After a few episodes of season 6, I basicly stopped watching Voyager, and only cought several episodes here and there. So, I was wondering, did we ever see the Equinox crew that were taken aboard Voyager again??
Janeway: "What's for breakfast Neelix?" Neelix: "Ah Captain, tempt you with some fresh soylent green?"
Actually I think they were stripped of rank and spent the rest of the trip scrubbing plasma thingies in the bowels of the ship, under guard the whole time. That's what should have happened, if Janeway folded them into her crew after they knowingly abandoned Voyager to their probable deaths she would be a total sucker. I really liked Marla Gilmore who seemed to be in love with Ransom. If it was a different sort of show we would have seen more of her.
They actually ended up back on Earth 2 years before Voyager. Little did Janeway know there was actually a small wormhole in the darkest recesses of Voyager the entire time! An artifact of the Caretaker's displacement wave. Because they were selfish and traumatized and abandoned their Starfleet principles, they didn't tell anyone, just looked at each other silently, and ran into the wormhole.
Followed by a voice over by Rod Serling: "Case in point for those who step on people like rungs on a ladder, or in this case killer space dolphins from another dimension. The mountaintop has a toll, and the pied piper must be paid his due, and the wages of sin is death, the burial plot in... the Twilight Zone."
That was my first thought too. But I like the theory that they all ended up scrubbing out plasma conduits. Though IMO they should have been used as background characters or something. One of the weaknesses of Voyager (as opposed to DS9 or nuBSG) is that they would often create a minor character and then forget that they existed. Of course there were some major exceptions like Ahni Jetal of the 5th season episode Latent Image: She was supposedly a very beloved member of the crew who dies because the Doctor decides to operate on Harry Kim instead of her. Where in the world did she come from? Or think of Lyndsay Ballard: She was supposedly a member of the Voyager crew that Harry had a big crush on. Lyndsay was killed by the Hirogen (what season did they first appear?) and then later reappeared as a reanimated alien: We never saw her before the Season 6 episode Ashes to Ashes. It reminds me of Nikki and Paolo, survivors of Ocean Flight 815 who magically appeared in Season 3 of Lost (as if they had been there the whole time). I'm not saying we should know everything about every minor character, but it was funny when some would pop up in a later season episode and everyone acted as if they were very popular membesr of the crew.
They joined............. (drum roll and trumpet fanfare) The Shuttle And Torpedo Building Team! Voyager's true heroes!
"Latent Image" and "Ashes to Ashes" were 2 of Voyager's strongest stories (except for the Kobali being able to cover somewhere in the ballpark of 35,000ly or so in so short a time). If the writers/producers were really good, which obviously they weren't, they would have seeded the show with at least a few extras who have at least decent acting ability, have them be seen in several shots, occasionally speaking with crewmembers, and then have them disappear and come back later to fit in these stories. If we saw Jetal or Ballard and then they vanished and came back, people would have been proclaiming it as excellent writing. Both actresses played their role well enough to make many of us viewers wish we saw them earlier and that they had scenes with Kim, Paris, etc. If they had a few of them, in case any one of them landed a regular role on another tv show/movie and couldn't appear, they'd have more than one to draw from. Voyager had far more than 150 faces walking its corridors. There was some website that actually showed them all, forget what it was. There was some guy who was an extra on TNG in Season 7 and on Voyager too. Then of course, the most visible extra on Voyager was the elderly black man in a blue uniform who was as much a fixture in the mess hall as Morn was in Quark's... until the Hirogen came! He was last seen right before "The Killing Game" (implication: perhaps he was among the casualties alluded to in that episode).
I remember a website like that. There was like 80ish named characters and almost 30 of those, had died (or left) on screen. However they doubled up a couple times since they had to count a couple "characters" twice as they had been gender bent, being referred to sometimes as a boy and sometimes as a girl that you had to wonder how many siblings were stationed on Voyager? Someone here said that John Savage was being groomed to replace Mulgrew if she got difficult duting contract negotiations... If so... Then some of the Equinox 5 (Marla and Noah obviously) would have been kept on if Kate got the flick... It make establish some level of continuity. But would that mean that they would have had to fire someone else on the main crew to make room for the Equinox "few"? Who was going to save you how that time Kim?
I'd love to see John Savage as a starfleet captain but I can't imagine how they would have worked that without killing off Chakotay. Yes he outranks him but clearly his violations would exempt him from command, if he even was let out of the brig for walks. If he WAS the captain then Marla would quickly end up in a Janice Rand positing I'd imagine.
Ayala was in ten more episodes than Jeri Ryan (113 episodes). Sam was in 8 episodes. She is regarded as a MAJOR character, but 8 episodes in seven years? Fuck that. Voyagers producers didn't believe in character retention because it costs more to use the same actors over and over again, and they have no faith in their audience to remember shit, no, no they had complete faith in their audience to abandon Voyager if any story appeared which required having seen any other episode every made in any of the series.
That's what I figured. They were being punished, there was no reason to see them again. Bad people don't deserve to see the light of day. However, I'd rather we not see the Equinox crew if they weren't going use them in a plot to give reason for seeing them again. It seemed pointless to have the actor that played Lt. Carey make cameo just to say "Can I help you, Lt.?" It seems a waste of money & time to bring an actor back to speak one line or walk by in the background. Odd though, many say that not showing them again shows a lack of continuity on Voyager's part but nobody ever questions what happened to the Starfleet Security Chief that showed up during the second season of DS9.