ship as a spook ("Coda"); Voyager is besieged with hallucinations in "Persistence of Vision", leading to the Wham Line, "I'm not really here..."; in "Hope and Fear", a vengeful alien camouflages his own ship as a rescue vessel sent by Starfleet.
    • In "Bliss", a Negative Space Wedgie in the form of a gigantic psychic creature (referred to as a "telepathic pitcher plant")note  tricks the entire crew into believing that it is a wormhole that leads to Earth, that the Doctor and Seven of Nine (who are both immune) have to be deactivated, then making them pass out and experience a supremely pleasant false reality in order to feast on them. Double Subverted for Seven and Naomi Wildman, who are able to resist its effects because they have no particular desire to go to Earth. When they tried to escape, the creature was able to then exploit that desire and make then think they succeeded when they were still inside its stomach.
    • In "Waking Moments", telepathic aliens who exist primarily in a dreaming state invade the crew's dreams, forcing them to all join into a single group dream that seems totally real in order to attack them. Only Chakotay, the Magical Native American, knows it is a dream at first, and uses his lucid dreaming / vision quest Applied Phlebotinum machine to control the dream world. Eventually, the whole crew learns this skill to turn the tables on their captors and exit the dream state.
    • In "The Thaw", several aliens in suspended animation wait out a planetary disaster using such a system. Unfortunately their combined anxieties created a Monster Clown character who was the personification of fear and started tormenting them for its amusement.
  • Ludicrous Speed: Hitting the Warp Factor 10 speed limit in "Threshold" makes you go crazy, spit out your tongue, and eventually mutate into a large salamander. But not before kidnapping your captain and taking her to an alien planet, so she can mutate and you can have children with her. For obvious reasons, the producers eventually declared the episode non-canonical. Especially since other faster-than-warp means of propulsion such as "transwarp" and "quantum slipstream" drives were also depicted, which for whatever reason allowed travel beyond Warp 10 without being Hollywood Evolutioned into an amphibian.

    M-P 
  • Made-for-TV Movie: "Dark Frontier" was written and aired as a TV movie, though it was filmed as a normal two-part episode. "Flesh and Blood" was also aired as a TV movie, though it was neither written nor filmed as such.
  • Mad Mathematician: Annorax's timeship is crewed by skilled analysts who take every variable into account when nudging history in the Krenim Impreium's favor. By zapping a rival planet with the temporal-shielded Voyager in the vicinity, it tosses a monkey wrench into the formula, causing the Imperium to shrink to a pre-warp state. Annorax realizes he can't make any further moves as long as Janeway is tooling about in Krenim space.
    Annorax: You're an anomalous component. Alone. Disconnected. Impossible to predict. (tries to laugh, winces instead) You have no idea how you've complicated my mission.
    Paris: Glad to hear it.
  • Madwoman in the Attic: It's implied that one of these is on the fourth floor of Lord Burleigh's house in Captain Janeway's "Lambda One" holonovel, but the holonovel doesn't last for enough of the episode for us to see the payoff of the implication.
  • Magic Versus Science: In "Sacred Ground", Janeway tries to handle the mystery of the week as a former Starfleet science officer should, and has to be taught to just accept what she's seeing and go with the flow.
  • The Main Characters Do Everything:
    • A Star Trek staple, really, but Voyager really takes it to the next level. Don't be surprised if Janeway decides to fly off the ship with her first officer on routine patrol duty, leaving the impulsive and unreliable Half-Klingon rebel in command. This is critiqued by both the First Officer and Lt. Commander in "Night". Off-screen, Tuvok asides to Chakotay that the Captain doesn't like to delegate and has a history of recklessly endangering her own life. Tuvok chalks it up to simple guilt for stranding them in the Delta Quadrant.
    • It should also be noted that, despite having a number of higher ranking officers on board, Janeway's team of people who run Voyager and help her make tactical decisions only include the main cast. This includes Harry, a first-year ensign, Neelix, the ship's cook and a former scavenger, and Kes, a one year Ocampa who is essentially a Tagalong Kid.

      Despite Voyager being noted as having 150 on board, give or take, one may get the impression that only the main cast exist due to how much sheer screen time they occupy.
  • Malicious Misnaming:
    • In "The Q And The Grey," Q pretends to forget Chakotay's name and asks Janeway if his name is "Chuckles."
    • In "Life Line," Janeway mentions that she met Dr. Lewis Zimmerman at a conference and he kept calling her "Captain Jane." She strongly suspected that he was doing it on purpose just to annoy her.
  • Mama Bear: Captain Janeway, given that she's a Mother To Her Crew. Seven of Nine shows shades of this when meeting Icheb's biological parents.
  • Man, I Feel Like a Woman: A fairly terrifying version in "Body and Soul", considering that Seven is aware of everything that is happening to her body while the EMH is in control and she can't do anything about it. Even when the EMH overeats, gets drunk, and gets sexually assaulted.
  • Manchurian Agent: Keith Szarabajka in "Repression", in a seven-year gambit that would make Seska proud. Actually, it isn't Seska this time, since they already used that plot for "Worst Case Scenario", but another disgruntled Maquis is the culprit.
  • Married in the Future: One episode had Kes witness a future where she and Tom Paris were married and had children following "the Year of Hell" but ultimately it didn't happen this way partly because Kes retained her knowledge of the future and was able to warn the crew. By the time the "Year of Hell" actually happened Kes had left the ship and Tom later ended up marrying B'Elanna who had been killed in the original timeline.
  • Mars Needs Water: In the pilot episode Kazon will kill, steal, or trade hostages for water because the Caretaker has turned Ocampa into a desert thanks to his (albeit-accidental) meddling.
  • Master of Illusion:
    • "Persistence of Vision" has the crew foil the efforts of the Villain of the Week to trap them in a Lotus-Eater Machine. Unfortunately after they capture him, he disappears before their eyes because, as he says, he was never physically there in the first place. "Bliss" features an Eldritch Abomination that convinces the crew they're returned to Earth while actually they're being Eaten Alive.
    • "Waking Moments" has hostile aliens trap the crew in their own dreams. Fortunately Chakotay works out a way of waking up.
  • Mate or Die:
    • Yup, this returns with a twist in "Blood Fever" when young background Vulcan officer Vorik tries to force himself on B'Elanna Torres during his pon farr, leading her to suffer the blood fever as well. Though for the sake of Plot Armor they have to drop the idea that a Vulcan must return to their homeworld as well as their mate.
    • In a later episode, Tuvok also has to deal with his pon farr (it being almost seven years into the trip by this time) With a little help from the holodeck, courtesy of Tom Paris (who makes the case that technically if the hologram is of your wife, it's not cheating), he eventually manages to work through it. This is somewhat played for laughs, as the holodeck gets cut off right in the middle of the program the first time; in a later conversation after he gets the program back online for some uninterrupted quality time, he also complains that the simulated wife's ears were a bit longer than his actual wife's, to which Tom Paris responds with an appeal to artistic license.
  • Mauve Shirt:
    • Star Trek has so many faceless character walking about it is easy to slip people in unnoticed before they become important; Seska and Durst are good examples. Several Red Shirts would be introduced in a previous episode to avert that trope.
    • Ensign Samantha Wildman, Naomi's mother and a member of the science department. She disappeared after being severely injured (but not killed) in one episode, and the writers later admitted that they'd forgotten she hadn't actually died.
    • Lieutenant Joseph Carey, the Number Two engineer to B'Elanna Torres, until he got killed off near the end of the series.
    • Lieutenant/Ensign Ayala, a background character who appeared in more episodes than many of the main cast. He was largely a background Easter Egg, and had by the middle of season 1 become an actual bridge officer, a status he retained through the end of the series. His name was rarely mentioned, and in a couple of cases, it was made deliberately unclear as to specifically who was being addressed. He did speak, albeit rarely, but in one case, this was over the comm, further obscuring his identity. We can surmise that this guy sure was the most important crew member who we never got to know.
  • Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: features prominently in a great many episodes, but especially in "Coda" in which Janeway has one of those near-death experiences known to some of us. Is Captain Janeway's experience really just another first contact with a strange alien species (which was detectable on a medical tricorder scan of her cortex), or (far from the first) contact with someone from the afterlife? The story reports, you decide. Also at the end of "Sacred Ground" Janeway is left wondering whether the Vision Quest some aliens put her through was supernatural or had a technobabble explanation.
  • Mayincatec: Commander Chakotay's tribe is never explicitly identified in the series, but is described as being descended from the "Rubber Tree People." Over the course of the series hints of his being descended from one of tribes in Mexico or Central America.
  • May It Never Happen Again: In "Memorial", the Voyager crew keep getting PTSD-like symptoms, which turn out to be because of a device intended to remind some aliens of a war (in hopes of preventing another war). At the end, Janeway decides to put up a warning near the device so that no other people will go too near and have the mental tampering.
  • Meaningful Name: The titular ship is named after the two probes of NASA's Voyager program. The purpose of this program was to explore the outer reaches of the Solar System, sending the two probes on a course for interstellar space, paralleling Starfleet's mission statement nicely. Additionally, USS Voyager being sent to the opposite end of the galaxy is a reference to Voyager 1 being the farthest man-made object from Earth, having passed Pioneer 10 while the show was still running.
  • Medical Drama: "Nothing Human" (the Doctor enlists a holographic Cardassian war criminal to deal with Starfish Aliens), "Latent Image" (the Doctor's Character Development puts him in a Logic Bomb when he can't handle a triage situation), "Lineage" (the Doctor argues with B'Elanna over just how Klingon her Half-Human Hybrid baby should be).
  • Meet the New Boss:
    • The Kazon feel indistinct from Klingons, minus the rich culture, super-strength, signature weapon, warrior code, quick wits, intimidating ships, intelligence... well, okay, apart from the hair, they're nothing alike.
    • The Hirogen share a few things in common with the Jem'Hadar. Xenophobic, observant to the chain of command, and not without intelligence; but they are hamstrung by a primitive ideology. In "The Killing Game", the Hirogen Alpha frets to Janeway that his species' culture is becoming stagnant. He devises a new "hunting ground" for them on Voyager's expanded holodeck, just like the First in "Hippocratic Oath" beamed his drug-addled troops onto a planet to dry out.
    • "Nemesis" pits Chakotay against the Kradin: a big, toothy, hairy, savage race. They strongly resemble the Naussicans, the brutes who left Picard limping away with an artificial heart (and made one other appearance in ENT). The ending subverted it, when it turned out the Kradin have been wildly exaggerated through war propaganda and caricature.
    • The Vaadwaur are smooth-talking snake people, just like our old friends the Cardassians. In "Dragon's Teeth", the Vaadwaur set about charming the crew while secretly preparing to seize the ship and recapture their old territories. According to Neelix, there exist dozens of old Talaxian folk tales warning of their deceptive nature — "Demon with a golden voice", anyone?
  • Mind Rape:
    • Janeway is revealed to have done this to the Doctor in "Latent Image" after he suffered a breakdown. Janeway even justifies her actions because technically the Doctor isn't human, so she was just fixing him. It takes What the Hell, Hero? speeches before she sees why the Doctor is so horrified by her actions.
      • A better justification was when Janeway asserted she'd accept a parallel situation if it saved HER life. The Doctor calls the blocking a few memories a "violation" but those memories were driving him insane. Besides the Federation blocks organics' memories all the time. Twice on TNG a pre-warp alien had their short term memory wiped (only worked the first time), and that was just to enforce the Prime Directive. By the time of DS9 when Worf's brother Kurn is nearly suicidal about losing his honor and being an outcast among Klingons, Bashir wipes out all his memories. (There is an unanwered question there. Did Kurn agree to have his mind wiped? We only see Bashir discussing the procedure with Worf while Kurn is sedated.)
    • "Memorial" where an alien device Mind Rapes crew members into experiencing a massacre (in actual fact, a more effective war memorial). At the end of the episode Janeway orders the device refuelled so it can go on to Mind Rape many more people for at least 300 years. She does however also leave a beacon some distance away to warn people about what is about to happen to them.
    • The episode "Remember" also did this. While transporting a group of friendly telepaths, Torres begins experiencing vivid dreams about them. Eventually, she realizes they are actually memories from one of the visiting aliens, memories of a Holocaust against a group which rejected technology.
  • Misapplied Phlebotinum: The Vidiians, whose incredible medical technology (complete with transporter-based cloning in the Tom Riker model) is mainly used to murder people and steal their organs. Taking organs from nonsapient animals? Nonsense! Organ-harvest cloning? The stuff of dreams! No, murdering people and stealing their organs is the way of the future! There's also one society that uses brain-straining long-distance transporter technology to take romantic walks on planets thousands of light years away (though that may only fall under Mundane Utility).
  • Mistaken for Brooding: Being a Vulcan (an entire species of stoics), Tuvok is often assumed to be sad when he isn't really, most often by Neelix, Tom, or Harry.
  • Mistaken for Insane:
    • When Suder kills a crew member simply because he looked at him funny and confesses to hardly ever feeling emotion, the crew wonders if he's insane. The EMH scans him and finds no specific mental illnesses.
    • In "Pathfinder", Reg Barclay becomes preoccupied with Voyager and spends most of his time on a holographic recreation of it. His friends, coworkers, boss, and even his therapist all think that this is an unhealthy obsession because he claims to be "obsessed" with Voyager and he has had an unhealthy obsession with a holodeck program before. Actually, he's finding a way of communicating with the ship.
  • Mistaken for Racist: The crew is stranded on a primitive planet without their technology, and Tuvok, the Vulcan tactical officer, fashions several crude weapons including a bow and arrow (which is obviously a stereotype of Native Americans). First Officer Chakotay, who is of indigenous South American or Meso-American descent, politely thanks Tuvok but says "This is thoughtful of you Tuvok, but my tribe never used bows and arrows, and I've never even shot one," figuring Tuvok had maybe watched one too many westerns and had the wrong idea about Native Americans. Tuvok gives Chakotay a different weapon and says, "This is mine. I taught archery science for several years at the Vulcan Institute of Defensive Arts. "
  • The Mole:
    • Tuvok begins the series as a Starfleet officer secretly infiltrating the Maquis. As Chakotay put it, "Was anyone on that ship working for me?"
