For a show with the conceit of being so far from home, Star Trek: Voyager found a surprising number of things in the Delta Quadrant that originated in the Alpha Quadrant, including several from Earth itself. The USS Voyager, commanded by Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), and Commander Chakotay’s (Robert Beltran) Maquis raider Val Jean were both brought to the Delta Quadrant in 2371 by the Caretaker (Basil Langton). After Janeway destroyed the Caretaker’s array to save the Ocampa, Voyager and the Val Jean were left without a ticket back to the Alpha Quadrant, and banded together to make the long journey.

Finding something familiar in an otherwise totally alien corner of the galaxy brought a sense of familiarity to the USS Voyager crew and viewers at home alike, but the presence of something from the Alpha Quadrant in the Delta Quadrant inevitably raised important questions, like how familiar people and objects traveled 70,000 light years from home in the first place, and whether the find could lead Captain Kathryn Janeway towards a quicker path home to Earth.

8 A Pair of Ferengi Negotiators, Arridor and Kol

Star Trek: Voyager Season 3, Episode 5 “False Profits”

The USS Voyager encounters a pair of Ferengi negotiators, Arridor (Dan Shor) and Kol (Leslie Jordan), who claim to be the prophesied Great Sages of the Takarians, a society with Bronze Age level technology. The Ferengi have no Prime Directive to deter them from interfering with the Takarians’ development, so they’re performing “miracles” with a standard replicator to reap the monetary benefits of the Takarians’ worship. Voyager’s crew know the Ferengi reputation well enough to know they’re no Sages, so they must figure out how to put a stop to Arridor and Kol’s grift.

“False Profits” serves as a Star Trek sequel episode to Star Trek: The Next Generation season 3, episode 8 “The Price”, as Voyager catches up with Arridor and Kol (formerly played by J. R. Quinonez) seven years after their Delta Quadrant arrival. The Ferengi took a test flight through the supposedly stable wormhole near Barzan II, which was supposed to emerge in the Gamma Quadrant, but instead stranded the Ferengi in the Delta Quadrant, where they made the best of their situation as only Ferengi can.

7 The Voth

Star Trek: Voyager Season 3, Episode 23 “Distant Origin”

“Distant Origin” opens on Forra Gegen (Henry Woronicz), a scientist who discovers that his people, the Voth, share certain genetic similarities with the humans aboard the USS Voyager. While this confirms Gegen’s theory that the Voth are the descendants of a species brought to their homeworld millions of years ago, religious leader Minister Odala (Concetta Tomei) refuses to accept the truth. Even with Commander Chakotay present as a living specimen of humanity, Odala pushes Gegen to recant, because Gegen’s theory goes against the Voth Doctrine that keeps Odala in power.

After meeting Gegen’s assistant, Tova Veer (Christopher Liam Moore), Janeway and the Doctor use the holodeck as a research guide to extrapolate how hadrosaurs might look in the 24th century if they’d been able to evolve into a humanoid form with comparable intelligence. The result resembles Veer, so Janeway and the Doctor conclude, like Gegen, that the Voth evolved from hadrosaurs into a highly advanced species on Earth, then fled to the Delta Quadrant in spacefaring vessels instead of being wiped out with the other dinosaurs.

6 The Friendship One Probe

Star Trek: Voyager Season 7, Episode 21 “Friendship One”

By Star Trek: Voyager season 7, the USS Voyager is in regular contact with Starfleet Command, and Starfleet gives Voyager a mission to retrieve a 21st-century Earth probe, Friendship One. The probe proves difficult to find, but once discovered on an alien planet suffering devastating climate collapse, the implications of Friendship One’s launch become clear. Besides the irreversible damage to the planet’s climate, the inhabitants are all suffering from radiation sickness, and bear understandable hostility towards Earth, because the aliens believe humans orchestrated their destruction with the Friendship One probe.

Friendship One was launched in 2067 by the United Earth Space Probe Agency with the intention of making friends with whomever found it, as the name implies. Although Friendship One, the 400-year-old Earth probe, traveled for centuries carrying messages of peace, musical recordings, and ways to translate languages, the people who discovered Friendship One in the Delta Quadrant took a greater interest in the antimatter it used to travel across space. Without the proper knowledge of its use, antimatter proved devastating to the planet and its people, resulting in death and disease for generations.

5 Dreadnought, a Cardassian Missile

Star Trek: Voyager Season 2, Episode 17 “Dreadnought”

The USS Voyager discovers a dangerously powerful, self-guided Cardassian missile in the Delta Quadrant, which Lt. B’Elanna Torres (Roxann Dawson) recognizes as one nicknamed “Dreadnought”. When B’Elanna was with the Maquis, Torres had actually reprogrammed the missile herself, with the intention of turning the Cardassians’ own weapon against them. Without a Cardassian target in sight, the artificially intelligent Cardassian Dreadnought targets a heavily-populated Class-M planet, Rakosa V. B’Elanna determines she must be the one to keep Dreadnought from hurting anyone else, and boards the missile to convince it to stand down.

