Warning – For those who have not read Star Trek Voyager’s “Homecoming” and “The Farther Shore” by Christie Golden, this article does contain spoilers!

After seven years on our TV screens Voyager came to an end, in a fitting and dramatic finale.  As voted for by a recent debate at Destination Star Trek London, Endgame became the favourite two part episode for Voyager fans, but should the journey have ended there?

For me personally…no.  There were too many questions I had and I felt the creators owed it to the fans to answer them.  I wanted to know, how exactly was a ship that had been lost for seven years, supposed to integrate into a quadrant that had moved on?  A quadrant that had been ravaged by war?  Where exactly had the romantic relationship between Seven and Chakotay come from?  Was Tuvok healed?  I believed this would have been best presented in a short mini series, much like Farscape’s “Peacekeeper Wars” just to tie loose ends.  Unfortunately, the producers didn’t seem to agree.

Thankfully, Christie Golden, one of my favourite Voyager authors, had a similar idea to me when she wrote “Homecoming” and “The Farther Shore” a duo of books created to tell the story directly after Voyagers return to the Alpha Quadrant.  However, her story was very familiar to me.

As with all good books, you had a main story that was spliced with sub plots that all mixed together to create a fantastic finale.  We had the Borg, but a Borg invasion like no other.  We had a holographic revolution, and we had two novels that addressed faith, religion, spirituality, culture, slavery, racism, torture, romance, child abuse, control and humanities paranoia that reached levels of darkness that made you want to shove your hands through the pages and throttle several of the characters.  As you can see, not the most light hearted of tales!

So lets delve into the underlying themes of the books starting with faith, religion and spirituality.  Now I could start by talking about the obvious, which was B’Elanna’s quest to find her mother on the Klingon holy planet Boreth, but that’s too easy.  Although B’Elanna’s struggles, running through the wilderness naked, fighting off foes and learning how to be a true Klingon were like a spiritual awakening for her, especially considering she had thought her mother dead, these are only the straight forward references to the for-mentioned themes.  What I would like to bring to attention, are the themes of faith and religion brought to us by Brenna Covington (Starfleet Intelligence Director), who was trying to make herself into Earth’s own Borg Queen.  Her worship of the Borg and her delusions of power, had lead her to think of herself as a deity, who had worshipers already there to do her bidding.  It was actually quite disturbing to believe that even in the 24^th century, we still had deranged, insidious characters, buried within the Federation, that could threaten to enslave trillions of lives.  Of course, it was made clear why Covington had become a grade “A” psychopath when it became clear that the little snippets of text, relating to “the hand” where about the abuse she had suffered as a child from the hands of adults that were supposed to protect her.  We actually see events like this unfold around us in the world every day.  How many times in the news do we hear of a murder, that was committed by a person with a disturbed past.  Yes I could see how a story like Covington’s could unfold, but with the technology of the 24^th century at her disposal, there was no limit to the horror she could unleash.  It was a present day story, with a 24^th century injection of power and science.  Scary huh?

Now lets take a look at racism and slavery within this tale.  No, we’re not back in early 1900’s world history.  But its the same story…to an extent.  We all remember the Doctor’s holo-novel “Photons be free”, and I’d like to think we all had questions as to what happened to all those mark one holograms who had seen it back in the Alpha Quadrant.  Well, they hadn’t been idle thanks to a flesh and blood activist, Oliver Baines, who believed that all holograms were being treated as slaves.  Baines had somehow missed the Doctor’s point of “peaceful protest” and had taken it upon himself to punish several flesh and blood victims in a grueling set of scenarios that could have killed them.  This plot line reminded me of a couple of episodes from the TV series, “Flesh and Blood”, where the Doctor joined a band of rebel holograms bent on creating a “new life” lead by a deranged Bajoran hologram who turned out to be no better than the Hirogen who hunted him in the first place.  I relate, to the holograms they liberated from a simple ship that had rudimentary subroutines.  They didn’t even have the capacity to expand their programmes, much like numerous holograms on Earth that performed minor tasks.  It begged the question, could all holograms be sentient, and were the flesh and blood people, being racist and enforcing slave labour?  An interesting question, inferior beings underneath the boot of so called “superior” beings.  Again, this was another theme that I could see playing out in todays day and age, and we do still see this all over the world.  We like to think that we live in a civilised world, but lets face it…we really don’t.

My final theme of choice, is that of humanities paranoia of the unknown, which you would have thought by the 24^th century, would have been stamped out.  Obviously not where the Borg are concerned!  There were parts of these books that truly sent shivers down my spine, and infuriated me.  I refer to the imprisonment of Icheb and Seven.  The Federation were scared about a possible Borg invasion, an invasion that made no sense compared to previous Borg methods.  So what did they do?  Captured, imprisoned and essentially tortured the two people who would have selflessly helped them solve the problem.  This was a story repeated in numerous science-fiction shows, movies and books.  We all remember E.T.  What truly made me furious, is that I know full well, that if there was life out there, our governments would rally together, keep it secret, and torture them to within an inch of their lives, just to find their weaknesses so that we could destroy them if necessary.  Given humanities paranoia in this present day, I’d be willing to bet that destruction would be preferred to peace.

To conclude, “Homecoming” and “The Farther Shore”, were two futuristic books, with present day themes running throughout.  That’s what made them such compelling books.  We had all the character development, and completion of character story lines that we craved at the series end, and then we had so much more.  The novels were bittersweet.  A completion to a fantastic Star Trek story, but a brutal reminder that as a race, humanity just can’t stop repeating the mistakes of the past.

P.S. For those interested to read these books, I highly recommend them, especially if you would like to finish off the first stage of the Voyager journey.  The two books nicely tie up all of the Voyager character journeys, not just those mentioned above.  For example, Tuvok’s reunion with his family, Tom’s reunion with his father, and Harry’s reunion with Libby.  Lets not forget the awkwardness of Janeway’s reunion with her ex fiance!