Star Trek: Voyager S5 E25, S6 E1: "Equinox" / YMMV

Alternative Character Interpretation:
- Whooooah boy. This, along with "Tuvix," is probably the most talked about episode among those debating Captain Janeway's morality. Between Janeway's demonstrably false claim never to have violated the Prime Directive and her obsessive desire to take Ransom down at any cost, some fans have theorized that Janeway is transferring her own self-loathing over the times she's violated the Federation's and her own principles onto Ransom.
- Captain Ransom is impossible to completely defend, but exactly how much he's lying about, and how evil his character truly is, is somewhat ambiguous. The fact that he is shown to be telling Blatant Lies on multiple occasions, along with his emotional manipulation of his crew, makes it hard to trust anything else he says. This has polarized fans between those who think that he's being largely truthful about the hardships he and his crew had to face, and those who think that every word that comes out of Ransom's mouth is a pack of lies, and that the journey of the Equinox was in all likelihood going absolutely fine (if at a slower pace than that of Voyager, thanks to its less powerful warp drive) until Ransom and his crew got greedy and decided killing a few aliens was worth it to get home quicker.^note
- During the second half of the story, the main villain's role seems to shift from Ransom to Burke, who is depicted as being far more gung-ho about killing the aliens than Ransom, makes thinly-veiled threats of sexual assault towards Seven, cares nothing for the lives of the Voyager crew, and eventually mutinies on Ransom. This leaves open the possibility that Burke had in fact been the one truly pulling the strings on Equinox all along, and that Ransom was too downtrodden by getting his ship trashed and most of his crew killed (likely on top of being a morally weak man in the first place) to oppose him.
Draco in Leather Pants:
- Ransom tends to get this treatment, despite the fact even if Janeway crossed the Moral Event Horizon in this episode, it doesn't mean Ransom didn't do so to an even greater degree. To wit: Janeway's choices to destroy Tuvix, and ally with the Borg, right or wrong, were done to protect her crew (and, in the case of allying with the Borg, the galaxy in general from a potential Species 8472 invasion). Ransom knowingly subjected his own crew to the aliens' fatal wrath, over and over, all for fuel to make their ship go faster, well after the point where it could have been justified as something necessary for their survival.
- Janeway herself gets this from some fans, who believe that her attitude towards the Equinox crew in the second half of the story is entirely justified, and that Chakotay was fully deserving of being removed from duty for undermining her authority by putting a stop to her using the Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique on Lessing. While it's true that having a rogue Starfleet crew flying on ahead of Voyager and giving Starfleet a bad name could cause them problems further down the road, not only does Janeway herself admit that her actions were wrong at the end of the episode, the writers have explicitly said that the idea was to have Janeway going off the deep end, and Ransom finding redemption.
Epileptic Trees: With Ransom's claiming to have encountered a whole bunch of aliens that Voyager never did, yet somehow having never encountered a Borg cube, some fans believe that he took the option that it's sometimes suggested Janeway should have done, namely setting course for the Gamma Quadrant terminus of the Bajoran Wormhole — and that his managing to get half his crew killed straight away demonstrated what a horrible idea that was in reality.
Narm:
- Janeway's absolutely absurd claim that she's never once violated the Prime Directive since she got to the Delta Quadrant. It's like they were daring the fans to throw the show's lack of continuity in their faces.
  Jim "Reviewboy" Wright: The enormity of the lie causes the captain's nose to grow, her pants to blaze... and her approval ratings to inexplicably skyrocket. (For those playing the home game, Janeway is the freakin' M.C. Escher of the Prime Directive.) And until now, she hasn't had any admirals, commodores or fellow captains to say different.
- Captain Ransom's acting during battles, especially in his first and final scenes, might come off as a bit melodramatic, at times almost feeling like a parody of a military leader.
Strawman Has a Point: While Captain Ransom and his crew are clearly in the wrong, many viewers feel that Janeway comes across as rather sanctimonious and more than a bit hypocritical when condemning them for their actions (especially with her blatantly false claim to have never broken the Prime Directive, which comes across as a quite egregious case of "Not Cheating Unless You Get Caught" reasoning). For those who believe Ransom is telling the pure truth, or at least being broadly truthful about his ship's hardships before he began his atrocities, it seems like the Equinox just didn't get the same "plot coupons" Voyager did.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
- Janeway's sudden Captain Ahab-level grudge against Ransom in the story's second half ends up being too abrupt and too poorly-developed to come across as either righteous anger towards the crew of the Equinox, or misdirected self-loathing for all the times she's had to break her own principles. It instead comes across as an exceedingly long tantrum that comes out of nowhere, and then just disappears when Ransom dies and the Equinox is destroyed. This means that for fans who prefer Star Trek to be a straight-up "good versus evil" morality tale, Janeway's attitude ends up making her hardly any better than the villains, and for fans who prefer the more morally ambiguous side of the franchise, it passes up the opportunity to examine what effects her time in command have had on Janeway's psyche.
- Having a second Starfleet ship around, ultimately leading to it betraying Voyager for their own ends, is the kind of story that could have made for a good multi-episode arc, and would have allowed for much more exploration of the dynamics of the two crews, much like the introduction of the Battlestar Pegasus during the second season of Battlestar Galactica (2003) a few years later. Or failing that, they could have at least had the Equinox escape rather than being destroyed at the end of the story, allowing them to become recurring adversaries and forcing Voyager to deal with a rogue Starfleet crew giving the Federation a bad name (though the latter idea would at least be revisited in a fashion in "Live Fast and Prosper").
- The surviving Equinox crewmembers being stripped of rank and forced to re-earn the trust of their Voyager counterparts sounds like it might make a good recurring story arc for Season 6. Too bad none of them are ever seen or mentioned again.
- As mentioned on the main page, the Doctor becomes instantly evil when his ethical subroutines are deactivated, squandering a perfect opportunity for him to prove how far he’s developed in his six seasons on Voyager by, say, displaying that he no longer needs to be programmed to have morals. Or, if the showrunners really wanted him to be evil so badly, why not have him display the same loyalty to his crew as the Equinox EMH, and become ready and willing to kill everyone on the Equinox to protect Seven? Instead, presumably just so they’d be relatively out of the way and could have some creepy scenes, we get the Doctor lobotomizing Seven (which has no consequences either).
Tough Act to Follow: A Meta example. Equinox, Part II not only kicked off Season Six, but was also the first episode of Voyager to air following the conclusion of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. This meant that not only was Voyager no longer airing alongside another Trek series for the first time in its run, but it was also now the only Trek series on the air and had to carry the franchise banner forward on its own (and for better and for worse).

YMMV / Star Trek: Voyager S5 E25, S6 E1: "Equinox"

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