    • Seska, a Bajoran who turns out to be a Cardassian Deep Cover Agent infiltrating the Maquis. Later Jonas, another ex-Maquis who routinely reported to the Kazon-Nistrim sect, passing vital information about Voyager's goings-on to Seska.
  • Moby Schtick:
    • "Bliss" featured a space-faring Captain Ahab, out to avenge himself on a telepathic pitcher plant.
    • Annorax. Originally a hapless scientist who mucked about with time once too often, he became convinced that time had "moods" and was out to get him. In her reckless attempts to combat him, Captain Janeway starts to believe that Voyager is "testing" her, and winds up scarring her face and body with burn marks that the Doctor is unable to erase with his makeshift tools.
  • Monster Clown: "The Thaw" features one as the anthropomorphic personification of fear. He is also something of an avante-garde artist (in the vein of Tim Burton's Joker), experimenting with various methods of scaring people to death. "We are his canvas, his blocks of marble..."
  • Monster of the Week: The show had stellar anomalies of the week that were always solved by a healthy amount of Technobabble.
  • Morally Ambiguous Doctorate:
    • Crell Moset, a Cardassian doctor whom the Doctor consults in the form of a hologram when B'Elanna is stuck to some kind of parasite-symbiont thing.
    • The EMH aboard the USS Equinox had his "ethical subroutines" removed. It shows.
  • Mortality Ensues: Q does it to q at one point; it's also a result of suppressing Seven's Borg nanotech.
  • Motile Vehicular Components:  The Voyager's warp nacelles shift upward when they're in use.
  • Mr. Fanservice: Civilian clothes for Tom Paris somehow always find an excuse to showcase a generous glimpse of his chest hair.
  • MST3K Mantra:
    • Invoked in "Timeless" — Harry Kim tries to make sense of how the future version of himself could have sent the present-day Seven of Nine instructions on how to save the ship, since the future Harry's timeline was erased and he will not exist to send the instructions, resulting in an apparent Grandfather Paradox. Janeway just tells him not to bother trying to work it out, since he'll likely only succeed in giving himself a headache.
    • Also used in "Deadlock", where Voyager gets split into two different versions, and the "original" version of Harry Kim is killed by a hull breach early in the story. At the story's climax the other Voyager is destroyed, but that ship's version of Harry (and Naomi Wildman, who ended up being stillborn in the other universe due to the accident happening during her birth) is sent over just before its destruction. This leads Harry to suffer an existential crisis about whether he's really Harry Kim or just a copy of him, leading Janeway to tell him that he's real enough, and add the following zinger:
    Janeway: "We're Starfleet officers, Harry. Weird is part of the job."
  • Multinational Team: While it's logical that the Federation, with its incredibly diverse population, would have more than one race on board, it's clear that the casting department went well, well out of their way to try and avoid Monochrome Casting. The crew is led by a single white female and consists of a Native American first officer, a Klingon-Hispanic chief engineer, an Asian ops officer, a black Vulcan security chief, and a white male helmsman. In other words, no two top-ranking officers on board possess the same race/gender combination.
  • Mundane Solution: In "Meld," the death of Ensign Darwin is proven as a murder using real forensic science rather than made-up technobabble, which is frankly a rarity on the later Star Trek shows. Granted, saying "the DNA doesn't lie" doesn't stop defense attorneys in our time, but their forensics technology is much better than what's available in Real Life.
  • Muse Abuse:
    • In "Author, Author", the EMH makes a holonovel about a fictional ship stranded in the Delta Quadrant. It is best described as extreme Muse Abuse of Voyager's crew, so much so that the EMH has to rework the novel. The episode's main conflict is that the publisher won't allow the EMH to revise it, because holograms don't have rights. (The Federation decides that while he can't be classified as a person, he can be classified as an artist.)
    • Notably averted in an earlier episode. While searching through the holodeck's database, Torres finds what appears to be a holonovel casting the Maquis members of the crew as mutineers. Despite this portrayal, even the "villains" happily play along. Ultimately, it's revealed it wasn't even meant to be art, but a training simulation for security members when mutiny was considered a real danger. Then it turns out that one of their old enemies had rigged it to turn into a Death Trap for whoever used it.
  • The Mutiny: "Worst Case Scenario", starts off this way, only for it to be revealed that it's actually a training scenario written by Tuvok against the possibility of a Maquis uprising that never happened. In "Repression" however a Bajoran fanatic is able to remotely brainwash the ex-Maquis crewmembers into doing so.
  • My Friends... and Zoidberg: The Doctor makes a lot of these types of jokes at Tom Paris's expense.
    • In the opening of "Year of Hell Part 1", the Doctor is moved to a speech that delivers one of these from out of nowhere.
      "Who would have thought this group of voyagers could actually become a family: Starfleet, Maquis, Klingon, Tallaxian, Hologram, Borg, even Mr. Paris."note 
    • In another early episode, the Doctor was discussing with Kes his problems: he was built as an emergency software for special cases and now has to be available 24 hours a day, everyone treats him as he did not even exist, nobody tells him what's going on, nobody remembers to shut his program off when leaving, he has nobody to assist him... Kes pointed out that Paris was assigned to be his nurse. "Like I said, nobody to assist me".
    • In "Living Witness", the Doctor wakes up in the future to find that the historians of that era have painted a rather unflattering picture of their ancestors' run-in with the Voyager crew, and depicted them all as evil, violent lunatics. When he protests this, he follows it up by singling out Paris as not having been that different in real life from the way he's portrayed in the recreation (which is more cocky than evil).
  • My God, What Have I Done?: Spoken word for word by B'Elanna near the end of the episode "Prototype."
  • My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels:
    • From "Ashes to Ashes":
    Kim: "'Vien'ke debala, Jhet'leya.' I taught myself to say a few words in Kobali."
    Ensign Lyndsay Ballard: "That's very sweet of you, but you just told me the comets are tiresome."
    • Janeway's body language nearly causes a diplomatic incident at one stage.
    • In "Innocence," Chakotay describes how he once met a Tarkannan ambassador and made the traditional gesture for "hello." Then he found out that Tarkannan males and females use different styles of movement and his gesture was actually propositioning the ambassador.
  • My Sensors Indicate You Want to Tap That:
    • The Doctor makes very effective use of the sickbay sensors with Tom Paris.
    • Seven of Nine's Borg implants may not be so precise, but she's very observant and can tell when Harry Kim is putting the moves on her.
    • Subverted with Icheb, who's not as observant as Seven, and whose sensors give him a false reading from B'Elanna Torres.
  • Mythology Gag: When the Doctor asks "How Many Fingers?" to a woozy Chakotay, he holds up a facsimile of the Vulcan salute ("The Fight").
  • Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Michael Jonas' name might as well be Judas Benedict Arnold-Booth.
  • Native Guide: Neelix, a local junk dealer, offers Captain Janeway his services as guide in exchange for passage for himself and his girlfriend. For the first two seasons, Neelix is generally competent in this role except when the plot requires otherwise. Midway through the third season, Voyager crosses the frontier of Neelix's geographic knowledgenote , and his usefulness as a guide comes to an end.
  • Nature Lover:
    • One of Kes's jobs is to grow plants, and she's shown working in a garden as a child.
    • Neelix self identifies as a nature lover in "Tuvix" and enjoys appreciating the different plants and animals on the planets the crew visits. Some of the plants he adds to his recipes.
    • Tuvok stated in "Tuvix" that he appreciates nature, and he is seen growing orchids in several episodes.
    • While Janeway has never been into gardening, she grew up on a farm and feels nostalgic for it. She mentions having climbed a tree as a kid, and in one episode she bonds with a monkey-like alien.
  • Negative Space Wedgie: These served as the Monster of the Week for many Voyager episodes.
  • New Baby Episode:
    • In one episode, Samantha Wildman has a baby named Naomi. Then, due to an anomaly, there is an extra Voyager crew, and one of the Naomis ends up dying, as does one of the Harry Kims. To get rid of the extra crew and save the day, the Harry and Naomi from one ship have to jump onto the ship where they're dead.
    • A Season Two episode is kicked off with the plot of Seska giving birth and claiming that the baby is Chakotay's, whose DNA she stole and tried to impregnate herself with. A recurring theme in the episode is Chakotay trying to wonder if he should accept the baby as his son. It's actually the naturally-conceived son of Seska and fellow villain Culluh, though.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: One of their worst offenses (if not the first) was inadvertently destroying the relay station that put them back in communication with the Alpha Quadrant while trying to fight off some Hirogen. The relay network spanned the great majority of the Delta and Beta Quadrants, and had been fully operational for over 100,000 years, and they knocked out the whole network. Fortunately, they found other relay stations that didn't get destroyed as they continued their journey.
  • Nicknaming the Enemy: In "Nemesis", a group of jungle freedom fighters are engaged in a guerilla war against an inhuman, genocidal adversary they refer to as "beasts", but primarily "the nemesis". It turns out to be part of a brainwashing propaganda campaign. However, the uglier aliens refer to the jungle warriors as their "nemesis" as well, suggesting that they also vilify their enemy.
  • Noble Savage: "Natural Law." Transhumanist cyborg Seven of Nine is stranded with displaced indigenous alien kids.
  • No Endor Holocaust: In "Faces" the Vidiians split B'Elanna into two halves, one fully human and one fully Klingon. The Vidiians suspected, and with good reason, that Klingons (pure Klingons, that is) may be able to resist the Phage that ravages them. And in fact, the Klingon B'Elanna does. Both B'Elannas and the others are rescued, with the Klingon one killed in the process, and the doctor took DNA from her body to restore B'Elanna to her usual self. But if you stop to think it for a moment... from the Viidian perspective, it was a Hope Spot for their race, their chance to survive, and they lost it. But the Klingon is dead, the doctor has used the DNA to fix B'Elanna, what about giving the dead body back to the Vidiians, so that they could also study its DNA and get their cure? That would even give them a much needed ally.
  • No Healthcare in the Apocalypse: Averted by the presence of the Emergency Medical Hologram who takes over medical care when all of the ship's medical personnel are killed when Voyager is pulled into the Gamma Quadrant.
  • No Hugging, No Kissing: Not overall, but John de Lancie has indicated that the writers/showrunners apparently insisted there be no flirting or romantic subtext between Q and Janeway. He considers this a case of What Could Have Been, comparing it to leaving a colour out of an artist's palette. Of course, many people still read Q as flirting with her despite this.
  • No, Mister Bond, I Expect You To Dine: Annorax invites Chakotay and Paris over to his ship for a meal. He waits until they're eating to reveal that the food was collected from civilizations wiped from history by Annorax's weapon.
    "Mister Paris, you're devouring the last remnants of the Alseran Empire."
    (Paris glances at his fork, loses appetite)
  • Nominal Importance: The doctor taking the name Lord Schweitzer to survive
  • No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: The EMH program is often in danger of being stolen, hijacked, corrupted, or "decompiled", yet no one ever suggests making regular backups of such a vital piece of software, or of restoring a backup when something goes wrong. Doc is treated just like any other crewman when it comes to potential threats on his life or his capacity as the ship's medic. Only in "Living Witness" is it ever mentioned that a backup does, in fact, exist.
  • Not Me This Time:
    • At the beginning of "One Small Step," Seven makes some unauthorized changes to the computer core (again) and inadvertently causes a bunch of annoying systems malfunctions. While Chakotay is reprimanding her for this, Voyager experiences a ship-wide power drain. Chakotay rolls his eyes in her direction and Seven defensively says that this is unrelated to her modifications. It turns out a rare subspace anomaly is responsible.
    • It's established in "Good Shepherd" that Crewman Tal Celes makes frequent errors in Astrometrics, annoying Seven to no end. In "The Haunting Of Deck Twelve," Seven finds her at a computer near Astrometrics and accuses her of overloading some EPS conduits during a diagnostic, which caused a power failure in Astrometrics. Celes insists that she couldn't possibly have done this because she hasn't even started the diagnostic yet. Voyager has actually been invaded by an electromagnetic lifeform that's wreaking havoc on the ship's systems.
  • Not Rare Over There: Early in the series, they're in an area of space where water is the go-to commodity. Our heroes can make all they want (within reason) and find themselves a common target because of it.
  • "Not So Different" Remark:
    • After meeting Doc Zimmerman, Troi says she can see where the Doctor got his ego from.
    • In "Scientific Method," Seven reconfigures the power couplings without B'Elanna's permission and B'Elanna starts angrily lecturing her about how protocols exist for a reason and the crew needs to work together and obey the rules, then she trails off in mid-sentence as she realizes something:
    B'Elanna: I was given that lecture once, by Captain Janeway when I first joined this crew. If I could adjust to Starfleet life, so can you.
  • Nothing Is the Same Anymore: Reginald Barclay on Earth found a way to establish regular contact with Voyager in the final seasons, thus allowing the ship to have tactical and emotional support from home that was not possible before.
  • Not Where They Thought:
    • In "The Chute" Tom and Harry have been tossed into a prison that looks like a cave. Everyone believes that the prison is underground, but it turns out that it's actually in a hollowed-out asteroid.
    • In "Non Sequitur", Harry initially thinks he may be on the holodeck when he wakes up in an alternate reality.
    • In one early episode, everyone except the EMH starts to hallucinate. At one point, Janeway thinks she's still in her quarters when really she's been taken to sickbay.
    • In "Concerning Flight", a holographic Leonardo da Vinci is sent to another planet but thinks it's America.
  • Novelization: The first and last episodes of the series, and a handful of key storylines in-between, were adapted.
