10 Star Trek Quotes That Made Us Trekkies

Some have found fault with Star Trek: Voyager for not making the most of its 'alone on the other side of the galaxy' premise. The Void, however, is one of those episodes in which starship and crew must truly face the perils of the Delta Quadrant when they are flung into a practically empty pit of space and forced to survive. We know Voyager's going to make it, or they'd have had to stop (or, at least, rename) the show right there, but it's rarely the what, but the how that makes for a good quote.

Janeway's resolute approach — that some principals are worth dying for, especially those of the Federation, and especially if the alternative means theft and murder — provides the moral core of The Void. "We won't lose who we are" is a powerful way of saying that, for Janeway, the ends will never justify the means.

If we contrast this with episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise that aired hardly three years later, but post 9/11, the difference is striking. Captain Archer's actions in the Expanse were highly divisive at the time and suggested a moral ambiguity that The Void had avoided. Captain Archer would say that "I can't try to save humanity without holding on to what makes me human," but he'd already broken that adage in Anomaly and would do so again in Damage.

Neither captain has a monopoly on the truth, however. As Trekkies we must, as F. Scott Fitzgerald would say, "hold [the] two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."