It’s fascinating, but also frustrating. Voyager’s structure as a highly episodic series means that this incredible denouement starts and ends with conclusion of “Prime Factors.” The damage to Tuvok and Janeway’s friendship is immediately dropped. As heartbreaking as it is to see in the moment—anchored in a brilliant performance by Kate Mulgrew and Tim Russ, one achingly emotional and the other constrained by Vulcan logic—their conversation has no consequence, logistically or emotionally. Voyager simply moves on, the events of the episode never to be brought up again. But you cannot help but wonder what might have been if the show was not so solely confined by Trek’s episodic bread and butter, if all these relationships and their ups and downs were allowed to sit and linger beyond the events of particular episodes. Especially a show like Voyager, where personal and structural events should have a much larger feeling of consequence, considering the ship is all the crew have stranded far from the rest of the Federation.
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Alas, that can only ever be a thought experiment—as inevitably doomed to fail as the Voyager crew’s chances of finding a way home are this early on in the show. And yet, it’s a moment that still hits all these years later, one of the first true signs of Voyager’s dramatic potential… even if it ultimately doesn’t quite live up to all of it.
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