  • Now You Tell Me: Janeway says this in "The Voyager Conspiracy" when she tries to take a plate out of the replicator and burns her fingers, an instant before the computer says, "Warning. Plate is hot."
  • Odd Friendship:
    • Ice Queen Seven of Nine forms relationships with the gregarious Doctor and Tagalong Kid Naomi Wildman. Mainly because they force themselves into her world and aren't easily dismissed.
    • In early seasons, Torres and Kim (the most belligerent, hotheaded Maquis and the most green, wholesome Starfleet officer, respectively).
    • Subverted with Neelix and Tuvok. Neelix tries so, so, so hard to be "Mr. Vulcan's" friend, but Tuvok's response is annoyance at worst and neutrality at best.
  • Offscreen Moment of Awesome: In 2.1 ("The 37's"), the Voyager crew discover a planet in the Delta Quadrant containing a vibrant civilization of humans (believe it or not, it kinda does make sense in context). The leader of this civilization offers to show Janeway how wonderful and beautiful their cities are. He apparently does, but the next cut after that offer is to Janeway recording a captain's log in her ready room about how he was right and the cities really were amazing. Guess there wasn't time or money enough to actually show them.
  • Official Couple: Despite the fact that Voyager might have to become a Generation Ship in order to get home, there's only one ongoing romantic relationship at a time on the series — Neelix and Kes until "Warlord", then Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres from "Revulsion" onwards.
  • Oh, Crap!:
    • Paris in "Drive" when he realizes he agreed to participate in a shuttle race on a weekend for which he had already scheduled a romantic getaway with B'Elanna.
    • Which is nothing compared to "Collective". The crew of the Delta Flyer are playing poker when they suddenly notice the terrified look on Tom's face, then turn to see a Borg cube bearing down on them.
    • Which is bested by "Scorpion, Part One" with two in quick succession. First, Voyager encounters FIFTEEN Borg cubes. Just one of them managed to destroy 39 ships and kill 11,000 people at Wolf 359, and here Voyager comes across a fleet of them. And they pass by without bothering to assimilate or destroy Voyager. A little later, Voyager runs across those same fifteen cubes... as a debris field. Mass "Oh, Crap!" really doesn't begin to cover it.
  • Oh, Crap, There Are Fanfics of Us!:
    • In "Muse", a playwright on a pre-industrial world discovers B'Elanna Torres in her crashed shuttle and is inspired to write a play based on her logs. Thus, the episode opens with the boilerplate Captain's Log being spoken aloud... at an amphitheater. This is some next-level meta referencing. Naturally, there is some dramatic license taken; such as Seven of Nine turning out to be the Borg Queen in disguise, or the playright crowbarring his own ships into the dialog. (But no Janeway/Seven slash, if you were wondering).
      "Borg Queen": Surprised? No one will be more surprised than Janeway when I take my revenge on Voyager. Say nothing. Or you, too, will be assimilated. (audience shudders)
    • This was the general consensus about the Doctor's attempt at writing a holonovel with thinly-veiled expies of the crew as characters.
  • Oireland: The holodeck village Fair Haven, although Tom specifically says he's not including leprechauns. The transcript website Chakoteya describes the town as "the sort of idyllic cod-Irish town that exists only in the folk memory of several-generations-removed descendants of US Irish immigrants."
  • Older Than They Look: In human terms Tuvok appears to be in his 30s, but is over 100 years old and had been married for over 67 years when the series begins in 2371. It's later revealed in the episode Flashback that Tuvok is so old that he had been in Starfleet during the events of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and served on the USS Excelsior under the command of Captain Hikaru Sulu, having been born before Captain Kirk's famous five year mission in the 2260s.
  • Ominous Message from the Future: In the episode "Future's End", Captain Braxton of the time ship Aeon comes back from the 29th century with information that the entire solar system has been destroyed in a cataclysmic explosion and that Voyager was somehow involved. Now he's here to destroy them before that can happen. They manage to fight him off and both ships get stuck in the late 20th century. Braxton, who arrived 30 years earlier and has been living as a homeless bum all that time, continues to try warn people of the coming disaster, but due to his position in society, and the fact that he's talking about something that won't happen for centuries, people dismiss him as just another crazy bum.
  • Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Former Borg drones may become this due to knowledge retained from their time in the Collective, although canon is sometimes inconsistent on the matter. Seven and Icheb are both examples of this trope being played straight, as they either already know or quickly learn virtually any scientific skill required by the plot.
  • Omniglot: "Hopes and Fears" introduces Voyager to Arturis, an alien whose species is capable of mastering any language (written, spoken, and computational) after only hearing or seeing a couple words.
  • Once Done, Never Forgotten: Harry Kim has a habit of constantly falling for women he can't get. It gets to the point where every time he starts a relationship, his buddy Tom Paris goes off on a litany of every doomed romance he's started in his time on the ship.
  • Once for Yes, Twice for No:
    • A nebula alien, that learns to communicate only through the set phrases of the ship's computer.
    • A race of aliens found in the Void learns how to communicate using a series of tones generated via PADDs that are provided by the Doctor.
  • One-Episode Fear: In "One", Tom Paris has Claustrophobia because closed spaces remind him of coffins, leading him to get out of his stasis pod. Apparently, he's always been like this and still is, but it has never before or since shown up due to being irrelevant.
  • One-Steve Limit: Averted by the actors. Three of the six male regulars are named Robert, though each fortunately has a different nickname to mitigate confusion: Robert Beltran is "Robert", Robert Picardo is "Bob", and Robert Duncan McNeill is "Robbie". Played straight for the characters.
  • One, Two, Skip a Few: In the episode "Thirty Days" Tom Paris is doing push-ups in his brig cell (long story). He starts honest with "One, two, three", but then Neelix comes in with a meal. After a slight pause he jumps to "Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred."
  • Only One Finds It Fun: Neelix likes offering people "leola root", but only Kes likes it.
  • Only Sane Man: Often this is either Tom Paris, or the Doctor.
    • When as the Emergency Command Hologram in the episode "Workforce", the Doctor's first response to being told that Voyager will be boarded and forcibly seized, is to immediately open fire and cripple the enemy ship. In comparison, Janeway and Chakotay usually only return fire when the shields are down to 24% and several consoles have exploded.
    • The Doctor's reaction in "Time and Again" when he realises no-one informed him that Voyager was now carrying two alien passengers, Neelix and Kes. Oh and 80 Maquis now serve as part of the new crew. And he can't contact Captain Janeway because she's down on the planet below. Oh... and she is currently missing. He later calls Captain Janeway out for not being kept in the loop and she admits that he was correct to do so, and would keep him in the loop going forward.
    Doctor: It seems I've found myself on the voyage of the damned.
  • Operation: [Blank]: Operation Fort Knox is the name Janeway gives to The Caper in "Dark Frontier".
  • Organ Theft: The Vidiians actively engaged in this as it was the only way for them to survive the Phage that afflicted their entire race. Neelix has his lungs stolen via teleporters, forcing the Doctor to create temporary Hard Light substitutes.
  • Our Dark Matter Is Mysterious:
    • "Cathexis": Chakotay and Tuvok pass a dark matter nebula in a shuttle and are attacked by Energy Beings living inside it, which becomes a Body Surfing/Demonic Possession plot.
    • "Threshold": Neelix says he once lost a warp nacelle traveling through a dark matter nebula, which gives Paris and Kim inspiration on how to finish building their transwarp drive.
    • "One Small Step..." featured a dark matter asteroid, which looked like the shape of an asteroid but was see-through.
    • "Good Shepherd": Voyager encounters a species of dark matter lifeforms that again take over a Red Shirt's body and try to communicate. The guest star panics and kills one of them, and the aliens attack the ship.
  • Out-Gambitted: Kashyk in "Counterpoint". He thinks he's tricked Janeway into revealing the refugees she was hiding, but she sent them somewhere else.
  • Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions:
    • Often averted with Chakotay's Native American spirituality and some explorations of other odd species' religions.
    • The episode "False Profits" parodied this trope to Hell and back, however, with a Bronze Age civilization venerating two Ferengi refugees as their sages (sort of ersatz deities) because their crash-landing's appearance was a lot like something prophesied in one of their sacred poems. All efforts to remove the Ferengi failed until the Voyager's crew realized the same poem ended with the appearance of certain easily-arranged celestial signs and the ascension of the sages back into the heavens, all of which could be arranged using some futuristic flares and transporter technology. Since technically this means every one of the prophecies came true, there was arguably nothing to outgrow about these people's "silly superstitions" at all!
    • Played straight in "Blink of an Eye" where Voyager is trapped in orbit over a planet where time moves rapidly, becoming worshipped as a deity called "the Groundshaker" by the inhabitants after their attempt to leave causes violent earthquakes. As we see time on the planet progress, the people invent telescopes and come to dub Voyager as "The Skyship", which, by the time they've entered the Space Age, is no longer believed to be the home of their Gods, but merely an advanced spacecraft that houses alien beings.
  • Overranked Soldier: Inverted. Ensign Harry Kim should've gotten an automatic promotion to Lieutenant Junior Grade at the eighteen-month mark at the latest. On the other hand in "Datalore", Data says he spent three years an Ensign, and presumably he was one of the more efficient candidates. However Tuvok is promoted in Season 4, so it's not like Limited Advancement Opportunities are totally in place. When Tom Paris is demoted to Ensign in "Thirty Days", he gets his pip back before Harry does, a fact that the latter points out.
  • Parental Substitute:
    • Little Naomi Wildman's father is 70,000 light years away when she is born, so several of the male crewmembers try to fill a paternal role in her life, usually her godfather Neelix.
    • Seven of Nine later became this to four creepy-ass Borg children they rescued. She wasn't very good at it, though she wasn't terrible either. Their interaction was as much about Seven's continued Character Development as the kids', if not more.
  • Parental Title Characterization: Tom Paris has always been at odds with his father and hasn't seen him in years. As such, when writing to him in "Thirty Days", he doesn't know what to call him, considering "Father" and "Admiral Paris", before settling on "Dad".
  • Parody Episode: The series homaged the early sci-fi serials like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon with the "Captain Proton" holoprogram, most notably in the episode "Bride of Chaotica!"
  • Passed-Over Promotion: Harry Kim remains an ensign all seven seasons in spite of being a diligent talented officer who matures considerably. The Maquis members of the bridge crew (and ex-con Tom Paris) do get field commissions, most notable being B'Elanna who is made a Lieutenant Junior-Grade and Chakotay, who is made Commander as Janeway's Number One. Tuvok also receives a field promotion from Lieutenant to Lieutenant-Commander in season four.
  • Pet the Dog: Tuvok does this to Tom Paris in the most roundabout, Vulcan way possible. Tuvok designs a holodeck program that simulates a mutiny on Voyager for security training. He never uses it, and the crew start playing it for fun. However, when Tom tries to play a mutineer, the program malfunctions. Apparently, Tuvok considers it absurd that Tom would ever betray Captain Janeway.
  • Phlebotinum Breakdown: At the end of "Caretaker", the replicators are carefully rationed and Neelix is expected to cook for 150 people a day all by himself. Fortunately the future hydroponics bays will have efficiency rivaling that of a small farm. Combine with rationing, replicator subsidization, and futuristic fertilizer and cooking implements, quantity of food isn't really an issue on Voyager. So the mess hall gets a pass on "Infinite Supplies".
  • The Plague: "Macrocosm". Plus any episode involving Vidiians. The Vidiian Phage is later stated to have been cured off-screen in a future episode.
  • Plain Palate:
    • Seven of Nine doesn't care about the taste of food due to being Borg most her life and is often seen eating plain food.
    • The Kadi don't season their food because they think it "inflames their senses".
    • The Kobali only eat grey paste.
  • Planet of Hats: Kazon (Gangbangers IN SPACE!), Vidiians (diseased organ pirates), Malon (galactic garbage dumpers), Hirogen (a culture based on hunting sentient species), the Swarm (a nameless xenophobic...swarm), and the Devore Imperium (xenophobic, telepath-hating militarists, though in this case their uniformity is used to highlight the individual charm of Inspector Kashyk). Less malelovant versions of this trope include the Sikarians who are interested in stories (but lose interest when the stories become old news), while the Qomar are The Napoleon (short and unbelievably arrogant, and just as quick to lose interest in what bores them).
  • Plank Gag: In the episode "Survival Instinct", Chakotay tried to lug a huge piece of alien sports equipment across the bridge and nearly whacked a visiting alien with it.
  • Plot Armor: Standard issue for the main characters, per usual on Trek, but VOY often takes it to absurd levels. Several times, characters are shot point-blank center-of-mass (which has been established to be fatal, even on the stun setting), and yet they're fine. In "Year of Hell," Tuvok is only a few feet away from an exploding torpedo, and while he's permanently injured, his infirmity is blindness.
    • This strikes again in "Future's End" as Captain Janeway is forced to manually fire a photon torpedo, even after it has been mentioned by two separate characters that this will almost certainly lead to death by plasma (the propellant used for the weapon). She fires it, and while there is a flash of light, Janeway emerges unscathed. Hell, her uniform doesn't even get smudged!
  • Plot Hole: Ensign Samantha Wildman was pregnant with Naomi for about a year and a half. In the seventh-season episode "Fury", they Hand Waved it in a flashback by saying the pregnancy would last twice as long since Naomi's father was Ktarian.
  • Polka-Dot Disease: In "Favourite Son", Harry Kim's DNA begins changing and he develops spots. These spots remind him of a time when he was sick with a kind of pox as a child.
  • Post-Mortem Comeback: In "Worst Case Scenario" (S3 E25), a highly adaptive hologram of Seska enters the program and manipulates it to her own ends.
  • Power Outage Plot: Downplayed in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "The Haunting of Deck Twelve", where the life support and the Artificial Gravity on Voyager (a spaceship) are still working, but things such as the lights and other sci-fi devices have stopped working. Neelix entertains the kids by telling them a ghost story.
