Watched this last night. Felt really sorry for them when Tuvok said we are are all duplicates, none of us are real. What kind of realisation (or lack thereof) would that be? If they had turned back in that moment they might have had a greater chance of surviving.
Well, I'd say : 1. That we are very few things on Earth or elsewhere in the Universe, 2. That we do not know how to enjoy what we have (family, friends, work,etc...) Sorry but the crew 2.0 was never intended to survive the odds so... However, the time they spent in the body of real people, allowed them to share a part of their lives, with their joys and sorrows.
What would have happened if they turned right around? Would getting to the Demon planet have saved them?
twists not taken 1) have harry survive - but be the only one left when they reached home, doomed for eternity 2) have them reach earth before disintegrating
They could have settled on the first demon class planet-Janeway simply refused to fight the miners for it wasting precious time for her crew. If you ask me there was no way given the distance they traveled and the rate they were degrading to ever make it back to the demon class planet. They may have reached earth given they just installed a warp drive but then they would have died, they could have fought he miners for the other Y-Class but even Duplicate Janeway refuses to do this, or they could have hit the accelerator and gotten back to the Y-Class and settled from there. But the third option was far less a certainty and its guaranteed more of the crew would die.
If they decided to keep going and disintegrated when they reached Earth orbit, that actually may have been more heartbreaking.
But then there would be a record of their existence-an incomplete one. Starfleet probably wouldn't be able to put two and two together to realize they weren't the real Voyager and silver blood duplicates and they'd be confused when real Voyager made it.
Then Voyager could learn of the fate of the silver blood crew from Admiral Paris. They'd be really sad, but also jealous that the demon crew beat them.
I kind of like these duplicate crew scenarios. It's a shame that Course Oblivion came after Deadlock. If it had been prior, the silver blood crew could've gone through the space time rift that the Deadlock crew went through and there would have been four lots!
You know I always wanted a Deadlock AU fanfiction where through some technobabble they successfully split the ships into two. With two identical crews just lacking one Harry Kim and one Naomi Wildman. Basically Thomas and Will Riker duplicated writ large-a whole ship with everybody and everyone on it duplicated. Now how would that affect the journey across the DQ?
For me, this episode and Timeless were two of my favorites from Season 5. But for me personally, this one was really good. Season 5 of Voyager was the first time I watched a season of trek during it's first run. And I was generally familiar with Star Trek, but I was really just starting to get into it (having also just recently seen First Contact on HBO at the time.) I thought it was so cool how the episode starts off like any other episode, for us, the audience, to then find out that the entire crew is duplicates, and that they are one by one falling apart. The ending though was unexpected as well. Typically, one would expect some evidence of the crew to survive and make it to our versions of the crew. But nothing does. No records, no logs, no how-to's on creating a deuterium-dichromate-lifeform-melting enchanced warp drive. Total buzzkill, but totally awesome way to tell a story and still be able to keep doing the show next week.
Course: Oblivion and Timeless have a lot in common. Some Background Info: The story was conceived and written by Bryan Fuller. The script by Bryan Fuller and Nick Sagan(Yes, the son of Carl) To the person who mentioned going to Earth, it looks like that was the original idea. Here's a copy/paste from Memory Alpha:
I really loved this episode, too. Someone earlier in the thread asked how do we know which episodes were real or duplicate crew. There are only a few episodes where this is possible... "ONE" "HOPE AND FEAR" "NIGHT" "DRONE" (I tend to discount this simply because of the reference of designing a bigger shuttle which ultimately led to the building of the Delta Flyer.) "NOTHING HUMAN" All others had either Tom as an Ensign or had the Delta Flyer appear, and since we never heard any mention of it in "COURSE: OBLIVION", we can conclude the duplicate crew never developed or built it.
The novel Battle Lines is pretty close to one of the previous adventures Silver Blood Chakotay describes.