Characters / Star Trek: Voyager

Voyager Crew

Captain Kathryn Janeway

Captain Kathryn Janeway

Played By: Kate Mulgrew

"Abandon ship? The answer's No. I'm not breaking up the family."

A former Science Officer who was given command of a prototype Intrepid-class starship. On her maiden voyage, the ship was hurled through space to a distant corner of the galaxy. Janeway spent the next seven years doggedly (and often recklessly) trying to get her crew home.

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• Action Girl: Highlights include "Macrocosm", in which Janeway does the Sigourney Weaver bit, her repairs of the deflector dish in "Year of Hell", and her role as a Parisian resistance fighter in "The Killing Game".
• Admiring the Abomination: She’s a scientist at heart. In “The Cloud”, with barely-restrained gleeful curiosity, she wants to see what penetrated every defense system on the ship until she finds out that it’s actually a lifeform.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Neelix and the Doctor both accuse her of prolonging the journey to get home because she wants to investigate everything.
• Badass Boast: It comes with the job, but she gets off a magnificent one in the episode "Extreme Risk."
  Janeway: Well, Mister...?
  Malon: Vrelk. Controller Vrelk.
  Janeway: Vrelk. We have a little expertise of our own; we're a very determined crew, so my suggestion is that you leave orbit, and in the future, if you come across anything that bears the insignia of the USS Voyager, head in the other direction.
  • Even earlier, she lets the Vidians know they are not welcome:
    Janeway: Any aggressive action against this ship or its crew... will be met with the deadliest of force.
• Badass Bookworm: Served for many years as a Science Officer before she transferred to Command. Once Voyager gets stranded in the Delta Quadrant, she's effectively her own Science Officer. It's always cathartic to see Janeway toss science and diplomacy out the airlock for a plan that consists entirely of "fuck it" and "let's do it".
• Beneath the Mask: She doesn’t let people in easily, but is actually very anxious about being seen as a good Captain to her stranded crew.
  Janeway: I only wish I felt larger than life… computer, delete that last sentence.
• Benevolent Boss: She tells B’elanna in “Parallax” that she’s a captain who likes being confronted and questioned, as it makes her better at her job.
• The Berserker: She usually isn't loud about it, but Janeway is a lockjaw. Once she is angry, and has decided on a particular course of action, absolutely nothing will stop her.
• Berserk Button: Do not. Harm. Tuvok. Although Janeway expressed a commitment to getting the entire crew home, watching Tuvok die (it happened in a few different timelines) or become incapacitated or ill, was the one thing that would reliably cause her to become truly berserk.
• Berserker Tears: She starts off Tranquil Fury with the Vidiians, but learning how they’ve come to be scavengers of others’ organs, and how she has no choice but to let them go, disgusts her so much she starts crying in anger.
• Bold Explorer: Although more focused on finding her way home, Janeway still took her mission of exploration seriously.
• Book Ends: "Set a course...for home." Hits you right in the feels.
• Broken Pedestal: Janeway had been inspired to join Starfleet by the stories of her ancestor, Shannon O'Donnell. She spoke with pride on how Shannon was one of the original Mars colonists and single-handedly pushed a special "Millennium Gate" tower against massive opposition. But going over some old Earth records, Janeway discovers that over the centuries, the legends of Shannon's "exploits" have been massively overblown: She was never an astronaut, she was only a consultant on the Gate and there was no huge opposition as it was welcomed with open arms by everyone except a small bookstore owner named...Janeway. Janeway tries to shrug this off, saying her biggest worry is how she's going to break it to her aunt that the great family legend is false. Chakotay replies that Janeway shouldn't blame Shannon as she had no idea she'd have to live up to such expectations.
• Catchphrase: "Do it!" (a more terse version of Picard's "Make it so") and "Coffee. Black."
• Celibate Hero: Since she begins the series happily engaged and is the captain, she flatly refuses to consider having a romantic relationship with any of her subordinates. This state of affairs endures for over six years; even after finding out her fiance gave her up for dead and has married, it still takes three more years before she succumbs to temptation, with a holographic lover.
• The Chains of Commanding: She refuses to accept any luxuries denied to the rest of the crew. Tuvok reveals in "Night" (in confidence to Chakotay) that this is nothing new to Janeway; the Captain has always shown great empathy for her crewman, to a degree which is honestly rather unhealthy. While serving as Commander of the U.S.S. Billings, she nearly lost an away team during a botched survey mission on a volcanic moon. The next day, Janeway — against the protests of her crew and good sense — completed the mission solo, at great risk to her life.
• Character Development: She steadily gets more sick of her and crew’s situation and does more of what she feels she has to do, less trying to stick to the Prime Directive.
• Character Tic: Janeway putting her hands on her hips. Spoofed in one episode where an alien race that communicates via body language regards this as "the worst insult imaginable."
• Characterization Marches On: Early Janeway was determined to keep hold of her principles even when all the arguments for abandoning them made very good sense. She seemed to enjoy hiding behind the Prime Directive to avoid making tough choices. (‘Unfortunately, extinction is often the natural end of evolution’ she states in "Prototype"). In "The Omega Directive", the P.D. was officially rescinded "for the duration of this mission".
  • For the first few seasons, Janeway was noticeably detached from her command crew in comparison to Sisko or Picard. She took the approach of captaining more from strict authority than building a great deal of trust or affection. Once Seven is introduced, she becomes more open to relationships. By Season 5 she has moved into a role of open affection and friendship with the main characters while still being totally willing to stamp her authority as rigidly as required. The two elements of her personality frequently meet when she finds her self in a surrogate parent role with Seven or Harry, coming down on them in a more personal way than she would have early on.
• Close to Home: Being a mother to her men, it always causes her great grief when children are hurting or lost, and in the very first episode she relates to the Caretaker worrying if his children can handle life without him.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: To her immediate predecessor Benjamin Sisko from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Both are in command of their own crew who have inclinations to command and technical directions, but unlike Sisko who is a full-time command officer who does engineering work on occasion, Janeway works as a science officer in her double duty during the first half of Voyager. Sisko focuses on what he does and does not believe on the Federation's flawed ideals, while Janeway is a stickler who often believes them to a certain degree, even to unhealthy levels. And certainly, it extends to their relationship to the Federation's adversaries, including the Borg. Sisko has a deep hatred for the Borg (due to the Battle of Wolf 359 that killed his wife) and has absolutely low tolerance against them, while Janeway is diplomatic, who at one point negotiated with the Borg and even had a surrogate parental role towards the xB Seven of Nine.
• Combat Stilettos: As vertically challenged as she is (5'4"), the at least three inch puppy heels she wears every day with her normal uniform actually make sense, as even Torres is taller than her otherwise.
• Control Freak: If Janeway can be said to have a fatal flaw, it's her inability to delegate. It's an outgrowth of her refusal to issue an order, no matter how dangerous, that she would not follow herself. The woman would rather jump into a furnace and fiddle with the deflector controls herself (with a pitiful flame shield made from scrap) then send somebody else to do it.
• Crazy Enough to Work: Janeway finds herself in Borg Space. What does she do? She destroys their base and steals their tech to get home, all while (figuratively) giving the Borg Queen the finger through her ready room window.
• Deadpan Snarker: She can lay down the snark with the best of them:
  Neelix: I did not come aboard this ship to be a veterinarian.
  Janeway: And here I thought you were a man of unlimited talents.
• Death Glare: A pissed-off Janeway can melt holes through the viewscreen with her eyes.
• The Determinator: Woe betide anyone who gets in Voyager's way. When it comes to defending the ship, Janeway is willing to put literally everything on the line, and will not stop until she is physically incapacitated. During "Year of Hell, Part 2," when the holographic Doctor tries to relieve her of command, she informs him that he will need to physically subdue her in order to do so. In a conversation with Chakotay in "Night," Tuvok notes that this mindset can be Janeway's greatest strength, and just as easily, her greatest weakness.
• Depending on the Writer: Is she a by-the-book hardass, an empathetic mother over her crew, a loose-cannon with a tendency to give in to her emotions and curiosity, a moral victor who upholds the ideals of the Federation in a savage galaxy, or a pragmatist who is very willing to play dirty to get her crew home?
• Did They or Didn't They?: Janeway and Chakotay in "Resolutions". This angle got dropped when a new executive producer took over who wasn't into the idea of their becoming romantically involved.
• Drives Like Crazy: The Janeway Maneuver: when backed into a corner, play chicken with a binary pulsar system.
• Easily Forgiven: Janeway was remarkably willing to forgive insubordinate officers who blatantly disobeyed her. Then again, being stranded in the Delta Quadrant meant replacing demoted officers would have been difficult.
  • In Prime Factors, Torres and Tuvok disobey her orders not to acquire and use alien transportation technology. She doesn't punish either one of them.
  • In Maneuvers, Chakotay steals a shuttle for an unauthorized mission. Her only punishment for this is putting him "on report".
  • In Prey, this is subverted as Seven-of-Nine faces minor punishment (restriction of computer access and access to certain ship areas) for disobeying her order not to turn an alien invader over to Hirogen ship.
  • In Thirty Days, this is finally averted when Tom Paris is demoted and sentenced to 30 days of solitary confinement in the brig, for disobeying her orders by trying to commit an act of sabotage on an alien world.
  • In Flesh and Blood, the Doctor faces no punishment for disobeying Janeway's orders and assisting the rogue holograms.
• Endearingly Dorky: She has such joy in her voice when talking about scientific matters (which is when she and B’elanna start to enjoy each other’s company, by bouncing off ideas with each other), is obsessed with coffee, and is insecure on how to appear to her crew.
• Establishing Character Moment: She’s shown in authority at a penal colony, hands on hips and coolly telling Tom Paris that she has a job for him. She’s also striding down the hill with her hands behind her back, to look as professional as possible, no matter how much it affects her actual walking. But when she’s alone, she squees over her dog.
• The Extremist Was Right: As much as her commands must annoy in a non-Starfleet setting (especially since it is her command decisions that led them to this fate), she is exactly the sort of person you need on your side if you want to survive tough conditions.
• Falling into the Cockpit: The scientist to Kirk's action hero, Picard's diplomat, and Sisko's builder, Janeway rose through the science division rather than being groomed for command from the start. Voyager's maiden trip was a relatively short mission into the Badlands, an assignment which didn't need a particularly experienced command officer.
• Farm Boy: She grew up a Farm Girl from Bloomington, Indiana.
• Feminine Women Can Cook: If you cut off the charred part, it's sure to taste good! Oh well. Tellingly, while under the effects of a mind wipe in "Workforce", Janeway recalls that "making a hot drink" is her one culinary skill.
• Fiery Redhead: To summarize Janeway, think of her as the result of a transporter accident involving Katherine Hepburn and Martin Riggs. Some fans believe Janeway is insane on a good day.
  Janeway: I never knew you thought of me as 'reckless', Tuvok.
  Murtaugh Tuvok: A poor choice of words, Captain. It was clearly an understatement.
• For Science!: Janeway is practically salivating at the though of being able to sneak aboard a Borg ship and pillage their technology, but then she always has been mildly suicidal when it comes to acquiring scientific data.
• Future Badass: An elderly admiral who single-handedly crushes the Borg, albeit at the younger Janeway's urging.
• Geeky Turn-On: The woman almost seems to get turned on by technobabble.
• Good Is Not Nice: It’s the ending that everybody still talks about: the Captain forces Tuvix at gunpoint to sickbay and effectively kills him. When the Doctor refuses to take Tuvix’s life out of ethics concerns, she conducts the procedure herself, and the whole time Tuvix looks her straight in the eye so she knows what she is doing.
• Guile Hero: She is willing to play dirty when it comes to military, political, and personal manipulation to either save or help her crew or do what she thinks is right (even if her actions to get there are amoral). By the later seasons she really does become quite good at it.
• Hero with Bad Publicity:
  • Janeway’s reaction to the reputation of Voyager as a ship of death is sheer horror. She clearly had no idea of the rumors and lies that are being spread from the races they have done battle with so far.
  • Once again Voyager’s reputation precedes them in "Dreadnought": the quadrant is rife with rumors that she has threatened many races since they landed here. (Guess opening a dialogue with ‘There’s a Maquis missile heading towards your planet on a parallel course to our ship’ isn’t the best legal defense).
• Heroes Love Dogs: She's a dog person, but is thousands of light-years from her own dog Mollie. One of Q's attempts to get in her good graces is to conjure up a litter of Precious Puppies for her.
• Heroic BSoD: In the interim between Seasons Four and Five, Voyager enters a region of space with no visible stars of systems, an endless night which gradually takes a toll on morale. Janeway is hit the hardest, retreating to her cabin to ponder over the many mistakes that stranded them there. Fortunately, a hostile alien boarding party perks her right up.
• Hypocrite: Is often militant about enforcing the Prime Directive, Temporal Prime Directive, and any other regulations that strike her fancy, and will brutally smack down anyone who violates her interpretation of them. However, she herself can be very arbitrary in her interpretation of those same regulations and she frequently exercises a sort of Captain's privilege when she decides it advances her goals.
  Chakotay: What about the temporal prime directive?
  Janeway: To hell with it!
  • Spent much time, especially in early seasons, pontificating about how important it was for Voyager not to disrupt the balance of power in the Delta Quadrant, as per the Prime Directive. Then, in "Scorpion", she is willing to bargain with the Borg, stated as the Enemy Number One by Starfleet Command (Picard once got chewed out by Admiral Nechayev for passing up an opportunity to destroy, or at least severely damage them). Janeway is actually prepared to help the Borg, a menace to the Delta Quadrant and the galaxy as a whole, win a war with a more powerful alien race in exchange for safe passage through their space. Entire civilizations would later get assimilated as the Borg worked to replenish the drones lost during this war.
  • In "Endgame", in the future, after to returning to Earth, she has become an Insane Admiral, and decides to toss the Temporal Prime Directive out the window because three people she liked (Tuvok, Chakotay and Seven) did not get happy endings the way the timeline had played out and she wants to change the past to fix that (but not to the extent of saving any of the Red Shirts they lost earlier in the series).
• Hypocritical Heartwarming: Nobody tortures Harry Kim without her permission ("The Chute").
• I Did What I Had to Do: She admits to feeling like a Shellshocked Veteran sometimes, and makes bad choices because she has an obligation to get her crew home.
• I Will Wait for You: As Captain, she doesn’t have the luxury of pairing off and she wants to get back home before Mark decides to give her up for dead. Which he does, sadly.
• Iron Lady:
  "Dismissed. [beat] That’s a Starfleet expression for Get Out!."
  • It really stuck out in season 7 when they strengthened the formula. Instead of Janeway disregarding the reasonable objections of Chakotay, they had Janeway disregarding the reasonable objections of both Chakotay AND Tuvok!
  • As far as direct violence was concerned, Janeway probably got her hands dirty more often than any other captain after Kirk. Given her apparent (presumably largely civilian) background in the Science track, she was a surprisingly effective fighter, as well.
  • Sexism may be a relic in the Alpha Quadrant, but it's still in full bloom on most Delta Quadrant planets. In "Flesh and Blood", Janeway extends every courtesy to a Hirogen crew as they come under attack. The Hirogen "Beta", balking at taking instructions from a female officer under any circumstances, is kindly reminded that Voyager can let him off at the nearest rock if the idea of the lady at the wheel offends him. Her voice doesn't go above a whisper, either.
    Beta: Prisoners!
    Janeway: Guests.
  • Lampshaded early in “Phage” where Tuvok says he knows her after four years, and that going in guns blazing when a member of her crew has been harmed isn’t a surprise.
• The Kirk: Chakotay points how many times the prime directive has been ignored in the past when people have felt strongly enough about it, Kim (naturally) thinks it’s a fabulous set of rules and Janeway ponders how cruel it is to be on the other side of the fence, being turned way on account of another culture's rules. All for the sake of a slim chance to return home.
• The Knights Who Say "Squee!": Janeway talks with some enthusiasm about Amelia Earhart’s attempt to fly around the world and it would appear she has discovered something of a kindred spirit. Janeway looks thoroughly disappointed that Earhart chooses to stay on the planet and not join her crew!
• Like a Son to Me: The battle for Seven's soul in "Dark Frontier" is between Janeway and the Borg Queen. Janeway shares more than a little in common with Seven's parents — and that's not meant as a compliment. Seven respects the Captain's cunning, but believes she is too cavalier and reckless when it comes to the Borg.
  • This would also explain B'Elanna's competition with Seven throughout the four years. "Barge of the Dead" revealed that Janeway is the closest thing to a maternal figure B'Elanna has had since she was a child. This adds a whole other dimension to Janeway scolding her for hacking into Seven's personal files in "Dark Frontier."
• Mama Bear: She is the Mother Hen of all the captains. She protects her crew like her own children, and you mess with one of them, you are in for a world of hurt.
• Married to the Job: According to Word of Dante, Kathryn likely went straight back to military service shortly after returning to Earth (thus explaining her Admiralty in Star Trek: Nemesis), having missed the boat on an intimate relationship after Mark. The pilot has an essentially “my gender is Captain” line, explaining she doesn’t like being called sir, and ma’am is only acceptable in a crunch.
• Meaningful Name: named for feminist author Elizabeth Janeway.
• More Deadly Than the Male:
  • Janeway is not often physically violent (that usually only happens if pretty much everyone else has been incapacitated), but at times she employs the Machiavellian angle, and is usually good at it.
  • Kirk boxed with a Gorn. Sisko grabbed a bat'leth and went to town on Klingon boarders. Janeway may not be in peak physical condition like those two, but surrender isn't in her vocabulary. A Hirogen learned it the hard way when a pipe-wielding Janeway disarmed him, played his head like a bongo, and shot him off a ledge to his death.
• A Mother to Her Men:
  • You know you've pissed Janeway off when she starts flying her own ship! She's serious about getting rid of unwanted visitors.
  • No matter her character inconsistencies, what the fans think or how morally grey her actions, the one thing about Janeway is that she really does closely align with this trope (for good or bad). She cares about every member of her crew, will take them into battle against all odds and have the ingenuity - or plot convenience - to win, and her crew are devoted and loyal. She will do anything to save them, but will still enforce discipline and come down hard on crewmen and officers alike if she thinks they are not fulfilling their potential, although she'll still be supportive despite her hardass attitude. Even though she does have a maternal side, her role as a captain and leader comes first.
  • Although it wasn't her decision (shrewd Neelix immediately takes over the galley like a squatter in a vacant loft), it's a very Janeway move to give over her private dining room to the crew to socialize in and have home-cooked food served for them. She tries to flatter Neelix by telling him his meals are becoming a highlight of her day whilst chomping down on his latest indigestible concoction.
  • Harry and B'Elanna are open in their reverence of the Captain as a surrogate mother figure. Seven takes a little longer to defrost, but she eventually came around to seeing Kathryn in this way.
• Must Have Caffeine:
  • Her idea of relaxation? Coffee ice cream.
  • Her Memory Alpha page has a whole paragraph devoted to her love of it. She equates replenishing a dwindling Antimatter fuel supply with regaining the ability to order coffee from the energy-intensive replicators.
    Janeway: There's coffee in that nebula.
  • Her future incarnation, Admiral Janeway, somehow managed to kick the habit over the twenty year stretch. She promptly falls Off the Wagon once she's aboard Voyager.
• Must Make Amends: Heavy lies the head that wears the bun. Janeway’s decision to destroy the array and prevent their escape back to the Alpha Quadrant is a tough one and we do see it weighing heavily on her shoulders in later episodes. This life-changing decision causes a fractious relationship between her and a few of the Maquis members, which is exploited by Seska.
• Mutual Kill: In "Deadlock",Janeway scores one of her two best moments as she welcomes the Vidiian pirates to the ship just seconds before the self destruct sequence tears through both of their ships. "Year of Hell" is #2, a scarred and ruthless Janeway slamming her ship into Annorax's.
• Never Mess with Granny: She is a legend in her own time after she gets home and they start combing through the specimens and logs on the ship, matching statements from the crew, etc. Admiral Janeway is one of the most decorate officers the Starfleet history, according to Barclay.
• No Sense of Personal Space: Often touches her subordinates while talking to them. Given her celibate status, this was frequent Fanfic Fuel.
• #1 Dime: Her "lucky teacup" (later replaced with a sturdier "lucky mug") which survived the first run-in with Annorax's Timeship....only to shatter minutes later. In the same pair of episodes, Chakotay saved up his meager replicator rations to fashion a pocket-watch for her birthday. It's a replica of the watch worn by a fictional British naval captain who was lost at sea, but managed to get his tattered ship back to shore regardless. She barked at Chakotay to recycle it into something useful for the task at hand, but he ignored the order and stashed it in his quarters for Janeway to discover at her lowest emotional ebb.
• Out-Gambitted: Inspector Kashyk in "Counterpoint" is basically a charming, smarmy Nazi officer (Hans Landa meets Bruce Campbell) who enters into a game of wits with Janeway. The banter between them veers into the romantic at times and Janeway pretends to play the "submissive" role , flirting outrageously and even playing the "Good Cop" to Kashyk's Bad Cop. She plants a big wet kiss on him near the end — but only after she's already woven her spider web around him so there's no chance of escape. Really, Janeway would be the antagonist of this piece if Kashyk was a legitimate detective and not a fascist.
  Kashyk: You created false readings!
  Janeway: That is the theme for this evening, isn't it?
• Parental Substitute: You could also argue that she serves as a positive parent to young Kes, rehumanized Seven of Nine, B'Elanna Torres (whose father abandoned her), Tom Paris (ditto, just not physically), and Harry Kim (made even more pronounced in "Endgame").
  • Lampshaded in "Barge of the Dead" (where B'Elanna's mother appears in a vision wearing a Starfleet captain's uniform) and "Dark Frontier" where Janeway 'tucks Seven into bed' (plugs her into her Borg alcove) after she wins the custody battle rescues Seven from the Borg Queen.
• Pintsized Powerhouse: Gives a verbal beatdown to many men taller than her, and almost always gets them to back down.
• Playing Hard to Get: Because his ego is bigger than Voyager, Q thinks Janeway is doing this when he tries to romance her. Because she's genuinely uninterested, she's says she's "impossible to get". Which Q interpreted as a challenge.
• Power Hair: The first few days of filming saw Mulgrew with her natural hairstyle; however, when watching back the first edits, producers noticed that the stage lighting was making Mulgrew's ginger hair appear see-through. The more severe bun was then used, requiring reshoots on a number of scenes (a massive undertaking).
• Pragmatic Hero: Janeway is second only to Ben Sisko in this regard. Janeway is willing to step into some morally gray areas if it means getting her crew back on their journey safely. This has come back to haunt her more than once.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Gives one in the finale to the Borg Queen:
  "Must have been something you assimilated."
• Puppy-Dog Eyes: Whenever she thinks of home. Or a crewmember she's taken under her wing does something she approves of.
• Rank Up: She's an admiral in Star Trek: Nemesis and the Borg Invasion 4D attraction, presumably a reward for bringing Voyager home.
• Real Men Take It Black: Genderflipped as Janeway is a stern and occasionally ruthless captain who likes her coffee black, like her Vulcans.
• Rousing Speech: She occasionally gave one of these, and was a fairly charismatic orator, if a bit overly formal. Her speeches were usually of the Independence Day variety, given the nature of the situations Voyager often found itself in. Janeway was the only captain who used speeches to motivate the crew for the most part, as well. Although Picard and Kirk were also great orators, their speeches were almost always oriented towards reprimanding evil/unco-operative aliens, or sometimes the admiralty in Picard's case.
• Sadistic Choice:
  • In Phage a pair of aliens steal Neelix's lungs for their own use. After capturing the aliens, Janeway has to decide between letting them keep the lungs or killing one of them to return Neelix's lungs to him.
  • In Tuvix, Neelix and Tuvok are combined into a single being. Janeway has to decide to destroy the being to save them, or let it live, which would effectively kill them.
• Samaritan Syndrome: What stranded them in space in the first place. Neelix sarcastically pointed out the Captain's proclivity for exploring deadly anomalies in "The Cloud". The elder Admiral Janeway is so disgusted with it that she traveled back over twenty years to tell her to get moving! However, even when presented with a first-class ticket back home, Captain Janeway still can't help herself and postpones their return for a daring assault on the Borg transwarp network.
• The Scapegoat: "Living Witness" portrays a race that had stolen a module with a copy of The Doctor's EMH program installed, accidentally activate him centuries later, and to The Doctor's horror, historical revisionists had used "Warship Voyager's" Hero with Bad Publicity to place blame on Voyager's crew, specifically Janeway, for the war they started, as well as many, many war atrocities, painting themselves as innocent victims. The Doctor's testimony showing how blatantly false this retelling is, served to trigger a full-blown racial riots just shy of all-out war, until he was able to provide hard evidence that the official historical account was pure fiction.
• Science Hero: Janeway had no Science Officer on Voyager, but luckily, she used to be one herself. While other Captains sign off on the technobabble, Janeway often plays a crucial role in developing the theories and sometimes getting down and dirty with the work herself.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: It is a not a democracy, and she refuses to run Voyager on consensus. How ironic for a character who is basically the equivalent of Picard in this quadrant (an ambassador for the Federation) to so blatantly disregard its rules, tipping the balance of power in the entire Quadrant for the sake of getting her people home. This comes back to bite the crew on a few occasions, some notable instances being "Living Witness" and "Hope and Fear". Tuvok confirms the Captain has a few extrajudicial powers in the Delta Quadrant, a hair-raising proposition when so far away from the nearest Federation court.
• Serious Business: Coffee.
  Janeway: "Coffee. Black."
  Neelix: "I'm sorry, Captain, we lost two more replicators this morning-"
  Janeway: "Listen to me VERY carefully, because I'm only going to say this once: Coffee. Black."
  Neelix: "Yes, ma'am." (serves coffee) "While I've got your attention—"
  Janeway: "Coffee first." (Gigantic Gulp) "Now what's the problem?"
• Show Some Leg: Janeway posing as prostitute in "Resistence" is definitely an attention-getter. It says something about this Captain's willingness to put her dignity aside in order to leave this miserable planet. Played for Laughs when she has to play Queen Arachnia in The Adventures of Captain Proton.
• Significant Monogram: Perhaps a "happy accident" but... compare to Kirk's name. Now widen eyes. Appropriate, given that Voyager was arguably more similar to the original series than The Next Generation was.
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: In "Alliances", Tuvok naively compares their potential pact with the Kazon to the Federation's first steps of peace with the Klingons and proposes that something good might come to this: a potential stability to the Quadrant. Her eventual downfall is almost inevitable; Voyager's attempts at arbitration fail spectacularly, they're more vulnerable than ever and have even more enemies to contend with. After this episode, when diplomacy fails, Janeway will use force to get her own way. So much for the Prime Directive.
  Mabus: You're naïve, Captain. It's clear you have no understanding of the harsh realities of this part of space.
• Small Girl, Big Gun: Vertically-challenged Janeway brandishes a big compression phaser rifle whenever it's time to go Sigourney Weaver on the Monster of the Week's butt.
• Socially Awkward Hero: She gets better at it, becoming more of a Team Mom to her crew, but starts out nervous and not sure what to do when it’s not on duty.
• Team Mom:
  Janeway: Take a message to your people. If I ever encounter your kind again, I will do whatever is necessary to protect my people from this harvesting of yours. Any aggressive action against this ship or its crew will be met by the deadliest of force.
  • She takes a personal interest in her crew and shepherds them into becoming better officers, or (in Seven's case) humans.
• The Other Marty: originally played by Genevieve Bujold, who quit on Day 2 of filming "Caretaker."
• Tough Leader Façade: Every Captain has The Chains of Commanding, but this is the form her version takes, worrying if she can live up to the image her crew has of her, and trying to weigh being a Bold Explorer and doing whatever it takes to get home.
• Trademark Favorite Food: "Coffee. Black."
• The Unfettered: Seska suggests that Janeway's obsession with the Prime Directive is hampering their ability to get home, which is opportunistic of Seska to say but yet still true. Later seasons would see the Captain growing more torn between getting her crew home properly by the numbers but also wanting to get it done as fast as possible.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: With Chakotay due to Subordinate Excuse.
• Uptight Loves Wild: She was always a child of the 24th Century, even when he parents forced her to go backpacking to keep in touch with their pioneering roots. Janeway really doesn’t count on having to rough it with Chakotay in the woods. In "Resolutions", Chakotay scoffs that they're hardly roughing it with so much technology at their disposal and enough food to last them effectively forever.
• Workaholic: It's often lampshaded that Janeway isn't getting enough sleep because she's up all night wrestling with the crisis of the week. Hence the coffee.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: "Counterpoint" shows the Captain at her duplicitous best. Janeway keeps her game face on at all times, but is clearly relishing playing the innocent Starfleet Captain with nothing to hide. She at least has the modesty to act surprised when Inspector Kashyk yanks the pullchain on his dragnet (thinking he's won), whilst inside she is doing a little jig of victory.

