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Millennials Need Janeway’s Return, Now More Than Ever
Millennials Need Janeway’s Return, Now More Than Ever
Published on May 26, 2026
Credit: CBS
Credit: CBS
There’s a scene in Star Trek: Voyager’s Season 5 finale “Equinox” that feels unsettling relevant to the current moment. The Federation starship Equinox’s captain, Rudy Ransom—weaselly, evasive, a living embodiment of the Peter Principle—has been murdering alien life forms and using their bodies as fuel to return to Earth as quickly as possible. Thrown to the same point in distant space years after Voyager, he’s outpaced the other vessel significantly—he’s moved fast and broken things, in the parlance of our times. His ship is trashed and over half of his crew is dead. When welcomed onto Voyager, a generally cheerful and functional ship replete with children, bumbling alien cooks, ex-Borg drones, and all sorts of other misfits, Ransom and his first officer privately sneer at its captain, Kathryn Janeway—at her naivety, her adherence to regulations, her idealism—her damned womanliness.
Captain Janeway is furious when she learns of Ransom’s murderous antics, which are a betrayal of every principle she’s struggled to uphold over five years alone as her ship’s leader and ultimate authority. She relieves Ransom of his command and sets about punishing both him and his subordinates. Ransom asks Janeway to show leniency towards his crew; after all, they were just following his orders, he says. “Their mistake,” Janeway replies icily.
If you’re a millennial like me, you might also be rewatching favorite ’90s TV series to distract yourself from the unrelenting horrors of the outside world. Or maybe you’ve watched the first season of Starfleet Academy and feel inspired to dig back into the Trek canon. I have both good news and bad news: Voyager hits different in 2026. On rewatch, you might like it more than you did previously. However, it might not distract you from the outside world. It just might make you think more about that world: about war and power, kinship and tribes, men and women, just how the hell we got here, and, above all, what you should be doing, right now. In watching, you might also conclude that we all need a Voyager reboot, now more than ever.
I’ll briefly recap Star Trek: Voyager for the uninitiated: After a brief hiatus following TNG’s final episode, Trek fans were introduced to a brand-new starship, one leaving Earth’s solar system with orders to chase down some rebel fighters who aren’t happy with (distinctly problematic) compromises made by Trek’s good guys. Captain Janeway is eager to get underway. Explicitly modeled after Odysseus, with an adorable dog and a male Penelope waiting for her to return, she’s bright, enthusiastic, feminine, and has an endearing nervous energy. After both Voyager and the rebel ship are pulled across the galaxy, 70,000 light-years (75 years) away from Earth, Janeway decides to destroy a potential way home in order to protect an alien species. The rebel captain becomes Voyager’s first officer, and the two crews and some new alien friends band together to begin the long journey home under Janeway’s leadership.
Voyager will encounter a wide range of villains: organ-harvesting aliens, giant space viruses, the Borg, space Nazis who hate telepaths, a shuttle possessed by a malevolent entity, aliens with temporal weapons, and various siren-like monsters. Janeway is determined to sow goodwill everywhere she can, fight like hell to escape and overcome bullies, and, contrary to Trek doctrine, work for the freedom of oppressed strangers when she deems it reasonably wise. The series engages with classic Trek themes like technology and sentience, war and remembrance, responsibility and self-determination, and adds to the mix explorations of biracial identity, trauma and self-harm, and crises of faith and meaning.
Strip away all the sci-fi trappings and moral dilemmas, and the central message of Voyager is that chosen family is vital and lifesaving, and that unconditional belonging in such a tribe is available for all. Chief engineer B’Elanna Torres grapples with her half-Klingon identity and slowly unlearns self-loathing as she pulls off one impressive feat of advanced technobabble after another. Convict turned helmsman Tom Paris outgrows his sarcastic aloofness to become an excellent officer and a reliable friend. First officer Chakotay finds peace (and some sexual frustration) in serving as Janeway’s confidante and friend. The famously catsuited Seven of Nine eventually joins the series as an ex-Borg drone, challenging Janeway in a way no other crew member can. As she discovers her individuality, Seven expands Janeway’s own conceptions about loyalty and family. It’s a nuanced, brilliantly portrayed relationship that alternately prickles with familial frustration and pride, maternal desperation and protectiveness, and sublimated erotic need. Indeed, the Janeway Easter egg in Starfleet Academy’s premiere, one of her most iconic quotes, comes from an episode in which no one but a literal child believes Janeway when she instinctively knows that Seven has not willingly left them to return to the Borg.