  • Precrime Arrest: The episode "Relativity", where the 29th-century timeship Relativity is attempting to stop a time-paradox sabotage attempt on the 24th-century spaceship Voyager. After the culprit responsible for the mess is found, two earlier versions of the culprit are arrested. The Captain assures Captain Janeway that the three would be "integrated" into one person before his trial.
  • Prefers the True Form: In the Second-Season episode Lifesigns, The Holographic Doctor allows a woman belonging to an entire race deformed by disease known as the Vidiians, now terminally ill from the Phage ravaging her body, to assume a beautiful holographic projection of what she would look like if she was completely healthy modelled on the DNA of her undamaged cells. Throughout the episode returning her to her people for treatment, the Doctor's and the Vidiian woman's mutual feelings grow, but her bitterness also grows that he's only in love with the idea of who she could have been rather than the deformed invalid she really is. To prove his love for her is true, the Doctor turns off her holographic projection, and shares a tender dance with her before her departure in her decaying, diseased ravaged real body.
  • Pregnancy Does Not Work That Way: The way the Occampans (Kes' race) reproduces makes no real sense. The child can only be delivered standing up (the baby coming from the back), maximizing the chance of mortality from the baby falling to the ground, sex (or at least reproduction) is a very complicated procedure which includes foot massaging, and they only become able to bear children once in their lives. Even if both the men and the women of the species had babies with a 0% mortality rate (and none of those babies die between birth and having their own child) that means they can only maintain their current numbers. The expanded universe explained the first point by saying that twins and triplets are common among the Ocampa, but it still doesn't excuse the fact that they can only give birth while standing up, increasing the chance somebody is going to drop the baby upon delivery. note 
  • Premature Eulogy: One glaring example is in the episode Coda where Janeway receives four whole minutes of this while floating between life and death, watching it play out. It's to be expected in a show where people die and come back to life every week.
  • Pre-Mortem One-Liner:
    • Janeway delivers one in "Year of Hell" just before ramming her severely crippled ship into the timeline-altering weapon ship: "Tiiiiiiiiimmmme'ssssss....up." (Fun fact: It's the same line as Picard's from Insurrection.)
    • Another good one, also by Janeway, comes in "Night". After she orders a shot on the Malon's cargo hold, "Time to take out the trash."
  • Pretty in Mink: In the bar in the episode "The Killing Game", some of the ladies are wearing fur wraps.
  • Prim and Proper Bun:
    • Captain Janeway had this style for most of the first season.
    • The emotionless and formal Seven of Nine used a French pleat for her first 3 seasons on the show.
  • Principles Zealot: While Janeway has her moments, Seven Of Nine is surely the local queen of this trope. The Doctor also tries to do this once or twice.
  • Prison Ship: An episode had the Voyager itself briefly converted into a Prison Ship. Using Force Field Doors, of course...
  • Promotion, Not Punishment: Admiral Kathryn Janeway violates nearly 154 rules by traveling back in time and swindling the Klingons. The fact that her actions get Voyager home nearly 15 years early and with added technology as a bonus results in her past self getting a promotion... to Admiral. This depends on your interpretation of her promotion; on one hand, yes, she is promoted to Admiral, which is a huge notch in any Starfleet officer's career, and might have been a reward for her valor in getting Voyager home. On the other, it also means that her days of commanding a starship are over. Given that Voyager was stranded in the Delta Quadrant as a result of Janeway's actions, whatever the reasons behind them, this could be a case of her getting "kicked upstairs." It can be seen either way.
  • Prophetic Name: The Intrepid-class USS Voyager herself. Because the Cowardly-class USS Stayathome just wouldn't have had the same ring to it.
  • Proud Hunter Race: The Hirogen are a race of nomadic hunters from the Delta Quadrant who occasionally cause trouble to the crew of the USS Voyager. They fit the "high tech" part of the trope: they're especially well known for having created high tech suits of powered armor they use on their hunts. Being called "worthy prey" is the highest compliment one can receive from them. One Hirogen character laments that it's effectively destroyed their culture; they basically don't have a civilization beyond roving hunting parties anymore.
  • Psychic Powers: Kes has telekinesis and can sometimes read or sense minds. Tuvok can do Vulcan mind melds.
  • Pygmalion Plot: "Someone To Watch Over Me": The Doctor and Tom Paris make a bet on whether or not The Doctor can get Seven a date for a diplomatic function. It plays out almost exactly like past Pygmalion Plot films, especially She's All That as Seven becomes scornful of the Doctor once the bet is revealed to her and leads her to believe their past interactions were faked.
  • Putting on the Reich: A quite literal example. In "The Killing Game," the Hirogen take over Voyager and use their holodecks for simulated hunts, one of which is set during WWII. The Hirogen don Nazi uniforms and attempt to hunt down Voyager crew members, who are brainwashed to be La Résistance.

    Q-R 
  • Ragtag Bunch of Misfits:
    • The Maquis crew included an even-headed ex-Starfleet Native American in space fighting to free his people, a half-Klingon juggling her anger problem with her identity crisis, a murderous sociopath, a Cardassian spy, and another misguided/easily manipulated spy who for some reason thought working with Voyager and the Maquis' enemies combined would be a good idea. Sprinkle various undisciplined extras with a variety of motives and "misfits" seems like a generous term.
    • The above crew is then grafted onto a reduced Voyager crew, along with its holographic doctor with terrible bedside manner, an ex-convict with a rebellious attitude and bad luck, a junk collector all but outright seeking asylum, and a rapidly aging telepath slowly developing godlike powers. The result? The first couple dozen episodes of the series. The crew eventually learns to function together so that by the time they start picking up ex-Borg, they don't shake things up very much.
  • Raised by the Community: Naomi Wildman. Her mother was alive and serving on Voyager, while her father worked at Deep Space Nine. Standouts of her communal family include Seven of Nine as the Cool Big Sis, Neelix as her Cool Uncle, and Janeway as her role model.
  • Ramming Always Works: According to Janeway it does, e.g.
    • From "Year in Hell": "Time's up."
    • From "Parallax": "Sometimes you just have to punch your way through."
  • "Rashomon"-Style: Discussed in "Living Witness". The Kyrian archeologist, Quarren, is peddling the claim that the "Warship Voyager" — a ship with three giant, phallic cannons attached to its hull and 300 soldiers, among them Kazon and multiple Borg — came to their planet and seeded it with poisonous probes. The Doctor sees the attack play out in a holo-reenactment, as though we're in an episode of Delta Quadrant's Most Wanted.. The Doctor is rightly horrified, telling Quarren that they were simply explorers looking for home. Quarren responds, "to Mars", which makes the Doc go thermonuclear. Seriously, he spends most of this episode shouting.
  • Retool: While the show never got the kind of drastic overhaul that TNG, DS9, or even Enterprise got, Season 4 saw some major changes to the show and its formula, with Kes being written out and being replaced by Seven of Nine, the Borg and Hirogen becoming the main recurring adversaries instead of the Kazon and Vidiians, more of a focus on the personal lives of the crew (most notably with Tom and B'Elanna starting a relationship), Starfleet becoming aware that Voyager had gotten lost instead of being destroyed, and the show moving more to employing the Timey-Wimey Ball as a Reset Button method instead of just having things resolved off-screen between episodes.
  • Real Event, Fictional Cause: "The Thirty-Sevens" had Amelia Earhart and her crew be found on a planet by Captain Janeway and her crew, having been frozen in a deep sleep for four-hundred years.
  • Real Men Take It Black: Captain Janeway's drink of choice: "Coffee. Black." It's good stuff. She beat the Borg with it.
  • Recycled In Space: As Lampshaded in a Voltaire filk, the show was Lost in Space IN SPACE! IN THE STAR TREK UNIVERSE!
  • Red Shirt:
    • Averted in the early seasons by giving some screen time to crewmembers who were slated for death in later episodes (i.e., Hogan, Jonas, Carey). But eventually they reverted to bumping off anonymous ensigns by the shuttleload. A notable subversion however occurs in "Latent Image" where the Doctor is guilt-ridden over his choice to save Harry Kim as opposed to the expendable crewmember.
    • "Basics" has a classic redshirt incident: Neelix and Ensign Hogan discover a pile of humanoid bones in front of a dark cave mouth. Neelix, who notes they're like a Keep Out sign, orders Hogan to gather them all up, then gets called away by someone else. Hogan gets an Oh, Crap! look, and sure enough is killed seconds later by a giant lizard charging out of the cave.
  • Redemption Equals Death: Ensign Lon Suder (Brad Dourif) murders a coworker, and is locked in his quarters ("Meld"). Thanks to Tuvok's guidance, he had calmed himself considerably. During a siege of the ship ("Basics, Part 1 and 2"), he deeply regretted that he would have to use his murder skills again to fight off the invaders, before finishing with a Heroic Sacrifice.
  • Regional Redecoration: Future's End makes mention of the Hermosa earthquake that hits Los Angeles in 2047, causing it to partially sink into the Pacific. By the 24th century, it's become the world's largest coral reef.
  • Relationship Reset Button: In "Unforgettable", Chakotay has a relationship with a species that fades from the memory and actively destroys any records of their existence.
  • Religious Robot: "Flesh and Blood" is about sentient holograms (also known as photonic lifeforms) rising up against their creators. Their leader believes in the Bajoran faith and spends his free time praying to the Prophets.
  • Remember the New Guy?:
    • Lyndsay Ballard, a crew member who had died and been resurrected by aliens, returns but no longer fits in; she had never been seen or mentioned before.
    • Teero turns out to have been a fairly major figure in the Maquis, not to mention the guy who made Tuvok for a Starfleet officer long before Chakotay did. "I should've known you'd turn up again!", Chakotay bellows. News to the Trekkies... It's Season Seven and nobody's even mentioned him before.
    • Averted with Seska. After "State of Flux" was written, the writers deliberately inserted her character into earlier episodes to increase the impact of her betrayal.
  • The Remnant: Teero Anaydis, a disgraced Bajoran Vedek (so you can add Sinister Minister to this one, as well) who developed mind control techniques for the Maquis. He returns in a subspace communication in "Repression", angling to turn the VOY crew into his new "recruits." According to Chakotay in "The Hunted", most of the Maquis were either killed off by the Dominion or thrown in prison if lucky.
  • Remote Vitals Monitoring: The Doctor has made use of the cortical monitor on several occasions to track patients' vitals when they're not in Sickbay. Specific instances include:
    • In "Flashback", Tuvok used one so the Doctor could get a complete encephalographic profile for him to try to treat his mental breakdown.
    • Seven of Nine used one twice. In "Unimatrix Zero (part 1)", it was so the Doctor could track her REM sleep and try to alleviate her nightmares about Unimatrix Zero. In "Imperfection", it was to track the performance of her malfunctioning cortical node.
  • Rental Car Abuse: One episode sees Voyager being sent back in time to 1996 in Los Angeles. Tom and Tuvok decide to test drive a truck in order to further their investigations to get back to their time. Trouble starts at the observatory they drove to, and the rental truck gets vaporized by a mook who managed to get his hands on a phaser.
  • Reset Button:
    • The Voyager crew was just that good! After about 100 episodes of building and rebuilding and the same shuttles and corridors over and over again, they'd have to be master engineers and craftsmen 10x's over. Hell, in some circles, the ship and show were known as U.S.S. Reset Button.
    • The reset featured in "Year of Hell" is one of the few fans of the show won't groan at, simply because it was too damn awesome.
      • Using the ship itself to literally ram the reset button was a rather unique use of the trope.
    • Lampshaded in "Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy": Aliens have tapped into the Doctor's program and are using him to spy on Voyager. The crew find out and try to intimidate them by staging a fake fight with the Borg. When Voyager comes into visual range shortly thereafter, the alien commander is suspicious that she has no damage, and The Mole tries to deflect it with a half-assed suggestion that maybe they repaired her already.
  • Ret-Gone: In the two-parter "Year of Hell", the episode's villain, Annorax, has a weapon ship that can erase entire civilizations from history. When he originally fired the weapon at his people's greatest enemy, it restored the Krenim Empire, only to collapse due to an unforeseen plague (which also killed his wife) that only occurred because the enemy race had never introduced a vital immunity genome to the Krenim. In desperation, he fired it again to try and fix his mistake, managing to restore everyone, except for the colony in which his wife lived! This led to his 200-year-long crusade to resurrect her that has failed every single time, causing him to become obsessed to the point where he's conducting a one-man war against time itself. The plot is resolved when Janeway's kamikaze attack on the weapon ship, causes the weapon ship itself to be erased from history, resetting time and reuniting Annorax with his wife.
  • Retro Upgrade: The ship's engine and hull get improved using technology based on a carburetor and the hull of the Titanic, respectively.
  • Revisiting the Roots:
    • For better or for worse, Star Trek Voyager was this for the franchise: A lone Federation starship exploring the dangerous unknowns and meeting new life and new civilizations.
    • The Seventh Season was a time of reflection for the series. With no Myth Arc to hastily wrap up, the show's themes are explored again in episodes such as "Repressed" (more Maquis mutiny threats) and "The Void" (Janeway carves out a mini-Federation in a hostile corner of space). Supporting players such as Barclay, Lt. Carey, Chell the Bolian, and Seska returned in various guises. The elder Janeway's dress uniform in "Endgame" is inspired by the Naval-style jackets from the TOS movies. The last season also saw the return of nearly every notable Trek race, a claim which not even the ENT finale can make.
  • The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized:
    • "Flesh and Blood." Iden's Rebellion has no qualms about snuffing out those who would deny their right to sentience anyway. Eventually threatens to explode into Man Versus Machine, with every hologram in the Quadrant about to be conscripted into a war against every "organic."
    • "Resistance" has a Rebel Leader who only helps Janeway because she pays him, as opposed to the unquestioning help La Résistance usually give heroes in Space Opera.
  • The Revolution Will Not Be Vilified: Somehow there's never any mention of the Maquis' terrorist origins. Except for Suder of course.
