The Star Trek Character Who Won’t Stop Dying

As longtime fans will remember, Voyager didn’t waste time getting us used to seeing Janeway’s death onscreen. In the early season one episode, “Time and Again,” she and Paris are thrown into a planet’s past only 24 hours before everyone on the planet dies. When she realizes her crew’s own high-tech rescue effort actually causes everyone to die, Janeway shuts the disastrous subspace fracture down, saving one version of herself while another dies in a fiery explosion.

In fact, Captain Janeway’s death being caused by a noble sacrifice became something of a theme throughout Voyager seasons. In the season two episode “Deadlock,” a duplicate Janeway sacrifices herself and her ship so that “our” Janeway and her crew can survive. In the series finale “Endgame,” the time-traveling Admiral Janeway infects herself with a neurolytic pathogen that helps her younger self defeat the Borg and get her crew home that much sooner.

That sacrificial Janeway was from an alternate future, and our beloved captain’s death in alternate timelines became another recurring bit of storytelling. She and others die in “Relativity” thanks to a planted bomb whose explosion Seven of Nine was eventually able to stop; in the episode “Timeless,” we see her dead, frozen body in yet another alternate timeline. Speaking of alternate timelines, “Living Witness” takes place 700 years in the future, where the ship’s holographic Doctor is the only surviving member of the Voyager crew.

Of special note are the Star Trek: Voyager storylines that managed to give us multiple Janeway deaths. For example, the season three episode “Before and After” has Kes see an alternate future called the Year of Hell, in which Janeway died during the ship’s prolonged battle with the Krenim.  Later, when we get the two-part “Year of Hell” episode in season four, Janeway sacrifices herself and the ship to destroy the Krenim’s timeship and reset the timeline.

If you’re in the morbid mood to see Captain Janeway’s death on repeat, though, look no further than the episode “Coda.” This episode has the character in a Happy Death Day-style time loop where she keeps dying, resetting time, and then dying again. In this ep alone, we see Janeway strangled to death by aliens, blown up in a warp core explosion, and even euthanized by the Doctor.

The sheer frequency with which Voyager presented Janeway’s death might make you think the writers had it out for her, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Janeway actor Kate Mulgrew had plenty of input into her character’s stories, and she was the one pushing for Janeway to sacrifice herself in the series finale. She was ready to go down with the ship, and for better or for worse, the fan-favorite actor had seven long seasons of practice to prepare for her character’s final onscreen death.