As a child of the ’90s, I believed a lot of things when Voyager concluded in spring 2001. I believed that the world’s future would be more just and prosperous than its present. I believed that sexism was on its way out—basically gone, really! A minor, dwindling inconvenience that we had collectively outgrown. I believed that I would flourish in the working world as a result of my skill and dedication—minimal political maneuvering, making nice with skeevy peers, or compromises required. I believed that improved technology and increased efficiency would make us all happier and more connected—after we sorted out some trivial details. Through some osmosis of history lessons, good teachers, Trek episodes, and exposure to a muscular strain of Catholicism, I gathered that many people would need to play important roles to make these hopes real—but surely we would all pitch in to do our part. How could we not?
Watching Voyager, I observed that there are roles to be played and sacrifices to be made for the good of a big, unruly tribe. Janeway changes drastically over the course of the series—becoming generally harder, less patient, less outwardly feminine, less idealistic. She (wisely) forgoes romantic relationships with crew members, and misses out on having the biological family she’d wanted. She gets depressed. Sometimes her judgment is flawed. Very occasionally, members of her tribe must talk her down or reel her back in. And yet, she almost never loses her compassion or her desire to redeem others, even her enemies.
To be clear, Voyager isn’t perfect. A handful of episodes are real clunkers. The series regularly takes pretty ambitious swings, some of which don’t fully connect. The writing can be uneven and occasionally contradictory. But given what the show was up against—the formidable constraints of ’90s network television, the corporate haranguing of Kate Mulgrew as the franchise’s first female lead—the resulting product is a bit of a miracle. Voyager regularly delivers scenes of stunning depth and beauty: Janeway’s late-night conversation with a Romulan scientist in an early episode, expertly directed to showcase both her strength and loneliness. The Doctor falling in love with an alien patient in a holographic ’57 Chevy parked on Mars. B’Elanna Torres reliving the memories of an alien woman who betrays her lover to a totalitarian government in an episode suffused with female desire and yearning. Ensign Harry Kim’s description of an afternoon spent picking and eating fruit with Janeway in an imagined eulogy. The extended meditation on meaning and mortality that is “Death Wish,” and Janeway’s impassioned defense of the joys of mortal life to a suicidal Q. The beautifully crafted tribute to early space flight in “One Small Step.”
I could go on, but I’ll end by noting that in 2026, there’s a delicious, almost perverse joy in watching Voyager’s series finale, in which a future version of Janeway marshals all her skill and guile to break the rules, travel back in time, and get her people home sooner. One marvels at how something this female and this queer got made in 2001: an elderly woman flag officer vamping around her old starship, sparring and scheming with her past self, ultimately seducing and deceiving the sinuous, sensual Borg Queen in an act of mythic sacrifice that cripples the hive mind, gets her ship home, and—most significantly, we’re told—prevents the death of Seven of Nine.
The teenaged version of me—who first viewed this episode by setting the family TV’s rabbit ears on top of five or six stacked VHS tapes in a marginally successful effort to improve UPN’s always dodgy reception—could not have accepted today as reality. The executive branch waging a disastrous, strategically incoherent war in Iran, wantonly displacing civilians and threatening genocide with complete impunity. A large chunk of the country cheering the terrorization of immigrant communities, laughing about the murder of protestors by federal thugs. Afghan allies threatened with settlement in the Congo. A non-trivial number of people younger than me opining that “Hitler had some good ideas, really” and that this is all funny.
The past decade or so has been a long, depressing awakening for women of my generation and the men who love us. Ideas generally relegated to fringy academic discourse when we were college-aged are now everyday realities: the general uselessness of rules and norms against nihilistic subversion; the breathtaking, unrelenting pervasiveness of sexual abuse and physical violence against women and children; the enmeshment of abusive misogyny with violence and war generally, and with U.S. foreign policy specifically. Some reminder of this rank disdain exists around every corner—just scroll through the comments of most sites, or spend a few minutes listening to anyone serving in the current administration. Millennials vaguely intuit that the tumult and nastiness of this moment relates to male insecurity and sexual scarcity in a system in which humans settle down and own things. Millennial women have specifically been told that male loneliness and disaffection is The Problem, and that it’s our fault: if we could just stop achieving at work, stop buying houses, stop being queer, and content ourselves with dating and marrying men who do not see women as people, much less as equals, none of this would have to happen. Look what you made me do.