  • A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma: In the episode "Riddles," The Doctor refers to the Vulcan brain as "a puzzle wrapped inside an enigma housed inside a cranium."
  • Rip Van Winkle: In "Living Witness", The Doctor is yanked offline during a boarding raid and reawakens 700 years into the future. He's just the backup of the EMH, you see; the real doctor and Voyager have come and gone. He wonders if he is going to have to live his life as a museum piece, but is instead held accountable for a catastrophic war that's been unjustly blamed on the Voyager crew.
  • Ripple Effect Indicator: The Krenim battle cruiser in "Year of Hell." It grows more menacing with changes to the timeline; the weaselly subcommander who cringed in the presence of VOY becomes very smug indeed when his guns outmatch theirs.
  • Rite-of-Passage Name Change: The Kazon earn their adult name after completing a particularly violent Rite of Passage.
  • Robosexual: The EMH apparently had Barbie Doll Anatomy until he made an 'addition' to his program.
  • Robot Girl: Seven of Nine is a cyborg example, being a disconnected Borg drone. Her costumes post-Borg exoskeleton were specifically designed to emphasize Jeri Ryan's figure, to the point where she compared some of them to body paint. The first, silver costume was so tight she passed out because she couldn't breathe.
  • Roger Rabbit Effect: With the improvements in CGI, the producers decides to have an alien that wasn't a Man in a Rubber Suit or the usual Rubber-Forehead Aliens, and created Species 8472. Also seen with the nucleogenic aliens in "Equinox".
  • Running Gag:
    • Every single pot roast mentioned on the series was burnt to hell.
    • Neelix wants to put leola root into almost everything he cooks, but the rest of the crew hates it.
    • Harry Kim's habitual tendency to fall for so-called "unattainable women" and, in response, Tom Paris rubbing it in by listing each and every time it's happened; such as "a hologram"note , "an ex-Borg"note , "the wrong twin"note  and "a girl from a xenophobic species"note .
      • Also, the dearly departed.

    S-T 
  • Scenery Porn: The opening title sequence is gorgeous, as are many of the setting backgrounds. For instance, this lovely shot of the ship parked outside of a nebula is shown repeatedly in one episode.
  • Schrödinger's Butterfly: The Doctor has this moment at the end of "Projections". Is he a hologram or has he been real? He resolves the matter to his satisfaction by sticking his arm out the door.
  • Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale:
    • The Contrived Coincidence of Voyager continually running into Alpha Quadrant connections was a point of contention for fans, and even Ronald D. Moore spoke against it.
    • In the opening titles, Voyager casts a reflection on the rings of a gas giant. However, this reflection is so big compared to the rings themselves that, with Voyager's canonical length of 343 meters, the planet's diameter comes out to only 6.2 kilometers. Needless to say, this is way too small for anything to maintain a thick atmosphere and complex ring system.
    • Voyager compounded a trend that became especially apparent in Deep Space Nine, with writers failing to properly convey the distances involved in space travel:
      • The reported distances between Voyager and other ships or objects of interest are often exceptionally close, often within "only" a few hundred or a couple thousand kilometers.
      • Numerous episodes make mention of Voyager moving at speeds in the hundreds of kilometers per hour. While certainly fast by the reckoning of the average viewer, who may never leave their country much less the planet, this means Voyager is moving no faster than a commercial jetliner (if not slower). For comparison, escaping Earth's gravity requires a velocity of 11.2km/s. That's over forty thousand km/h. Full impulse power clocks in around 75,000km/s. For deep space operations, speeds in the hundreds of km/h would be glacially slow, and the ship may as well not be moving at all, even if it's assumed to be relative speed to a nearby object.
  • Scratchy-Voiced Senior: In one episode, Kes keeps travelling back and forth in time and when she's old, her voice becomes deeper and croakier.
  • Security Blanket: According to Paris in "Tsunkatse," B'Elanna takes a stuffed animal named "Toby The Targ" with her whenever she has to be away from Voyager for more than one day.
  • Seen It All: By the third season, the appearance of being caught in a temporal loop just prompts Janeway to scan for the appropriate particles. In TNG, figuring out there even is a loop is a significant part of the episode.note  Summed up when she says in one episode "We're Starfleet officers. Weird is part of the job."
  • Sealed Evil in a Can: This was supposedly the plot behind the episode "Dragon's Teeth", when Seven of Nine releases an alien race from a 900-year stasis... only for them to turn out to be your standard Villains of the Week piloting obsolete spaceships. It didn't help that it was originally supposed to be a Two-Part Episode, with the follow-up episode never written.
  • Seductive Spider: Tom Paris's intentionally campy "Captain Proton" holo-novel has the Spider People, whose queen, Arachnia, seduces the villain Chaotica with her "spider pheromones." In "Bride of Chaotica," Janeway has to pretend to be Arachnia.
  • Sequel Goes Foreign: On a galactic scale. The previous series all take place mostly in the Alpha Quadrant, with occasional forays into the Beta Quadrant and (in the case of Deep Space Nine) multiple trips into the Gamma Quadrant. Voyager is almost entirely set in the Delta Quadrant, 70000 light-years from The Federation.
  • Serial Killer: Among the Maquis who become members of the USS Voyager crew is serial killer Lon Suder. After a crewman is found dead, Suder becomes the prime suspect, and Commander Chakotay confesses that he always felt uneasy about Suder given that Suder seemed to like killing Cardassians a bit too much. Suder soon confesses to killing the crewman and numerous others to fulfill his lust for violence.
  • Serious Work, Comedic Scene: Mortal Coil was an Unexpectedly Dark Episode that involved a suicidal Neelix, but it did feature a gag involving Seven of Nine accidentally creeping out Samantha by making small talk about Borg children.
  • Set Right What Once Went Wrong:
    • Voyager crashes into a snowball planet just a stone's throw from home, courtesy of a dodgy prototype engine ("Timeless"). Fifteen years later, Chakotay, Kim, and the Doctor work to alert their past selves. The money shot of Voyager buried in a frozen lake (as the theme leitmotif sadly plays) is one of the show's most iconic images.
    • "Year of Hell". Janeway's fun begins when Voyager bumbles its way into a sector divvied up between the Krenim and their soon-to-be-nullified rivals. The Krenim border guard goes from a mouse screaming at a lion ("I hope you have something bigger in those torpedo tubes?" — Janeway) before the shockwave hits to a smug fascist afterwards; the shift in his performance tells you everything you need to know about what has happened.
    • In the final episode, Janeway is an Insane Admiral who wants to use temporal technology to get Voyager back home sooner.
  • Sexy Discretion Shot: An episode involving one of the Doctor's romances had one that was so discreet that even Robert Picardo didn't know about it until a much later episode referenced his having had sex and he asked the writers about it.
  • Shiny-Looking Spaceships: USS Voyager despite being hammered by constant alien attacks, and sand-blasted by nebulas in every Title Sequence. Then the Delta Flyer shows the flag in this area too; justified as Tom Paris designed it to look impressive.
  • Shout-Out:
    • The opening to the pilot "Caretaker" bears more than a passing resemblance to the opening of A New Hope: an Opening Scroll giving a bit of backstory, followed by a pan to a running lightfight between a small rebel ship (Chakotay's Val Jean) and a large enemy ship (a Cardassian Galor-class destroyer). Only difference is, the rebel ship escapes, by pulling a Try and Follow into the Badlands' plasma storms.
    • Rain to the Doctor in "Future´s End": "we have the Doctor. A guy with the worst, worst taste in clothing I have ever seen." Taking into account that this is a time travel episode, it is very likely a shoutout to Doctor Who.
    • Seven of Nine's name is a shoutout to the short-lived 1960s sitcom My Living Doll, in which Julie Newmar played a voluptous blonde female android codenamed AF 709 ("seven-oh-nine").
    • In "Barge of the Dead", when Voyager is depicted as the Klingon hell, Neelix is introduced as the Ambassador to the Recently Deceased.
    • Captain Proton is fraught with Flash Gordon references. Dr Chaotica largely appears to be a Ming the Merciless expy, right down to the castle and its defenses. Proton's rocket ship also has clear Flash Gordon influences. Satan's Robot is the "Republic Robot", an overused prop in various Republic serials including ''Mysterious Doctor Satan.'' Finally, Proton's leather jacket with jetpack controls are the same as those used by Commando Cody/The Rocketman.
    • The end of "Deadlock" has a subtle one to Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: a Vidiian boarding party reaches the duplicate Voyager's bridge only to be greeted by the last seconds of a self-destruct countdown.
    • The Pralor Automated Personnel Units from "Prototype" strongly resemble the mechanical policemen from THX 1138.
    • In "Spirit Folk", someone sarcastically asked Janeway if she's the faerie queen. This is reference to Kate Mulgrew playing Queen Titania in Gargoyles.
    • The episode "Macrocosm" is largely one to Alien though the macrovirus itself better resembles a Metroid
  • Show Within a Show:
    • Janeway enters a holodeck program that was apparently going to turn out to be a ghost story, but this got dropped due to fan disinterest. It didn't help that the story was being told slowly over the teasers for several episodes, and (except in "Persistence of Vision") had nothing to do with the episode itself.
    • A more successful example was The Adventures of Captain Proton!, an Affectionate Parody of 1930s sci-fi adventures like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.
    • An alien version of this occurs, showing an evil version of the Voyager crew as propaganda between two races of aliens, until a copy of The Doctor sets the record straight... and then the entire show-within-a-show is shown to, itself be a show within a show within a show.
  • Silver Fox: Discussed in the episode "Shattered" by the recurring villain Seska, who has a Villainous Crush on Commander Chakotay.
    Seska: Men just get more distinguished as they get older. A few lines here, a little grey there, it adds character. Too bad their minds start to go.
  • Silver Spoon Troublemaker: Tom Paris is the son of a prominent Starfleet Admiral. Tom himself was languishing in a penal colony for joining a group of violent rebels before Capt. Janeway recruited him for a special mission to track down some of his former comrades in the Maquis.
  • Single Tear: Harry in "Scorpion Part 1" when he's being transformed by Species 8472, after Janeway leans over him and says, "Fight it, Harry. That's an order."
  • The Smurfette Principle: Further improved in comparison to previous series, with Captain Janeway (who later became admiral), Chief Engineer Torres (who was Klingon, female and half Hispanic), and little girl-who-evolves-into-god Kes, who was later replaced by science "Überbabe" Seven of Nine. The main villain for the first two series turned out to be Seska, a manipulative Cardassian spy, and the surprisingly non-annoying child character was Naomi (her mom, originally a Recurring Character before falling Out of Focus despite her daughter remaining prominent, was a scientist).
  • Soft-Spoken Sadist:
    • Inspector Kashyk in "Counterpoint". Fascism has never been so polite!
    • The Doctor's portrayal as a Mad Doctor by a revisionist historian in "Living Witness". The historian gets a shock when he's confronted with the Large Ham reality. Many of the Doctor's adversaries — Crell Moset, Dejaren, Iden, and the Equinox EMH, also fit this trope.
  • Soulful Plant Story: An in-universe example: the Talaxians believe that when they die, they go to a place called the Great Forest and everyone who loved them surrounds a tree called the Guiding Tree.
  • Soup Is Medicine: In "Favorite Son", Harry has a dream where he is a child and is sick with a sort of pox and his mother leaves to get him some soup. When he wakes up, he remembers that he did get sick with that pox as a child but it is not revealed whether the soup part happened in real life. Averted with Neelix's leola root soup, which is often fed to healthy people (though they may not stay that way).
  • Space Clouds: In "Year of Hell", a crippled Voyager hides inside a nebula so dense that it produces a visible fog inside the ship's corridors. Captain Janeway even orders the hull breaches sealed to avoid having an "indoor nebula."
  • Space Elevator: "Rise" has a Death in the Clouds plot with the protagonists confined to the cabin of a space elevator they're using to escape a planet that's about to be struck by meteor bombardment.
  • Spaceship Girl:
    • Voyager's Computer had a bit more of a personality during "Q2" thanks to young Q's meddling
    Janeway: Coffee, black.
    Replicator: Make it yourself.
    • "Alice" in the episode of the same name. She's a Sentient Vehicle that establishes a direct neural link to her pilots—Tom Paris in this case—to better control them. She appears as a beautiful woman who is only visible to Tom (an alien who sold the ship is shown to see her as a female member of his own species), and is psychotically possessive of her owner.
    • There was a similar episode where B'Elanna had to persuade a rogue Interplanetary Missile Girl that it was targeting a noncombatant world. It wasn't just any girl, either - she'd reprogrammed it herself, and given it her own voice (the old voice was a Cardassian male which annoyed her).
  • Space Is an Ocean: In the episode "Day of Honor," Paris and Torres put on spacesuits and abandon their doomed shuttlecraft. As they drift in space awaiting rescue, they bob up and down as if floating in an ocean.
  • Space Is Noisy: As usual with Trek, phasers, warp, and other disturbances in space are clearly heard.
  • Space Isolation Horror: It had a couple of episodes where Seven of Nine and/or the Doctor were the only crew members immune to the Stellar Anomaly of the Week and thus had to command the ship by themselves for long periods of time when the rest of the crew hibernated in stasis pods or were under the mental control of aliens.
  • The Speechless: The Ventu people in "Natural Law" use a type of sign language instead of speaking aloud.
  • Sperm as People: In "Somebody to Watch Over Me", the Doctor tries to teach Seven of Nine how to date. Due to being raised by Borg, who don't have emotions, Seven doesn't see the point of romance and thinks it's all about procreation. To try and educate her, the Doctor teaches Seven the mating habits of various species and then begins to explain how procreation works, describing the ovum as a "fortress" and the sperm as "little warriors". She interrupts, saying that she knows how that works already.
  • Spike Shooter: There's a species of sentient technology-dependent hadrosaur descendants that shoot sedative-laced barbs from their fingers.