Commander Chakotay

Commander Chakotay

Played By: Robert Beltran

"As Captain, you're responsible for making decisions in the best interest of your crew. And I think you have to ask yourself if you're doing that."

A big name in the Maquis, a group of freedom fighters contesting Federation activities. Chakotay's ship was yanked into the Delta Quadrant shortly before Voyager was. Over the course of the pilot, he and his crew form an uneasy alliance with Janeway. Since he is a former Starfleet officer, Janeway re-activates his commission and makes him her Number Two. He provides the voice of reason among the bridge crew.

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• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: Several Maquis did not adjust well to the ship, and refused to go through Tuvok's Training from Hell. They told Chakotay, their former Maquis captain, that there's the Starfleet way and the Maquis way, and they wanted to stay doing things the Maquis way. Chakotay broke that guy's mouth with a megaton punch, and promised to do the same tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and so on, until they report back to Tuvok. That's the Maquis way.
• Boxing Battler: The Tattooed Terror! Boxing is barbaric and entirely pointless from The Doctor's point of view, but the Noble Art is still taught at Starfleet Academy and practiced on the outskirts of the Alpha Quadrant, which suits Chakotay just fine.
• Captain Crash: Crashed his Maquis Raider into a Kazon battleship in the first episode, and has crashed nearly every shuttlecraft he's flown since.
• The Consigliere: It takes him awhile, but in "Alliances" he finally confronts Janeway and informs her that they are on their own in this Quadrant and they need to start changing in order to survive, which might mean bending the rules a little. He makes Janeway realize that the interests of the crew are her main concern, and he questions if she is actually prioritizing that by sticking so rigidly to Starfleet rules.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: Towards William T. Riker from Star Trek: The Next Generation, being the loyal first officers towards their own captain. Riker is a womanizer, conceited ace, while Chakotay is mature and professional, being more principled in his job than Riker would. While both are Starfleet Officers, Riker is a member of Starfleet for years who is with the Federation, while Chakotay left Starfleet in the past and joined the Maquis, being a major name in contesting the Federation and their own activities before being reinstated to the command again after stopping the Kazon and the Caretaker.
• Cultural Blending: Rather than give Chakotay an actual Native American tribe, the writers just made one up and presented a bunch of Magical Native American cliches to go with it. Then due to Beltran's Mesoamerican heritage they moved this fictional tribe down to Central America. So we have a tribe in the jungle who worship sky spirits despite only glimpsing the sky, have vision quests (sweat lodges in the jungle?), medicine wheels, medicine bundles, ancestor worship (more of an Asian practice), and facial tattoos that look more Maori than Native American.
• Cultured Warrior: He's a Starfleet officer turned Maquis resistance leader who can quote philosophy and is deeply in touch with his religious side. In "Bliss", his secret desire revealed by the pitcher plant monster is to be pardoned and get a professorship of anthropology at Starfleet Academy.
• Deadpan Snarker:
  • As the XO who had to relay all of Janeway's crazy ideas. "Maybe I should go to Red Alert and get it over with."
  • Janeway offering to play William Tell with a phaser. "Sounds great. If I miss, I get to be Captain."
• Death Glare: Chakotay's glare is on par with Janeway's. He's often seen using it on B'Elanna whenever her Klingon temper starts going out of control.
• Demoted to Extra: As Seven got more focus, Chakotay was one of the characters to lose it. Reportedly became a cause for complaint from his actor.
  • Possibly a case of Real Life Writes the Plot as Robert Beltran was vocal about his hatred of his character and the show in general, meaning that giving him more screen time was presumably not a priority.
• Drugs Are Bad: Chakotay says his people used to contact the spirit realm using psychoactive herbs, but as it wouldn't be proper to have the crew coping with stress by getting stoned on mescaline, an Applied Phlebotinum called an akoonah is used instead.
• Dull Surprise: Reportedly a covert form of protest by Beltran, who was very dissatisfied with the show. In later seasons when he's given A Day in the Limelight, he starts Chewing the Scenery with relish.
• Facial Markings: His face tattoo proudly displays his lineage for all to see.
• The Fettered: He gives his loyalty to Janeway in spite of early opposition from his Maquis comrades, putting aside their conflict so they can get home.
• First-Name Basis: Has a tendency to address his captain as "Kathryn", even on the bridge. Janeway doesn't seem to mind except the one time he's thrown back in time before they become friends.
• Former Teen Rebel:
  • It was Sulu who was responsible for sponsoring Chakotay's application to Starfleet Academy. Only an old cowboy like Sulu would see past the lad's rough edges. He fell in pretty quickly with Janeway's crew: He will still step in from time to time, pointing out the Captain's errors, but nowhere near to the degrees that Torres or Seven object. Justified, as he may had been a Maquis, but he was also a Starfleet commander, before getting lost in the Delta Quadrant.
  • The trope is played literally when a flashback reveals that as a teenager he wasn't interested in his father's Magical Native American ways; this changed after his father was killed by the Cardassians.
• Grave-Marking Scene: Chakotay got the Tasha Yar treatment in the fake "Endgame" timeline.
• Have I Mentioned I Am a Dwarf Today?: In the early seasons, he had a bad habit of bringing up his heritage at the slightest excuse. It often bordered on Cultural Posturing, since he seemed to ascribe every even vaguely deep phrase he'd ever heard to his culture.
• Honor Before Reason: Refuses to work against Janeway, no matter how dire the situation or the prodding of the other Maquis. Also once put himself on report (along with the thieves) for eating a meal that he didn't know was made with stolen rations. Then again, one wrong move from Chakotay could (and nearly did) have the entire Maquis crew pushing for a mutiny. He knows Voyager won't last long if the two factions conflict with each other.
• Horrible Judge of Character:
  • Chakotay's willingness to give people a chance and try and understand their point of view sometimes results in him trusting people he really shouldn't—Tuvok, Seska and Annorax all took advantage of this, as did a few one-shot enemies.
  • (to Tuvok) "You were working for [Janeway], Seska was working for [the Cardassians]...wasn't anyone aboard that ship working for me?" Chakotay realises that everybody has been treating him like a mug.
• Ice-Cream Koan:
  • Chakotay has some tales from "his people" that somehow sum the situation up perfectly and also not at all.
  • "We have a saying among my people. The turtle who keeps his shell never gets stabbed in the back."
• Magical Native American: Any episode that opens on Chakotay searching for his father’s spirit 70,000 light years from home is getting us off on the wrong foot.
  • Chakotay's grandfather's ghosts must not be confused with Chakotay's alien ancestors.
  • His exact origins are pretty vague, although he did visit some distant relatives in what looked like Central America once. While some might consider this a mild caricature, Chakotay represents one instance where it is pulled off sufficiently well, that it ultimately doesn't matter much. There was even some awesome fan fiction written by a genuine Native American, about Chakotay becoming the ship's shaman. The big, appropriately coloured tattoo, along with Robert Beltran's soft voice and Latin American facial features all contribute to the effect, as well as his acting.
  • He was extremely stereotypical in early seasons, talking about animal guides (his is a female, which is awfully specific) and medicine bundles, and telling ancient legends, often in a "mystical" tone of voice. This was rectified in later seasons, when he began acting more like a normal dude with manly interests. It was revealed that his knowledge of ancient legends came partially from an interest in anthropology, and he had knowledge of several Earth cultures, rather than just being a walking Native American encyclopedia. When his Native American culture did come up, he now spoke about it in a much more matter-of-fact tone.
  • A lot of his early characterization was due to the writers use of Jamake Highwater as an "expert consultant". The man was a complete fraud who made up all of his information from generic New Age ideas and things he'd seen in movies.
  • Averted in "Basics", probably as a result of all the complaints. Chakotay can't shoot a bow (he mentions his tribe never used them either) or light a fire by rubbing sticks, and fails to make a spiritual connection with the tribal shaman. Where he does prove himself is by risking his life to save a woman of their tribe, earning their friendship by example.
• Mr. Fanservice: A tall, muscular, Latino/Indian man, who's a former outlaw that constantly rebels against Janeway's orders...but who loves nature, is soft-spoken, and has no qualms about being second to a woman, or discussing feelings with shipmates.
• Number Two: Janeway's first mate.
• Only One Name: And it's not 'Federation', it's Chakotay!
• Only Sane Man: In the first two seasons Chakotay is caught between his by-the-book captain and his more headstrong Maquis comrades. Even for the rest of the series, he often plays "straight man" to Janeway's extreme measures, and other characters' extreme personalities. Particularly funny whenever he interacts with Neelix, who he clearly has a "bemused" attitude towards, but respectfully treats as if he's a completely normal person.
• Pragmatic Hero: He's far more willing to ignore Federation ideals than Janeway in the interest of getting home. It's pretty much a given that had he been the captain, Voyager would have gotten back to Earth sooner, but with a lot more blood on their hands. That said, there are certain lines even he won't cross, like allying with the Borg.
• Rebel Leader: He lead his own Maquis cell and commanded the raider Val Jean in the Alpha Quadrant. Many of the expanded universe novels set before Voyager show him as a peer to other Maquis leaders like Cal Hudson and Michael Eddington.
• Silver Fox: Lampshaded by Seska in "Shattered".
• Space Marine: Chakotay is far more comfortable in the field than he is as a First Officer, and episodes like "Memorial", "Nemesis", "Timeless", and "The Killing Game" (as an Allied squad leader in WWII!) are a tantalizing glimpse at his life before "Caretaker".
• Technical Pacifist: He is a gentle man from a gentle people! *punches Darby*
• Token Religious Teammate: He is one of the very few openly religious main characters in the history of Star Trek. Although him practicing an unrecognizable form of Native American animism probably helped it go down easier with the audience.
• Ultimate Job Security: Chakotay constantly questions Janeway in private and in front of the crew, even arguing or disobeying if he doesn't like her orders and making his disagreement obvious if he thinks he doesn't have a choice. Janeway values it and considers him an Honest Advisor, but some of the things he says and does would have made Picard, Sisko, and Kirk boot him out of the Number One chair.
  • This is no doubt due to the disadvantage Janeway had (and the advantage the writers had), that with Voyager being stranded, Janeway couldn't get immediate qualified replacements for her senior staff, and had to iron problems out rather than simply giving Chakotay the sack for rebelling all the time, or Tuvok for going insane every other week. This is especially the case in early seasons where having Chakotay's support was necessary to keep the rest of the Maquis in line.
• The Watchmaker: During the "Year of Hell", Janeway realizes that she's stating to lose track of time. Chakotay chirps that he has a remedy for that, and presents her with a pocket-watch. She later finds the watch again while rooting through Voyagers wrecked upper decks. It also symbolizes Chakotay's newfound power as an apprentice onboard Annorax's timeship.
• The World's Expert (on Getting Killed): Trapped on a barren planet, and Janeway's stuck with the only Indian in the universe who can't start a fire by rubbing two sticks together.

Lieutenant Commander Tuvok

Lieutenant Commander Tuvok

Played By: Tim Russ

"On the contrary, the demands on a Vulcan's character are extraordinarily difficult. Do not mistake composure for ease."

Tuvok is an old friend of Janeway's who was assigned to spy on the Maquis. He takes up the positions of Tactical Officer and Security Officer in the consolidated crew. The first Vulcan to be played by an African-American actor. (A desert planet would likely produce skin tones rich in melanin.) The character has a prominent role in the Fan Film series Star Trek: Renegades, which was produced by the actor.

For his appearance in Picard, go to its character page.

