YMMV / Star Trek: Voyager S5 E17: "Course: Oblivion"

• Accidental Aesop: It has been argued by many commentators, including by SF Debris in his review, that the episode is unintentionally one of the strongest arguments in favor of the oft-maligned Prime Directive that Star Trek has ever produced. In "Demon", the Voyager crew changed the nature of a species through well-intentioned meddling, and as a direct consequence, in this episode they're completely wiped out.
• Broken Base: One of the more notably divisive Voyager episodes. People on one side of the fence either hated "Demon" and hated revisiting the concept, thought that its exploration on whether the copies of the crew were truly real and the fact that they eventually lost their sentience was just too sad, or, on the flip side, didn't care for the alternate crew because they weren't the real Voyager crew and found the episode pointless. People who like this episode admire its strong dramatic elements and actually enjoy that it was an Unexpectedly Dark Episode and explored deep themes.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • At first blush, even after watching the episode, the use of the word "oblivion" in the title seems to be just a synonym for "destruction, annihilation." But "oblivion" literally means a state of having been forgotten, which is what's specific about the tragedy of the dupicate Voyager: not only are they destroyed, but there's not even enough left for the original Voyager to realize who they even were, and all of their experiences since "Demon" are forgotten and lost.
  • The fact that the first few people to get "sick" or "die" were engineers makes sense, since the radiation was from the warp core.
  • The fate of the duplicate Voyager is an all too common one. Ships have disappeared at sea without a trace, their ultimate fate and the stories of their passengers lost to the waves.
• Fridge Horror: Captain Janeway's duplicate happily mentions "Ensign Harper's new baby" near the beginning of the episode. Which reminds us, Naomi Wildman and her mother presumably have a duplicate aboard that ship too... Not to mention the fact that the "new baby", unlike most of the people on the alternate ship, was the only one who wasn't a copy but rather an entirely new lifeform.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: For some who didn't like "Demon", they thought this episode was better for its exploration on whether Clones Are People, Too or not.
• Tear Jerker: Easily one of the saddest episodes for VOY and the entire franchise.
  • The scene where Tom describes the honeymoon he has planned with B'Elanna as she slowly slips away (literally). Even though it's not the real Tom and B'Elanna, it's still sad to see a couple not being able to go on their honeymoon because one of them is dead.
  • The increasingly bleak atmosphere on Duplicate Voyager as one character after another dies, and everyone else is just barely alive.
  • The biggest tearjerker is probably the fact that the duplicates' entire ten month existence amounts to little more than a footnote in Janeway's log.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • An 'expendable' Voyager could have been used to explore areas the writers had been reluctant to explore in the series.
  • The duplicate Voyager had several adventures on its own. This could have come up later with the real Voyager insisting they didn't do this or that, and yet presented with "proof" that they did.

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