10 Most Unique Star Trek Episodes

The premise for Course: Oblivion is a little silly. A ship full of goo-people think they're the originals, then things quickly begin to fall apart - literally. Some of the make-up effects can edge into the ridiculous during the episode, and some of the effects haven't aged very well. Now, that said, the episode offers one of the most crushing endings of any Voyager offering, before or after.

The episode follows this crew of not-Voyager as they go from celebrating the wedding of Paris and Torres to desperately trying to reach a Demon-class planet to regenerate. As the episode goes on, the audience discovers that they haven't been following the usual characters at all. These are all copies, born from the silvery blood on the Demon planet, a year before.

It's a shock to say the least, but things become even more grim as crew members start dying. A new propulsion system, much faster than the original, has been irradiating them to such a degree that they are beginning to lose cohesion. That's not even the worst part. When it becomes clear that the ship may not survive, all of the crew's logs are downloaded into a probe, so that at least some of them can be left for others to discover.

And then the probe is destroyed. And then the ship is destroyed, leaving nothing but a cloud of globules floating in space.

It is, perhaps, one of the cruelest twists in Star Trek's history, making this episode a stand-out example of a writer needing to be asked - who hurt you?