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• Almighty Janitor: He's third in command overall, but considering he starts the series as a lieutenant (he gets promoted to lieutenant commander about halfway through the series) despite being the most decorated officer among the crew. He's proven to be a better captain than Janeway, whose command style is unconventional to say the least.
• Always on Duty: He's always the very last person to read his letters from home. This causes the normally-jocular Neelix to blow his stack: he's being harried day and night by crewmen eager to receive mail, and now the Tactical Officer has the gall to say 'come back later'? (Once Neelix stomped out, however, Tuvok put aside his work to read about his new grandchild.)
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: In "Infinite Regress", Tuvok had less than ten minutes to mind-meld with Seven and locate her consciousness in a sea of Borg victims. Not helping things is a female Vulcan personality who surfaces to remind Tuvok that he's just one brain among thousands and that this mission is wholly illogical.
• Beneath the Mask: Despite his stoic persona, Tuvok is shown to have deeply buried flaws and passions that he constantly seeks to control — pride and violence being the strongest. He has in several episodes formed platonic attachments to women that he rigidly controls to prevent them becoming romantic.
• Beware the Nice Ones: When threatened by a telepath who traded dark thoughts and impulses on the black market, Tuvok unleashed all the horrific things held back by his Vulcan discipline... causing the man to begin screaming in pure, unadulterated terror.
• Bothering by the Book: In the beginning, he was a pragmatist who was perfectly willing to override Janeway if he found her logic wanting. By the end of Season One, Janeway was the risk-taker and Tuvok the living embodiment of Starfleet protocol. In "Learning Curve" he chastises a Maquis crew member for noticing that something needs fixing and getting on with it rather than going through the proper channels. Considering how short-staffed and under-equipped Voyager is, he risks a mutiny by slapping their wrists for such trivial things (the only significant problem caused was deleting some holograms Janeway was talking to). Unlike Tuvok, B’Elanna understands how to win the respect of the Maquis crew and get them to work more efficiently.
• Butt-Monkey: His Odd Couple relationship with Neelix is a Running Gag. And as the ship's stoic Vulcan, he's often the victim of practical jokes from Tom Paris and Harry Kim. Even Janeway isn't above trolling him on occasion.
  Tuvok: During my years on Voyager I have come to respect a great many of you. Others I have learned to tolerate.
• Captain Crash: Tuvok's mere presence on a shuttlecraft ensures that it's going to crash in the teaser. He's responsible for a majority of the 16 shuttles lost during the series' run.
• Captain Obvious: Tuvok has a penchant for stating the obvious. This is even lampshaded in The Q and the Grey:
  Female Q: The Vulcan talent for stating the obvious never ceases to amaze me.
• Captain Smooth and Sergeant Rough: You have got to love Tuvok’s style: at the news of hearing that they might be able to find the Caretaker's mate and convince her to return Voyager home, he suggests creating a poison that could debilitate the creature just in case it gets hostile.
• Catchphrase: "Logic dictates..." and "Your logic is flawed."
• The Comically Serious: It never fails. Poor Tuvok tries to catch a quiet couple of minutes with his own thoughts and Neelix comes bumbling over because clearly his services as morale officer are required! As with Worf, the writers seem to milk him for these kinds of gags every chance they get.
• The Consigliere: Tuvok always had an advisory role to Janeway throughout the series, but it was most prominent in the first couple seasons. It is hinted that this relationship existed for years before the series began. Eventually, as the Federation and Maquis crew managed to better integrate, Chakotay took over this role as Chakotay was also the spokesperson for the Maquis.
• The Cynic: He’s the only one who isn’t hopeful in “Eye Of The Needle”, knowing it’s going to end up in disappointment.
• Deadpan Snarker: Tuvok gets all the best zingers, moreso even than Spock, and boasts a very dry sense of humor. You'd be forgiven for not noticing, thinking he's completely humorless. Perhaps inspired to become one at an interesting time earlier in his life...
  Sulu: And don't tell me Vulcans don't have a sense of humor, because I know better.
  • 'It appears we have lost our sex appeal, Captain.' Of course, he's speaking for Voyager itself as it fends off pubescent aliens, but Brannon Braga bought this story treatment just based on that line coming out of Tuvok's mouth.
• Eating Lunch Alone: Though he says it’s by his own choice because he hates small talk, it’s also because he doesn’t have many friends at the beginning of the series.
• Evil Feels Good: In "Meld", Tuvok leeches off of Suder's murderous impulses, and he rather likes the feeling... (Perhaps because, as Suder says, it doesn’t require logic) The second meld sees Tuvok mentally raping Suder and Suder moaning as he enjoys it.
• Expy: To Worf, as a put-upon security officer who's The Comically Serious. All that's missing is his prune juice.
• A Father to His Men: In "Resolutions", Tuvok admits that he cannot feel the loss of their comrades as the crew does and fails to understand what purpose it would serve if he did! Even so, Mr. Vulcan does an uncharacteristically emotional thing at the beginning of "Innocence" by giving a dying redshirt a glimmer of hope that somebody will miss him when he dies.
• Good Parents: Though Tuvok's children have long since grown up, Kes and Tom still go to him for advice on parenthood. The Security officer is bemused at being consulted, but also somewhat nostalgic for those heady days. "Offspring can be disturbingly illogical, yet profoundly fulfilling. You should anticipate paradox."
• The Guards Must Be Crazy:
  • Tuvok might want to step up his training regimen, because his deputies are rather wet.
  • The legendary episode where Tuvok transports a ship full of convicts with only a force field to prevent all of them from escaping at once.
  • How bad is Tuvok at his job to allow Seska to meet with the Kazon, to beam over to their ship to destroy the evidence, fabricate more evidence and to beam away AGAIN at the end? At least he looks embarrassed by it. In "Maneuvers" (another Seska episode), Janeway chews Tuvok out for allowing Chakotay to steal a shuttlecraft to seek his revenge; it’s about time she laid down the law at how relaxed security seems to be on this ship.
  • So Tuvok promises Janeway it won't happen again. Several episodes later, the captain is abducted by a mad crewman who steals yet another shuttle so they can travel at Ludicrous Speed to turn into a salamander. Tuvok likely avoided court-martial only because it was too embarrassing for all concerned.
• Happily Married: For over 60 years, with children. It's played up when he develops a neurological disease upon being separated from his wife for seven years (Vulcan marriages are weird).
  • Seven years, you say? A "Neurological Disease"?
• Hates Small Talk: Makes sense, as talking about nothing isn't logical. No wonder he got on with Seven so well.
  "Vulcans do not make small talk."
  • During Meld his test to see how bad his self-control had gotten was a holodeck simulation of Neelix trying to engage him in small talk. He lasted about a minute before throttling him to death.
• I Can't Dance: He does, however, grudgingly wiggle his toe once Neelix departs the ship for good, as a token of goodwill. Like Spock, Tuvok can play the lute and sing well enough.
• The Killer in Me: In "Repression", an ex-Maquis pulls the trigger on a subliminal command he implanted in Tuvok's brain way back when.
• The Lancer: To Janeway; often her source of advice.
• Never My Fault: Tuvok once said to Chakotay that Vulcans are always honest. Chakotay pointed that he had been a spy among the Maquis. Tuvok replied that he had always been honest "within the parameters of his mission".
• Noble Bigot: Revealed to have been one earlier in life. When he was younger, Tuvok greatly disliked Humans for their arrogant belief that they are "special" and every race should be like them. He eventually overcame his prejudice towards them and decided to rejoin Starfleet.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: In "Meld". Due to his mind-meld with Suder, this causes Tuvok to begin to lose control. Later the Doctor is forced to temporarily suppress his emotional control in order to "reset" his brain chemistry back to normal, causing him to act like a violent sociopath.
  • In "Endgame", he loses in a game of kal'toh to Icheb, a sign that he is beginning to develop a neurological illness similar to Alzheimer's that, unless he mind-melds with a family member in a timely manner, would leave him debilitated.
• Officer and a Gentleman: Tuvok is a very effective fighter (he taught at the Academy) and disciplinarian, and he takes his duties very seriously.
• Only Sane Man: Along with Seven, he is the voice of pragmatism aboard a ship with a maverick scientist, a tattooed mystic, a guerrilla fighter, a cocky test pilot, a starry-eyed cook, and a self-righteous hologram. It's a wonder Tuvok's head doesn't explode from all the illogic on display. It also overlaps with his role as a security officer, where he generally recommends the more cautious/safe/shoot-first-ask-questions-later options (just like Worf in TNG).
• Out of Focus: Tuvok figures out the Caretaker's plot in the pilot by using his vast knowledge and experience to find a motive behind the alien's behavior. Without his insight the crew might not have escaped. It's stated that the Captain and Tuvok go way back and that Janeway trusts his council more than anyone. Russ is forced to spend much of the next seven seasons holding back his talents and limiting his role. Each Captain seemed to have an old friend as part of their crew, but this is barely touched on after Seven of Nine joins the cast.
• Passed-Over Promotion: There was some resentment between Tuvok and Chakotay over the latter being elevated to First Officer, essentially demoting Tuvok. But it was the only way to ensure loyalty between the two crews.
• Rank Up: Starts off as a lieutenant, and gets promoted to lieutenant commander in "Revulsion."
• The Mole: At the beginning, when he is in the Maquis but is actually a Federation agent.
• Sitcom Archnemesis: In the episode "Meld", Tuvok wants to verifiy if he's developing psychopathic tendencies by running a holodeck program of Neelix being annoying. He strangles Neelix to death.
• Smart People Play Chess: As well as Kal-toh.
• The Stoic: As a Vulcan, you tend to expect this; although on the rare occasion when he *does* lose it, look out.
• Stealth Pun: Does his being a black Vulcan remind you of something? He often appears in the same scene/shot with a Commander of vague Native American ancestry, just to drive it home.
• Took a Level in Dumbass: Tuvok proves to be one of the most thoughtful characters in Season 1-2. He is badly castrated in later seasons, insisting that everyone go through the usual, tedious channels. Episodes like "Repression" confirm what we already knew about Tuvok: he's no Hercule Poirot.
• Tranquil Fury: While all Vulcans make a point of containing their emotions, Tuvok exemplifies this, being particularly restrained and having a history of once questioning the Vulcans' adherence to logic and stoicism. On the rare occasions when he loses control, he's downright terrifying.
• Twofer Token Minority: He's a black Vulcan, minority in both regards to the typical white Humans that make up most of the cast and crew of Federation ships and the Star Trek franchise.

Lieutenant Junior Grade/Ensign Tom Paris

Lieutenant Junior Grade/Ensign Thomas Eugene Paris

Played By: Robert Duncan McNeill

"Asking me to give you a bumpy ride is like asking a virtuoso to sing off-key."

Ace Pilot who joined the Maquis after getting booted out of Starfleet. He was caught and arrested on his very first mission. The opening scene of the show is Janeway securing his release from prison. His Backstory is similar to that of TNG guest character Nick Locarno, also played by McNeill. Though his personality doesn't change, his onboard relationships change wildly: forming a strong bond with Kim, harrying the Doctor, and later starting a family with Torres.

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• Abnormal Allergy: In the episode "Threshold", Tom Paris's first symptom that he's changing into a lizard thing is that he's now allergic to water.
• The Ace: Tom is probably one of the most competent men in Starfleet history, showing at various points expertise in piloting, commando tactics, field medicine, insurgency, engineering, history, and at one point helping to build an engine that could reach the speed of infinity. Demonstrated quite nicely in "Basics" where he manages to win dog fights in a heavily damaged shuttle, fix said shuttle on his own, and then raise an army in order to retake the ship.
• Ace Pilot: The Delta Flyer became his private craft.
• Action Hero: Never shied away from a good fight.
• Bad Guys Play Pool: Tom recreated his favorite Parisian pool hall on the holodeck. Which is where the senior staff unwinds in the early seasons (later replaced with the Hawaii and Fair Haven programs). Janeway hustles him on her first trip to Sandrine's, pretending not to know what the stick does ("It's called a cue, Captain") so Paris will allow her to break.
• Badbutt:
  • The "Tom goes rogue" episodes. His behavior is considered riotous and unacceptable because... his hair hangs a little loose and he has an opinion.
  • Zigzagged In "Thirty Days", Tom is demoted and thrown into the brig for neary forcing a planet to undergo environmental protections which normally wouldn't matter to starfleet, if it wasn't for the fact that A) the places he targeted are basically life support for the species to live on their planet and B) launching an attack on a planet that wasn't engaged in hostilities at the time.
  • Even his stint in New Zealand could have been avoided if Tom had kept his head down, but his conscience wouldn't allow it and he threw himself at the mercy of a Starfleet magistrate, accepting his sentence with grace. What a loose cannon!
  • His stint in prison was actually a result of being a member of the Maquis, his confession to his academy incident only got him expelled. Had he not gotten lost in the Delta Quadrant, he likely would have been reinstated into Starfleet after serving his 18-month sentence, or by the outbreak of the Dominion War at the very latest. And the other example involved striking a superior officer.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: With B'Elanna.
• Big Brother Mentor: Towards fresh-faced ensign Harry Kim, starting with warning him away from Quark's merchandise.
• Born in the Wrong Century: Paris' appreciation of 20th-century Earth plays a key part of his personality and reflects heavily upon his character. His specialty is WWII history and Cold War politics, handy for Star Trek allegories. It also comes in handy in the episode The Killing Game, as they are trapped in a WWII simulation, and once the crew recover their memories, he is the only one that knows what's going on.
• Boxed Crook: Tom Paris was recruited from a penal colony by Janeway for one mission in exchange for assistance with his sentence; when Voyager was lost in the Delta Quadrant, this turned into Trading Bars for Stripes, and is backstory involved going From Camouflage to Criminal, so he plays all three of these related tropes straight.
• Broken Ace: His self-esteem is actually quite very low and he believes that he is doomed to fail. But he is trying his damndest to pull his life together.
• Casanova Wannabe: Although pitched as the ship's resident playboy, the writers eventually gave up and admitted that Tom is, in actuality, kind of a dork, and he ends up married to B'Elanna.
  Doctor: Ah, Mr. Paris. I assume you have a great deal of experience being rejected by women...
• Catchphrase: "Yes, ma'am." Usually said in response to Janeway to indicate he's taking a matter seriously, as she said in the pilot she preferred to be addressed as "captain", but "ma'am" was acceptable when it was "crunch time". Occasionally said to Seven or B'Elanna as a sarcastic response to a demand.
• Characterization Marches On: Comparing the Tom in season 1 with the Tom in season 7 is quite something. Tom spends the first couple of seasons being kind of a guy's guy, who creeps on every woman in sight and hustles fellow crew members in pool games. (Interestingly, Robert Duncan McNeill played him very laid-back, never really giving Paris the kind of sleaze that the writers were clearly going for.) This fell by the wayside after he came out of the Neelix/Kes Love Triangle having handled it much more maturely than Neelix did. From there, Tom started losing that edge, in favor of being The Ace of the ship and a Fan of the Past. Or to put it another way, Tom Paris turned out to be a huge nerd, who gets excited about how science fiction looked a few hundred years ago, and working for hours on a 20th-century car. It helps that sparking a romance with B'elanna discouraged him from leering at girls all the time, as he proved to be very devoted to her.
• Character Tics: When his voice drops in both pitch and volume, it usually means he's going from smart-ass to serious and self-reflective.
• Deuteragonist: Michael Piller conceded as much in Visions of the Future. Paris serves as our entry character into Voyager, mimicking Jim Kirk's big reveal of the Enterprise in The Motion Picture, is central to the plot of "Caretaker", and has the most distinct character arc out of anyone in the cast. He even changed rank a few times! (Apologies to those viewers who fainted from shock.) Even his middle name suggests an air of narrative importance: Eugene, after Eugene Roddenberry. No prizes for guessing his new vocation in the series finale.
• Expansion Pack Past: Tom is surprisingly well-versed in warp theory after having served two years on a freighter. Didn't he mention that already? No? Oh well.
• Expy: An Ace Pilot, who can't shut up about what a great pilot he is. A former criminal who makes a deal to work with the good guys to get out of the trouble his crimes got him into. Befriended a Naïve Newcomer at a bar, then fell in love with a woman with whom he shared a Belligerent Sexual Tension. Slowly learned to care about people and noble causes. He ended up being far more similar to Han Solo than Okona ever was.
• Fan of the Past: Done more realistically than most examples — Tom is a fan of the 20th century, but mainly of the early to mid part of it, liking Captain Proton from The '30s and cars of The '50s. When he was thrust into the viewers' present day of 1996 through Time Travel, he adapted better than the rest of the crew but still made a faux pas by referring to the Soviet Union in the present tense. He also gets called out for claiming to be a "Secret Agent", a term that nobody says anymore.
• Fate Drives Us Together: Rather sweetly, each time Tom and B'Elanna's memories are erased and become strangers, they always develop an attraction in any case. ("The Killing Game", "Workforce")
• Forced Transformation: In "Threshold", Tom is subjected into an accelerated evolution, first changing his anatomy in bizarre ways, and finally transforming him into a salamander-like creature. He's back to normal by the end of the episode.
• The Gambler: Paris has the nerve to re-program the holodeck characters to be his co-conspirators as he fleeces the entire crew!
• Gone Horribly Wrong: Poor Tom is saddled with not one, but two prototype engines which end up backfiring and mutating/killing off the crew: The Warp 10 engine in "Threshold", and the slipstream drive in "Timeless".
• Good Old Ways:
  • B'Elanna replicated him an authentic T.V. with old-timey shows built into the set. Most old movies in the 24th century can be viewed in three-dimensional form on a holodeck, but Tom prefers to curl up on a couch like a real American.
  • Yo dawg, I heard like you like 3-D, so I put 2-D in your 3-D so you can watch 3-D in 3-D.... He takes his wife out to see Revenge of the Creature in "Repression", blissfully unaware of the idiocy of wearing 3-D glasses on a holodeck.
• Grease Monkey: Good at it, too. The Delta Flyer was his design.
• Handsome Lech: Until he falls in love with B'Elanna, he was often flirting.
• I Choose to Stay: Flirted with, but not fully realized as with Neelix or (to take a contemporary example) John Crichton. A running theme in the show is Paris' assertion that there's nothing waiting for him on Earth, because Voyager is his home now. He began this journey as a criminal and ended it as a husband and a father-to-be. In terms of quality of life, Paris has never had it better. Comparing his lack of excitement with Harry’s tail-wagging at the thought of making it back to the Alpha Quadrant is very telling.
• Innocently Insensitive: You'd be surprised how many times Tom accidentally offends his own friends without knowing it.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: In contrast with the Locarno character, whom McNeill described as just the reverse — kind on the outside, incredibly selfish on the inside. Paris could act as a cynic or Hustler/Lancer type when he thought it was necessary for his survival, but his level of sensitivity would cause him to experience pain and/or self-loathing afterwards. For example, one arc involves Paris behaving badly, so much so that he gets thrown in the brig by Chakotay and subsequently resigns — after which it's revealed that the entire thing was a ploy so he could try to find a spy. After all was revealed, Paris gave a heartfelt apology to everyone for his behavior, especially Chakotay.
• The Medic: After learning that he took a course in field medicine in Starfleet, The Doctor forced Paris to begin studying medical procedures and act as his nurse after Kes left. While mostly played for comedy vis-à-vis the Doctor, his medical training actually proves crucial to the crew's survival in later episodes when the Doctor wasn't available.
• Military Brat: His dad is an admiral. Guess what trope is at the bottom.
• Military Maverick: Deconstructed. He's a decent guy, an excellent pilot, and has a host of other skills, but he starts the series in prison and later gets demoted and sent to the brig for a month because of his willingness to break the rules.
• Morality Pet: While somewhat overinflating his own bad boy image, he considers Harry the conscience he’s never had.
• Most Writers Are Writers: Tom's passion for holonovels and comic books eventually led to a lucrative career as a writer. This happened in a possible future where the VOY crew made it home, but it's unknown if our Tom assumed that vocation.
• Mr. Exposition: Tom Paris starts out as an ex-con with a chip on his shoulder, but it only takes a season or two before he becomes a Rhodes Scholar, able to talk at length about a variety of subjects. This is explained away by Tom's fascination with pre-Warp Earth history.
• Official Couple: With B'Elanna.
• Porn Stache: Lieutenant Marseilles, The Doctor's Captain Ersatz of Paris in the holonovel Photons Be Free, sports one.
• Real Men Wear Pink: In contrast to his father's "Men Don't Cry" attitude, Tom freely admits to finding catharsis in a good cry.
• Renaissance Man: He's an ace pilot, expert commando, knows how to pick locks and superb theoretical physicist capable of designing an engine that goes to infinite speed. He's also the field medic, and has written several holoprograms.
• Ship Tease: With Kes, whom he actually marries in an alternate timeline.
• The Snark Knight: He has a nice sarcastic streak.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Originally, the character of Paris was to be Nick Locarno from TNG, who was kicked out of Starfleet Academy and sent to prison for attempting a dangerous stunt that got a fellow cadet killed. When the producers ran into copyright issues on the matter (the author of the episode with Locarno demanded royalties for every time the character would appear) and realized that what Locarno did prevented a credible redemption arc, they rewrote him as Tom Paris with an almost identical background and some details altered to make Paris less unlikeable. And they were both played by Robert Duncan McNeill.
  • Ironically, Star Trek: Lower Decks wound up bringing Locarno back decades later...and he indeed proved to be irredeemable, being the actual Big Bad of season 4 and out for revenge against Starfleet. Hilariously, Boimler and Rutherford argue over his resemblance to Paris (or lack thereof, as Boimler claims not to see it).
• Unishment: Tom recalls that being sent to his room by his strict admiral father was this. He was glad to be sent some place quite where he could read, play games, or just cry without something shaming him for it.
• Urban Legend Love Life: Despite his reputation, he actually got the least Girl of the Week action of all the male cast, including the Doctor.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: The Doctor can't stand him. Tom gets it the worst in the holonovel parodies of the crew, and the Doctor rarely if ever says anything positive about him in private. Their relationship is never hostile, though, and more resembles a stern teacher and his feckless pupil.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: It's a wonder Paris has any sense of self-esteem let alone his runaway ego, considering even his father Admiral Paris refused to play favorites with him at the Academy. Part of Tom's rebellious nature stemmed from the feeling that he would never get his dad's approval.
  • In one scene, Tom's father finally gets the chance to tell him he's proud of him. Tom is moved almost to tears.
• White Male Lead: zigzagged. Paris was not the main character of the show, but he was the token Straight White Male; as a result, he was, especially in the earlier seasons, fairly frequently put in positions of prominence not justified by his back story, rank or personality.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: Janeway suggests that Tom Paris’ name will be spoken in the same breath as Neil Armstrong and Zefram Cochrane if he can pull off Warp 10. It's understandable why somebody like Paris would want to get his names in the history books to prove wrong everybody who thinks he is a wastrel. Unfortunately, it means he tends to cut corners in his pursuit of getting Voyager home.

Lieutenant Junior Grade B'Elanna Torres

Lieutenant Junior Grade B'Elanna Torres

Played By: Roxann Biggs-Dawson a.k.a. Roxann Dawson

"I inherited the forehead and the bad attitude, that's it."