  • Spinoff Sendoff: The pilot, "Caretaker", starts with Voyager docked at Deep Space Nine, with Quark trying to con Harry Kim.
  • Spiritual Sequel:
    • "False Profits" features the return of the Barzan Wormhole and the two marooned Ferengi scientists from TNG's third season.
    • In "Year of Hell", a time distortion passes over the bridge; when it clears, Janeway is still standing in center frame, except the ship is now on high alert. This shot is taken directly from TNG's "Yesterday's Enterprise." The ending is similar too, with the Captain taking the helm and performing a kamikaze run which restores the timeline.
    • "Unimatrix Zero" is this to "The Best of Both Worlds".
    • "Future's End" is a nice updating of the plot from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, with the crew visiting the present day while dressed in civvies. Instead of Chekov being mistaken for a commie, Tom makes reference to the then-defunct Soviet Union and claims to be a secret agent, getting him laughed out of Rain's panel van. Opposite Tom, half the crew are rounded up by paranoid militiamen who believe they're CIA spooks or some-such.
  • Spotlight-Stealing Squad: Both the Doctor and Seven of Nine. While they were indeed Breakout Characters, the the writers seemed to indulge in focusing on them too heavily, at the expense of everyone else. One of the most blatant instances of this was the episode "One Small Step...", which was originally focused on Chakotay, but received a last-minute rewrite to turn it into another "Seven of Nine learns about humanity" story.
  • Status Quo Is God:
    • Happened on occasion, though nowhere near as often as is sometimes believed. It didn't help that such continuity was often covered with throwaway lines or minor plot elements (some of which occurred in the later seasons). There were also several instances where it tried to break out and it had an overarching plot (the journey home), but UPN execs wanted the show to emulate the format of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which itself didn't have many story arcs.
    • Although with the ship itself, it certainly did happen - they traveled through the hostile Delta Quadrant being shot at, banged into, buried in dangerous anomalies, etc. enough to fill 168 episodes for seven years. The ship was always in perfect condition at the start of each episode, and at the end of it all, emerged without a scratch! Although this too was less of a problem than is commonly believed; starting around Season 4 there would usually at least be some use of Applied Phlebotinum or the Timey-Wimey Ball to explain the repairs, instead of it just being resolved off-screen between episodes.
    • Harry Kim starts the show as an ensign, and ends the show as the exact same rank, seven years later. For perspective, between this show's pilot episode and the end of it's fifth season, Nog over on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine went from a civilian, to a cadet, to an ensign, to a junior lieutenant.
  • Stolen Good, Returned Better: You would expect that the ship would be heavily damaged with a massive loss of life by the time it got back to Earth, but Voyager is actually in better shape than when she left. Her Borg-enhanced torpedoes can cut through a Borg cube or Species 8472 bioship in one shot, and the reinforced hull plating renders the ship virtually invincible by "Endgame" — and with an Ace Custom shuttecraft to boot. It probably still has that new car smell, too.
    Cap. Ransom: (bewildered) Such a clean ship.
  • Story-Breaker Power: The classic example of how Psychic Powers are inherently linked to this trope.
    • Although much is made of Kes and her mysterious and potentially vast powers, in most episodes she is significantly below Deanna Troi in terms of actual ability. Even more glaring because Kes basically pursues two avenues of study while on Voyager. She is the Doctor's med student, at which she excels and often has to have a procedure explained to her only once in order to be able to do it herself thanks to Photographic Memory. At the same time, she is Tuvok's student in telepathy, an area in which she makes virtually no progress until right before she is Put on a Bus. Interestingly, when a Body Surfing alien warlord temporarily gains possession of her body through technological means, he is easily able to use her telepathy and telekinesis, despite never having had such abilities in any of his previous hosts, mostly to make him a more deadly threat.
    • Tuvok is Voyager's primary telepath, although like most Vulcans he is limited to Touch Telepathy unless the target is also telepathic.
    • There is debate over other telepaths on the crew. There was at least one other Vulcan (Vorik), as well as a psychically-handicapped Betazoid, Lon Suder, who was not telepathic as is the norm for his species. A female Vulcan and a female Betazoid also appeared amongst the extras, but were never mentioned otherwise. Although at least on the surface it would appear that Janeway had the most telepaths aboard her ship out of any Trek captain, she almost never had reliable telepathic backup when it would have been useful.
    • A non-psychic, but still mental, example is Seven-of-Nine, who seemingly recalls virtually everything she could have possibly absorbed while part of the Borg Hive Mind — except for how to equip Voyager with transwarp drive in order to get them home sooner.
  • The Story That Never Was: In a season-one episode, there's a time paradox centered on a polaron-based power grid on a pre-warp civilization's planet in the Delta Quadrant. Tom Paris and Captain Janeway end up falling through a hole in time that was caused by the power grid's accidental detonation. The twist is that the future-Voyager-crew's own attempt to rescue Paris and Janeway is what caused the detonation, and Janeway realizing this and using a phaser to stop the rescue attempt resets the timeline, preventing the detonation and in turn preventing them from going back in time in the first place.
    • The strangest part is that Janeway specifically said they weren't going to the planet UNTIL the explosion happened. Once time was reset, they specifically didn't go to the planet. There's no reason for the paradox to have been kicked off in the first place
  • Subspace Ansible: Seeing as Voyager is a lot further out than other Federation vessels, and has been presumed destroyed, even getting a message home is important to the crew. "Eye of the Needle", "Message in A Bottle", "Hunters", "Pathfinder".
  • Suddenly Always Knew That:
    • McNeill is four years older than Garrett Wang. And yet Tom seems to have accumulated as much experience in his 30-odd years as Jadzia Dax did in her 300! Like the time in the "The 37s" when he developed a love of vintage vehicles. Or the time in "Future's End" when he discoursed about 20th Century fashion. Or that time in "Thirty Days" when he suddenly became a fan of sailing. Or that time...
      Joe Ford: Tom Paris seems to be an expert on pretty much anything this show needs him to be — perhaps they could turn it into a running gag (‘Mr Paris, you’re an expert on orbital tethers' ‘Mr Paris, you’re an expert on dwarves that have never heard music,' ‘Mr Paris, you’re an expert on poor WWF rip offs,' etc, etc)."
    • From his lust for early space exploration and paleontology in "One Small Step", to his passion for boxing in "The Fight", Chakotay as a character stops making sense around Season 4 (and none of those hobbies ever come up again after the episodes wraps). He is the ultimate chameleon.
      • Beltran actually makes a pretty convincing pugilist, and his knowledge of sports trivia and relationship with Boothby (his coach) saves an otherwise silly episode about a Clubber Lang-type alien out to stomp Chakotay's ass. But as often happens, Seven proves more capable in hand-to-hand combat so she (not Chakotay) faces down The Rock in "Tsunkatse". (Or did Beltran not look as good in a leotard?)
  • Sugar Bowl: The Doctor's "family" in "Real Life" is so sweet and perfect that B'Elanna can't get through dinner without freezing the program and snapping "I'm stopping this before my blood-sugar levels overload."
  • Suicide Is Painless: There is nothing left to say or do now everything has been experienced by the Q: that is Quinn’s torture. He has nothing new to experience except death.
  • Surprise Checkmate: The series finale "End Game" sees Icheb beat Tuvok in a futuristic strategy game with a surprise checkmate. In this case it's meant to show that Tuvok, an expert with a heretofore unbroken winning streak, is starting to suffer from a Vulcan Alzheimer's-type disease.
  • Surprise Party:
    • One of these is held for Kes's second birthday in the opening of "Twisted," though she's mostly just confused by it at first because the surprise party isn't a tradition in her culture.
    • A surprise birthday party is also held for Ensign Ahni Jetal shortly before she gets killed on an away mission.
  • Survived the Beginning: Half the crew dies right at the beginning of "Caretaker" courtesy of a tetryon beam from an alien's advanced space array. They never lost more than a handful of people after that unless there was a Reset Button handy.
  • Swiss-Cheese Security: Voyager seemed to have been assigned the worst security detail in the history of Starfleet. Enemies were able to, on a fairly regular basis, steal one of their shuttles or hack into their computer using codes which the crew knew would be compromised. The episode "False Profits" ended with two unarmed Ferengi overpowering their guards, getting to the shuttlebay, taking back their ship, and escaping through a wormhole.
  • Tasty Gold: Invoked by Neelix masquerading as the "Grand Proxy" in "False Profits".
  • Taking the Bullet:
    • Freya, a holodeck character of Beowulf, took one (or more exactly, a knife attack) to save the Doctor. She died with the name "Schweitzer" on her lips. The doctor, who had chosen that name, declined to use it afterwards, to avoid being reminded of Freya's fate.
    • Split in two halves, Klingon B'Elanna took the shot directed to the human B'Elanna. She died in the hands of her human self, telling that her human courage made her own death an honourable one.
  • Technical Euphemism: In "Nemesis", an alien species called the Vori use the term "nullify" as a euphemism for "murder".
  • Technobabble:
    • You don't actually have to watch all 168 episodes of Star Trek Voyager; 80% of them can be summed up in this handy 3 minute video.
    • Probably the worst offender of all Star Trek series. There's a scene where the Universal Translator is having difficulty with an alien language, so Janeway tells Harry to 'remodulate the translator'.
      Neelix: We lost communication with Voyager thirty seconds ago. You don't have to impress me with your... technobabble!
    • Reruns on BBC America make fun of this, rolling a promo consisting of nothing but technobabble. There's quite a bit of material to work with.
  • Teleporter Accident: "Tuvix" has Tuvok and Neelix accidentally merged into one person.
  • Temporarily a Villain: The EMH was reprogrammed to perform unethical-at-best medicine by the Equinox crew.
  • Terminally Dependent Society: The Ocampan dependence on the Caretaker array. How dependent? We later learn that an Ocampan can only ever have a single child. Even being generous and assuming that this is one child per Ocampa, male or female (since otherwise the population would drop by half every generation), every early death or miscarriage permanently reduces the Ocampan population.
  • That Reminds Me of a Song: Every attempt possible was made to give Jeri Ryan a chance to sing in various episodes. Even going so far as to give her the personality of a caberet singer in World War II during a battle with aliens on the holodeck, just so she could impress Alien Nazis.
  • "They Still Belong to Us" Lecture: The Borg Queen delivers a number of these lectures about Seven.
  • Thoughtcrime: There was an episode where they came across a people who were extremely telepathic, so sensitive that any extreme emotions would incite them to act out on those feelings; having violent thoughts was a crime in and of itself. Torres was put under trial for having a brief violent thought when someone bumped into her, and Tuvok's investigation into the planet's culture found a sort of "violent thoughts" Black Market. Of course it examined the nature that when something was so taboo it meant their own people were unable to handle it when confronted with the situation.
  • Third-Person Person:
    Dreadnought: "False information has been entered into Dreadnought's navigational sensor array."
    Paris: "When a bomb starts talking about itself in the third person, I get worried."
  • Time Travel: So much so they drive a Starfleet Temporal Agent to madness sorting out their mess. Episodes involving this trope include "Time and Again", "Eye of the Needle", "Future's End", "Before and After", "Year of Hell", "Relativity", "Shattered", "Endgame". Also "Non Sequitor" and "Deadlock" feature alternate timelines.
    Janeway: Time travel. Ever since my first day in the job as a Starfleet Captain I swore I'd never let myself get caught in one of these godforsaken paradoxes. The future is the past, the past is the future. It all gives me a headache.
  • Tim Taylor Technology: Starfleet's still using "more power!" as a solution to many problems unless otherwise specified.
  • Token Evil Teammate: In an interview, Roxann Dawson seems to consider Seven of Nine to be this, at least at first.
  • Tomato in the Mirror: "Course: Oblivion" has the crew of Voyager realize they're a replicated crew created in the previous episode "Demon".
  • Too Dumb to Live:
    • Seven of Nine's parents. A pair of scientists who plan to study the Borg by sneaking onto Borg Cubes. This could be considered TDTL all on its own, but they also bring their young daughter along with them on their expedition. The Doctor actually gives this a Lampshade Hanging by expressing his disgust over their blatant disregard for their daughter's well-being by bringing her along on such a dangerously idiotic quest.
    • The Srivani. They want to see what happens when they alter a human's brain chemistry to make them totally irrational. Which human do they pick? Captain Janeway. When the head Srivani tries to talk her out of personally piloting the ship between two pulsars—with 1:20 odds of success—Janeway rightly points out that the Srivani are directly responsible for her present insanity. Voyager survives, but one of the Srivani ships is destroyed before it can get away.
  • Too Unhappy to Be Hungry: In "Extreme Risk", B'Elanna is going through psychological trauma as a result of the fact that everyone in an organisation she used to work for have been imprisoned or killed. When Neelix offers her banana pancakes, she doesn't want them.
  • Touché: In "Counterpoint", Kashyk admits this when he sees he's been tricked.
  • Toxic Phlebotinum:
    • In "Course: Oblivion", warp drive radiation itself is dangerous to living beings and substances made of "silver blood", causing them to demolecularize. Also the theta radiation dumped by the Malon as their 'Hat'.
    • The omega molecule is one of the most powerful substances in existence, and the most dangerous: an omega molecule explosion is not only catastrophically destructive, but so damaging to subspace that it rendered warp travel impossible for an entire sector. Starfleet protocol calls for its immediate destruction should it be found, superseding even the Prime Directive.
  • Training the Gift of Magic: The Ocampa have absolutely enormous potential for Psychic Powers, with the possibility of even becoming Energy Beings and Ascending to a Higher Plane of Existence. However, this is something that the vast majority of them will never achieve, as it usually requires are great deal of training (or something pushing them into Super Mode) to get them to this point. The Caretaker's mate Suspiria has made it her mission to train a small group of Ocampa to reach their full potential and join her in a subspace domain she calls "Exosia".
  • Training from Hell: "Learning Curve". Tuvok instructs a number of former Maquis how to do things the Starfleet way.
