Season synopsis
Contains spoilers for this season and earlier seasons.
Voyager continues its long route through the Delta Quadrant while the fragile Starfleet–Maquis partnership faces pressure from outside and within. Seska has openly defected to the Kazon and uses her knowledge of Voyager to help Culluh pursue the ship. Janeway tries a pact with the Trabe to strengthen Voyager’s position among the Kazon factions, but learns that the Trabe plan to kill the Kazon leaders during their meeting. She breaks the alliance and withdraws before the Kazon can retaliate, reminding her crew to hold on to the rules they still have.
The crew also discovers that someone aboard is passing information to the Kazon. Janeway and Tuvok turn Tom Paris’s apparent misconduct and departure into a covert investigation, asking Neelix to look into the matter through his new shipboard broadcast. The spy is Michael Jonas, a Maquis engineer who sabotages Voyager and tries to guide the ship into a Kazon ambush; Neelix confronts him, and Paris returns after escaping the Kazon vessel. The deception unsettles Chakotay because Janeway kept the plan from him while suspecting a Maquis crewmember.
The conflict reaches its season boundary in “Basics, Part I.” Seska sends Chakotay a message claiming that Culluh will kill the baby she says is Chakotay’s, and Janeway and Chakotay debate whether the plea is genuine or a trap. An apparent Kazon defector aboard Voyager dies in an explosion after attacks disable key systems. Culluh’s forces then seize the ship and maroon most of its crew on a hostile planet; Paris has escaped in a shuttle, while the Doctor and the supposedly dead Lon Suder remain aboard. The takeover is left unresolved for the next season.