A half-breed engineer in the Maquis, now put in charge of Voyager's engines. She counts as a Three-fer Token Minority, but she has renounced her Klingon lineage. It takes a her a while to get a lid on her Klingon rages. Over time, she becomes a surrogate daughter to Janeway and a love interest for Tom; by the end of the series, she gives birth to a girl, Miral Paris.

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• Action Girl: Though petite, her Klingon heritage, fiery temper and sheer Determinator nature when it comes to fighting makes her a Cute Bruiser. Her strength and fighting prowess leaves her with the ability to take down even Cardassians and Vulcans twice her size. In fact in terms of hand-to-hand combat skill, she's probably third on the ship after Tuvok and Seven of Nine.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Torres was an angry little girl with no friends, so it's no great shock that she matured into an angry young woman. She hasn’t seen her father since she was 5 and she thinks her mother is somewhere on Qo'nos. Most of B’Elanna’s "family" are the Maquis members on the ship, so there is no guarantee that anyone back home gives a damn that she is alive. B’Elanna tried to murder her animal guide so it's a safe bet she didn't fit in with the Indians living on the DM, either.
• Art Evolution: The look of Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres changes early in the run of the series. Not the hair styles, but her facial features. She loses the uppermost of her four forehead ridges, resulting in her hairline beginning a bit further forward. Her bushy eyebrows also get reduced to a more human like appearance.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: With Tom. Results in a lot of Slap-Slap-Kiss when they're dating, although their relationship becomes legitimately functional afterwards.
• Big Ol' Eyebrows: A result of her mixed genetics with hairy Klingons.
• Boomerang Bigot: She is trapped between feeling pride at her Klingon heritage and considering it an abomination. She comes close to 'deleting' her daughter's Klingon features while she's still in the womb.
• Broken Bird: Behind all the anger and tough exterior, she's really quite sensitive and very tentative when it comes to emotional relationships, a by-product of still dealing with the psychological issues her father and mother both left her with. It's mostly her relationship with Tom that helps her get past them.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Torres’ way of handling a difference of opinion: giving Carey a bloody nose. According to her, the roadblock at the Academy was a system that didn’t give her a chance to breathe. However, a lot of people at Starfleet vouched for her, so Janeway agrees to roll the dice and make her Chief. B’Elanna only made it into the second year of the Academy so when (and if) they make it home, her honorary title of Chief Engineer may be stripped from her.
• Character Tic: Whenever she's feeling hesitant or uncomfortable with a conversation, she tends to cross her arms and look away from who she's talking to.
• Death Seeker: A few later episodes imply that she has grown so emotionally disconnected with everyone due to their situation that she has some subconscious desire to no longer care about her own safety. Fortunately, Voyager's crew acts as her Morality Chain.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: B'Elanna began the series as one of Janeway's more vocal opponents, but that didn't last long. She also had trouble learning to work in groups, having grown used to her autonomy onboard the Valjean. Tom wore down her emotional defenses which helped a bit in that regard.
• The Engineer:
  • Given that she left Starfleet and joined the Maquis, she was presumably more self-taught and improvisatory than most. That would have been extremely useful, in Voyager's usual circumstances.
  • She joins both Chief O'Brien and Geordi Le Forge in the ranks of legendary Starfleet Engineers who can somehow keep their ship (or starbase) together against all odds.
• Family of Choice: She’s the earliest to admit that she’s got nobody back home who will care if she’s alive or not, and all her friends are on the ship.
• Gadgeteer Genius: She turned a Cardassian missile into a Maquis predator drone, figured out how to let an android race "reproduce," and kept Voyager running in the Delta Quadrant.
• Genius Bruiser: One of the most brilliant and talented engineers to ever wash out of Starfleet Academy, and a fierce fighter who can stand up to full-blooded Klingons to boot.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: This was a major reason that she dropped out of Starfleet Academy, having been written up and suspended multiple times. According to Chakotay, she once started a brawl in Astrotheory 101. When confronted about it, she declares herself the model of tranquility in a way that suggests she will disembowel Harry if he disagrees. (She gets much better at controlling it over the course of the show.)
• Half-Breed Angst: B'Elanna Torres is half-human and half-Klingon. Her human classmates used to tease her for the ridges on her forehead and claim that her fiery personality was due to being half-Klingon. She also blames her Klingon side for driving her father away when she was a child. When she gets pregnant in "Lineage", she wants to defy this by genetically-engineering her future daughter so that she would have no forehead ridges and thus appear completely human, but her husband and the Doctor say no.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Half Human, Half Klingon. Never truly fit in with either.
• Hot-Blooded: She is half Klingon. As Chakotay teases in “The Cloud”, she’s the only one he knows who tried to kill her animal guide.
• I Coulda Been a Contender!: If she had a better lot in life and mixed with the right people she would never have become a wanted felon.
• Internalized Categorism: "Faces", "Barge of the Dead" and "Lineage" imply that B'Elanna loathes her Klingon side, blaming it for much that goes wrong in her life. She becomes more accepting by the end of "Prophecy", when she meets a Klingon who coaxes her into exploring her culture again, but in "Lineage" she tries to make her Half-Human Hybrid baby less Klingon in the belief that she will experience the same Fantastic Racism that she did.
• It's All My Fault: She blames herself for her father's abandonment because, as a child, she overheard him complaining about having to live with two Klingon women and she angrily suggested that he leave. John Torres' behavior on the trip indicated that he was already checking out (e.g. scolding her for "overreacting" to her cousins' bigoted taunts even though their own father wanted to punish them) and a grown man shouldn't base his behavior on a kid's angry taunt, but she never had the chance to process her misplaced guilt.
• Kick the Dog: An oddly literal example.
  Chakotay: B'Elanna is the only person I know who tried to kill her animal guide.
• Kids Are Cruel: In grammar school, she was known as "Miss Turtle Head." The other students loved to wind her up and watch her explode, inevitably getting B'Elanna in trouble while letting the real culprits go scot-free.
• Maligned Mixed Marriage: When she was a child she did everything she could to disguise her forehead, because she and her mother were the only Klingons where she grew up. After her father dumped the family, she cried herself to sleep every night for a month; B'Elanna was convinced he left because she was growing to look like a Klingon. Which was pretty much the case.
• My God, What Have I Done?
  • Lampshaded as early as “Phage”, where Janeway notes with amusement that she goes out of her way to ignore Starfleet procedures.
  • Torres says it word-for-word in "Prototype", when she realizes she's just revived a self-replicating robot army. Before that, there's a moment of Frankensteinian joy when the unit blinks awake, and Torres does everything but say ‘Its ALIIIIIVE’.
  • She talks about Dreadnought as though it were her own child, getting into its guts and reprogramming it to work for the Maquis. Torres sent the missile off to destroy a Cardassian depot without consulting Chakotay, so now she feels responsible for any destruction it causes. How embarrassing for Torres to hear her own voice as a computer drawl threatening Janeway. Just as she has adjusted to being on a Starfleet vessel, her old life as a terrorist has come back to haunt and embarrass her.
• Leave Me Alone!: Fond of this, going all the way back to her childhood. "Lineage" shows that when her father began to get tired of living with two Klingon tempers, she suggested that he just leave. He abandoned the family shortly thereafter.
• Literal Split Personality: As the human B’Elanna in "Faces", she is meek and nervous and lacking in confidence, and you see just how much punch she gives the character usually. To be able to shout at her Klingon half and say her temper has gotten their in trouble so many times is good talk therapy! At the end of the episode, both sides of Torres are still at war.
• Odd Friendship:
  • With The Doctor. As he's a hologram and she's an Engineer, it could be said she's his doctor. In fact, when the Doctor's matrix began to destabilize, the only way to fix him was to boot up a holodeck program that served as a repair manual for the Emergency Medical Hologram. Not having the tools necessary to actually fix him, the only way to fix him was to transpose the Doctor's program onto the matrix being used by the repair program from the holodeck.
  • Despite her resentment of Starfleet as an organization, one of B'Elanna's earliest and most peaceful friendships is with the by-the-book officer Harry Kim, whom she even affectionately calls "Starfleet". It helps that they're both the engineering nerds of their respective crews (Kim even subs in for her in "Resistance"), and that Harry's the bluest of blue onis to B'Elanna's red.
• Official Couple: With Tom, who eventually becomes her husband.
• Out of Focus: One of the characters the writing team were most invested in. You could tell by the way they focused on her immediately after the pilot. There was a nice little arc running through the first three seasons that saw the character go from a hothead to a steady hand. It seems that with the advent of Seven of Nine that Torres was neglected, almost as though you can’t have two character arcs on this show, and she underwent something of a regression.
• Proud Warrior Race Girl: Downplayed. Her Klingon heritage has caused a lot of trouble and tension in her life, so she's not particularly happy about it. However, she still retains the pride, fiery temper and fighting prowess of her heritage (although becoming a warrior was actually a point of contest with her mother).
• Science Hero: One of the most resourceful in all of Trek, though she can be the Action Hero too if called upon.
• Scotty Time: Lampshades the trope in an early conversation with Janeway. B'Elanna tells Janeway a task will take two hours, and Janeway promptly tells her she's got one. B'Elanna fires back "I'm not one of those engineers who pads my repair estimates to make myself look good. If I say it'll take two hours, it'll take two hours."
• Shower Scene: B'Elanna gets her share of sonic showers — although one is ruined by the Doctor buzzing in to inquire about some repairs. ("Nothing I haven't seen before.")
• Spicy Latina: Zigzagged. Torres has Latin heritage, and she is quite fiery; however, her fieriness is entirely due to her Klingon side. When she's split into human and Klingon halves in "Faces", her human (Latina) half is quiet, fragile and emotional.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: For TNG recurring character Ro Laren, just like Kira Nerys in Deep Space Nine before her — Ro joining the Maquis in TNG's penultimate episode was intended as a setup for Voyager. When Michelle Forbes again refused to commit to a full series, the writers invented a new character instead. Like Kira Nerys before her, though, B'Elanna soon developed into her own character.
• Tank-Top Tomboy: In later seasons has a tendency to strip down to her undershirt whenever she has to get hot and sweaty fighting or fixing things.
• Techno Wizard: She always finds a solution for any mechanical problem.
• Tsundere: The "Tragic Past" variety, caused by her conflicting heritages, half-human and half-Klingon. Yes, Tom has a really hard time even getting close to her, although he does seem to be the only one who can calm her down when her temper flies off the hook. Her deredere side only surfaces very occasionally, and generally only with Tom; but her tsuntsun half can be really hot.
• Twofer Token Minority: Hispanic human and Klingon, although by the 24th Century, what with all the Interspecies Romance, it is doubtful that human ethnic/racial divisions are taken very seriously anymore.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: While on a camping trip with her father, a 12-year-old B'Elanna overheard him griping about living under the same roof with two difficult Klingon women. Hurt and betrayed, B'Elanna told him to leave and never come back — advice he took to heart, as he soon left his family.
• Wrench Wench: An inversion of the "Klingon Scientists Get No Respect" cliché, B'Elanna was such a bright student that she far surpassed everyone at the Academy. Unfortunately, she was also quite a bit smarter than her instructors, too. Combined with her hot temper, that probably didn't help her career. Like most Trek engineers, she has little in common with the hotshot officer class. "It may be the warriors who get the glory, but it's the engineers who build societies. Don't forget that."
• You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry!: Her core trait, struggling to control her bestial nature, is one which got her washed out of the Academy. With no one in the Federation interested in her obvious engineering talents, she went to work for Chakotay's band of terrorists, who were far more forgiving of her violent impulses.

Ensign Harry Kim

Ensign Harry Kim

Played By: Garrett Wang

"I better get to the bridge. You never know when Ensign Kim'll be called upon to take command again."

Harry is Voyager's lone innocent. He's a glorified administrator who never moves up in rank (as there supposedly isn't any room), but he is eventually put in charge of the night shift. Over time he becomes more ambitious: bucking for a promotion and, occasionally, standing up to his friend Tom.

---

• Affectionate Nickname: Torres calls him "Starfleet" in that same tone of voice Lois Lane used with "Smallville" in the cartoon.
• Always on Duty:
  • When asked if he wants a tipple at Sandrine's, Harry Kim asks for a cup of tea. Hey, you never know!
  • The lad is ready to jump right back into work at the end of "Emanations", and Janeway has to remind him that he has been dead and might want to ponder that for a day or two.
  • When he starts having panic attacks in "Memorial," the Doctor notes that Kim came straight off an away mission and started doing ship repairs, and diagnoses overwork as the problem.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: He meets Tom Paris when Tom saves him from getting fleeced by Quark. This earns Harry's Undying Loyalty for the remainder of the series, including early on when he pointedly sits with Tom while other Starfleet officers shun him due to his chequered past.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Once he stops letting people push him around.
  • Despite being the newest of New Meat in "The Chute," he actually lasts longer than Tom Paris in a superviolent space prison.
  • He pretty much single-handedly unravels the Hirogen occupation of Voyager (while the Doctor and Seven were important players, they were acting on a plan Kim specifically designed), all while the Hirogen were watching his every move and dishing out random beatings.
  • He's also the driving force behind the Set Right What Once Went Wrong plot in "Timeless".
  • His torpedo trick in "Dark Frontier" annihilates a Borg probe vessel (albeit partially by lucky accident).
  • He pulls a similar trick in "Workforce", rigging three escape pods to explode and disable three attacking warships.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • As Harry once lamented, he is perhaps the most "predictable" crewman on the ship. He often botches his rare opportunities for advancement, seems pathologically incapable of absorbing any bad news, fails to acknowledge the unattainability of women he fancies (often times ignoring the attainable girls in favor of certifiable maniacs!), and becomes little more than a starry-eyed, one note joke that all of the characters have a kick at eventually.
  • Fans were also fond of observing that he was killed and brought back to life with something approaching regularity. Seems even being a major character isn't enough for an Ensign to survive.
  • Subverted in the episode "Timeless", where everyone BUT Harry Kim (and Chakotay) dies, but this only means that Harry suffers from Survivor's Guilt until the end of the episode, when, of course, they both die.
  • Harry Kim has the dubious distinction of being the only officer in Starfleet to be reprimanded for having sex with an alien woman.
  • In both parts of "Future's End", Voyager actually succeeds in returning to Earth, albeit in the wrong timeframe. Because of the story's plot, practically all of the main cast gets to set foot on Earth; even B'Elanna Torres (who is part Klingon and doesn't have as much emotional investment to the planet) and the Doctor (who up until this point was confined to just a few rooms on the ship). Neelix and Kes don't get to visit, but since they're aliens from another quadrant it's just as well. Now, which character was it who had an almost obsession in returning home, but never once got to set foot on the planet during this event? Yep... Harry Kim.
• Clueless Chick-Magnet: Harry's actually on par with his alleged womanizer friend Tom Paris as far as attracting female attention goes, and that's without actively trying as hard. Even Seska at one point says she's had her eye on him, and towards the end, even the Borg Queen will mention him by name. Unfortunately for Harry, his Fatal Attractor / Butt-Monkey status can almost always be guaranteed to kick in.
• Death Is Cheap: Seriously, how many times has he been nearly killed, killed and brought back, or killed and replaced with a parallel universe version of himself (maybe)?
• Distressed Dude:
  • Harry is chained up, beaten and tortured a good deal of time. (Even in the pilot episode.)
  • At least The Clown explains why Harry is such an enticing hostage: With a mind full of technical details, he needs to keep Harry close by because he might just think of a way to rescue the other prisoners. Kim being dragged to the guillotine and having his neck feathered-dustered before the chop is the final indignity.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Kim has survived a ridiculous amount of physical and mental abuse — up to and including multiple deaths — in the line of duty, holds the same job (Ops) that Data did on the Enterprise, co-created the astrometrics lab and personally saved the lives of most of the main cast. He never even appears to be considered for a promotion. (His actor provides one of the trope quotes, no less!)
  • By the end of season six, Harry's openly invoking this trope! When Tom gets a promotion back to lieutenant in "Unimatrix Zero", Harry casually brings up that he doesn't seem to be getting an extra pip... only to be greeted by an awkward silence before mercifully, something comes up on sensors. Harry gets A Day in the Limelight later in season seven where he finally gets to command a ship for realsies. Sure enough, it quickly degenerates into a mutiny.
• Establishing Character Moment: "Mister Kim, at ease before you strain something."
• Fatal Attractor:
  • And for those of you keeping score at home, Harry has fallen in love with the wrong Delaney twin, an ex-Borg, two holograms, a dead girl, three vampires, a member of a xenophobic species, and a xenophobic terrorist wannabe. Man oh man, he can NOT get a break, can he?
  • Libby turned up in season two and it was clear that Kim was still in love with her, and when Paris suggested that he shack up with one of the Delaney sisters he scoffed at the notion. By Season Four, he just seems to have forgotten about her completely and he can be as sexually adventurous as he chooses. Because the series cannot seem to decide whether Harry should be loyal to Libby back home or not, most of these women are harpies placed in Kim's way to mislead him. Tal turned out to be riddled with STDs. (That is not a joke. It actually happened; Kim caught the clap in "The Disease".)
• First Day from Hell: Voyager is Kim's first assignment out of Starfleet Academy.
• Future Badass: In "Timeless" and "Endgame". There is an interesting parallel between the two episodes, both involving time travel. In the former, Kim is a well-intentioned renegade, on the run from a reluctant Captain Geordi LaForge. In the latter, Admiral Janeway steals a prized Federation shuttle, some serum, and a Klingon device before being intercepted by a reluctant Captain Kim.
• Good Cop/Bad Cop: Hilariously, Kim is cast as the Bad Cop (to Chakotay's Good Cop) in a historical reimagining of Voyager in "Living Witness." In a figurative sense, Kim also plays the Bad Cop to Kes' Good Cop in "Resolutions" as the two put the most pressure on acting-Captain Tuvok to relent.
• The Heart: A consistent yet understated part of Harry's character is how he works to foster friendships with the crew. He comes to appreciate Neelix's food, he indulges Janeway's maternal and mentoring instincts, he geeks out with B'Elanna over engineering, he plays wingman to Tom, and he's among the first to recognise Seven as a victim of the Borg, instead of something to be feared. Come the finale, nobody objects when Harry speaks for the crew that the journey is more important than the destination.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: In "Non Sequitur", Harry is willing to give up a great position at Starfleet Headquarters and a chance (however illusory) to spend his life with his happy fiancé for the sake of... saving Tom Paris. He seems to occupy Harry's thoughts as much as Libby does.
• I Will Wait for You: It's commendable that Harry is remaining faithful to his girlfriend on Earth but a little naïve to think they will be getting home within a day or so.
• The Klutz:
  • In "Prime Factors", Harry Kim takes one of the Delaney sisters to Venice, and promptly falls into one of the canals.
  • Even a hazard suit wasn't enough to save him in "Demon": he immediately faceplants into a pool of living mercury.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: When Kim stops being the Butt-Monkey or the Distressed Dude, watch out. His rescue of infant Naomi Wildman in "Deadlock" and his defense of Tom Paris in "The Chute" certainly qualify.
• Limited Advancement Opportunities:
  • He and Chief O'Brien ought to share a pint and compare hard-luck stories. This poor kid remains an Ensign for the entire series, even after everything he's gone through... That said, by the later seasons his rank as Ensign is basically In Name Only, as he takes command and barks orders at Mauve Shirts. It could even be argued his de facto rank is Lieutenant-Commander. This is later rectified in post-series materials.
  • For reference, Tom Paris deliberately and flagrantly violates orders while interfering in the affairs of another species, gets demoted to Ensign and thrown into the brig to sit around bored for a month, and then a year later is re-promoted to Lieutenant, no hard feelings, kiss and make up. Meanwhile, Kim's sitting around being the good officer, following all the rules, and generally being exemplary and offering helpful solutions to problems the ship encounters (while Paris just minds the wheel), and he's stuck at Ensign. No wonder he plays a jazz instrument; it's the language of the blues.
  • Hilariously, there's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment in "Living Witness" when Janeway addresses Kim as "Lieutenant" in the alien society's historical recreation of their encounter with Voyager. So basically, even aliens who remember Voyager as a bunch of crazed, genocidal thugs responsible for all their society's problems are quicker to promote Harry than the real Janeway is.
  • He did shoot all the way up to Captain in only a few years' time in the Bad Future of the series finale, though, so presumably once he was back into Starfleet and had advancement opportunities, he was fast-tracked to make up for lost time. And he still gets stuck with the USS Rhode Island, a Nova-class ship, which "Equinox" established as a class of low-end science vessels that entered service not long before the series started in 2371, over three decades prior. That said, his ship and crew do prove badass enough to safeguard Janeway from a pair of powerful Klingon warships when she heads for a rendezvous with the past Voyager in the Delta Quadrant (whether or not it was a fatal effort is left unrevealed). And then that future is seemingly wiped from existence by Admiral Janeway's changes to the timeline.
  • Curiously, according to some members of the production team this was an Enforced Trope - producer Rick Berman insisted someone had to be Ensign Newbie, so Harry couldn’t be promoted, which annoyed both the writers and Garrett Wang.
• Married to the Job: He'd rather run a trans-data diagnostic then help Paris chat up the Delaney Twins, and doesn’t quite have the hang of exaggerating his importance to smooth-talk his way into their quarters.
• Momma's Boy:
  • According to the clown, Harry sees the Captain as a surrogate mother, which explains an awful lot. When Tuvok is briefly promoted to Captain in "Resolutions", Kim is an inch away from mutiny.
  • Ever the square, he keeps hearing his mother in his head telling him to practice the clarinet and so he has replicated himself one. He also wears a sleeping mask at night because it reminds him of his "mother's womb." Sure, fella.
  • Even his subconscious is square: the worst nightmare Harry could conjure up in "Favorite Son" was being scolded by his grandmother. Oh the humanity.
  • He is the most impatient crewman whenever Neelix the mailman makes his weekly rounds, hopping up and down and demanding to see a message from his parents. Nevermind that Neelix has no control over the influx of decrypted messages.
• Mr. Fanservice: Kim was saved from death in the "Scorpion" two-parter after Garrett Wang landed on People's 50 Most Beautiful list for that year. Which may at least partially explain why he was tied up and tortured so often...
• New Meat: Everything about this kid seems to be geared at reminding the audience that he is inexperienced and desperate to please. He always looks so pained every time somebody reprimands him.
• Nice Guy: Began and ended the series as a darn nice fella.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Kim loves anomalies. With each new disaster which befalls the crew, the possibly for his promotion increases. He's so proud of telling another Ensign what to do in the corridors.
• No Guy Wants to Be Chased: It started with Harry pining for the unavailable Delaney sister and ignoring the horny one. And it snowballs from there.
  Tom: Oh, Here We Go Again!.
  Harry [clueless] What?
  Tom: You, going after impossible women! A hologram, an ex-Borg, the wrong twin, and now a girl from a xenophobic species?!
  • In a nice irony, Harry remonstrates Tom for doing exactly the same thing in the Season 2 episode "Parturition".
  Paris: Hey, don't knock it if you haven't tried it.
  • Somewhat less humorously, when a group of Klingon cultists start squatting on the ship, Harry has to duck a particularly pushy one who takes a liking to him and won't take no for an answer. He shows up in sick bay with bruises.
• Odd Friendship: Despite being easily the most straitlaced Nice Guy Starfleet officer of the main crew, Harry's first two real friendships are with Paris and Torres — both convicted and/or wanted Maquis criminals.
• Only-Child Syndrome: He is an only child, and he once talks about how much his parents spoiled him, calling him their "miracle child". He often wondered if he really deserved that much devotion.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: In "Resolutions," Kim's so horrified at leaving Janeway and Chakotay behind that his obsession with protocol goes out the window and he openly revolts. He has to be talked down by Tom Paris of all people!
• The Pollyanna: Harry Kim is naïve from the off, and nothing changes in seven years. You can't even say he looks older (which is entirely to his credit), so he's as green at the end of the series as he is at the beginning, despite having died several times along the way. Harry is something of an anti-Worf in a way. Rather than offer up a stratagem which is immediately shot down by the Captain (only to later be proven right), Harry will be the first to suggest a long-shot outcome which is not to be.
  Tom: You shouldn't get your hopes up, Harry. No hopes, no disappointments.
  Harry: I'm not you.
• School Newspaper Newshound: Harry edited the newspaper at Starfleet Academy and broke the story of the Maquis rebellion, getting the students and faculty to form opinions and take sides.
• Sexy Sax Man: Harry Kim and the Kimtones. This jazz quartet performed for the Qomar in "Virtuoso", with Harry on clarinet.
• They Killed Kenny Again: Not a deliberate version, but Harry ended up 'dying' more than any other main character.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: Harry, salivating over yet another cluster of wormholes, pitches a plan to investigate them in "Endgame." Captain Janeway overrules his dumb idea only to be overruled herself by the older and wiser Admiral Janeway. Turns out that Harry's hunch was right for once.
• Thrown Out the Airlock: In just one of his many deaths, Harry gets blown out into space through a hull breech, only to have his place taken by his other self from a mirror universe.
• Token Good Teammate: A walking Starfleet recruitment poster, Harry is the lone voice of optimism amid this voyage of the damned.
• Took a Level in Badass: Starts out as green as they come but becomes a more capable and confident officer as time goes on.
  • Lampshaded in an episode by Tom after he stands up to Tuvok during a briefing, rather than roll over for him.
• Undying Loyalty: He's eliminated an alternate timeline, twice, for the sake of the well-being of his friends and shipmates. That's a friend.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: In "Timeless," and in the sense of wiping out an entire timeline, he succeeds. Beware the Nice Ones, indeed.

