Yes indeed! I do wonder if the implication is supposed to be that Trelane is Junior or that he's Junior's baby brother. Either way, a fun little fanservice moment.

Yes! One of the more fun ones from that season.

Q-Junior's redemption arc is played a bit more seriously than his father's was – no mariachi band to celebrate the return of his powers this time – and it's a lot of redemption to fit into one episode. Still, I like the sincerity. It feels like Q is just a kid who's never fit in anywhere before.

I mean, the Doctor would make sense, but I assume the producers thought (no offense to Mr Picardo) the Attractiveness Gulf was too wide. I guess they could have gone with Neelix. That would probably have been worse, knowing what he's like when he's in a relationship. But at least he isn't the XO!

It's a classic Pair The Spares situation; they wanted Seven to explore romance, but Tom and Tuvok are married and Harry is… Harry. So this episode largely exists to set up this awful relationship, despite the fact we're 95% of the way done the show and the two have never shown any mutual interest.

Janeway's love interest is a bit bland, as they so often seem to be, but likeable enough. He made her happy and tried to help her do what was best for her, and that's good enough for me. But I'm definitely not broken up over the fact that he stays behind.

I'm always happy to see the Emergency Command Hologram, but very disappointed in the lack of pip activation sequence. Him and Harry squabbling about who should be in command is silly – Chakotay needs to just pick one – but fun, and I like that each of them gets to show off their tactical chops.

This episode does sort of get at my complaints about the episode “Barge of the Dead”, where I said I didn't really believe they would write B'Elanna's character to be a believer from then on, and this episode proves me right. Kind of makes the earlier episode pointless in retrospect, huh?

Obviously the Benkarens are a paper-thin allegory for Black Americans, but we get to avoid confronting that fact because this individual Benkaren was a bad person, and therefore we can just drop the thread – or, worse, agree with Tom and the Nygeans that maybe the Benkarens are inherently criminal.

Neelix, and by extension the audience, is left to assume that this Benkaren is in fact guilty of the crime he was convicted of (on slim evidence) and not that, say, he was an innocent man who was beaten, starved, and sent to be executed, and that he was hardened into violence by that experience.

Tom is pretty close to his best self in this episode, while B'Elanna is very much not, but their dynamic feels very believable and the resolution feels earned. Even got me a bit misty at times.

It also strikes me that Voyager hasn't been running into many Weird Space Thingies lately, especially compared to, say, TNG, or even early DS9. We've been mostly dealing with alien cultures for the past couple seasons, and that's fine, but sometimes you just need a good Weird Swirly Thing In Space.

The episode is slightly frustrating, because Janeway is clearly in the wrong but then gets vindicated by the plot, a trope I really don't like. It's not that Iden's Messiah complex isn't believable – it's just very convenient, and it comes out of nowhere right on time to prove Janeway correct.

I do actually like the moral ambiguity, the fact that we're never entirely sure whether helping the Kraylor was the right thing to do. That's ultimately why there's a Prime Directive, right, to keep Starfleet from having to make decisions like that? It's a good, subtle reinforcement of that idea.