I’ve never catched the real reason. I’ve tried to figure out but I can’t. They find a lot of intelligent races, most of them being familiar with the Federation (even speaking English, or the same language!), and they know they’re in Delta Quadrant (or whatever).
Why in the known universe can’t they return? It’s so difficult to find the Alpha Quadrant (or whatever) and no one knows the way home? It’s pretty weird to me, almost a MacGuffin, unless there is some logical/official explanation that I have missed.
They weren’t really Lost in Space. They knew which direction to go. It was just a really long ways away. It was supposed to take them many years to get home (unless they found some sort of miracle technology or shortcut).
Also, they were on television and had to have many mediocre adventures before the series was resolved.
They DID in the final episode. I don’t remember exactly how they got there – I think it was something to do with Borg technology. I remember being beyond pissed at the final shot – Voyager approaching Earth, and them BAM! the final credits. Arrrrgh.
Though I generally hated Voyager, I actually liked the final episode, which was a fun time travel story.
In the first episode, a Mysterious Alien transports Voyager to the Delta Quadrant, which is really far away. Even travelling at maximum speed, it would take them many years to get home.
The reasons the aliens speak English is because it’s television.
While chasing bad people, Voyager and crew get transported very far by an immensly powerful device/being. They end up facing a choice of letting the even worse people they found have free run of this ultra powerful technology, or destroying it, thus ending the threat but leaving them 70,000 lyrs from home. They do the latter, and immediately begin a voyage home that they figure either their children will finish, or they may find some other majic to get them home.
It never occurs to janeway to create some kind of timer and attach it to some kind of explosive to attach to such alien technology, so they can jump back and prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.
At Maximum Warp I think it would have taken like 70 years or something. The aliens don’t speak English! The com system has translators. Voyager had an episode where several humans were foung on one of the planets. The humans were kidnapped by aliens and taken to this planet where they were lain in suspended animation. I think one of the humans was even Emelia Earnhart or something. Anyway, there were Japanese, Spanish and English speaking humans. But they all ‘heard’ their own language when the others spoke. Because of the translators… see? Oh, that… and because it’s tv of course!
whiterabbit, that doesn’t seem to be the last episode as I recall it. Are you sure you watched the whole thing?
Yes, everything that happened or didn’t happen on Voyager was Janeway’s fault. Everything.
(Joking. I liked the character, and the show for the most part. Except for the “Let’s destroy the ship each week, then have it back good as new next week”).
An addendum to NCB’s post: Their captain, Kathryn Janeway, is/was a schizophrenic bitch and she had a bug up her ass about the Caretaker Array (the device the Super Duper Alien [the Caretaker] used to strand them in the Delta Quadrant) possibly falling into the Kazon’s (the bad guys) hands. Instead of using it to get home and allowing the cultures to go on as they had been, she destroyed it, citing the Prime Directive, which is BS since both species were advanced enough that it didn’t apply to either.
Basically, she was Bush, the Kazon were Iraqis, and the Array was the WMDs a good seven years before there was even a second Gulf War.*
I can’t remember what the exact final shot is (i think that whiterabbit is right though) but aside from that, that is the last episode as I remember it.
*Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale,
A tale of a fateful trip
That started from this Starfleet port
Aboard this tiny ship.
The mate was a mighty injun man,
The skipper was cocksure,
70 passengers set sail that day
For a three week tour.
A three week tour.
The subspace started getting rough,
The tiny ship was tossed*;
If not for the courage of the uptight crew,
The Voyager would be home by now.
The Voyager would be home.
The ship’s aground on the shore of this
Uncharted desert quadrant,
With Chakotay,
Cap’n Janeway too,
The Telaxian and his wife**,
Tom Paris,
And the rest
Are here in Gilligan’s Quadrant!*
*) The distance of said tossing was approximately 70,000 light-years, give or take a light-year.
**) Until season 3, when the Telaxian’s wife was replaced by a younger, sexier model with Borg implants.
[spoiler]
The time travel element is that Admiral Janeway comes from the future to help regular Janeway.
The crew find the Borg’s central hub of transwarp tunnels that allows them to travel throughout the galaxy in minutes. Admiral Janeway wants to use one of them to get the ship home. Regular Janeway wants to destroy the hub. Admiral Janeway insists it can’t be done. Regular Janeway insists on trying and sends Admiral Janeway to meet the Borg Queen (who controls all the shielding protecting the various tunnels). The Admiral’s been injected with a virus that will infect the Queen and destroy the Borg before they can adapt. By crippling the Queen, Voyager is able to go through the tunnel that opens up near Earth. A Borg sphere is sent after Voyager, but the crew is able to destroy it just in time to come out of the tunnel right before it’s collapses. The ship is greeted by 18 Federation starships who were sent to investigate the opening of the tunnel.
The last shot is Voyager heading for Earth escorted by the fleet.[/spoiler]
BTW, what happened to Neelix? I got away from Voyager after a couple of seasons, and when I started watching again (near the end the series) Neelix was gone. What’s the deal with Voyager’s “morale officer”?
Did she actually say it was because of the Prime Directive? I thought it was the more general StarFleet policy of non-interference. It’s been a long time since I saw it, though.
The Caretaker (who looks like an old man, but is really a psychedelic Jello mold) has set a self-destruct program to destroy the array so that the Kazon won’t use it to destroy the Ocampa people. After Chakotay sacrifices the Maquis ship to protect Voyager, the Kazon ship damages the array and disrupts the self-destruct program. Janeway decides she can’t allow the Kazon to destroy the Ocampas and destroys the array herself. Tuvok suggests that destroying the array would violate the Prime Directive, but Janeway disagrees citing that they were brought to the Delta Quadrant against their will and they have no other choice.
On Deep Space 9 they went a little more in depth – everyone has a “universal translator” implant in their ears or something.
There is an episode where it turns out that Quark (the pesky Ferengi bartender), his brother, and nephew go back in time and crash land on Earth – they are the Roswell UFO!
There are a few more details about the universal translator in that episode. You hear them speak Ferengi from the eathlings point of view, and gibberish human-talk from the Ferengi point of view. The translators aren’t working properly so they can’t understand the humaahns. Normally they’d hear the human words in Ferengi.
That episode was called Little Green Men, and was basically a satirical homage to all those cheesy 1950s scifi movies involving alien invaders.
The best part is when the Ferengi start smacking their heads to get their translators working again, and the doofus military officiers think it’s a greeting ritual.