The Doctor

The Doctor

Played By: Robert Picardo

"Please state the nature of the medical emergency."

Voyager had an actual doctor, but he died en route to the Delta Quadrant. Fortunately, the ship is outfitted with experimental software: an Emergency Medical Hologram who can oversee Sickbay when the real Doctor is unavailable. Imperious, snarky, and pushed way beyond his comfort zone, The Doctor became a fan favorite.

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• Action Survivor: There were a couple of episodes where the Doctor was the only character who had not been captured, leading to a Die Hard-like scenario where he had to save the ship.
• Aesop Amnesia: Several episodes had some malfunction occur in his matrix as a result of his own attempted self-improvements. Among these are him turning into a total psychopath and losing his grip on reality. He never simply took the advice of getting some help in installing these improvements.
  • The Doctor will always stick up for the rights of artificial life, whether it be holographic, mechanical or otherwise. He often forgets that most of the alien A.I.s Voyager has encountered have turned out to be violent, insane or both!
• All Love Is Unrequited: Has this for Seven, complete with Anguished Declaration of Love when he thinks his program is decompiling in the penultimate episode. Also may have had a bit of a crush on Kes.
• The All-Solving Hammer: The Doctor’s plan to create a pair of holographic lungs for Neelix (in "The Phage"), is pretty inspired and proves he is able to innovate as well as act as the ship's medic: holographic mirrors on the ship's hull to project fake ships (used once in "Basics" and then abandoned, natch), an "Emergency Command Hologram" [!] to maintain the ship while in crisis, and even a theoretical "Photonic Cannon". Between his hard light technology and Seven's "nano-probes", this ship has got the Delta Quadrant licked.
• Ambiguously Jewish: By extension, at least. His appearance and personality is based on his creator Lewis Zimmerman, whose surname is often associated with Ashkenazi Jews.
• Artificial Intelligence: Unlike the rest of the crew, he's a hologramed program.
• Attention Whore: He'll always be a piece of Starfleet property, but on alien worlds (or in the holodeck) the Doc is very often the toast of town and he basks in the popularity.
• Badass Pacifist: or maybe Combat Medic:
  Unferth: Stop him, my Lord! He is a madman!
  EMH: The only reason you won't die is that I've taken an oath to do no harm.
• The Bore: After he starts developing hobbies, he routinely subjects the crew to them, whether it's lectures on medicine or slideshows.
• Breakout Character: Like Data, his struggle to become more human and individual was good episode fodder.
• Cannot Spit It Out:
  • The Doctor admits that he finds Kes beautiful and he has always longed to tell her. Rinse and repeat with Seven of Nine.
  • In contrast to both of these, the first time The Doctor had romantic feelings toward someone in "Lifesigns" it was averted in as hard a fashion as possible.
  EMH: (while casually performing brain surgery) By the way, Danara, I've been meaning to tell you....
  Danara: Yes?
  EMH: (Unashamedly blunt) I'm romantically attracted to you and wanted to know if you felt the same way.
• Catchphrase: "Please state the nature of the medical emergency."
  • After being given the option to change his start-up phrase, after much deliberation he decided to just leave it as it was, admitting that he'd become fond of it and its simplicity.
• Character Development: Designed for limited supplementary work, he's basically a glorified nurse, having to transcend his own hard-coded limitations. When his date in "Lifesigns", asks the Doctor about his life, all he has to boast about is a list of surgical procedures he has performed – there is nothing personal about his program and nothing that he does for pleasure. This changes a good deal in the future.
• Closed Circle: Until acquiring the Mobile Emitter, he couldn't venture outside any location with holographic emitters (ie. Sickbay and the Holodeck). And even then, the Holodeck emitters had to be reconfigured before he could materialise there.
• The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes: He’s tired of the whining amongst the crew every time one of them falls ill, so in "Tattoo" he adjusts his program to give himself flu to show how you can muddle through even when you feel uncomfortable. Unfortunately (or predictably) it all goes horribly wrong and he is forced to suffer longer than he intended and learns the lesson of being nicer to his patients.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character:
  • Comparatively, he's similar to The Next Generation's Beverly Crusher, being that they are the emotionally driven and sensitive members acting as their own crew's doctor. But otherwise, he is easily different to the human doctor in so many ways. Beverly is a flesh-and-blood human who is the mainstay doctor of the Enterprise-D, while the Doctor is an Emergency Medical Hologram who is the substitute to the Voyager's real Doctor who was KIA during the first episode of Voyager. But while Beverly is a Combat Medic who puts her life on the line, the Doctor is an Action Survivor who is usually the one doing the saving when the Voyager's crew is in danger and with himself being the only one who is not captured. Beverly is warm, friendly and also maternal towards the crew, while the Doctor is a Dr. Jerk, who has an attitude problem, being short-tempered and grouchy, and is extremely straight to the point.
  • He also is a contrast to Data. Both are artificially constructed beings who strive to become more human, but unlike the emotionless Data who was made as a blank slate and given room to develop into his own being, the Doctor was programmed with a complete preset personality and set of emotions (and personality flaws, based directly on his creator) and developed beyond that over time.
• Costumer: Pagliacci, Rembrandt... And he once wore a bitchin' smoking jacket.
• Disability Immunity: As a Projected Man, the Doctor could initially not even leave Sickbay, and came with other limitations. As a tradeoff, his lack of physical form made him immune to all sorts of things that would inconvenience his flesh-and-blood shipmates, such as the energy weapon used by an attacker in "Latent Image" which mortally wounds the two people with the Doctor but has no effect on him.
• Dr. Jerk: He comes online when the ship is in pieces and replaces the old Doctor who somehow had an even bigger attitude problem than the EMH! (Star Trek loves a crabby doctor.) There is no physician, no surgeon, and no counsellor on board and the EMH is trying to cope with the job of all three. Initially he came across as a mean cuss, although the crew didn't exactly endear themselves to him either, since they kept turning him off without asking and treating him as if he wasn't real. He was also much nicer than the flesh and blood doctor he replaced, right from the start.
• Deadpan Snarker. The Doctor's black humor and pithy takedowns are legendary. Especially when someone forgets to turn him off (in fact, Picardo's response to that in his audition got him the role.) He can demolish pretty much any Star Trek villain in ten words or less. For example, after Voyager encounters a nebula that turns out to be a life form has this exchange:
  Janeway: I need to know if we did serious harm to this life-form.
  Doctor: Let's see - you ran your ship through it, fired phasers at it and blew a hole in it with a photon torpedo. I'd say it's a pretty good chance that you did.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Oddly it is a holographic character that enjoys the most development in Voyager and his journey from over-qualified ear, nose & throat doctor (in "Caretaker") to a respected Federation author and scientist (in "Author, Author" and "Endgame") is really something. In her initial tours of the ship Janeway unthinkingly ends the EMH in front of a roomful of people. Nobody treats him as a person in his own right yet; he is just a tool.
• The Eeyore: Just like the rest of the Mk. I line. He became more jocular over the course of the show.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": For most of the early seasons, he debated over choosing a name (Thank goodness the Doctor didn’t keep the name "Schmalus"). He finally settles on one of the blandest names possible (Joe), to appease his wife. But that happened in the alternate future of "Endgame".
• Fake Defector: Seska takes the Doctor at face value when he feigns ambivalence at her "change of command".
• Fascinating Eyebrow: As with Vulcans, used mainly for silence snarking or ironic commentary.
• Forehead of Doom: Like all Mark I EMHs, he has a huge shiny forehead just like his creator.
• Good Counterpart: To Professor Moriarty on TNG.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: He eventually became a full-fledged crew member with a wide array of skills, including tactical and engineering expertise. Both came in handy when the crew evacuated or went into hibernation.
• Hard Light Hologram: Though he can toggle this at will. His substantiation is effected through projected forcefields as with any holographic projection in Star Trek.
• Heroic BSoD: A literal one, brought on by a Sadistic Choice of saving Harry's life or that of another crewman. This wreaks havoc with the Doctor's ethical subroutines, which aren't equipped to make such a judgement.
• I Am the Noun: "I am the embodiment of modern medicine."
• I Can't Dance: In the episode with his Vidiian crush.
• I Hate Past Me: Since Zimmerman is pretty much the arrogant, thoughtless Doctor we encounter in "Caretaker" it is useful to compare the two characters and see how much he has changed.
• I'm a Doctor, Not a Placeholder: He actually used this line more than Bones did, believe it or not (helps that the show ran for over twice what the original did). Justified since he's a hologram built for that purpose alone.
  • Incidentally, during his audition, Picardo, a non-Trekkie, ad-libbed the line, "I'm a doctor, not a nightlight," despite having no clue that it was McCoy's catchphrase back in TOS. He got the part.
  • His holographic nature afforded him a larger array of things he could be a placeholder for, such as a battery or a database. A character lampshades the latter by pointing out that, indeed, the Doctor is also a database.
• Impossible Genius: "We're hoping the Doctor will be able to successfully reintegrate Commander Chakotay’s consciousness…" If ever there was a contest held for technobabble endings that skip over logic to restore the status quo, "Carthexis" would a strong contender. Until "Threshold" came along.
• Ink-Suit Actor: A rare in-universe version. His appearance and voice are identical to his human programmer, Lewis Zimmerman. Naturally, both are played by Robert Picardo.
• Insufferable Genius: He’s an incredibly sophisticated computer simulation even if he says so himself! While the Doctor is undoubtably one of the smartest people on Voyager and skilled in multiple fields, he often tends to act as though he's a lot more capable and versed than he actually is.
• It Will Never Catch On: The Doctor jokes to Torres that if he had the ability to program himself he would raise a family. To prove that a high-concept idea is never wasted on this show this was followed up in Real Life. Neelix was also the one to suggest he take up singing, to which the Doctor responded with a snort.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Evolved into this after befriending Kes.
• Job-Stealing Robot: He was developed as a short-term supplement to the medical staff with 1500 hours life in him tops, and after being active for 2 years his memory simply cannot handle the extra activities he has incorporated.
• The Lab Rat: Because so much of VOY's medical equipment and personnel armor depends on the user's unique physiognomy, the Doctor is always kept busy devising new doohickeys to keep them alive.
• Last of His Kind: The EMH Mark 1's lousy bedside manner meant that the program was considered an abysmal failure in the Alpha Quadrant and they were repurposed to mine dilithium. The Doctor is the only EMH Mark 1 still in service as a Physician. Except the USS Equinox, which also had one, but that EMH was evil and got deleted.
• Like Father, Like Son: He is the spitting image of his creator, Dr. Lewis Zimmerman, both in appearance and in personality: short-tempered, not very personable, and a touch arrogant.
• The McCoy:
  • Janeway makes a big mistake in "Basics" by telling the Doctor that his advice is always welcome on any topic...that statement will come back to haunt in the years to come.
  • For all his rude and abrasive attitude, the Doctor is still a very sensitive and kind-hearted man who will more often than not (angrily) interject his compassion into a moral dilemma; quite ironic considering he is an artificial construct. Evidently this came about from a UPN edict urging the writers to give the non-human characters more chances to emote.
• Miles Gloriosus: The Doctor (as Beowulf) telling amazing stories of his prowess (basically some pretty dull medical successes) whilst waving around the largest leg of meat you've ever seen.
• Minored In Ass Kicking: No one could compete with the Doctor when he initiated the Emergency Command Hologram and took over the bridge. Pure gold.
• Morality Chip: "Ethical subroutines"...which can be deactivated if you need him to cross a Moral Event Horizon.
• Most Writers Are Writers: "Author, Author", a clever send-up of fan criticisms of the series. In the Doctor's thinly-veiled holonovel about his shipmates, Chakotay is defined entirely by his religion (with comically huge facial tattoos and Bajoran earrings), "Torrey" is angry all the time, "Tom Marseilles" is a lech, and "Captain Jenkins" is a cruel viper with a itchy trigger finger.
  • Tom gets revenge by reprogramming the sim, depicting the Doctor as an insufferable ass who spends far too much time on his recreational subroutines (like golf).
• No Social Skills: And it's a trait all EMH's have thanks to Lewis Zimmerman's own issues ("Emergency Medical Hotheads"). However, since the EMH is operating nonstop, he develops them.
• Odd Friendship: With B'Elanna Torres (half Klingon) and Seven of Nine (half borg).
• Only Sane Employee: As the Emergency Command Hologram. It's best demonstrated in "Workforce", when the alien race that abducted the entire crew ordered him to surrender and allow Voyager to be boarded. The Doctor responds by immediately opening fire and crippling the vessel.
• Only Sane Man: Several times he thinks about himself this way. Is he the only one in the ship who realizes that going into a nebula is asking for trouble? Or that a patient should have a little rest after a delicate operation? Or that making a Mind-Meld puts Tuvok and the other's lives in risk?
• Oops! I Forgot I Was Married: In "Projections" he got himself trapped into a malfunctioning holonovel, and had a crisis of being unsure if he was what he is, or if he was a human being and his whole existence on Voyager was a complex holonovel. Once all the Dream Within a Dream sequence was over, he asked questions to confirm his identity, and one of them was "And Kes is my assistant... not my wife".
  • After his attempt at creating a holographic family, he never mentions his wife, son, or dead daughter again in the series. Though given how traumatic this was for him, perhaps he simply didn't want to.
• Phlebotinum-Proof Robot: Being a hologram, he is unaffected by many things which could hurt, or even kill, the rest of the crew. He is used for this purpose in several episodes.
• Projected Man: The ship's only holographic crewmember.
• Pygmalion Plot: Seven of Nine has trouble assimilating into human society. Given his long struggle to grow beyond his programming, the Doctor thinks he's an expert on the subject and tries to advise her accordingly, eventually falling in love with her.
• Psychotic Smirk: Wears one when his ethical subroutines are turned off.
• Really 700 Years Old: In "Living Witness", his backup copy actually is 700 years old when it's uncovered by alien archaeologists.
• Renaissance Man: Likes to think of himself as one in later seasons, and is even lampshaded in the episode of that name. He sings a select number of classical music from the era throughout the show.
• Rip Van Winkle: "Living Witness" and "Timeless" had the Doctor's program being activated years after the crew was dead.
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: As the Doctor is ravenous for fame and prizes, the hologram of Crell Moset (a Cardassian "doctor" known and feared through Bajor's labor camps) throws every bribe in the book at him, including promises of co-authorship on a research paper when they return to Earth. Even the Doctor has to draw the line somewhere, however; to endorse Moset's research would set a dangerous precedent. ("Nothing Human")
  Moset: You're a physician. You know there's always a price to pay for the advancement of medical science.
  Doctor: Sometimes that price is too high. Torture?!
  Moset: Your word, not mine. I cured the Fostossa virus, didn't I?
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: When his ethical subroutines are turned off, he becomes this, and it's clear he enjoys doing morally ethical things.
• Soul Jar: The Doctor eventually got a "mobile emitter" which made him a self-sustaining hologram and allowed him to roam the halls. As a plot point, this could always be stolen from him to deactivate him.
• Super-Powered Robot Meter Maids: When he turns into the "Emergency Command Hologram", especially in the episode "Renaissance Man".
• Team Dad: Kes has always shown a daughterly affection for the Doctor. With Tom, he's very much the curmudgeonly father waiting in vain for his son to grow up.
• Tinman Typist: Wrote an unintentionally scathing holonovel about his struggles with the rest of the crew of Voyager, that despite being released without his consent, became something of a cult hit with the other EMHs.
  • The part of the trope about using human means of interfacing with a computer (like typing or voice-commands) despite being a program who should be able to just connect to other programs on the computer is given an implied justification: as an emergency hologram it makes perfect sense to separate his programming and computer systems from the main computer systems so something that damages the main computer doesn't necessarily damage the EMH.
• Unknowingly in Love: He's a holograph with the appearance and mind of a grown man, but only a few years of actual life experience. Therefore, he doesn't understand what romantic love is, having not experienced it up until the events of "Lifesigns". Until Kes suggests that he's in love, he doesn't know why he's been so nervous and spacey ever since his crush arrived.
• Weak-Willed: Quickly becomes something of a Sense Freak when temporarily in control of Seven's body.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: The Doctor is eager to show Dr Zimmerman how much he's evolved — unfortunately his creator turns out to be a Jerkass who's embarrassed about the Mark One's very existence. It was only after the Doctor saved his life (after some very intense pressure to overcome his stubbornness) that he realized that at least there was one Mark One still active out there who wasn't a failure.
• What Is This Feeling?: The Doctor underplays the scene where Janeway offers him autonomous control of his on/off switch. This is a man whose needs have never been up for discussion, and he doesn’t quite know how to respond to the offer.
• The Worf Effect: The Doctor is potentially the deadliest adversary you'll face in the Trek universe (Just see "Worst Case Scenario" or "Renaissance Man"!). In the end, though, he's just software. His program is easily "destabilized" in a ship battle, causing him to flicker and vanish. The mobile emitter actually makes him more vulnerable. If the emitter shorts out or is damaged while in transit, the Doctor's program could be entirely lost.
• You Are in Command Now: Due to Voyager's original chief medical officer and nurse dying when the ship is forcibly brought to the Delta Quadrant, the EMH is forced to become the new de facto chief medical officer, a position he was never designed to fill. The fact that he does fill it, and does a pretty damn good job of it, basically rewrites the book on Starfleet's EMHs. It then gets taken beyond medical matters when he's upgraded with the "Emergency Command Hologram" expansion, allowing him to take command of Voyager herself.

