Star Trek: Voyager — 6x09 — The Voyager Conspiracy

Aired 1999-11-24

SpaceOpera.com rating:6

Average reader rating:4.42

Synopsis

Seven suspects there is a conspiracy.

Remarkable scenes

Seven of Nine's complex web of reasoning for how she discovered the parasites Neelix accidentally brought aboard.
Voyager stumbling on the space catapult.
Tash regarding his catapult: "Catapult a vessel across space, in the time it takes to say 'catapult a vessel across space.'"
Seven of Nine speculating that a tractor beam recovered one of the reactors on the Caretaker's array.
Seven of Nine outlining her conspiracy theory to Chakotay.
Seven of Nine outlining her new conspiracy theory to Janeway.
Seven of Nine accosting Naomi.
Janeway and Chakotay confronting each other with (perhaps not so) subtle innuendo.
Chakotay: "You didn't poison the coffee did you?" Janeway: "Not any more than I usually do."

Review

This episode is both annoying and wonderfully hilarious at the same time. Seven of Nine's conspiracy theories reminded me of clinically paranoid people who have nothing to do but study the intricacies of world politics all day so that they can invent government conspiracies. A nice tip of the hat there. But Seven's behavior was hardly rational. It seemed pretty clear early on that Seven's theories were bogus, so it was kind of annoying but also somewhat funny watching as she managed to convince both Chakotay and Janeway of conflicting theories. Kind of reminded me of a sleazy car salesman. While Seven's actions made the plot kind of exciting, I think Voyager's cooperation with Tash is the remarkable part about the episode. Tash's catapult reminds me a lot of Babylon 5's hyperspace gate. A small deficiency, why didn't Voyager get the schematics of this catapult? They could have attempted to build another one; and even if they failed they could at least transmit the schematics to Starfleet so that the Federation could build some and send some to Voyager in sequence. Oh well.

7 reader comments

This episode kind of reminded me of DS9: Whispers. The convincing conspiracy theories demonstrates how evidence can be arranged to support all kinds of wild theories, and that correlation does not necessarily mean causation. It also makes fun of a lot of current conspiracy theories that violate Occam's Razor to a ridiculous extent.
by Pete Miller | 01/02/2007 at 9:05 pm

I like Voyager, but why don't they wear more casual clothes when the eat, have dinner or are in own quarters. Like Riker on TNG or Sisko.
by Dejan | 03/12/2008 at 12:57 pm

You know, I think it takes a current or former conspiracy theorist to fully appreciate this episode. I think it did quite a spectacular job and has several important lessons, among them: good and plentiful data does not necessarily mean good information, and even good information does not always translate to actionable knowledge. Our brains loathe chaos, yet the natural and socio-political world is inherently chaotic. Its easy for us to find patterns where none exist. And find solutions and false answers to questions that may ultimately be too complex or bizarre to even begin to answer.
I love how at the end we're left wondering…What was that 'tracking beam' that Seven found? Some kind of astrometric lab artifact? Or something more bizarre?
by a2a.com | 12/27/2011 at 5:34 am

This episode is awful and an abomination of logical reasoning.
I went to the grocery store today. Was I picking up food to eat, or establishing channels to monopolize the local food supply to gain power?
Simply adding or and then a random conclusion to explain simple behavior is shown in this episode to be compelling reasoning. After all, it pretty much convinced the top two officers.
by Rick Smith | 04/09/2013 at 4:09 am

One amusing nitpick: When Janeway tried to regain Seven's trust, she said "Stardate 52840 - the captain orders Seven to study her parent's journals…". Clearly the writers mixed up the events of "11:59" and "Dark Frontier".
I suppose we could argue that it was Janeway who made the error, but there is no way Seven - in full-paranoid-mode - would have trusted her after such an inconsistency.
And to Rick:
The fact that you deny your quest of world domination, is evidence enough that these suspicions are true ;-)
by OmicronThetaDeltaPhi | 01/23/2014 at 9:39 pm

I did like Tash's catapult, and the episode was intriguing until Seven went all tinfoil hat and laid out wildly speculative theories to both Chakotay and Janeway, apparently within mere hours of each other.
Lost in all that, though, was one question: what was that tractor beam in the middle of the explosion of the Caretaker Array? That's never sufficiently answered. It's never even made clear that it's the same technology that eventually wound up with Tash. You could assume something survived the explosion and he eventually got his hands on it, but that doesn't make clear what the tractor beam was. Kind of an unsolved mystery of the episode, I guess.
by Mike L. Jackson | 06/15/2017 at 11:20 pm

This episode could have been good, but I agree with Rick, Sevens reasoning was random, she badly needs logic lessons from Tuvok. And even worse that Janeway and Chucky immediately fall for it and betray each other to the point they start wearing weapons! Add to all of it that Sevens information was at times flat out wrong, like when she talked about the Chakotay-Seska child plot, which wasnt even his child in the end.
by Amelia Obumhardt | 03/02/2022 at 8:39 am