10 Changes Star Trek Hoped You Wouldn't Notice

One of the premises for Star Trek: Voyager was that the ship had been flung tens of thousands of miles away from the Federation, Starfleet or any allied powers. This automatically left them in a bind. Not only would they have to struggle to find friendly races to trade with, so as to replenish their supplies but they would also have to find a way to refuel the ship.

As Voyager went on into its second season and beyond, some of these aspects were quietly dropped from the show. It wasn't so much that they were wiped away altogether, as in the fourth season episode Demon saw the ship struggling with an almost empty gas tank. It was really more of a case that the restrictions that the show had placed on itself got in the way of the stories they began telling.

For example, when the Borg finally arrived at the end of the third season, there simply was no place for a storyline that would see Voyager on the run, suddenly out of weapons, fuel and supplies. Rather, these elements only returned when the episodes had room for them.

Ronald D. Moore, who only worked on a handful of episodes of Voyager due to a difference of opinion with Brannon Braga, went on to reinvent Battlestar Galactica, along with David Eick. In this series, these issues - particularly that of low fuel levels - were not only never far from the main plot but often guided the characters decisions along the way.