10 Times Janeway Was The Best Captain In Star Trek

The captain goes down with the ship. Hardly a new idea, but Janeway managed to turn a suicide run into a beautiful leap of faith, ramming the now near-derelict Voyager into the Krenim Temporal Weapon, resetting all of the damage that they had done.

Magic reset buttons can be extremely frustrating in any story. Consequences help the characters to learn and grow. This was something that Deep Space Nine largely succeeded in achieving and something that Voyager sometimes floundered in.

However, Year of Hell is the exception to the rule. This two-part episode is often voted among the best in the entire show's catalogue. It is a 'what if?' scenario - what if Voyager never got resupplied, never managed to fix repairs and was constantly on the back foot? Basically - what happened if Star Trek: Voyager was Battlestar Galactica?

Yet, this episode paints such a grim light on that that, though we only see it for two episodes, we get everything that we need. Janeway is almost maniacal when it comes to safeguarding her crew and her ship. She refuses to abandon Voyager, all the way to the bloody end. She willingly sacrifices her own life at the chance that, by doing so, she will return the galaxy to the shape it had been in originally. It is a leap of faith for sure and, depending on whether or not one believes in an afterlife, it was the end of that particular Janeway - going out in a blaze of glory to save lives.