I attempted a thread about this last year, but it ended up becoming a discussion board about the Caretaker himself. Let's forget about the Banjo Man here, and focus on his potential victims. The Caretaker supposedly pulled many other ships into the Delta Quadrant, from all over the galaxy, before Voyager. Yet, the only confirmed cases are Voyager, the Val Jean, and the Equinox. In this thread, we speculate on other possible ships, and how they responded by getting stranded. Off the top of my head: The U.S.S. Hera - Geordie La Forge's mother captained this ship, and vanished with it. Many have already speculated that the Caretaker was responsible. It happened a few years before Voyager, so if the Hera had chosen to head home, they'd be too far ahead of Voyager for the two to cross paths. But is that what happened? The Hera was a Nebula-class ship, with a mostly Vulcan crew. Might either of those facts affect the Captain Silva La Forge's decision to attempt going home, or just settle on some planet? Of course, this, alongside the Equinox, begs the question of why no DQ aliens have heard of the Federation before Voyager. A Dominion Ship - If a Founder is onboard, they might struggle to keep control over the crew of Vorta and Jem'Hadar, without the power of the Dominion to back them. As the crew experiences a part of the galaxy without the Dominion, their perspective and loyalties might begin to shift. Of course the Jem'Hadar would need to find a replacement for their Ketracel White. No doubt, the Founder, or if there isn't one, the head-Vorta, might demand a mass-suicide, if their chances of reaching the Dominion proved too low. But would all onboard adhere to that? What might a bunch of rogue Vorta, Jem'Hadar, and maybe Founders get up to, in the DQ? (Another thread here noted some Jem'Hadar in the audience in "Voyager's" episode "Tsunkatse.") Romulans - Would likely have tried to use the Array to get home, but if this was back when the Caretaker wasn't so weak, maybe he'd prevent that. But how would the Romulans respond to the Ocampa, who must surely remind them of their Vulcan cousins? And how would they react when, after decades of crawling through space, they finally reach the Alpha Quadrant, only to learn Romulus has exploded? Hirogen - The Caretaker surely took ship from this quadrant, and some would still be very displaced. The Hirogen would likely just start exploring this new hunting ground. Things might get ugly if they meet the Vidiians, and the battle for each other's organs begins.
I remember this episode and would have bet good money that it would have gotten a follow-up in VOY, but no dice. Just the fact that the ship had a primarily Vulcan crew was practically a dead giveaway for a Tuvok-centric episode. But apparently no one saw any need for a connection with what happened to the Hera and the Caretaker. The Dominion had transporter technology that enabled them to beam places from light-years away. I'd bet they'd have enough advanced tech to be able to find a way back if one of their ships got stranded. However, the ketracel-white shortage is a good point. Wasn't one of the plot points of "The Voyager Conspiracy" was that not only was a Cardassian ship pulled into the Delta Quadrant, but a cloaked ship, probably Romulan, was as well?
One more wall-banging missed opportunity for "Voyager." Dang, I forgot about that. But maybe the Caretaker damaged that tech in their ship.
...If one were made, we'd gripe about how nothing in "Interface" suggested such a connection, I guess. The Caretaker caught two ships from the Badlands, which really is statistical suggestion that this is the only place in Alpha where he would have done any catching (Neelix speaks of just fifty-ish sad stories of abduction in total). One wonders about that tech: it was never seen in use anywhere, after all. Even when referred to that unique once, in "Covenant", it might have been faked by Dukat instead. Shortage of White would be a story point, but not an insurmountable obstacle to anything. Somebody in the Dominion knows how to make that stuff, and apparently at least the Son'a and the Feds know, too (the former is more or less stated, the later is implicit in the Federation taking Jem'Hadar prisoners and expecting them to live). It'd thus be a quest for them to find somebody to make White for them, if the Vorta already didn't know how. Calling that a "point" might be a tad too generous. For all we know, none of that ever happened, and what wasn't a delirious misunderstanding by Seven was a deliberate manipulative lie told by her to convert her current victim to her deranged cause. Timo Saloniemi
Weren’t most of the previous ships returned? Yeah it would have been cool seeing a Dominion ship deal with the isolation.
The dominion ship wouldn't have been going in the same direction as Voyager, obviously. They may not encounter the Kazon (I strongly believe Ocampa was on the far flung edge of Kazon's part of the Quadrant) or the Viidians.
We never heard of any ship that would have been returned. Nobody claimed that the Caretaker would return ships. Seven suspecyed he might have, but she was crazy as a cuckoo at the time. Apparently, all the ships but Starfleet's finest ended up in that scrap heap Neelix was living in, and all the crews were killed... Timo Saloniemi
I got the definite impression in Caretaker that the caretaker abducted a few crew members, and when they didn’t work out, returned the rest.