It’s not as if every tech conglomerate, corporate employment structure, and political organ converged to profit off humanity’s deepest insecurities and most ancient hatreds, all while rendering even the most fortunate among us too exhausted to make a meal or shop for our own groceries, let alone work for genuine connection with others.
For its part, Star Trek spent the decade or so after 9/11 generally remythologizing the gunslinging cowboy facets of the franchise in prequels that splintered decades of hopeful, aspirational universe-building. These choices enabled dramatic, lens-flared space battles and record global box offices. Female characters wore mini-skirts and screamed. Executives undoubtedly knew what they were doing—both reflecting and playing into rising regressive and protectionist sentiment. More recent Trek outings have been well-intentioned but ham-handed attempts to reestablish a progressive outlook and speak to the issues of the day—climate change, Brexit, AI—with heroes that are often comically incompetent or unlikeable, careless storytelling, plots that make little sense, and a vision of Trek’s structure so far removed from even morally complicated precedent that it often doesn’t feel like the same universe.
But above all, heart and real meaning have been in short supply. The series that feels the most like classic Trek in both tone and content is Star Trek: Prodigy, an animated effort targeted to a younger audience that skillfully balances grim dystopian themes, the anxieties and hopes of children, and the wonder of space exploration. A holographic version of Janeway plays a role in the series, and a version of her future self eventually joins in. Despite a warm reception from fans and critics alike, Paramount canceled Prodigy while its second season was in production and kicked the show off its streaming platform. The series briefly found a home with Netflix, but is now unavailable for streaming on any major platform. Release of a third season appears unlikely.
Despite Prodigy’s considerable charms, Voyager’s story remains incomplete. What happened when its epic hero concluded her odyssey and, if we’re to believe recent Trek, soon found the proverbial house she’d devoted her life to in disrepair—full of demagogues, sycophants, and decent, disempowered people? What does it mean to build a family in the wild and then watch it slowly disperse? How does a person experience years of isolation, conflict, and incredible closeness with others—and then move on? When you lose your softness and emotional body fat enduring a difficult experience, do you ever gain it back? How?
And then there are the more urgent, specific questions: What do you do when the institution you’ve devoted your adult life to betrays everything you’ve worked for? How does a military leader continue to serve under shitty political leaders, and implicitly, the citizens who empower them? Do these citizens have some valid complaints? Are humans especially susceptible to despair and manipulation when cultures hyperfixate on mental pursuits and virtual realities? Who gets to be a member of your tribe, and how do you protect them? Which battles do you pick? When do you decide it’s time to leave a broken system? And what comes next?
Millennials are starving for real, substantive exploration of these questions and examples of compelling adult leadership. Much has been written about Starfleet Academy not getting renewed for a third season, with some blaming anti-woke trolls. As a longtime Voyager fan, I know a thing or two about the less evolved contingent of the Trek fanbase. And I’ll note that Kate Mulgrew was absolutely right to defend Holly Hunter’s Captain Ake from mean-spirited Janeway comparisons—there is absolutely more than one way for a successful leader to carry herself. But I don’t believe Starfleet Academy was cut short due to anti-woke animus. I’d offer that it didn’t provide Trek’s core demographic—nerdy, competent, thoughtful people of all ages—a meaningful vision of resistance to the morass of nihilism and cruelty in which we find ourselves.
My friends who also grew up on Voyager include a successful science podcaster who finds himself questioning the usefulness of his work, a military officer in the middle of a largely satisfying career—uninvolved in current Iran operations but deeply distressed by haphazard planning and the danger to her deployed friends, a stay-at-home mom wondering if she needs to leave her deeply red state before she tries for another baby, a Peace Corps alum struggling to find work in international development, and an air traffic controller wondering how much longer he can reasonably stay in his job. All of them would binge a Voyager reboot in a heartbeat. There are millions of others like them, if Voyager’s consistently strong streaming numbers are any indication.
At Starfleet Academy’s premiere, Kate Mulgrew was asked about a live-action Janeway series. She reiterated her openness to the idea and her requirement that any series be well-constructed and ultimately hopeful. She also detailed previously rejecting a strange “Wild West” reboot pitch from show-runner Alex Kurtzman. Seriously, the Wild West? Isn’t there a whole epic poem that could give us a better idea of what Janeway might do next? For the love of God, would someone write a compelling story that just lets Janeway clean house? We all know she would. Here’s hoping we get the chance to see her do it.[end-mark]
The post Millennials Need Janeway’s Return, Now More Than Ever appeared first on Reactor.