Series Television Has a Change Problem

When Star Trek: Voyager introduced a Borg character, the producer's rationale was that it would open up "limitless story possibilities." But the show had already squandered the possibilities built into its own premise. The setup was promising on paper: a ship flung tens of thousands of light-years from home, a seventy-year journey back, and a crew divided between loyal Starfleet officers and rebels. That combination suggests an uneasy alliance, exploration under desperate circumstances, and the psychological strain of a long voyage on a ship far smaller than the Enterprise.

In practice, the premise collapsed under the weight of series television's constraints. The fundamental demand of a series is that regular characters remain recognizable week after week; viewers must care about them and worry for them. But because they will always return next episode, genuine jeopardy is hard to sustain. A story, by contrast, requires someone to change of their own accord. Change can be triggered externally, but the actual transformation has to come from within. That is the paradox of episodic television: only guest characters are permitted to change, yet the instrument of that change must be a regular, leaving neither character room to do anything interesting.

Some shows dodge this by making characters genuinely disposable, as Hill Street Blues did. When bit players die, the regulars suddenly seem vulnerable. Voyager took the opposite approach. In the first season, an episode introduced a traitor as clever as Captain Janeway herself. After leading her around for nearly an hour, he confessed — and beamed off the ship, having struck a deal with the locals. It was a setup tailor-made for a series: an intelligent recurring villain who had bested the captain. Yet it felt like a cheat. The story had no resolution.

What the Traitor Episode Needed

The better version would have ended with the confrontation and an arrest. The traitor goes to the brig — and stays there for the foreseeable future. That gives the viewer a moment of victory. But now Janeway has someone on board who is her intellectual equal, someone with no formal rank to constrain their relationship. Whenever a problem grows severe enough, she has the option to visit the brig and negotiate. "The ship dies, you die." And when she is feeling low, he can needle her: "By the way, I thought of a way to get everyone home in one-tenth the time. Have you, Captain?"

He would not appear every week. But he would be available whenever the story needed an extra push. Escape attempts and the constant problem of simply keeping him imprisoned would generate whole episodes on their own. The key is that he is never disposed of easily; he remains a resource and a threat.

A stronger version of this idea would force Janeway into a genuine moral crisis. Imagine a breakdown: the ship stranded, power failing, and life support running out. There are too many people on board. One crew member has already died. Another must die — or the prisoner can be executed. Tuvok points out the logic: a summary court martial is within the captain's authority, and the prisoner's guilt is not in question.

Janeway refuses. "The Federation doesn't do that." But everyone dies if she holds that line. She looks for a technological fix, and the deadline tightens. A crew member volunteers to die; another volunteers as well, forcing her to choose between people the ship cannot function without. Someone tries to solve the problem by killing the prisoner unilaterally, and the attempt wastes precious power, moving the deadline past the point where engineering's solution becomes feasible. The prisoner, meanwhile, offers ideas — in exchange for a full pardon. Did he try to destroy the ship before? Yes. Is he bluffing now? Maybe.

The ending has to follow logically from what has been established. This is where episode plotting usually fails, with a last-minute "if we vorpalize the antibogon flow" technobabble solution. Any technological fix has to be seeded in the first half of the episode or it is deus ex machina. Given the setup above, three endings are possible:

  • A crew member sacrifices themselves to save the ship. This is weak unless Janeway does it herself, because it shifts focus away from her decision.
  • Janeway makes a deal with the prisoner, and they solve the problem together. This grants him freedom while the rest of the crew despises him — grist for future episodes.
  • Janeway decides to execute the prisoner, refusing to hold a court martial. A million-to-one chance might save him anyway, but the point is that she has chosen to kill him rather than her crew.

The strongest ending is the third. The decision is difficult and meaningful — a true command decision. Whether the prisoner actually dies matters less than the fact that Janeway chooses to order it. John Gallishaw categorized stories as either tales of achievement or tales of decision. The latter are far harder to write, because both options have to matter. That is the kind of story Voyager needed, and it was already available in its own premise — if the writers had been willing to let a character stay in the brig long enough to matter.