Yet we never heard of any returning - when our heroes beg the Caretaker to do that, he appears surprised by the very idea. What the Caretaker did was generally destructive: he had everybody he tested killed, apparently. He never says what happened to those he didn't test, and although we have two cases where only one from the crew gets tested, this might only be because the Caretaker was growing tired. And there is that big debris cloud nearby... Any untested folks in their abducted but still spaceworthy ships would supposedly be able to sail away - into Kazon space. Few would be likely to ever see home again. (But if a Dominion crew decided that informing their gods of this threat was necessary, they'd be certain to make it home! Provided it happened before they died of old age within the decade, that is.) Timo Saloniemi
The Hera disappeared roughly a year and 1/3 before Voyager got taken, so there is still enough distance of time between the two for them to never meet. They could also have gone a completely different path than Voyager, which would explain why no one heard of the Federation. As for not encountering the Kazon, Janeway herself made an enemy of the Ogla maje in the pilot, and he clearly made sure of it to everyone in known space. Without that issue, the Hera could quite easily fly around without getting into a confrontation with them. The Vidiians, though... if they did encounter the Hera, it would certainly explain why one of the Vidiians in "DEADLOCK" was able to identify Tuvok as Vulcan when he scanned his body after he shot him. Dominion ship... ketracel white production would be a massive issue. The Son'a produce it, and only certain planets have the active ingredients needed to make it. There may be Jem'Hadar captives in Starfleet during the Dominion War, but considering Bashir had such a hard time recreating the white, I wonder if they were simply put in stasis or enough stockpiles of white was found and they supplied it to the prisoners. They can live as long as the white supplies them... their short lifespans are due to them being used entirely for battle. A Romulan ship... they may not necessarily have even encountered the Ocampa. If not for Neelix and Kes, Voyager wouldn't have been able to even go to their underground city. They would certainly have tried to take the Array, and obviously failing to do that, either are destroyed in the process or just head home. Ironically, they likely had the best shot of getting home out of any option I've seen... Romulans live for a couple centuries and with their cloaking device, they can just sneak their way almost the entire way home. Another Delta Quadrant species... unless it's from a species we'd already seen before, I'm not sure how we as the audience would feel a connection, especially since it's already their home quadrant. Definitely wouldn't be as long a journey as Voyager. The only two races we know were never brought by the Caretaker are the Vaadwaur, since they were all dormant for centuries, and the Borg, simply by virtue of them not coming with more cubes to find out about it if one of their ships was destroyed or damaged.
...What hard time? In "The Abandoned", he mentions no difficulty. In "Hippocratic Oath", he makes no attempt. For all we know, after identifying the substance in "The Abandoned", he was able to produce it at will. There simply was no need in any particular episode - although this is the very thing he offered to do first in "Hippocratic Oath", only Goran'Agar turned him down immediately. Indeed. The only thing pointing our heroes towards that system were the energy pulses from the array, and the witnesses suggested those were a recent thing. Prior arrivals might never have had the incentive to get to a situation where encountering would even have been an option. Of course, in practice it would be the story of a man from Harlem suddenly finding himself in Valparaiso, mugged of all his possessions; his journey back home on foot might be epic enough, but hey, he's "already home", on the very same continent! How so? Failing to exploit the shortcuts Janeway found might result in this protagonist covering more lightyears "on foot" than Janeway ever did, assuming he didn't live in the immediate vicinity of the Ocampa but somewhere else in Delta instead. Reaction time matters, though. Starfleet may leave ships missing for a century; some Borg might have been caught but the abduction not yet reacted upon by the Collective... Timo Saloniemi
In "THE ABANDONED", Bashir came up with a stopgap but it still wasn't that effective. Later in the episode, they found a case of white and used it. Agreed about "HIPPOCRATIC OATH", but there is nothing we've seen that suggests they succeeded in making it, other than that quick line about Jem'Hadar POWs. As far as the journey, Earth is far more distant than anywhere in the Delta Quadrant, so of course the journey back would take longer than any other race in the Delta Quadrant. If a Kazon ship was trying to head back from the edge of the Delta Quadrant, it still isn't as far because it is still in the same quadrant. 50 or 60 years instead of 70 years is still a shorter journey.
Only marginally so, though. So there's quite a bit of a dichotomy between "he's already home" and "his home is basically as far away as Earth from here", perhaps dramatically unappealing to writers who want the audience to intuit it. Problems with White could go either way, with the evidence being so scarce. And I fear that they'd be a biggish deal in the first couple of eps and then be completely forgotten by the end of the first season, perhaps only to be mentioned offhand in a fourth-season episode again. Timo Saloniemi
If sometime after "Night" Voyager found the wreckage of the USS Hera, Janeway could have got some closure and let go of some of the guilt she had for not trying to return to the Alpha Quadrant in Caretaker. It does seem very unlikely that they would run into any other Alpha Quadrant ships though.
The Caretaker abducts a Borg cube, thinking it will be a whole lot more efficient with all those different assimilated species on board. This plan backfires and he and the Ocampa get assimilated.
@Finn If Janeway had tried to use the Caretaker's array to get back to the AQ, Voyager might not have made it back and more of the crew might have died than did on the show.