Star Trek Voyager: Homecoming

I think for most Star Trek fans, we all agree Star Trek Voyager deserved a better ending. It's not because the finale was bad, but because after seven years of trying to get home, Voyager finally reaches Earth and… that’s basically it. We see the ship heading toward home, everyone looks happy, and the credits roll.

I wanted to see the crew actually get home. I wanted reunions. I wanted to see how they adjusted after spending seven years stranded on the other side of the galaxy. Recently, IDW published Star Trek: Voyager – Homecoming a five-issue miniseries which attempted to give us that closure we've been looking for.

(Note: There was a great series of novels that told the story of Voyager post-series that was really good and offered a true finale. Definitely worth reading for any mega fans.)

The story of STV - Homecoming picks up right around the end of “Endgame,” with Voyager finally about to return home after seven years in the Delta Quadrant. Of course things immediately go to shit.

Instead of simply cruising back to Earth and having a nice welcome home party, the crew gets pulled into one last adventure involving Species 8472, fluidic space, the Borg, and pretty much everything else you’d expect from a big Voyager finale.

Homecoming feels like the Voyager movie we never got. That kept running through my head while I was reading it. If Paramount had decided sometime around 2002 or 2003 to bring Kate Mulgrew and the rest of the cast back for one big two hour television movie, I could easily imagine it looking something like this.

You’ve got Janeway being Janeway, Seven dealing with Borg stuff, Tuvok facing a very personal problem, and the rest of the crew getting dragged into one final situation when all they really want to do is go home.

I also really liked Ángel Hernández’s artwork. Licensed comics can be hit or miss when artists are trying to draw recognizable actors. Sometimes everybody ends up looking like wax figures or weird celebrity impersonators. (See the latest Escape from New York comic where Snake Plisken's face looks like it's made of silly putty.) But that wasn’t a problem here.

The characters are recognizable, the ships look great, and the book manages to capture the visual feel of Voyager without looking like somebody just traced screenshots from the show. Charlie Kirchoff’s colors help a lot with that too. There are several sequences involving fluidic space and Species 8472 that look especially good.

For most of the book, I was completely sold. Then we get to the epilogue.

Without getting too deep into spoilers, the actual adventure wraps up nicely enough. It gives the crew the kind of homecoming that the television series never really allowed us to see, and I would have been perfectly happy if the book had ended there.

Instead, there’s an extended epilogue filled with commentary that just felt incredibly forced to me.

It’s not even that I necessarily disagree with everything being said. It just doesn’t feel organic to the story we just finished reading. Characters suddenly start having conversations that seem less concerned with wrapping up Voyager and more concerned with making sure the reader understands exactly what the writers want to say.

Worse, it slightly undercuts what should have been a pretty emotional ending. After spending five issues watching these characters fight their way home one last time, I wanted the book to just let that moment breathe. But the authors couldn't resist, and instead they rob this great story of its power. Even two weeks later, I still can't stop thinking about how much it soured the story.

Everything before that worked well enough that I still walked away really liking Homecoming.

If you were a Voyager fan and always felt a little cheated by how quickly “Endgame” wrapped things up, this is worth checking out. It gives the crew one more proper adventure, looks great, and for most of its run genuinely feels like discovering a lost Voyager movie from the early 2000s.

I kind of wish that movie had actually existed, but this is a pretty damn good consolation prize.

Star Trek: Voyager – Homecoming was written by Susan and Tilly Bridges with art by Ángel Hernández and colors by Charlie Kirchoff.