Neelix

Neelix

Played By: Ethan Phillips

"I'm not a fighter. I'm just a cook — who sometimes imagines himself to be a diplomat."

Self-appointed "Morale Officer". A denizen of the Delta Quadrant who runs into Voyager not long after her arrival. Neelix is a jovial and, at times, resourceful junk trader who signs on as a guide to Janeway.

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• Absurd Phobia: A remarkably specific one that he nonetheless has to deal with several times over the course of the show; Nihiliphobia, the Fear of Nothingness. When Voyager has to travel through a region of space that's completely and utterly empty, he has a panic attack after looking out his window and not seeing any stars. Later when revived after being clinically dead for several hours he lapses into an existential and religious crisis at the idea of The Nothing After Death. Later still, when an alien life form takes over the ship and cuts off all sensors and lights (leaving Neelix alone in the darkened mess hall with no idea what's going on around him), he's a quivering mess until Tuvok comes to guide him to safety.
• A Day in the Limelight: Although his usual function was light-hearted comic relief, several episodes showed Neelix in a much more serious and sometimes tragic light, such as "Jetrel", "Fair Trade", and "Mortal Coil".
• Authority in Name Only: Not only is he Voyager's (self-appointed) Morale Officer, he's also the ship's cook, leading diplomat, and interstellar guide (at least one alternate future also has him becoming a security officer). The absurdity is not lost on Neelix himself, who lampshades it on a few occasions. In his departing appearance, the crew lined the corridors to give him a farewell salute, which is more than he ever expected.
  (pats imaginary combadge) "Neelix to Security. Kes' frown is losing its structural integrity. Red alert. I'm detecting a smile."
• Back for the Finale: Seven gets to catch up with Neelix in the final episode. Like him or loathe him, he was an integral part of this show for seven years and it's only right that he should show up for the swansong.
• The Bore: As the show progresses, they deliberately play on the fact that Neelix is annoying as Hell and almost always make "Mr. Vulcan" the target of this annoyance to get a cheap laugh out of the fact you're not supposed to be able to annoy a Vulcan, but you clearly can. This is kind of Ethan Phillips' wheelhouse: he plays a lot of pleasantly-annoying people.
• Butt-Monkey: In universe, one of the show's longest running gags among the crew, is Neelix's supposedly terrible cooking. Among the audience, his reputation was summed up by a game reviewer for Elite Force, saying that one of the best things about the game was the fact that, "you can shoot Neelix."
• Chef of Iron: ""Don’t worry Captain! You can count on me to keep those nefarious Kazon at bay!" With what, a breadstick? He does get promoted to Security Officer in "Year of Hell", but that timeline is ultimately erased.
• Composite Character:
  • A mixture of Guinan (serves beverages, belongs to an endangered species) and Quark (runs con games, loves to annoy the security chief). Fun Fact: Both Phillips and Rene Auberjonois (Odo) previously appeared as regulars on Benson, in which Rene A.'s character was the more insufferable character of the two.
  • According to the Doctor, "Tuvix "contains Tuvok’s irritating sense of intellectual superiority and Neelix’s annoying ebullience! Actually, as an amalgamation of the two characters Tuvix brings out the best in them: you have Tuvok's tidiness in Neelix's kitchen and Neelix's sense of joy in Tuvok's deliberations. Even the Starfleet uniform is jazzed up with the Neelix swirls added…
• Cordon Bleugh Chef:
  • Despite the Running Gag, Neelix can and does make food the crew likes, and they are occasionally seen asking for seconds. However, in "State of Flux" he comments that humans aren’t used to roughing it (which is harsh but valid) and that they better get used to it because its Leola root stew from now on! Bleugh! Bloodworm tartare! Ugh!
  • Tuvok is initially very thankful that Neelix took the time to study food native to Vulcan, but quickly loses his cool because a time-honored recipe has been meddled with! Neelix desperately wanting to give people a touch of home but cannot help but put his own...unique stamp on things.
  • His experiments combining (mostly basic) Delta Quadrant ingredients with Alpha Quadrant recipes, plus his preference for spicy foods, often yields unappetizing results.
  Tuvok: (tries his "Elixir of Endurance", gags) ....Interesting.
  Kim: (pained) Not bad. Not bad at all.
  Torres: (struggling to keep it down) What... is it exactly?
  Seven: It is offensive.
  • One of his great-grandfathers was from a species without taste buds. Which might explain why his food is less than delicious.
• Crazy Jealous Guy: He really can't stand it when Kes talks to another man.
• Crisis of Faith: In "Mortal Coil", he's shattered when he returns from an eighteen-hour death with no memory of an afterlife. His faith that his family and the other deceased millions of Rinax were in a peaceful forest had kept him going until then, and experiencing Cessation of Existence instead nearly drove him to suicide. Chakotay talks him down, but there's no Reset Button on his belief.
• Cynicism Catalyst: Underneath it all, there are hints that Neelix is bitter, depressed, and filled with self-loathing for having deserted during the war, which meant that he was safely offworld when most of his race (including his family) were wiped out by the Metreon Cascade.
• Depending on the Writer: Is Neelix a silly yet loveable Jack of All Trades or is he an annoying Bumbling Sidekick? The writers seemingly couldn't decide on the former or the latter, so in one episodes he's shown to be an able trader, guide and community organizer, and in the next he's so obnoxious and incompetent that you wonder how he managed to fend for himself for so long (and why Janeway doesn't just leave him on the nearest M-class planet). His last major appearance seems to put him firmly in the former category though.
• Draft Dodging: He skipped out on military service due to moral objections, which contributes to a lifelong case of survivor's guilt over the near-extinction of his race in the war.
• Fan Disservice: Neelix is a rake in his first couple of scenes and you can see precisely the joke that they are going for, with Neelix taking full advantage of his new accommodations, and Tuvok looking ready to drown Neelix in the bathtub after seeing him naked.
• For Happiness: Often tries to cheer up the crew, especially (to his annoyance) Tuvok.
• Fun Personified:
  • Quark was appointed "community leader", Neelix is the self-appointed "morale officer." There is one key difference between the two mascots, though. Neelix lacks the ability to hurt people. Also, he prefers to cheer people up the old fashioned way (e.g. not resorting to alcohol or whores).
  • He definitely took the "office" seriously, and in some of Voyager's more extreme situations, it paid off. He also moonlights as the ship's talk show host, babysitter, bard, etc.
• The Gadfly: He’s instantly a thorn in Tuvok’s side. Tuvok is so stony faced and Neelix is doing everything in his power to get the Vulcan to crack. Occasionally it is beyond irritating, and at other times, it shames Tuvok and forces him to reconsider his views.
• Genocide Survivor: Neelix is one of the few survivors of a moon whose population was wiped out by a weapon of mass destruction.
• Going for the Big Scoop: In "Investigations", Neelix launches his own daytime talk show. Janeway is very happy for Neelix to spread the good word through his broadcasts, but she's less than thrilled when he inadvertently bumbles his way into the middle of a complex, multi-week operation while looking for a story.
• The Heart: Comes with the job as Morale Officer.
• Immigrant Patriotism: Despite never reaching Earth or the Federation, Neelix displays an enormous pride in them and fights as hard as anyone else to get back to the Alpha Quadrant. He and Naomi were the ones to organize the celebration of First Contact Day and he's pleased as punch when Tuvok reenacts the first human-Vulcan interaction.
• Intrepid Reporter: Neelix begins using his television show A Briefing With Neelix to unmask spy Michael Jonas, after having been inspired by School Newspaper Newshound Harry Kim to do this.
• Kavorka Man: The first snog on the ship goes to Neelix and there is something very odd about that.
• Lethal Chef: The mess hall becomes something of a liability to the crew as he begins experimenting with their food and hospitalizing crewmembers. Neelix is shown to be a decent chef when he sticks to basics and has good, familiar ingredients. However, between his love for experiments, his fondness for spices and his complete infamiliarity with a lot of the foodstuffs Voyager gathers (some of which are only nominally edible) the end results land somewhere between "inedible" and "lethal". The most notable has to be time he managed to give the actual ship food poisoning.
  Neelix: [goes for Tom's throat] I'LL KILL YOU!!
  Paris: It's too late! I'm betting your hair pasta already did the trick!
• Mandatory Line: Not the only, but certainly the most notable case on Voyager. After Voyager travelled past the territory known to Neelix, and Kes left the ship, the writers sometimes struggled to include Neelix in episodes, especially if they were action heavy, or didn't have any scenes in the Mess Hall. This resulted in Neelix hand-delivering e-mail to the crew, serving coffee on the bridge, and generally interrupting crew members during their duties with random excuses that had no relation to the plot whatsoever, just so he could be present for a notable event (and Ethan Phillips had a few lines in the episode).
  Neelix: (entering Astrometrics, just before Seven of Nine picks up a Starfleet signal for the first time in years) I'M READY FOR MY [singing] LESSON!!!
• May–December Romance: Because of the Ocampan aging process, Neelix often talks to Kes like an overbearing parent rather than a lover. This was among the reasons for their breakup. It ends up zigzagged a little bit for the viewer, as Ethan Phillips is almost two decades the senior of Kes' actress Jennifer Lien, and that's never not visible either.
• The Medic: As a true Jack of All Trades, Neelix is also trained as a field medic (although on a far more basic level than Kes and Tom), and is seen to put his training to good use on several occasions (although the Doctor is not particulary enthousiastic about his attempts at "Talaxian homeopathy"). His biomimetic duplicate even serves as Chief Medical Officer for a while.
• Namesake Gag: Neelix is the namesake for Barclay's cat... Neelix
• Native Guide: In the pilot, local junk dealer Neelix 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 knowledge^note in "Fair Trade", and his usefulness as a guide comes to an end.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • Blimey, you know it's bad news if "Make the Vulcan Smile" Neelix is stomping around and pissed off.
  • His penchant for storytelling is used to insult Jetrel as though he is stabbing him with a rusty knife.
• Only One Name: If he's called anything else, we never hear it.
• Parental Substitute: As the godfather to Naomi Wildman.
• Reformed Criminal: He used to smuggle various types of contraband. It comes back to bite him when he meets his old partner and their attempts to get a map goes south.
• Sad Clown:
  • In the space of a season Neelix has his lungs ripped out and is told that he has a life threatening illness.
  • Neelix used to live in a colony in Rynax which had warm days and balmy nights until the metreon cascade, a weapon of mass destruction. Those lovely days were turned into one endless frigid night. 300,000 were killed and Neelix only survived by becoming a deserter (he was supposed to be on Talax with the rest of the defense force). He tries desperately hard to stay chipper but his voice breaks and his feelings take over when Jetrel, the man in charge of the cascade's deployment, turns up again like a bad penny. Neelix thinks of himself as a coward, because during wartime punishment for refusing to fight is death. Neelix has lost his mother, father and his younger siblings.
  • Not to mention the PTSD when he revived from the dead and suffered the loss of his faith.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran. His planet was invaded, and his family and most of the rest of the population were wiped out.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: When Voyager finds a small Talaxian colony in Season 7, Neelix decides to stay with them.
• Stepford Smiler: It becomes clear over the course of the series that Neelix's overbearing cheer is a coping mechanism to suppress his depression, loneliness, and self-loathing after his home and family were wiped out, something the writers occasionally brought back.
• The Storyteller: Neelix is a living compendium of old folk tales from the Delta Quadrant, which occasionally comes in handy when dealing with screwball aliens who hide their true motives.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Obviously the crew misses having him talk everyone's ears off in "Endgame", since they replace him with an even more irritating Bolian once he leaves.
• Team Chef: Since they're saving replicator energy, Neelix cooks things by hand in the mess hall.
• The Thing That Would Not Leave: Case in point: Neelix moves in with Tuvok without informing him. Tuvok is sitting in his PJs drinking tea and reading when Neelix barges in and makes himself comfortable. That time when he copulated with a Klingon in Tuvok's living quarters was also a highlight.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Neelix insisting on making his leola root stew even though nobody likes it.
• Took a Level in Badass: When he was scouting the Talaxian asteroid colony in Season 7, due to being shipwrecked, he saw his fellow Telaxians getting bullied by some aliens trying to lay claim to the asteroid that is their home, because they're also shipwrecked, and have terraformed the place, from scratch. When the leader of these aliens tries to direct violence at the telaxians, an unarmed Neelix beats him down, despite the fact that he has a phaser, and throws the squad out instead.
  Neelix:"You've said what you have to. Now, LEAVE!"
• Took a Level in Dumbass: In the pilot, he's a savvy, knowledgable, independent, and most importantly competent operator who not only is engaging in Obfuscating Stupidity to throw the Voyager crew off his scent while he gets to know them, but is quite capable of manipulating Janeway and the rest of the crew into getting the Kazon Ogla off his back and onto theirs. The writers tried to justify this by saying that, in comparison to the hypercompetent crew of Starfleet/ex-Starfleet officers he's surrounded by, he just can't measure up, but that ignores the fact that in the pilot episode, he conned those "hypercompetent Starfleet officers" as easily as blinking, and had a firm grasp of Starfleet tech and its uses within hours of first encountering it.
• Uneven Hybrid: He's 7/8 Talaxian, 1/8 Mylean.
• Verbal Backspace: A Running Gag in the early seasons, when Neelix would exaggerate his knowledge and skill set.
• The World's Expert (on Getting Killed): He claims to be an expert on many things, including mining and camping. The former ended up with him falling down a cliff and pulling Torres down with him. The latter led directly to the deaths of at least two crewmen. He also claims expertise in crew morale and cooking. This has led handmade food on the ship to be viewed as a punishment as well as the direct cause for a thriving replicator credits black market. He has also poisoned the ship on one occasion - not the crew, the actual ship itself. The most unfair part is that he himself survives, even when wandering off on his own got his lungs removed; other people suffer for thinking he knows what he's talking about.
• You Can't Go Home Again: His homeworld's destruction turned him into a drifter.
• Zeerust: Neelix seems to have missed his calling as a mailman. When Voyager finally re-establishes contact with Starfleet, and the crew starts receiving letters, Neelix gathers up an armload of PADDs and hand-delivers everyone's e-mail. He does this twice more - in one case, even delivering imaginary mail, sent by a telepathic pitcher plant that makes you believe your deepest desire came true (let that one sink in for a moment!). In other episodes he manually downloads files from Voyagers' database to hand them over on PADDs (a whole container of them) or the Borg equivalent of a thumb drive, instead of just directly transferring the files to a specific workstation.

Kes

Kes

Played By: Jennifer Lien

"I want complication in my life."

Kes is a medical assistant in Sickbay: an antidote to the Doctor's awful bedside manner. Shortly after she joins the ship, she begins to help the Doctor develop an identity. She was Neelix's girlfriend until they broke up in the third season. Eventually, her latent telepathic powers grow out of control and she leaves the main cast.

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• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: How she leaves the ship.
• Badass Adorable: When she gets serious she is adorably dangerous.
• Beware the Nice Ones: "Cold Fire" and "Warlord" hint at a darker side to Kes, which comes out fully when she returns in "Fury".
• Bizarre Alien Biology: The Ocampa's reproductive cycle is... weird. To whit, Ocampa can get pregnant only once, and they get one child... you do the math. Apparently the writers forgot this (Canon Discontinuity?), as there was also a reference to Kes having an uncle.
  • The writers explained that Ocampa's have higher odds for having twins in order to supplement their low fertility.
• Blessed with Suck: Though her telepathic abilities have proved useful on several occasions, they nevertheless put Kes through a number of traumatic experiences, such as her terrifying first encounter with the minds of Species 8472.
• Bold Explorer: Defends Janeway in “The Cloud”, saying that she would try and crack every part of the universe open and look inside like the Captain does.
• Break the Cutie: Goes through an early reproductive cycle, kidnapped by the Doctor when he was temporarily evil, possessed by a brutal tyrant....
• The Bus Came Back: She returns in the season 6 episode "Fury" but not Not as You Know Them.
• Caring Gardener: The cute and cuddly girl eventually runs the hydroponics bay. Often combined with Innocent Flower Girl.
• Consistent Clothing Style: Kes has several different outfits, but she's usually wearing a dress with short sleeves and leggings underneath.
• Creepy Child: Despite loving flowers she burns them up with her psychic powers in "Cold Fire", admitting to Tuvok afterwards that she enjoyed the destruction.
• The Dark Side: Kes is actually pretty terrifying as she makes Tannis bleed from his eyes and mouth in "Cold Fire". Kes’ ever-growing extrasensory power could prove a danger to Voyager in the future...
• Easily Forgiven: One of the few times when Tuvok’s lack of emotion comes in handy is in "Cold Fire". After Kes almost kills him by making his blood boil, he jumps up from his medical bed and tells her to think of this as a lesson and a warning rather than bearing a grudge.
• Fashionista: Kes probably has the most-diverse wardrobe of the whole cast. Not being a Starfleet officer, she didn't have to wear a Starfleet uniform. Instead, she sported a variety of colorful alien dresses, jumpers, and catsuits, often changing outfits multiple times within single episodes!
• The Fog of Ages: When she aged, she forgot that she left Voyager of her own volition. A recording left by her younger self eventually set her straight.
• Good Is Not Dumb: Her gentle, sweet demeanor notwithstanding, she's able to get one over on the Doctor more than once, and outwits the baddie of the week in "Persistence of Vision."
• Grand Theft Me: Occurs in the Season 3 episode "Warlord" when Kes' body is possessed by a, you guessed it, dying sadistic MALE warlord. She also gets a little bi action in this episode.
• The Heart:
  • When the Doctor tells Kes that when Voyager returns to Alpha Quadrant, he will be left behind. She responds by giving him a little smooch. It is Kes’ firm insistence on treating the Doctor like an individual and not a hypospray that pushes him on the right path.
  • She donates one of her own lungs to save Neelix when his are stolen by the Vidiians. So as well as the Heart she is also the Lung.
• Horror Hunger: Kes hits puberty and starts eating bugs in the arboretum. When Neelix comes to comfort her, she starts scoffing down his flowers.
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Kes beautifully affirms the Doctor’s very first step towards independence, telling him he will have to learn like the rest of them. She also bravely donates a lung for Neelix in "The Phage" because she wants to do something for him for once. Her heel turn in "Fury" is considered a low point for the series.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: Has demonstrated this on a few occasions.
  • A prime example is the aforementioned episode "Warlord". The sadistic warlord that has taken control of Kes' body gets a quick lesson that you should Beware the Nice Ones.
  • In "Fury", she literally warps several decks of Voyager just by her mere presence.
• Mayfly–December Friendship: Her relationships with the crew. The Ocampa only live about 9 years, in contrast to longer-lived species like humans, Vulcans, and Talaxians.
• Mayfly–December Romance: She and Neelix were an item early on, even though Ocampans only live nine years and Talaxians live much longer. In an alternate future episode, she's not only married to Tom, but their grown-up daughter is married to Harry Kim!
• The Medic: Becomes a nurse in Sickbay.
• Mood Whiplash: During seasons 1 through 3, Kes was a kind-hearted girl with no desire to hurt anyone, and became a fan favorite. When she returned in Season 6, she was a murderous psychopath — needless to say, the fans were not happy.
• Nice Girl: Quite cute and cuddly to boot.
• Only One Name: Kes, of course.
• Photographic Memory: She never forgets anything, no matter what it is. Justified given her short lifespan, so she has to learn quickly.
• Power Incontinence: Experiences this when the second group of Ocampa, under the Caretaker's female counterpart, magnify her powers. She incinerates the Hydroponics bay and nearly kills Tuvok, but it goes back to normal once they're gone. The problem becomes permanent in "The Gift," where changes in her physical nature endanger the ship.
• Psychic Powers: Tuvok trains her in how to control them.
• Put on a Bus: She leaves the main cast in the Season 4 episode "The Gift."
  • Put on a Bus to Hell: Jennifer Lien phones in her performance in "Fury", and with awesome dialogue like this it's hard to blame her:
  "I was a child. You corrupted me with your ideas: Exploration, discovery!"
• Ship Tease: With Tom Paris, Tuvok, and the Doctor. After she breaks up with Neelix, however, this is never followed up. By then, Tom is involved with B'Elanna, Tuvok is married, and neither he nor the Doctor would get involved with someone who is essentially their student.
• Space Elves: She has several elfish qualities, including a waifish figure, Pointy Ears, and mystical powers.
• Sufficiently Advanced Alien: She has the potential to (and eventually does) become one of these.
• Super-Intelligence: As the series progresses, it is revealed Kes possesses a variety of qualities related to this trope.
• Vocal Dissonance: Kes is two years old and looks like Tinkerbell, but has the deepest voice out of the main female cast members. Her voice gets even more of a workout when she's possessed by a male Villain of the Week in "Warlord."
• Walking Wasteland: "Fury" demonstrates what happens when she Kes gets pissed off.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: Despite being only a few years old, she demonstrates perception and maturity equal to any adult.
• Younger Than They Look: She has a nine-year life cycle, but consistenly looks like she's about 10.

