5 Episodes Of Star Trek: Voyager Season 3 You Can Completely Skip

There are a few Star Trek: Voyager season 3 episodes that you can easily skip. From the beginning, Voyager is all about cooperation, with its disparate crews working together. Season 3 sees how Captain Kathryn Janeway's (Kate Mulgrew) USS Voyager crew cooperates — or doesn't — with Delta Quadrant societies. Exploring themes of integration and assimilation, Voyager's characters are overtaken by external forces as they're swept up in the Delta Quadrant's cultures, religions, and wars. It's all Voyager's lead-up to entering Borg space, which closes out the season with a cliffhanger in "Scorpion, Part 1."

Like earlier seasons of Voyager, season 3 takes risks with high-concept stories, some of which pay off better than others. Voyager swings for the fences with stories like episode 21, "Before and After," which sees Kes (Jennifer Lien) traveling backwards through her own lifetime; and episode 23, "Distant Origin", or "the one with the dinosaurs." But not every risk can pay off as handsomely as Voyager season 3's best episodes. The season is also home to Star Trek: Voyager's "Trilogy of Terror" — but we'll get to that, along with which, if any, of those infamous episodes are worth skipping.

5"Warlord"

Voyager Season 3, Episode 10

Star Trek: Voyager season 3, episode 10, "Warlord", starts with the sounds of Neelix (Ethan Phillips) moaning as he gets his feet rubbed by a holographic Talaxian woman. That's a pretty good tip-off that this might not be one of the best Star Trek: Voyager episodes, and what follows is pretty solid proof that it's one you can skip. In fact, the best thing that "Warlord" has going for it is that Jennifer Lien is great at not playing Kes, because the dead Ilari tyrant Tieran (Leigh McCloskey) cheats death by inhabiting Kes' body, then breaks up with Neelix.After Tieran-as-Kes kills the current Autarch and peaces out with the other Ilari — including Nori (Galyn Görg), Tieran's wife — "Warlord" spends a surprising amount of its runtime devoted to Tieran staging his vainglorious comeback as a despotic Autarch. Even back on the USS Voyager, we hear more from the former Autarch's son about Ilari politics than we do about how to undo Tieran's mental takeover. It's an odd choice when we don't know the Ilari, and Janeway's planning to move on as soon as Kes is freed.

But the most frustrating thing about "Warlord" is that the episode comes too late in Voyager's run to actually make a difference for Kes as a character. After Lieutenant Tuvok (Tim Russ) manages to break Kes free of Tieran's control, he explicitly promises that Kes will be a markedly different person because of this experience, and she just ... isn't. Maybe "Warlord" would have been more of a turning point for Kes if Jennifer Lien hadn't left Voyager after season 3, but it's not, so go ahead and skip it.

4"Favorite Son"

Voyager Season 3, Episode 20

"Favorite Son" puts Ensign Harry Kim (Garrett Wang) in the spotlight, and actually lets him get the girl for once, after a string of Ensign Kim's failed romances. Harry deserves better than he usually gets, and he doesn't get to be the focus of too many episodes to begin with. But you can still skip "Favorite Son" without missing much, because the episode's basic premise — that Harry Kim is secretly a Taresian from the Delta Quadrant — strains credibility, even with everything the Taresians do to convince Kim he's been one of them this whole time.

The Taresians' flimsy cover story breaks down when you consider they'd have to go all the way to the Alpha Quadrant to implant Harry's mother with a Taresian fetus. Maybe the premise of "Favorite Son" would've worked better in TNG or DS9, where both viewers and characters wouldn't see the gaping hole in the Taresians' paper-thin ruse. But Ensign Kim ignores both the flawed logic and the Taresian cult vibes and just abandons his Starfleet life to become Taresian breeding stock.

Notably, "Favorite Son" is one of the "Trilogy of Terror" episodes that comprises a one-two-three punch of low-rated stories late in Voyager season 3. While it's not the worst of the bunch, Voyager just hits its infamous reset button after Harry Kim is rescued, so "Favorite Son" has no lasting repercussions. It's a shame when Voyager season 3 also had "The Chute," which did give Kim a meal of a role, and character development that actually sticks.

3"False Profits"

Voyager Season 3, Episode 5

Voyager season 3, episode 5, "False Profits", builds its premise off of one line in Star Trek: The Next Generation season 3, episode 8, "The Price," where a pair of Ferengi negotiators, Arridor (Dan Shor) and Kol (Leslie Jordan), were pulled through the Barzan wormhole into the Delta Quadrant. Because of that, "False Profits" pays more attention to being a Star Trek sequel episode and catch-up session with TNG's Ferengi than it does to being a proper Voyager episode.

"False Profits" forgets that Voyager works best when it's actually encountering new life and new civilizations in the Delta Quadrant, instead of revisiting what we already know. It's just a little too uncanny to come across Ferengi in the Delta Quadrant, and weirder still that Voyager doesn't figure in the ways that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine changed the Ferengi. Arridor and Kol could have been more sympathetic characters, but they're still written like one-dimensional, comedic villains who position themselves as prophesied gods to an unsuspecting pre-warp society.

2"Sacred Ground"

Voyager Season 3, Episode 7

Despite being a story about religion, "Sacred Ground" commits the cardinal sin of being a boring Star Trek episode. Captain Kathryn Janeway volunteers to undergo a spiritual trial to save Kes' life, which should be an interesting interrogation of Janeway's scientific beliefs as they relate to spirituality, but that's not what we get. Instead, "Sacred Ground" plods through its meandering story, where Kathryn's alien "guide" leads her exactly nowhere. It's part of the theme that some answers just aren't scientifically accessible, but the Nechani guides are hardly a substitute for Deep Space Nine's Prophets.

Frustratingly, the USS Voyager crew is just a little off-model. The plot demands someone to be sacrificed in the name of Janeway's journey, so Kes is more careless than curious. And because Kes is out of commission, Neelix's wailing and distress are that much louder than normal. Commander Chakotay (Robert Beltran) leans so hard into playing the devil's advocate for Nechani spiritual beliefs he almost seems anti-science. I want to like what "Sacred Ground" is trying to say, but Janeway doesn't seem willing to actually surrender to the unknown, so it's not really saying much in the end.

1"Rise"

Voyager Season 3, Episode 19

You can skip Voyager season 3, episode 19, "Rise," not least because the episode itself seems to have skipped its own beginning. The story starts in medias res, without any background knowledge of who the guests on the USS Voyager bridge are, or why Janeway's helping them shoot down asteroids. It's an unusual cold open for an episode that's ultimately not about asteroid defense, but the love-hate friendship between Tuvok and Neelix. At least, until it's about the murder suddenly turning up at the top of Act 4.

In other words, "Rise" doesn't really know what it's actually about. The plot seems cobbled together from pieces of at least three other stories. Curiously, the episode takes sides in the ongoing personality conflict between Tuvok and Neelix, with Tuvok painted as a bad guy for expecting Neelix to be honest or professional when Neelix only wanted to help. It's a paradoxical message for Star Trek, which usually touts cooperation as the pinnacle of working relationships, instead of criticizing any one character for their values — in this case, Tuvok.Four of these five Voyager episodes have a bad take on the season's overall theme of cultural assimilation versus integration. Except for "False Profits," the installments all see characters burying who they truly are for the benefit of others. Whether that's Tuvok letting Neelix win in "Rise," Kes being taken over by Tieran in "Warlord," Harry abandoning the Federation in "Favorite Son," or Janeway trying to be spiritual in "Sacred Ground," the messages of these Star Trek: Voyager episodes just don't mesh with Star Trek's ethos, so they're best skipped.