After seven long years trying to return home, it's no surprise that the seventh season of Voyager was emotional. It begins with the resolution to season 6's "Unimatrix Zero," in which Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), Torres (Roxann Biggs-Dawson), and Tuvok (Tim Russ) must find a way off the Borg Cube and Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) faces the loss of the precious bit of humanity she has just discovered. "Human Error" focuses on Seven's further attempts to explore her human side (a romance comes from out of the blue). And if Seven isn't the cast's most fascinating character, it's the other crew member struggling to find his not-quite-human identity, the Doctor (Robert Picardo). In "Body and Soul," the Doctor gets to experience physical life in the body of--who else?--Seven. He writes a novel in "Author, Author," and in the first of a pair of excellent two-parters, "Flesh and Blood," he explores what it means to be a hologram in the midst of a deadly situation involving the Hirogen. In the second two-parter, "Workforce," the crew is kidnapped and brainwashed into becoming ordinary laborers on a planet with a worker shortage, but Janeway is forced to question whether she wouldn't prefer this version of a normal, stable life.
The seventh season also saw the first Trek wedding since Dax-Worff, the return of the old Federation-Maquis conflict, the continuing efforts of Lt. Reginald Barclay (Dwight Schultz) to bring Voyager home, Kim (Garrett Wang) taking command twice (once with the help of the Emergency Command Hologram), the return of Q, and Neelix's discovery of a group of fellow Talaxians. The final episode, "Endgame," is less concerned with misty-eyed goodbyes than with a bending of conventional views of the space-time continuum that leads to an exciting showdown with the Borg queen (Alice Krige, repeating her role from Star Trek: First Contact but making her first appearance on Voyager). DVD bonus features include the usual season recap, a 12-minute featurette on the final episode, and a crew profile of the Doctor. --David Horiuchi
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