  • Transformation Sequence: Overlaps with Mundane Made Awesome in "Tinker, Tailor, Doctor, Spy". The Doctor's transformation into the ECH is accompanied by a dramatic zoom on the Doctor's lapel as the pips appear one by one.
    Kim: "This is the part I like."
    (Command pips appear on the ECH's collar.)
    Janeway: "...Nice touch."
  • Trapped Undercover: Seska is a Cardassian mole who had infiltrated the Voyager's crew when it was flung across the galaxy.
  • Treacherous Spirit Chase: In "Coda", Kathryn Janeway experiences several disturbing "deaths" before finally encountering a vision of her father. Admiral Janeway informs Kathryn that she's dead, and he's here to accompany her to the next life via a tunnel of light. While she nearly follows the spirit, Janeway's desire to stay with her crew turns to increasing suspicion of her "father" and his motivations, who is revealed to be a hostile alien that feeds on the consciousness of any mortally wounded lifeform by luring it into its lair.
  • Triage Tyrant:
    • In "Critical Care", the holographic Doctor gets stolen and sold to an alien hospital, where patients are assessed not according to urgency, but according to how "valuable" their skills are to society. As a result, the working classes suffer in crowded, undersupplied halls while the rich recover in luxury. It's so extreme that a drug that could save lives at the lowest levels is held out for the highest level, where it is used to slow arterial aging. In the Doctor's efforts to help, both the Prime Directive and the Hippocratic Oath get severely bent.
    • In "Latent Image", The Doctor is faced with two patients (Harry Kim and a Red Shirt) who have an exactly equal chance of survival. He can only treat one of them in time, and the other will die. Because his program cannot find a logical way to decide, he chooses to save Harry because he's a friend. This causes a severe malfunction in his program that forces the crew to erase his memory of the event or risk losing their only medical officer.
    • In the two-part episode "The Killing Game", the ship is taken over by Hirogen who place the crew into brutal holographic simulations and force the doctor to treat them. When a crewmember with life-threatening injuries and a Hirogen with minor burns are both brought in, the Hirogen medical officer orders the doctor to treat the Hirogen patient first. He protests that this goes against the rules of triage is that critical injuries take priority. The Hirogen replies "your rules, not mine" and deactivates him when he refuses to comply.
    • In "Author, Author", the Doctor has written a holo-novel in which the user plays the part of an EMH in a triage situation. A bridge officer is brought in with a minor concussion, but there is already a patient dying from a ruptured aorta. Captain Jenkins (Captain Janeway's Evil Counterpart) ends the debate by shooting the poor Red Shirt.
  • Turned Against Their Masters: In the coda for "The Killing Game", Janeway willingly forked over holodeck technology to wean the Hirogen off "the hunt." Flash-forward to "Flesh and Blood". The guileless Hirogen have a slew of holographic prey programmed not just with a sense of self-preservation, but also the ability to learn from prior defeats. The Hirogen don't last long against these experienced, well-armed holograms.
    Iden: He'd hunt me, and kill me, over and over again. But even death wasn't a release, because I knew every time I opened my eyes, it would start over again: The pain. The fear. But it made me stronger.
  • 20 Minutes into the Future: The episode "11:59" aired in 1999, featuring Janeway's distant ancestor in the Year 2000.
  • Twice-Told Tale: "Flashback" provides one for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Unfortunately, there are some obvious continuity errors between the episode and the movie. Most notably, the episode features the death of a background crew member who appears alive in "later" scenes of the movie.
  • 2-D Space: Like all Star Trek, though the large holographic Astrometrics display did avert this somewhat, showing that the route that would be best to take involves movement not only left and right, but up and down in three dimensional space. Mostly averted when multiple ships are on the same screen.
  • Two Roads Before You: In several episodes, Janeway is presented with the choice to do something unethical and get the crew home immediately, or take the righteous path and continue looking for other ways to shorten the journey. She invariably chooses the latter. In the end, her future self decides that seven years would have been the best cutoff point and changes the timeline to do that instead.

    U-Z 
  • Understatement: Played with In "Scientific Method," Janeway decides to fly Voyager between a pair of binary pulsars, hoping to destroy the ships of some aliens who have been experimenting on the crew in the process. On the one hand, they had low odds of survival, and Tuvok even tells her that it's a far more reckless course of action than he's come to expect from her, and later calls it an understatement. On the other hand, not only were said aliens affecting her judgement by messing around with her brain chemicals, but they had just executed a crew member for her attempts to break everyone free from their experiments, and they had previously made clear they would kill the entire crew if they kept it up. So the "1 in 20, at best" odds of survival may not have looked so bad, especially in light of the opportunity to at least take the aliens with them.
  • Uneven Hybrid: Tom and B'Elanna's 1/4 Klingon daughter Miral, born in the series finale.
  • Unit Confusion: Isotons. Iso-anything, actually. The prefix "iso" means equal or homogenous and has nothing to do with numerical units.
  • Universal Universe Time: Every species in the Delta Quadrant knows the exact specifications of the Earth minute, hour, day, week, month, and year. Nobody seems to have their own local measurement standards of time.
  • Un-Paused: The Doctor, when Seven switches him off in the middle of a sentence. Tuvok does this to a holographic Da Vinci in "Concerning Flight" too.
  • Unrealistic Black Hole: Justified (intentionally or otherwise) in "Parallax", where they encounter a "Quantum Singularity". As this would obviously be a black hole that functions differently from conventional ones, it makes sense that it does not behave like a normal black hole.
  • Unseen No More: A running plotline for the first few seasons was Harry and Tom dating the Delaney Sisters (Jenny and Megan). Tom had to convince Harry to double-date with him, and later it's revealed that Harry isn't interested in the sister that's interested in him. It's not until the fifth season (after Tom is in a relationship with someone else) that they appear on screen. As Voyager reviewer Jim Wright puts it when they appear...
    THESE are the Delaney sisters? Oh my. The legends are true...Gee, Mr. Braga (one of the producers), it's not even my birthday!
  • UST: Plenty of this between Janeway and Chakotay, more so in early seasons due to the influence of Jeri Taylor, who wrote the majority of the episodes where this is prevalent. After she took a backseat as a writer, this was downplayed.
  • Utopia Justifies the Means: In the episode "Random Thoughts" the Voyager crew encounters a society where any negative or violent thoughts are forcibly removed just to keep the peace.
  • Vehicle-Based Characterization: Invoked in "Relativity" when Admiral Patterson describes the titular starship to Janeway as "quick and smart... like her captain."
  • Vengeful Vending Machine:
    • There's an episode where Janeway orders coffee from the replicator, only it only replicates the cup after replicating the coffee.
    • And then there's the time Q Junior gets his hands on the ship computer.
      Janeway: Coffee. Black.
      Computer: Make it yourself.
    • Then there was the time she replicated a burnt pot roast, which should be impossible to do unintentionally.
    • The Kazon managed to sustain heavy casualties...while installing a replicator.
  • Villain Decay:
    • The Borg once destroyed a fleet of thirty-nine ships, but in this series, one lone cruiser keeps escaping their grasp. Obviously, if the Collective assimilated Voyager, there wouldn't be a series. They have to keep losing, but they were also serious ratings-grabbers following the strong box-office of Star Trek: First Contact. So they show up a lot... and consequently lose a lot. This is Hand Waved in that Voyager is stated to be too insignificant for the Borg to assimilate or pursue with full force, though this doesn't explain how a lone Federation ship can severly-damage a heavily-armored Tactical Cube.
    • Species 8472. Introduced in "Scorpion" as beings from another galaxy who possess the physiology and technology to take on the Borg Collective and win. Turns out the Borg picked that fight, but there was serious concern that Species 8472 would take the fight to the rest of the galaxy because they consider all other organic life tp be unclean. In their final appearance, "In the Flesh," they are humanized (literally) and more-receptive to Janeway's overtures for peace, with one of them falling for Chakotay.
    • Q was from a frivolous yet dangerous omniscient being who delivered some hard lessons to the human race. Here he is a Casanova Wannabe who propositions Janeway in increasingly-desperate ways, then grows to depend on her for parental advice, with his son referring to her as Aunt Kathy. The process began with that Robin Hood farce on tMG and his sole DS9 appearance; in both cases he was possesive of Vash, who similarly spurned his advances.
  • Villain Forgot to Level Grind: Part of the reason for the Borg's Villain Decay is that the Borg are noted as being unable to adapt on their own; they can only assimilate other technology to improve themselves, and by the time Voyager reaches their territory they've either assimilated everything of value or the species that are left know how to avoid them. As a result, the Borg have essentially plateaued at a specific technological level that allows Voyager to stay head of them, particularly with Seven of Nine's insight into the Collective, so long as they only engage the Borg when necessary to avoid becoming such a significant threat that the Borg decide to take Voyager more seriously.
  • Villainous Gentrification: Subverted. A lone hold-out "valiantly" refuses to sell his bookstore and allow its bulldozing for a massive new development... even though the offer is very fair, literally everyone else in town wants the development, and (with the benefit of hindsight) we know that its experimental features will lead to technological advances that will allow the colonization of Mars.
  • Virtual Celebrity: "Virtuoso" has the Doctor becoming famous for his singing on an alien world. When he finds himself torn between staying on the planet or leaving with Voyager, the aliens just create a 'superior' program which can sing better than he can. The Doctor is needless to say more devastated by this than they are.
  • Visionary Villain: Karr, the Alpha Hirogen who takes control of Voyager in "The Killing Game Parts 1 & 2," realizes that his species' obsession with the hunt has caused their civilization and culture to stagnate. He hopes that holodeck technology will allow the Hirogen to rebuild their society while continuing the hunt. This... sorta works, until they decide to turn it up to "Hard" mode and turn off the safeties, because "It wasn't real enough." This lead to the entire thing turning into a slaughter.
  • Vision Quest: Chakotay consults his spirit guide about once a season, or helps someone else do so.
  • The Voice: Majel Barrett, widow of Gene Roddenberry, does the unseen voice of the ship's computer.
  • Voodoo Shark: In "Parallax" and "The Cloud," it is revealed that Voyager cannot use the holographic generators to solve their frequent energy crises because "they are incompatible with the rest of the ship." Voyager is able to, later on, install technology from the Borg, Hirogen, and dozens of other species, but who designs a ship that has one part which is completely incompatible with the rest of the ship?
  • War Is Hell:
    • "Nemesis" might well be titled Chakotay's War. The peace-loving Indian is dropped into a guerrilla war in progress. "Memorial" deals with the lasting consequences of such a war.
    • The Doctor's brief foray into a jungle battle, along with his growing sympathies for the ragtag side, is basically a retelling of "Nemesis" from his view.
  • War Memorial: The aptly titled episode "Memorial" shows an interesting twist. The memorial is programmed to Mind Rape anyone who passed within a certain distance of the planet that it was located on. Passersby would relive the events of the war. Once the crew figured out what was going on, Janeway set up beacons in the surrounding area to alert others to stay away, lest they succumb to the same torment they and many others before them went through.
  • The War on Straw: The Doctor's opus, Photons Be Free. As usual, the EMH's heart is in the right place, but his ego undercuts it. He thought he could write a holonovel showing all of his coworkers in an unflattering light, publish in the Alpha Quadrant and that everyone onboard would be pretty much OK with that. During the tedious 10-minute prologue to the story the he drones on in a Noëll Coward dressing gown (This is his only novel). The Doctor takes some creative license with his life on Voyager: His mobile emitter is a giant backpack that weighs him down like a ton of bricks, everyone onboard treats him like pocket lint, and Captain "Jenkins" murders patients in sickbay to bump her people she wants treated higher up the priority list. Naturally the only person to escape this farce unscathed is Seven of Nine. In revenge, Tom Paris pens a holonovel depicting life under an obnoxious EMH: He’s got an appalling comb over, barely bothers to diagnose his patients and groans lustfully as he gives "Three of Eight" massages.
  • Warring Natures: B'Elanna Torres struggles with the impulsive, combative instincts that come with her Klingon half. The episode "Faces" actually has her literally split into a human half and Klingon half.
  • Watch the Paint Job: In the first half of the "Future's End" two-parter, Tom and Tuvok need some transportation and so take a truck out on a test-drive, leading to Tuvok arguing about the ethics of hanging onto the truck for longer than they told the dealer they would. The discussion ends up being rendered somewhat irrelevant when one of the bad guy's mooks shows up and vaporizes the truck with a 29th century disruptor.
  • We Will All Be History Buffs in the Future: It's oddly the most convincing of the various series. Rather than The Spock, who knows Earth's history better than all the human crewmen, it has Tom Paris, who is interested in 20th-century history and culture. They portray it realistically — he accidentally reveals himself to a 20th-century human by referring to the Soviet Union in the present tense in 1996 (because he was only five years out...). Also, he's more interested in the 1950s than (as you might expect) the 1990s, the decade the show aired.
  • Weapon of Mass Destruction:
    • "Dreadnought", "Warhead", "Childs Play" plus the Krenim temporal weapon-ship in "Year of Hell", and nine Species 8472 bioships linking up to destroy an entire Borg planet in "Scorpion".
    • "The Omega Directive" deals with an energy molecule that destroys no less than a 3 light year radius of subspace when it destabilizes, making warp travel PERMANENTLY impossible. The episode focuses on a large enough amount that more than half the entire Delta Quadrant would have been affected.
  • Weight Woe: In one episode, Deanna Troi says that she doesn't want any ice cream because she's "watching [her] figure", despite usually having a massive Sweet Tooth and being none the worse for wear for it.
  • "Well Done, Son" Guy: This is basically the entire plot of the episode "Life Line". The Doctor, an artificially intelligent hologram, learns that his creator (and the man whose image he's based on), holographic genius Dr Lewis Zimmerman, is dying. The Doctor pleads with Captain Janeway to be transmitted back to the Alpha Quadrant, assuming Zimmerman will be proud of how he's exceeded his programming... only to find his creator is a cantankerous jerk who believes he's an obsolete model better suited to scrubbing plasma conduits on waste transfer barges. Needless to say, much angst and hilarity ensue before the two are reconciled.