Seven of Nine

Seven of Nine

Played By: Jeri Ryan

"I may no longer possess Borg perfection, but my experience as a drone has taught me to be efficient and precise."

Voyager's de facto Science Officer is a disconnected member of the Borg, the dominant species in the Delta Quadrant. Once a human girl named Annika Hansen, she and her family were the first Homo sapiens to be assimilated. Eighteen years later, she was assigned to Voyager as a liaison between Voyager and the Collective. After trying and failing to assimilate Voyager, she was liberated against her will and made an individual.

True to her name, Ryan was a lucky addition to the ensemble and is probably most responsible for VOY enduring seven years. Twenty years later, Ryan reprised the role on Star Trek: Picard.

For more information, see her page.

U.S.S. Voyager

U.S.S. Voyager

Registry number: NCC-74656

Played By: Majel Barrett (computer voice)

"Voyager may not be as big as a Galaxy-class ship, but she's quick and smart, like her Captain."

— Admiral Patterson, "Relativity"

A new Intrepid-class starship whose first deployment gets her and her crew stranded on the wrong side of the galaxy.

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• Ace Custom: She becomes this when compared to other Intrepid-class starships — or, for that matter, other Starfleet ships in general — as the time she spends in the Delta Quadrant combined with various time-travel shenanigans allow her crew to get their hands on technology that the rest of The Federation doesn't have access to.
• Always a Bigger Fish: One species might regard Voyager as a highly-advanced warship. The next might knock out her shields with a single blast.
• Dummied Out: You may note there's what looks like a vehicle of some kind embedded in the underside of the saucer section — this was the aeroshuttle, intended to be a scaled-up version of a runabout (partially so they could use the existing runabout sets from DS9). But for various reasons (mostly budget), it was never used (outside of a comic book story) or referred to (with the Delta Flyer serving as a sort-of subsitute); some EU sources explain that it wasn't ready and/or fitted to the ship when it got zapped to the Delta Quadrant.
• Flawed Prototype: The first ship of her kind fitted with the bio-neural gelpack. Said gelpack got them in trouble several times over their trip home, from just breaking down to getting the ship equivalent of a cold from bad cheese. The fact that they can't be replicated doesn't help at all.
• Fragile Speedster: It's fast and heavily armed, but its defenses are notably sub-par, as being fired on by a centuries out of date Klingon battlecruiser was able to quickly bring its shield strength down by half. For reference a battlecruiser from the same era was unable to do more than scratch damage to the Enterprise D.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: Never runs out of torpedoes, despite it being established early on how those are a limited resource. Same applies to shuttlecraft, though at least they are seen building new ones (including two Delta Flyers) over the course of the series.
• Hyperspeed Escape: Even when she's outgunned she can at least outrun her enemies, having a maximum sustainable cruising speed of Warp 9.975.
• Legacy Vessel Naming: After her return to Earth and retirement, she becomes an Enterprise-level legendary ship, and her legacy is later continued with the Lamarr-class U.S.S. Voyager NCC-74656-A, the Pathfinder-class U.S.S. Voyager NCC-74656-B, and eventually the 32nd century Intrepid-class U.S.S. Voyager NCC-74646-J far, far in the future.
• Lightning Bruiser: Designed to be faster and more maneuverable than most other Federation starships while packing enough firepower to battle ships twice her size.
• Living Ship: As close as Starfleet has ever come, courtesy of her computers being augmented with bio-neural gelpacks. However the trope is downplayed as she never takes on her own personality or sentience (despite what The Captain might believe).
• Made of Iron: The notorious Reset Button. She takes massive amounts of damage, yet is always repaired in the next episode or even after the commercial break without having to duck into a space dock. Though there have been exceptions to this status quo such as with Year of Hell where the ship sustained enormous damage the crew were unable to repair, and things only got worse from there.
• Meaningful Name: To a far greater extent than was ever intended, as she gets to voyage across half a galaxy's worth of uncharted space. Additionally, the farthest man-made object from Earth in real life is the Voyager 1 probe.
• Shiny-Looking Spaceships: Undoubtedly one of the more beautiful Starfleet vessels. Being hammered by hostile aliens, assimilated by Borg technology and flying through nebulas and planetary ring systems every Title Sequence barely scratches the paint job.
• Signature Move: The warp nacelles moving to a 45 degree angle before Voyager jumps to warp.
• Spell My Name with a "The": Averted. While the vast majority of starships in Star Trek are referred to using the definite article, Voyager is always just Voyager, barring a few cases of Early-Installment Weirdness.
• Took a Level in Badass: In the finale, she gets upgraded with futuristic technology, including retractable armor and transphasic torpedoes that can one-shot a Borg cube.
• Two-Keyed Lock: Averted. Voyager's Self-Destruct Mechanism can be customized for just about any time limit or interval, and the option to mute audio warnings. One big difference from other Starfleet vessels is she doesn't require two officers to initiate or abort it, only the Captain. ^note It's never explained why, presumably because Voyager is stranded in the Delta Quadrant with a finite crew means normal protocol is no longer applicable, though would subject the Captain to a strict schedule of medical checks.

Delta Flyer

Voyager's custom-designed shuttle, designed to be far more capable than the standard class-2 craft.

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• Adrenaline Makeover: Designed to be a bigger and tougher alternative to the Starfleet Class 2 shuttles that keep getting crashed.
• Escape Pod: Albeit off-screen to save money on special effects.
• Cool Ship: Designed this way by Tom Paris who thinks it will deter people from taking them on, though Tuvok rejects the idea of adding 'dynametric tail fins' just for Rule of Cool.
• Legacy Character: After the first Delta Flyer is destroyed in "Unimatrix Zero", a second one is immediately built.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Despite not being much larger than a standard shuttle, she's tough enough to support Voyager in battle, and can even fight alone in some Old-School Dogfighting.
• Schizo Tech: Tom Paris includes a manual control panel in the style of his Captain Proton holoprogram so he'll have some hands-on piloting.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: For the above-mentioned aeroshuttle.
• Technology Porn:
  Paris: Behold the Delta Flyer. Ultra-aerodynamic contours, retractable nacelles, parametallic hull plating, unimatrix shielding based on Tuvok's brilliant design for the multispatial probe, and a Borg-inspired weapons system.
• Unfinished, Untested, Used Anyway: She's launched a bit ahead of schedule (thanks to a little situation involving the Malon) despite having an unresolved microfracture problem. If not for B'Elanna's talent for MacGyvering, she would've been lost with all hands in a gas giant.

Recurring Crew and Dependents:

Naomi Wildman

Naomi Wildman

Played By: Scarlett Pomers, Brooke Stephens ("Mortal Coil"), Vanessa Branch ("Shattered")

The first child born on Voyager, Naomi joins the crew in the middle of Season 2. She ages at least twice as fast as a human child, thanks to her father's Ktarian heritage. She lives with her human mother, Ensign Samantha Wildman, but doesn't know her Ktarian father, who is back in the Alpha Quadrant serving aboard Deep Space Nine. Neelix is her primary caretaker besides her mother. She eventually develops an unlikely friendship with Seven of Nine. When Icheb and the other Borg children come aboard, Naomi finally has someone her own age to socialize with. She is last seen as a pre-teen, in one of the last episodes of the series.

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• An Alien Named "Bob": Downplayed. Naomi is only half alien.
• Children Are Innocent: When Seven was liberated from the Borg, everybody distrusted her. Naomi's the only one who immediately accepted her the way she was.
• Consistent Clothing Style: Her outfits are generally made up of a short-sleeved shirt, a dress with straps, and leggings.
• Creepy Child: In "Dark Frontier", she appears in Seven's nightmare as a newly assimilated Borg, complete with Creepy Monotone.
• Free-Range Children: Downplayed. She's able to go around the ship by herself, but isn't allowed to go into more vital areas like Main Engineering without the supervision of Seven or the senior officers.
• Full-Name Basis: Seven always greets her with a dry, Borg-like "Naomi Wildman."
• Half-Human Hybrid: Her mother is human, her father Ktarian.
• Hero-Worshipper: Towards Seven, who is surprisingly flattered by the admiration and begins to act as a mentor figure.
• I Am X, Son of Y: Seven habitually calls her "Naomi Wildman, subunit of Ensign Samantha Wildman" before they become close.
• Intergenerational Friendship: She sees Seven, who's around the same age as her mother, as her best friend aboard Voyager.
• Kid Hero: Averted. Naomi does help Seven, the Doctor, and an alien save the ship in "Bliss", but never outright saves the day by herself.
• Longest Pregnancy Ever: Naomi's mother was pregnant with her when Voyager got lost, and stayed pregnant until the middle of Season 2! When Naomi was born and her Ktarian heritage was made clear, fans could assume that this accounted for the long pregnancy. But it wasn't until the Season 6 episode "Fury" that this was confirmed by the Doctor.
• Plot-Relevant Age-Up: She ages faster than a human child.
• The Power of Friendship: She helps Seven rediscover her humanity through their friendship.
• Raised by the Community: It seems like everyone on Voyager pitches in to help Samantha raise her; Neelix, Seven, and Janeway are the most prominent ones.
• Token Mini-Moe: Once she grows up, has a serious D'awww factor. Even Captain Janeway is not immune.
• Rubber-Forehead Aliens: Her only obvious alien trait is the small spikes on her forehead.
• Tagalong Kid: Becomes fascinated with Seven and determined to emulate her. Surprisingly Seven tolerates Naomi hanging around, as the former Borg believes she's entirely worthy of emulation.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • In most episodes where something affects the entire ship — like "Workforce", "The Killing Game", "Year of Hell", and even "Endgame" — Naomi is neither seen nor mentioned. Though there are plenty of perfectly plausible explanations, it would have made sense for the writers to explain where Voyager's only child was when the whole crew was brainwashed, enslaved, under attack for a year, or returned home to Earth.
  • Her mother also disappeared after early Season 5, with the writers ultimately admitting that they forgot they hadn't killed her off.

Icheb

Icheb

Played By: Manu Intiraymi

Icheb joins the crew in mid Season 6, when Voyager liberates him from the Borg Collective along with three other children. The others eventually leave the ship to live with new adoptive families, but Icheb stays aboard. He is close with Seven of Nine, and also becomes a mentor to Naomi. Thanks to his Borg upbringing, he is a typical Teen Genius, incredibly book-smart but socially awkward.

He reappears briefly in Star Trek: Picard.

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• Abusive Parents: His parents genetically engineered him to be a weapon against the Borg and then tried to get him assimilated not once but twice. Their justification is I Did What I Had to Do, but they don't seem terribly broken up about it.
• Back for the Dead: He shows up in a flashback in Picard to get his Borg implants harvested and requiring a Mercy Kill from Seven of Nine.
• Big Brother Instinct: He helps the younger former-Borg children with their studies and they express anxiety at the thought of him leaving Voyager and returning to his parents.
• Emotional Maturity Is Physical Maturity: Icheb is in fact a young boy, but has been aged to his late teens in a Borg maturation chamber. He exhibits emotional maturity to match, to the point where in "Imperfection" Janeway herself disputes the claim that he is "just a child".
• Odd Friendship: Q's son is every bit as irresponsible as his father, yet bonds with the serious Icheb.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: A grounding in several sciences seems standard for Borg drones, but Icheb's knowledge continues to grow by leaps and bounds once he joins Voyager. The mere suggestion from his father that he might have a knack for genetics results in Icheb quickly mastering the topic to the point where he can design genetic resequencing (of himself!) on his own. He is also an expert at subjects ranging from Astrometrics, Cybernetics, Engineering and Physics, and he expresses a hobbyist level of interest in Geology.
• Person of Mass Destruction: His parents infected him with a virus designed to destroy Borg ships, and they sent him out into space to do so.
• Rubber-Forehead Aliens: He would be a Human Alien except for the extended ridge that the Brunali have from their noses to the tops of their foreheads.
• Space Cadet: He takes Starfleet Academy classes by correspondence course while 30,000 light years away.
• Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: He had his Borg implants harvested and got a Mercy Kill from Seven of Nine some time in between Voyager and Picard.
• You Can't Go Home Again: He was made into a biological weapon and would be forced back into that role if he returns to his homeworld.

Vorik

Vorik

Played By: Alexander Enberg

A Vulcan ensign who works under B’Elanna Torres as part of the engineering crew. A capable crew member, he’s usually a solid hand for B’Elanna, and in the episode “Blood Fever,” he even expressed a romantic interest in her. It would be a bit of an understatement to say that it didn’t work out.

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• Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder: As per Vulcan custom, Vorik is already in an Arranged Marriage. Due to his predicament of being stuck on the other end of the galaxy, it's only logical that his wife assumes he is dead and has thus chosen another mate. This is his justification for shooting his shot with B’Elanna.
• Mate or Die: Has his first pon farr while Voyager is on the other end of the galaxy. Not exactly how any Vulcan imagines coming of age, but it's made worse when he accidentally gives B'Elanna a pon farr through a forced mind-meld.
• Mauve Shirt: Outside of "Blood Fever," his Day In The Limelight, Vorik was mostly a background character, and he appeared in a grand total of eight episodes. After the events of "Blood Fever," he slipped right back into being a minor recurring character, dutifully working in engineering. It's not hard to imagine an embarrassed Vorik wanting to get back to some normalcy as quickly as possible.
• Mr. Fixit: For engineering, and he's occasionally seen fixing things around the ship.
• The Stoic: Oh, he's a Vulcan, all right.
  Vorik: We should have transporters back online within the hour.
  B’Elanna: Well, that's great. But right now I'm more concerned with little things like, oh, I don't know, say, life support?
  Vorik: Indeed. According to my calculations, environmental systems will cease to function in two hours.
  B’Elanna: [scoffs] You say that like you're giving me the weather report.
• Would Hit a Girl: Not under normal circumstances, of course, but a certain chemical imbalance of the Vulcan brain throws his usual reserved nature out the window. B'Elanna, furious at being infected with Vorik's pon farr, surprises Vorik and names herself as her champion in the ritual koon-ut kal-if-fee, which means that Vorik actually has to fight his prospective mate for the hand of his prospective mate. Vorik hesitates, but is ultimately too 'in heat' to argue, and the two have a knock-down drag-out brawl until they can no longer stand under their own power, relieving both of their pon farr symptoms.

Lon Suder

Lon Suder

Played By: Brad Dourif

One of the Maquis crew. A Betazoid with uncontrollable killer urges; he kills a man for looking at him funny and Tuvok tries to help him deal with it.

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• The Atoner: Tuvok's mind meld therapy helps him feel remorse for his crimes. "Basics" shows that he fully intended on following through with this, but that's not how things worked out.
• Black Eyes of Evil: Thanks to having the dark irises of a Betazoid.
• Blood Knight: According to Chakotay, he was one during his time with the Maquis. Quiet and unassuming most of the time, Suder came alive while fighting the Cardassians, when he could indulge his violent urges. He demonstrates his combat skills onscreen in "Basics Part 2", retaking engineering single-handedly.
• Call to Agriculture: Takes up an interest in hydroponics and botany when confined to his quarters.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Suder killed crewman Darwin just for looking at him the wrong way.
• Heroic Sacrifice: In two senses. First he has to abandon every gain he's made in therapy and return to violence in order to save the ship. Then he's killed by one of the enemy during said attempt to save the ship.
• Muggle Born of Mages: Unlike most Betazoids, Suder has neither telepathic nor empathic ability.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Being forced to kill a Kazon after months of peace caused him a brief Heroic BSoD before the Doctor snapped him out of it.
• Not Hyperbole: You know when they say a person "would kill you just for looking at him the wrong way?" With this guy it's true.
• Off the Wagon: His return to killing is essentially this.
• Redemption Equals Death: He was forced to return to his violent ways to save the ship, and ended up dying in the attempt.
• Serial Killer: His whole reason for joining the Maquis was an outlet for his violent urges.
• The Sociopath: Was this until Tuvok melded with him.
• Sympathetic Murderer: "Meld" and "Basics" show that he was a deeply troubled person, with no illusions of his kills being necessary or even feeling pleasure in the act of killing. Being forced to fight the Kazon to retake Voyager troubled him greatly, and he ultimately gave his life to help the crew.
• Token Evil Team Mate: To the Maquis—Chakotay recalls how unnerving he was. Not so much to Voyager because they just lock him up once he murders a crewmate.

Joseph Carey

Joseph Carey

Played By: Josh Clark

The Assistant Chief Engineer on Voyager.

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• Back for the Dead: After not appearing past Season 1 except for episodes which took place in the past^note Apparently, the writers had forgotten that they hadn't killed him off, he was brought back in Season 7 simply to be killed off. He was the last on-screen fatality on VOY.
• Character Status Inertia: The last we see of Carey is when he's confined to quarters after Seska frames him. After that he only appears in flashbacks until Season 7, leading to the accidental impression that Carey had been locked in his cabin the whole time! Apparently the creators got him confused with one of the other early-season Mauve Shirts (most likely either Hogan or Jonas), and thought they'd killed him off.
• Disappeared Dad: He has two sons back home who he wants to get back to. Sadly, he can't.
• Failed a Spot Check: During a food foraging operation he proudly shows up with some apples only to be told that their poisonous.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Initially at odds with Torres and Seska, he ends up working fairly well with both of them (noticeably in the last two episode before Seska defects).
• Frame-Up: The patsy for Seska's replicator tech theft. It was suggested he was The Resenter over his Passed-Over Promotion.
• Mauve Shirt: One of the secondary characters created in the early seasons so they could be bumped off later (fortunately, the writers forgot they hadn't got round to it).
• Passed-Over Promotion: Despire his seniority, he got passed over for the promotion to Chief Engineer job in favor of the woman who broke his nose.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Joins Tuvok, Seska and Torres in trying to make a black market trade for technology which could get them home (although sadly it fails).

Jenny and Megan Delaney

Jenny and Megan Delaney

Played By: Heidi and Alissa Kramer

Stellar cartographers aboard the ship.

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• All Love Is Unrequited: Jenny is attracted to Harry while Megan only sees him as a friend, but Megan is the twin who Harry likes, while he finds Jenny annoying.
• Brainy Brunette: The twins are dark-haired science team members.
• Friends with Benefits: They regularly flirt with or date Paris and Kim on a nonexclusive basis
• Polar Opposite Twins: Harry clams that, "Jenny's aggressive, and sometimes annoying, but Megan — she's quiet, artistic, and she's got that cute little dimple on her right cheek." During the holo game, while both are Chewing the Scenery as haughty, villainous sexpots, Meg breaks character a couple of times to ask for clarification about a torture device and to apologize to Harry.
• Sibling Team: Twins who work in the same department on the same ship.
• Unseen No More: The twins are mentioned in several episodes before finally appearing in the season 5 episode "Thirty Days," albeit only in the holo-program, as well as a deleted scene from that episode.

Samantha Wildman

Samantha Wildman

Played By: Nancy Hower

An ensign who was pregnant before Voyager got lost in the Delta Quadrant. She's a member of the science division.

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• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: She eventually stopped appearing apart from an occasional namedrop and one episode set in the past. Most episodes featuring Naomi do mention her mother, but often not by name.
• Longest Pregnancy Ever: She was pregnant for the entire first season. Justified later by the fact that it was a half-Ktarian child.

Ayala

Ayala

Played By: Tarik Ergin

A former Maquis and frequent bridge extra.

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• Mauve Shirt: An extra who survives Voyager's seven-year journey.
• The Quiet One: He has all of six lines over seven years.

Antagonists

Seska

Seska

Played By: Martha Hackett

"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."

A fiery member of the Maquis and Chakotay's lover. She turns out to be a surgically-altered Cardassian spy who got caught in Janeway's dragnet. Seska is caught attempting to smuggle Federation technology, then defects to the Kazon, where she climbs up the ranks by becoming pregnant with Maje Cullah's child. She was the over-arching villain of Seasons One and Two, before being killed off in the Season Three shake-up.

