The real Voyager/Starfleet are going to have a hell of a mystery on their hands someday when their entire voyage is put together and races that the fake crew met start chiming in about their fantastic adventures too.
There could be thousands, millions of Voyagers making it/their way home to earth, and most of them are not going to make it, and how do we know that the first Voyager that got home was the "real" Voyager? From week to week how do we kow that we were following the same Voyager? Isn't it impossible that they always won? If we were only seeing the Quicksilver victories, wouldn't it have been just as fair to see all the catastrophic Quicksilver Voyager losses? It'd be like Kenny in South Park, or the Voyager episode Coda, or even Relativity with how the ship kept blowing up...
So after reading around a bit, I understand this episode being polarizing with the fanbase...with those hating it saying "Who cares? What was the point?" (Personally i loved it) But the NEXT ep, "The Fight". Holy crap that stunk. Now that was a pointless POS.
The Fight may be the worst modern Star Trek episode. Or it's one of them because it certainly stinks more than a pile of elephant shit. Course Oblivion is a sequel to one of the worst POS episodes ever Demons. But it's also one of Voyager's best eppies. C:O rocks!
I wonder if that may explain some of Voyager's discontinuities - we were watching the duplicates! (FWIW, one of the duplicate-Voyager missions Chakopy described bore a striking resemblance to the novel Battle Lines, although the name of the race that tried to conscript Voyager was different)
Voyager slaps continuity in the face and rapes it... End of story... By all rights Voyager shouldn't even exist given how the series showed more than a dozen temporal alterations...
What??? You've got it all wrong! I really like Voyager and I've seen the whole series at least four times. But its continuity is all over the place hence my comment but it's still a blast to watch. Continuity is VOY's biggest flaw but it doesn't detract that much from the time-travelling / time-altering episodes.
The true sign of our undying love for VOY is a willingness to accept it in its whole, numerous flaws and all C:O always struck me, from first time I saw it, as one of the most truly tragic and moving stories of VOY. Perhaps in Trek canon. (patiently waits for flak)
Kenny's dying was actually explained recently. I was kind of hilarious, Kenny can talk normally when he's in his Mysterion costume, and it's a hilarious shock in like the 14th season or so, Kenny suddenly declares "I have a real power...I...can't...die! And then, when I wake up in my own bed the next morning, nobody can remember I died!" That episode ends with Kenny saying "Well, I'm tired, I'm going to bed" and shooting himself in the head. Maybe it's like that in Voyager, actually. How like 20 crew members die then there aren't any less people on board next count. All those crew members are actually coming back to life and nobody can remember they died.
No, you're right. Going from wanting to get home to wanting someone to know what they did to just wanting someone to know they existed...and not even getting that. (well, other than whatever races they encountered.)
That's why this episode is so depressing. This duplicate crew of the duplicate Voyager are not only decay to grey goo, no one will remember them and that is really depressing.