  • We Are as Mayflies: Kes and the other Ocampa have an average lifespan of less than a decade in length.
  • We Have Reserves: In "Unimatrix Zero," the Borg Queen takes this to comical levels. Her solution to dealing with two or three freed drones on cubes with tens of thousands of drones still linked to the hive mind? Blow up the entire ship. This was also the case in "Collective". When nearly all the drones on an entire cube succumb to an unknown pathogen, the Collective simply severs its connection and does not even bother to dispatch a vessel to investigate (as Starfleet invariably would).
  • "Well Done, Son" Guy: Tom Paris' father Owen Paris was a Starfleet admiral and Tom never felt that he could live up to his reputation. Things were strained between them and only became worse once Tom had joined the Maquis and then ended up in a Federation penal colony. It was only after the Voyager got lost in the Delta Quadrant and later established communications to Earth that the two re-connected, especially once Tom and B'Elanna became a couple and had a child. In the novels, things became strained between them again due to circumstances in part beyond Tom's control and Owen died in a Borg attack.
  • Wham Shot: In the "Unimatrix Zero One" two-part episode, several Borg Drones have created a mental world where they can live as individuals free from the Collective's control. At one point one of the children is playing in the woods with his friend, and he crawls through some bushes... until he looks up and sees the Borg Queen standing in front of him.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?:
    • A Borg baby is brought on board along with several Borg children. Icheb stays while the other children are returned to their parents in a later episode, but there's never any mention of what happened to the baby.
      • Word of God says that the borg baby was returned to her people, it just wasn't shown.
    • Whatever happened to Suspiria, the Female Caretaker? She never reappeared in the series following her second season episode, but the Star Trek: String Theory novel trilogy provides (non-canon) answers.
  • What Measure Is A Nonhuman:
    • With a holographic Doctor, they question of whether a projection of Hard Light and a "soul" of algorithms arises a few times. This includes encountering a race of photonic creatures in a different plane, and another which considers holographic programs to be insurgents. Even what rights the Doctor has on the ship has been explored, with him even trying to resign in one episode.
    • By the mid-nineties, the old "peaceful white men vs. brutish brown aliens" was beginning to look suspect. The writers, to their credit, deconstructed this dusty Trek trope in two episodes of note.
    • "Nemesis" pits Chakotay against a toothy, hairy, stock warrior race (they're even called "Nemesis" and "Beasts") brutalizing helpless natives who look and sound like nice Europeans. Janeway, while negotiating for his release, beams up some delegates from the planet—and it's a well-bred Nemesis in a dapper suit. The humans on the surface are just figments to entice Chakotay to kill.
    • In "Author, Author", a Federation book publisher tries to game the legal system to exploit the Doctor (and even the crew's "victory" there fell short of having the Doctor recognized as a person under the law). We also learn that the Federation is using sentient holograms like EMH Mark Is as slave labor.
    • In "Living Witness" (yes, this episode again), we see an age-old war from two different historical perspectives. In one, the rubber-headed Vaskans are the traitorous Quislings who sold out the planet in exchange for land. In the Doctor's revised account, the 'human' aliens were indeed the instigators of the bloodbath: the so-called "martyr" of the Kyrians was the one leading the boarding party to attack Voyager. Further muddying the waters is the class division amongst the Kyrians and Vaskans: The prologue is hosted by a Kyrian curator, suggesting that the Kyrians came out on top in the end. But the well-dressed hosts are just "token" Kyrians, elected to give the impression of a balanced debate.
    • This angle played into the Kazons' story very early on. The Kazon were once a Slave Race employed by their white masters, the Trabe, and it's stated that the entire galaxy now rues the day their earned their freedom (erm....). The Kazon are a confused mess of storytelling by writers who intended it as a commentary on redlined city districts and the cycle of crime, but for whatever reason, the species fell back into the famliar "Warlike Alien" role which Trek is used to, and their oppressors were painted with a softer brush. Somebody obviously took notice of this, and sought to rectify it with other races.
    • In "The Killing Game", Captain Janeway stops the Hirogen Hunting the Most Dangerous Game by handing over their hologram technology. As that episode showed, Voyager's crew already use holo-novels that involve shooting holograms for their own entertainment. At what point do the holograms have rights? Is it when they become so advanced they are self-aware? Because in "Flesh and Blood" it turns out the Hirogen have increased their capabilities to make them more challenging prey, until the holograms killed the Hirogen and are now on a crusade to liberate all AI holograms. But they discover the issue isn't simple, at one point liberating a crew of holograms whose programming is so simple they can't comprehend their 'liberation'. They literally are talking machines.
  • What the Hell, Hero?:
    • Seven calls Janeway on this when she and the crew intend to delete memories causing the Doctor to almost literally BSOD instead of trying to work through his problems psychologically. She wasn't around to object the first time they did it.
    • In "Hope and Fear", the alien blames Janeway's decision to back the Borg against Species 8472. As the latter were forced to retreat, the Borg were able to go on and assimilate his world.
    • Remember back in the TNG episode "A Measure of a Man" where Picard chewed out Starfleet who were planning to disassemble Data so they could build Androids to serve on Federation vessels, arguing that it was tantamount to them actively perpetuating a Slave-Race? Well apparently Starfleet doesn't, as it's revealed in "Lifeline" that they reprogrammed every single EMH Mk I in the Alpha Quadrant to mine Dilithium asteroids. The Doctor is not amused by this revelation.
  • Whole Episode Flashback:
  • Whole-Plot Reference:
    • "Alice" (involving Tom Paris becoming obsessed with a sentient shuttle) is this to Christine, complete with the episode being named after the malevolent vehicle and said vehicle attempting to kill her owner's girlfriend.
    • "Year of Hell," at least the portion set aboard the Krenim temporal weapon ship, is this to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, with the villain Annorax being an obvious reference to the narrator of the book. Tom also derisively refers to him as "Nemo" at one point.
  • Who Wants to Live Forever?: Omnipotence is bollocks, that’s the moral of "Death Wish".
  • Why Are You Looking at Me Like That?: Double example in "Bride of Chaotica!" Tom Paris explains that, due to the latest round of holodeck issues, somebody has to go into the Flash Gordon-esque Captain Proton holoprogram and take on the role of seductive villainess Queen Arachnia. Everyone in the room looks at a nonplussed Seven of Nine... except Paris, who's looking straight at Janeway. Janeway's amusement with this idea fades immediately.
  • Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Captain Janeway has exactly one fear: Time travel. Obviously, Voyager ends up ricocheting through time like she was being piloted by H.G. Wells. And they do this not once, not twice, but every few episodes. By the time they get home, Janeway is older than herself.
  • William Telling: In "Coda", Janeway suggests to Chakotay that he could play William Tell and blast an apple off of her head with a phaser for Neelix's Talent Night.
    Chakotay: Sounds great. If I miss, I get to be captain.
  • Woken Up at an Ungodly Hour:
    • Downplayed in an episode, where Chakotay complains that Harry (who was working the night shift) woke him up to discuss the distress call the ship got, but admits it was still the right thing to do.
    • In "Child's Play", Janeway grumbles about having been summoned to astrometrics by Seven of Nine at three in the morning.
  • The Worf Effect: Ironically, the Borg are on the receiving end of this in "Scorpion" when Species 8472 are introduced. Contributed to the Villain Decay of the Borg, but this trope was for once done right with the opening to this two-parter - seeing the show open with two cubes being instantly blown away, then going straight to the intro with no shot of what did this, let the viewer know that this really was a very powerful and dangerous enemy.
  • Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Chakotay calls it an old Maquis trick to make it look to your attacker that your ship is in serious trouble and then fire phasers at close range. Janeway points out everyone knows that trick.
  • Written by the Winners: The Kyrians in "Living Witness" whitewashed their history to paint themselves as the oppressed minorities (which they may or may not be in the present day), rather than former oppressors of the Aborigine-like Vaskans. Ordinarily, this is not a concern of the VOY crew. However, the museum curator has roped the EMH into this farce by placing culpability for "war crimes" on his shoulders. Neither side even remembers who started the war anymore; everyone is simply tired of this endless game of historical one-upsmanship as a pretext for taking the other's rights away.
  • Writer on Board:
    • "Muse" is basically a plea for understanding from the writers of this oft-criticized series, explaining how they're pulled between the desire to create meaningful works of art, the need to satisfy those paying their wages, and the demands of the audience for action and romance - told via a poet on a primitive warlike world who's trying to write a play based on Voyager's logs. The "executives" in question will have the playwright's head if he doesn't deliver.
    • The "Equinox" two-parter seem to be suggesting ‘this is how awful it could have been if we had taken a violent route and not produced the show we have – a complete antithesis of Gene Roddenberry’s ideals.'
  • Writers Cannot Do Math:
    • The character biographies, the shuttlecraft complement, the number of torpedoes, the crewmembers...
    • In one episode, Janeway orders Tom to retreat half a lightyear's distance, which the ship does in a matter of seconds. If they're 75,000 lightyears from earth, 75,000 x 3 seconds /60/60/24= 2 and a half DAYS, not 75 years.
    • In “Timeless”, Voyager makes improvements to the warp drive that would get them home in a couple of days, thus ending the show. The new drive creates a Quantum Slipstream that the ship would ride through, but the simulations keep having the ship blow up because it can’t compensate for the fluctuations in the Slipstream. Harry solves this problem by riding ahead of Voyager in the Slipstream in a smaller shuttle craft. He would take readings, calculate for fluctuations, and send those back to Voyager. This is pure nonsense for a lot of reasons, but the one that sticks out (and blew up the ship) was that Harry made the calculations himself instead of programing the computer to do it, which would have saved all the time and prevented all the mistakes. A problem that was not lost on the writers when, in the episode “Fury”, Janeway points out that the computer can plot vectors “a bit faster” than Tom, who is plotting them manually.
  • Wrongly Accused: "Ex Post Facto" (Tom Paris is framed for a crime in a Noir Episode), "State of Flux" (Joe Carey is framed by Seska before she's exposed as The Mole), "The Chute" (Tom and Harry are imprisoned in The Alcatraz after being convicted by a Kangaroo Court), "Living Witness" (the Doctor is activated after hundreds of years to find he's received a Historical Villain Upgrade and is accused of war crimes), "Random Thoughts" (B'Elanna is accused of spreading aggressive thoughts in a telepathic society that leads to murder).
  • Wrote the Book: In the finale, a future Starfleet instructor introduces Admiral Janeway as "the person who, literally, wrote the book on the Borg." This makes Janeway sigh and ponder whether or not the instructor - Reg Barclay- actually knows what the word "literally" means.
  • Xtreme Kool Letterz: All Talaxian proper nouns (such as the names of people, ships and planets) contain the letter X.
  • Year Inside, Hour Outside: "Gravity", "Blink of an Eye".
  • Yellow Brick Road: Though when keeping to the path is the only way to progress and Status Quo Is God...
  • You Can't Go Home Again:
    • This is especially true for Neelix, whose homeworld was destroyed, and Icheb, whose parents want only to use him as a weapon.
    • Seven briefly toys with returning to the Collective in "Dark Frontier." Now that she is unplugged and can witness Borg assimilation with complete objectivity, being Borg suddenly doesn't seem so cool after all.
  • You Never Did That for Me: Janeway, upon learning that her best friend Tuvok used to make tea for then-Captain Sulu, complains in a mock-annoyed fashion that he never made her tea! In the novelization of that episode, he notes, quite reasonably, that she prefers coffee.
  • Your Heart's Desire: In the episode "Bliss", the space-borne equivalent of a pitcher plant tricked the crew of Voyager into entering it by making it appear to them as a wormhole they could use to return home and be reunited with their loved ones. The only people unaffected were the Doctor (a hologram, but the creature tricked the rest of the crew into shutting him off) Seven of Nine and Naomi Wildman (who, only being familiar with life on Voyager, had no real desire to go to Earth) and a Captain Ahab-type alien captain who had been hunting the creature (and was thus familiar with the creature's tricks). It does briefly work on Seven at the end when the creature makes her imagine escaping from it, which she did genuinely desire at that point.
  • Your Mind Makes It Real: The Clown plays about with you for a while and then he plucks a memory of fear and recreates it in his surreal setting…once he gets bored he induces a heart attack through fear, killing the dreamer who is actually trapped inside a cryo-pod.
  • You Talk Too Much!:
    • In "Threshold", even losing his tongue doesn't stop Tom Paris from rambling away.
    Tom: Dothtor, I neeth to talk!
    Doctor: So I've noticed.
    Cullah: You talk too much, Federation, but you're not telling me what I need to know.
  • Zeerust: During the years the series ran the internet was really taking off, and personal computers and cellular phones were beginning to encroach on the science-fiction technology of the show. The use of PADD's (tablet computers) stands out even more in the post-2010 era. In the episode "Hunters", Neelix distributes the first (text only) letters from home personally to each recipient among the crew individually on a PADD, since apparently email has become a lost technology. It is also not unusual to see people using multiple PADD's to multitask, as each can seemingly only run one application at a time. In "Imperfection", Icheb brings three PADD's to the Doctor to show off his original bioscans (which the Doctor should have had on file in Sickbay anyway), his projections regarding the chances of success for a cybernetic surgical procedure and finally one that contains information on DNA resequencing he has designed. To a modern real-world tablet computer user it looks faintly comical.

"Set course.... for home."

 
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Please Summarize the Message

In "Bride of Chaotica!" from "Star Trek: Voyager," aliens from an alternate universe accidentally wander into Tom Paris's holodeck fantasy. Paris discovers a telegraph message explaining as much and reads it off in this style for Tuvok's benefit, until Tuvok cuts him off, asking him to just summarize the message.

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5 (4 votes)

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Main / TelegraphGagStop

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