Star Trek: 10 Plot Twists Everyone Saw Coming

10. Barzan Back-And-Forth

"Options?" "There are none." That question from Captain Janeway, and that reply from Ensign Kim, at the end of False Profits, sums up the outcome of all of Voyager's would-be shortcuts home, until the very last. The plot twist was, by necessity, always 'back to square one,' or back to whatever square of the Delta Quadrant they had reached by that episode. Barzan and those bloody Ferengi, were but one in a line of examples of what Lieutenant Paris would later call the "tendency to blow up in our faces".

If Voyager had flown back through that wormhole in season three, the twist would have turned the series on its head. The highly frustrating for the crew was the already obvious for the viewer. The carrot had to be the stick. We all knew no amount of high intensity impulse would see them catch up with that aperture. The 'would-they?' was the 'how-would-they-not?'

Barzan, previously of The Price, wasn't even the first wormhole to have teased a quick hop across the galaxy for the Intrepid-class. At the end of the excellent Eye of the Needle, the twist was temporal mechanics, not a debrief with Starfleet. Later, the 'telepathic pitcher plant' would tempt Voyager, with a fake wormhole to Earth's doorstep this time.