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• Aborted Arc: Seska talks of the Kazon-Nistrim taking Voyager and conquering the Quadrant sector by sector, which isn't a half-bad idea. The writing team of Taylor & Braga didn't care for any of the elements introduced by Michael Piller, the Kazon and Seska included. And so her reign of terror came to an abrupt close in "Basics".
  Michael Piller: this was probably one of the worst two character decisions made on ‘Voyager’ (the other being to create Kes as effectively sexless).
• Asian Baby Mama: A Cardassian, disguised as a Bajoran, who claims to have inseminated herself with Commander Chakotay's DNA and impregnated herself with the child. It was revealed at the end of the story arc to be the child of her new lover, the Kazon Culluh.
  • Originally it was supposed to be Chakotay's, but the producers changed the baby's parentage because they weren't interested in having Chakotay raise a kid for the rest of the series (a la Worf) and because they couldn't have him callously abandon his own son.
• The Baby Trap: Chakotay spared her life because of this.
• Back for the Finale: Not quite, but a stone's throw from it, at least. Chakotay mistakenly drops in on Seska (post-Kazon takover of Voyager) after the ship becomes enmeshed in a fractured time field. ("Shattered")
• Deep Cover Agent: The Cardassians are no strangers to plastic surgery. It was bad luck that one ended up in Chakotay's resistance cell.
• Dating Catwoman: Chakotay really got around on the Val Jean. (There's still some lingering tension between him and Torres.) Considering how quick Seska was to jump into the sheets with Cullah, she's probably the one who initiated the tryst with Chakotay.
• Dragon-in-Chief: With Seska whispering in his ear Cullah finally becoming an adversary worthy of Janeway. You have got to love how she uses her manipulative feminine wiles to pull his strings and get things going her way in this Quadrant; even orders around his men despite women being held as inferior in Kazon society. Both chafe at their roles, but find the other too useful to change things.
• Dropped a Bridge on Her: Death by exploding console. Really. Not that this hasn't killed people in the past, mind you, but they're usually wearing red.
  Hackett: I was always grouchy about the way they killed me off … For Seska to die that way was like rolling over.
  • Which doesn't stop her from coming back twice for two episodes. (One involved a temporal fragmented Voyager and the other involved a holodeck copy of her.)
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Both Chakotay and Cullah mourn her death.
• Evil Counterpart: Seska using Federation tactics against her old crewmates. A Kazon ship punches a hole in their shields and a shuttle slips through and stabs into the hull like a knife in their belly and out pour soldiers firing like mad. It’s bold and takes the crew of Voyager, who are more used to lethargic enemies in the Delta Quadrant, entirely unawares. It is such a shame that the Kazon are all so dumb, though. There's also some talk of Seska attempting to unite all the various sects to bring down Voyager, essentially forging her own Federation (or Cardassian Union).
• Evil Makes You Ugly: In Season Two, Seska is stuck in mid-transformation from Bajoran to Cardassian.
• Femme Fatale Spy: Doesn't hesitate to use sexual manipulation, as Chakotay enjoys telling Cullah while the Kazon is beating him for information.
  Chakotay: She's quite a woman, isn't she? Does she rub your shoulders and tell you you're the most exciting man she's ever known? That's what she used to do for me. What's the matter? Didn't she tell you about us?
• Fur and Loathing: After she throws in with the Kazon-Nistrim, she starts wearing one of their fur-trimmed jackets.
• I Fight for the Strongest Side!: Seska was of the opinion that if Voyager was to survive, they needed powerful friends. Hence why, in her view, provoking the Kazons was a bonehead move.
• In Love with the Mark: She genuinely loved Chakotay, and offers him a chance to run off with her and the baby. Unfortunately her betrayal has killed any feelings he once had for her.
• Jerkass Has a Point: In the episode where she's exposed, it's hard not to sympathize with her rant that Janeway isn't prepared to do what it takes to get her crew home, or even keep them safe.
  • Ironically, when Janeway actually does this in later seasons, the fans condemn her for it, despite sympathizing with Seska's point in the first place.
• Killer Game Master: Rewrote a Starfleet vs. Maquis holodeck program into a deathtrap for Tuvok for friends: Holo-Janeway's phaser rifle backfires on her (vaporizing her instantly), and when Tom runs to the EMH for help, the mutinous Doc prescribes him 22 cc's of nitric acid!
  Tom: Maybe we can go to the mess hall now and let the holographic Neelix burn my arm with a frying pan.
• The Lancer: Her initial characterization in the show bible; actually, the writers weren't sure to do with this character. Torres ended up filling this role.
• Magic Plastic Surgery: Inverted. The only one of her kind in the Delta Quadant... and yet she still finds a way to restore her old Cardassian features.
• Manipulative Bitch: Both on the personal level and the Evil Plan level.
• Motive Rant: When cornered in her bio-bed in Sickbay, Seska starts to sound uncannily like a stereotypical Cardassian: espousing the pack mentality and cold-blooded realpolitik her species is known for.
• My Death Is Just the Beginning: Courtesy of Tuvok's holodeck program, prepared in the event of a Maquis takeover of the ship.. which Seska then hacked into. Uh oh.
• Paranoia Gambit: Credit where it is due, the idea of a member of the crew working against their best interest and defying protocol is an extremely unflattering one in light of the recent Stafleet-Maquis alliance. Seska pointing the finger at herself to frame Carey is a moment of genius on her part.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Willing to assist anyone and upset the balance of power in the Quadrant just to get home.
  "Federation rules, Federation nobility, Federation compassion? Do you understand that if we were on a Cardassian ship we would be home now!?"
• Sixth Ranger Traitor: By Hackett's own admission, the writers suddenly realized that they had painted themselves into a corner with Seska (she couldn't very well transfer to another ship in the fleet!), and that the cast had grown too large. It wasn't until the fourth episode that Seska was retconned into a Cardassian spy. Starfleet, Maquis and Cardassian expertise – that’s a pretty intimidating combination of training and talents.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Like all good femme fatales, she knows how to play to sympathy when suspicion is pointed at her, and Seska really lays it on thick with her sob story story about a terrible disease and a compassionate Cardassian "donor."
• You Fool!: In her Motive Rant to the show's leads, Seska sums up Janeway and Chakotay as a couple of "fools" — perfect for each other.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Chakotay has some friendly advice for Cullah. "Once Seska’s through with you…she’s gonna kill you." Ironically Cullah survives while Seska dies.

Borg Queen

Borg Queen

Played By: Susanna Thompson and Alice Krige

The Borg Queen is back, although it's a little unclear whether this is the same Queen Bee from the theatrical film First Contact. She is busy putting down a Borg revolt and constructing a transwarp tunnel to Earth. Alice Krige reprises her role in the series finale.

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• Abhorrent Admirer: The Alice Krige version of the Queen has a distinctly seductive air to her, trying to play assimilation as alluring. Not only does she make out with Data but treats her dealings with Picard, Janeway, and Seven like sexual foreplay. Even her hologram behaves this way toward Boimler in Lower Decks. When Krige asked the writers if she should still play the Queen this way when dealing with Janeway and Seven, she was told that the Queen is "omnisexual."
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • How much of an individual is the Queen, if at all? On the one hand she will sometimes refer to herself and the collective as the same thing ("us" instead of "me") but she still recognizes a personal history, such as being assimilated as a young child. This, like several other things about the Queen, is kept very vague, though the writers have said they didn't view her as a personification of the Borg, saying, "We saw her as a literal person."
  • What, if anything, is the difference between the two Borg Queens and why did the Collective switch them out? While it could just be a case of The Other Darrin, the two queens don't particularly act that similarly, down to the actresses making an effort to not mimic each others' performances.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: Of the entire Borg collective.
• Assimilation Backfire: Invoked. In the mother of all combination Batman Gambit and Gambit Roulette, Admiral Janeway injects herself with the Anti-Borg pathogen that Icheb carries before letting herself be assimilated by the Borg Queen directly. As the Borg Queen breaks down, Voyager is fleeing through the transwarp conduit, being chased by a Borg Sphere, and the Borg Queen boasts of assimilating the tech to Voyager's anti-borg armor... which is precisely what Admiral Janeway wanted, as the faster Borg Sphere carried Voyager directly to Earth before the transwarp tube blew up, and Voyager blew up the Sphere from inside with one last well-placed transphasic torpedo. Talk about Hoist by His Own Petard.
• Bald of Evil: The Borg are entirely hairless, and she's no exception.
• Big Bad: Took this post from Season Five until the end of the series. She also served as the Final Boss that Voyager's crew has to go through before making it back to Earth.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The Borg collective as a whole suffers from this, so naturally she's got it in spades. She sees assimilation is the path to perfection and she's doing every single of one of her victims a favor by inflicting it on them. While she at least recognizes that no civilization ever seems to consent to being assimilated, she doesn't understand why, let alone care. They'll see things her way once they're drones.
• Body Horror: Her body consists of her head, collar, and exposed upper spine that is connected to a mechanical body.
• Combat Pragmatist: The Queen is not above using really dirty tactics to get what she wants. In "Unimatrix Zero", she destroys several cubes to try and convince Janeway to give up the link to the dream world, and threatens to destroy every ship with a Unimatrix Zero drone aboard (Janeway calls her bluff, as it would involve destroying most of the Collective), and later orders a cube to self-destruct after her plot fails in order to invoke Taking You with Me.
• The Cameo: Briefly turns up in Lower Decks as a training simulation hologram.
• Control Freak: Her determination to destroy Unimatrix Zero, the last secret safe haven of individuality in the Collective, can only be summed up as such. A drone for the most past, was connected to the idyllic virtual construct when regenerating and would usually not retain memories of their time in paradise when active. Her plan ultimately backfires when its destruction causes a very real resistance movement within the Borg.
• Evil Counterpart: The Evil Matriarch Abusive Parent to Janeway's Team Mom Parental Substitute.
• Evil Matriarch:
  • To Seven of Nine. Kidnapping? Check. Threatening to kill her friends/foster family? Check.
  • Also to Picard's son Jack, who thanks to his Borg DNA she claims is closer to being the child of Locutus and herself than Jean-Luc and Beverly.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: She (or at least the Susanna Thompson version of her) reveals in "Unimatrix Zero" that she was assimiliated as a little girl, implying that she was just another nameless drone prior to becoming Queen. This seems to directly contradict the idea of the Queen being an anthropomorphic personification of the collective rather than an individual and is never really expanded on.
• Glamour Failure: A subtle science fiction version, in the series finale: when the Borg Queen realizes Admiral Janeway's scheme, the Queen snarls, "you've infected us!" Not 'me', 'us.' In her moment of rage she momentarily drops her facade of being an individual.
• Hive Queen: Borg Queen in this case. All Borg answer to her.
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: Her appearance in the last season of Picard shows that Janeway's final attack on her left her unable to communicate with her drones, forced to slowly cannibalize her own empire just to keep herself alive. Unfortunately for Starfleet, she still finds a way to play a long game and softly assimilate mankind through Jack Crusher.
• I Am Legion: She is the Borg and speaks with the voice(s) of the Borg.
• In Love with Your Carnage: In "Unimatrix Zero," she dismantles several Borg Drones while trying to reverse-engineer the subroutine allowing an internal Borg Rebellion where numerous assimilated drones start re-asserting their individuality during their "regeneration cycle." She openly praises the beheaded corpses, claiming they have reached "perfection", and lamenting that they are not alive to enjoy it.
• I Want Them Alive!: She considers Seven a daughter of sorts, or at the very least a replacement for Locutus-Picard.
• Joker Immunity: She's the face of the franchises's most iconic villains, so she's clearly not going anywhere. Between TNG and Voyager she dies multiple times, only to be reconstructed by the Borg so she can to continue to serve. Though seemingly killed at the end of Voyager, complete with her losing control over her drones, another Borg Queen still manages to rear her head in Picard. She, or at least her evil faction of the Borg, are seemingly Killed Off for Real at the end of that series. At least for now.
• Losing Your Head: The "Queen" is a severed torso that attaches to various exoskeletons.
• Obliviously Evil: She does not know, or care, that none of the species in the universe want to be assimilated into the Collective. She honestly believes that she is doing them a favor, granting "perfection" to them, by stripping away their free will, making them drones, assimilating their culture, technology, planets, and even civilizations.
• The Other Darrin: After being played by Alice Krige in First Contact, the Queen is played by Susanna Thompson in "Dark Frontier" and "Unimatrix Zero", and by Alice Krige again in "Endgame". Whether these Queens are meant to be the same entity inhabiting different bodies or different being altogether or something in between isn't really clear.
• Prim and Proper Bun: The wires sticking out of the back of her head are meant to invoke this air.
• We Have Reserves: The Queen is way more hazardous to the Collective than Janeway's crew, that's for certain. She routinely blows up entire Cubes just to clear out an 'infection.' Contrast to the Queen in the finale, who not only called her Cubes back when it was clear the upgraded Voyager outmatched them, but actually refused any further engagements until she developed countermeasures.
• What, Exactly, Is His Job?: Despite the Borg being all about perfection, it's never really explained either in or out of universe what contribution the Queen makes to the collective. She's said herself that she doesn't command the Borg (despite that being what it looks like) and she's clearly more than just a mouthpiece since she's active when there's no need for one. The closest explanation we get is her claim that she "brings order to chaos."
  Data: Interesting, if cryptic.
• You Killed My Father: Not directly, but the Borg assimilated Seven's parents.

Captain Braxton

Captain Braxton

Played By: Allan G Royal (“Future’s End”), Bruce McGill (“Relativity”)

The captain of both the Aeon and the Relativity, Starfleet timeships from the 29th century. He has a bad habit of encountering the Voyager crew via time travel and promptly going crazy and trying to kill them.

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• Cassandra Truth: In "Future's End" he spent most of his time living in 20th Century Los Angeles putting up "The End is Nigh" signs warning about the end of the world. Since he was a homeless man living in a wrecked car screaming about time travel and "Cardassian fascists", no one took him seriously.
• Have We Met Yet?:
  Past Janeway: Have we met?
  Old Braxton: Too many times, but you wouldn't remember. They haven't occurred yet.
• Noodle Incident: Along with the events of Future's End, Braxton has apparently been in charge of cleaning up any paradoxes from Voyager's other temporal incursions. Their repeated violations have embittered him a great deal.
• Reluctant Retiree: After multiple temporal rehabilitations, he was forced into retirement which ultimately broke him, leading him trying to sabotage Voyager in Relativity.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: In a temporal example, both his appearances have him trying to avert a catastrophe involving the USS Voyager, only to find out he was the real cause of the disaster(s):
  • In "Future's End", he tries to blow up Voyager after they apparently cause a temporal explosion that destroys the Sol system in the 29th Century. His timeship is damaged and both it and Voyager are thrown back to 20th Century Earth, where a crooked industrialist steals his ship and makes plans to fly it to the future, causing the disaster he was trying to stop in the first place.
  • In "Relativity" a future version of Braxton tries to blow up Voyager with a bomb, warning his "present" self that if he doesn't destroy them he'll be forced to go to rehab and ultimately retire from Starfleet. On realizing Braxton is the culprit of the sabotage plot, his first officer arrests him and locks him up...with the implication he'll be sent to rehab and retired just like his future self said would happen.
• Self-Serving Memory: According to his version of "Relativity", Captain Braxton asked Janeway for her help and she responded by stranding him in the 20th Century. Whether he means when he tried to destroy Voyager or when he was being chased by the police, either case it shows him as the victim of Janeway's reckless actions and not the result of his own.
• Time-Travel Tense Trouble: Even though it's his job to monitor and travel through the timeline, he still hasn't mastered the fine art of temporal verb conjugation.
  Braxton: (to Seven) Thanks to you, we've learned that the temporal disrupter was, and will be, concealed here. I gave up trying to keep my tenses straight years ago.
  

Michael Jonas

Michael Jonas

Played By: Raphael Sbarge

A Maquis fighter aboard Voyager who became The Mole for the Kazon.

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• Engineered Heroics: He creates a malfunction on Voyager so he can then risk his life to save the ship. Not only does this ensure that nobody pegs him as The Mole, but it also forces Voyager to make an emergency trip to a planet where the Kazon are lying in wait.
• Hypocrite: Despite originally being a member of the Maquis, an organization set up to resist Cardassian aggression against colonists in the Demilitarized Zone, he chooses to align with Seska, a Cardassian who had previously infiltrated his crew.
• Undignified Death: He gets taken out by Neelix of all people, when the two of them get into a fight after his betrayal is revealed, and Jonas ends up getting knocked over a railing into the stream from a leaking plasma conduit.

Culluh

Culluh

Played By: Anthony De Longis

First Maje of the Kazon-Nistrim sect.

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• Big Bad: Nominally for Season 2 as leader of the Kazon sect that poses the main threat to Voyager. It's abundantly clear though that Seska is the brains behind the operation and the Nistrim would be just as ineffective as the rest of the Kazon without her involvement.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Despite his misogynistic attitude toward Seska (and in general), by the end it's clear Culluh does genuinely love her in his way; he's genuinely grief-stricken at her death. He also had every intention of raising her child as his own, even before learning he was indeed the biological father (Seska had claimed that Chakotay raped her).
• He-Man Woman Hater: As is apparently standard for Kazon society, Culluh is a misogynist to the core; the only reason Seska is able to make use of him is that he's also too arrogant and stupid to realize she's playing him. This comes back to bite him in "Alliances"; Janeway comes to him with an offer of an alliance, only for Culluh to start making unreasonable demands, simply because he can't stand to have a woman setting the terms. Janeway promptly tells him to Get Out!
• Karma Houdini: Bizarrely, he gets away from the events of "Basics" unscathed despite the episode serving to permanently write the Kazon out of the series.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Flees Voyager with his and Seska's child at the end of "Basics", and by proxy taking pretty much the entire Kazon species with him as well as they're never seen again aside from time travel episodes.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Pretty much serves as the poster boy of the Retool that occurred between Season 2 and 3, as he abandons Voyager when the crew retakes the ship, taking Seska's child (hastily revealed as his and not Chakotay's) with him never to be seen again.

Neutral

Quinn

Quinn

Played By: Gerrit Graham

A Q that was sealed in a meteor by the rest of the Continuum. When Voyager accidentally releases him, he asks for asylum in the Federation. This leads to a court hearing between him and John de Lancie Q.

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• And I Must Scream: The other Qs trap him inside a frozen comet to prevent him from committing suicide.
• Been There, Shaped History: He was influential in the lives of Isaac Newton (jostled the tree that dropped the famous apple) and Maury Ginsberg (a ride in Quinn's jeep got him to Woodstock so he could fix the sound system and meet his future wife). In terms of the show's fictional history, it's thanks to him that William Riker exists. He saved the man's ancestor during the American Civil War.
• Brought Down to Normal: He wants to invoke this so he can die.
• Character Death: He succeeds in killing himself at the end of his introductory episode.
• Cool Old Guy: He gives off this vibe, as he attended and saved Woodstock from being a complete failure. His giving the peace sign to Maury Ginsbery implies he really was a hippie or at least familiar enough with lifestyle to respect it.
• Cruel to Be Kind: The Q sealed him up to stop him from trying to kill himself.
• Irony: Q's argument for the reason Quinn's life has been of value, and should not be allowed to end, is supported by examples of how he has positively impacted the history of the human race. The same human race that rabidly enforces the infamous Alien Non-Interference Clause known as the Prime Directive. Even funnier, Q is using Quinn's past interventions as a supporting argument, even though the ultimate goal is to return Quinn to imprisonment where he would not be able to affect anything anymore.
• My Death Is Just the Beginning: Invoked. He wished to commit suicide specifically because it would have a ripple effect that not even the Continuum know what would happen. While not part of his plan, his death ends up causing a civil war amongst the Q Continuum. Q himself, who was originally trying to prevent Quinn from killing himself, became the leader of those who were influenced by his death.
• Nice Guy: While Lancie Q was playing The Trickster with humanity, he was closer to Guardian Entity.
• Nothing Left to Do but Die: He's experienced literally everything the universe has to offer, from every possible point of view. He's ready to die.
• Physical God: A Q like Lancie Q. Subverted in that he doesn't think of himself or any of the other Q as gods, just Sufficiently Advanced Aliens.
• Small Role, Big Impact: He only appears once, but his example kicks off a civil war in the Q Continuum, and indirectly leads to Lancie Q starting a family and having a son.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: "Death Wish" on Voyager demonstrated that all the Q live a boring, empty existence because they've already done, said and visited everything. Q's actions here were thus explained as him trying to break the monotony. Quinn is the only one that wanted to end this by becoming mortal and dying.

The Silver Blood (UNMARKED SPOILERS)

The Silver Blood

A biomimetic organism that Voyager encountered while looking for deuterium on a "Demon"-class planet. They took the form of the Voyager crew and even Voyager itself. Unfortunately, they end up being destroyed by an enhanced warp drive.

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• Hero of Another Story: Some time after the real Voyager left, the Silver Blood recreated the ship itself and they set their own course for Earth. They had roughly ten months of adventures before their destruction.
• No Body Left Behind: By the time the real Voyager responds to the duplicates' distress call, the ship and all remaining hands had dissolved into formless flotsam.
• Tomato in the Mirror: Eventually, the Silver Blood forgot that they weren't the real Voyager crew and assumed their lives, including trying to return to Earth. The subspace radiation caused by the enhanced warp drive causes them to realize who they really are.
• Toxic Phlebotinum: About ten months into their voyage, they develop a new enhanced warp drive that would cut their journey to Earth to two years, whereas the real Voyager still had about thirty years from their present position. However, it generates a form of subspace radiation that, while harmless to humanoids and ordinary construction materials, breaks down the molecules of anything made from the Silver Blood.
• Unperson: Any species that they had encountered believe that they were the real Voyager. The truth of their existence is lost when their time capsule containing their logs and history is destroyed.

Other

Admiral Owen Paris

Admiral Owen Paris

Played By: Richard Herd, Warren Munson ("Persistence of Vision")

The father of Lieutenant Paris, and head of the Pathfinder project that's dedicated to locating, contacting, and recovering Voyager.

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• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Tom frequently describes him as a Fantasy-Forbidding Father, and while their relationship may be rocky at best, he clearly wants to see his son again. He even tells Janeway that he is proud of Tom.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Second only to Picard when it comes to tolerating Reg Barclay's eccentricities and allowing him to prove how good he is at his job.

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