Course: Oblivion

This is a great episode. It raises important questions about the very meaning of existence and does so in s captivating way.

An interesting episode that continues the events of the visit to the demon planet and shows us what has become of the cloned crew members. It also ends their existence, which is a good thing in my opinion - many viewers found the idea that there are copies of the crew in the delta quadrant quite disturbing.

Apparently many viewers have a problem with the fact that the duplicate crew no longer knows that they have been cloned. Let's look at it this way: The silver liquid can not only clone life forms and their memories, but also a highly complex spaceship including dilithium crystals, warp drive, computer programs and the mobile emitter of the doctor with technology from the 29th century. We don't know anything else about this liquid. I can certainly imagine that the crew has forgotten parts of their memories after being cloned as a result of this cloning process and now thinks they are the real crew of Voyager.

What makes me rather suspicious is the fact that the fake Voyager apparently flew as far towards the alpha quadrant as the real Voyager. That means the clones must have also gotten their hands on the slipstream drive, they must have corrected Harry's incorrect calculations, they must have attacked the Borg and stolen a transwarp coil... all very unlikely. Apparently the real Voyager was right around the corner, because it was able to fly to the location of the distress call within a very short time. Being so close together, either one or the other crew should have run into situations where alien species would have told them, that another Voyager has been visiting them just yesterday.

I found Janeway the most annoying in this episode. After learning that she is a copy of the real Janeway, she still wants to fly "home" - even though Earth is not their home. She's even toying with the idea of taking on the role of the real Janeway if the real Voyager doesn't make it home. She also continued to insist that they are Starfleet officers and therefore have to continue their mission. That was the low point of this episode. The crew should have reacted differently to the knowledge that they were merely second-rate copies of the real crew. Instead of continuing to act as if they were the Voyager crew, they should have instead tried to live their own lives as independent individuals by no longer flying towards Earth but choosing their own path.

The make-up was also rather weak. Basically, the decay of DNA has mainly been related to the face. This could have been done a lot better.

I don' t dislike this series. I've given lots of nines and tens along the way. But this is an utter contrivance. The Demon Planet ended and Voyage got out. There must have been a Demon Voyager around somewhere. Who were those people waving at the end? This is just a cheap plot, constructed with a ridiculous. It's like the worst of the original Twilight Zone. Maybe there should be some explanation. I give up.

Since the demon planet Voyager has encountered the Borg several times, seven of nine was briefly abducted and used as a weapon to defeat mankind. A transwarp coil was stolen and used which then shaved "several decades and thousands of lightyears" of Voyagers journey towards the alpha-quadrant. Monsters were defeated and space-vagrants rescued.

Or did any of that really happen? If this is the "canon" Voyager then travelling backwards towards the demon planet would take decades, however in this episode they said it should only take about six months? There seems to be some indications that this isn't the case here.

If this isn't the "canon" Voyager then none of what you've watched from the demon planet up until this point has happened and we can kill off this crew safely. But then why would they ever bump into the original Voyager which must have used the transwarp coil? The writing is crumbling at this point.

I don't think this episode fitted into the general Narrative of the Voyager series as it felt so far but opinions are ofc divided. Perhaps it would have found a better home in an older iteration of star-trek? It seems like a poorly thought-out episode with some gaping logical loopholes embedded into it. The disgusting faces of the duplicate crew, which kind of wants to make me puke only reinforced the feeling that I am watching something that could have been good but was so poorly executed that it ended up pure garbage.

So yeah, this was kind of a horrible episode in a way... in the sense that this would really suck if it was you on that ship. But the idea was really original and the acting excellent. These kinds of "what if" episodes are so interesting and what really made that glorious 90s era of Star Trek so darn great. Ah, I mean, what a depressing episode. But great at the same time.