While no concrete reason is given for exactly how the Dreadnought wound up in the Delta Quadrant, its last known location in the Alpha Quadrant was the Badlands, the same rough patch of space where Voyager and the Val Jean, Chakotay’s Maquis raider, fatefully met. Because of this, Torres theorizes that Dreadnought arrived in the Delta Quadrant the same way that Voyager and the Val Jean did, courtesy of the Caretaker.

4 A Klingon D-7 Class Cruiser, Complete With Klingons

Star Trek: Voyager, Season 7, Episode 14 “Prophecy”

The USS Voyager certainly never expected to find a Klingon ship in the Delta Quadrant, but more surprising is the fact that the crew of the Klingon D-7 Class Cruiser believes their savior, the prophesied kuvah’magh, is aboard Voyager. Janeway assures the Klingon captain, Kohlar (Wren T. Brown), that the Federation and Klingon Empire have been allies for the past 80 years, and offers Voyager’s own half-Klingon, Lt. B’Elanna Torres, as proof their societies are working together now. The kuvah’magh is Torres’ unborn daughter, who does save the Klingons, but not the way they expected.

Centuries ago, Kohlar’s great-grandfather set off on a quest to find the kuvah’magh, and the Klingon D-7 Cruiser became a generation ship that is now crewed by the descendants of its original crew. The quest begun by Kohlar’s great-grandfather brought Kohlar and his crew to the Delta Quadrant after four generations of searching. Whether B’Elanna’s child is actually the kuvah’magh or not, Kohlar desperately wants the baby to be their savior, so that his people may finally rest.

3 Amelia Earhart

Star Trek: Voyager Season 2, Episode 1 “The 37s”

The discovery of a 1936 Ford truck, seemingly disconnected from any parent vehicle, leads the USS Voyager to a nearby Class-L planet, where they find eight humans who have been in cryo-stasis since they were abducted by aliens in the 1930s. Among them are one of Janeway’s personal heroes, legendary American aviator Amelia Earhart (Sharon Lawrence), who disappeared without a trace while attempting to fly around the world, and Earhart’s navigator, Fred Noonan (David Graf). Earhart and the other preserved humans are known by the planet’s inhabitants as “The 37s”, and revered as sacred.

Originally thought to be aliens, the natives of the unnamed planet are the descendants of humans. A species called the Briori abducted the natives’ ancestors, along with Earhart and the other 37s, from Earth centuries earlier, and took them to the Delta Quadrant. Once held as slaves, the humans who weren’t in stasis revolted to free themselves from the Briori, and developed a thriving, Earth-like civilization in the Delta Quadrant. Voyager’s crew consider staying with the humans in their little slice of home, while Janeway also offers a ride back to Earth to anyone who wants it, including Amelia Earhart.

2 The USS Equinox

Star Trek: Voyager Season 5, Episode 26 & Season 6, Episode 1 “Equinox”

The crew of the USS Voyager believe they’re the only Starfleet vessel in the Delta Quadrant until they find the USS Equinox, five years into their journey home. Captain Rudolph Ransom (John Savage) and the Equinox crew have had a harder time in the Delta Quadrant than Voyager, with more damage, fewer starting resources, and fewer opportunities to make friends along the way. Ransom’s survival tactics include sacrificing innocent nucleogenic life forms for a more efficient form of fuel, which Janeway finds hard to stomach, and decides that Ransom needs to be held accountable for defying Federation ideals, regardless of how badly the Equinox is damaged.

Although Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) suggests that the Equinox might be in the Delta Quadrant on a rescue mission to find Voyager, the USS Equinox’s specs don’t fit the profile of a starship that would be assigned to a long-range mission. The explanation of how the Equinox arrived in the Delta Quadrant in the first place seems fairly simple, because Captain Ransom tells Janeway that the Equinox was also abducted by the Caretaker, just like Voyager, but the Equinox has only been in the Delta Quadrant for 2 years, and Janeway destroyed the Caretaker’s array 5 years earlier.

1 Seven of Nine

Debuts in Star Trek: Voyager Season 4, Episode 1 “Scorpion, Part 2”

When Captain Kathryn Janeway allies with the Borg in order to secure safe passage across Borg space, Janeway refuses the cursory assimilation that the Borg want to use to communicate with Janeway and Voyager’s crew, and instead requests a speaker for the Borg, citing the existence of Locutus (Patrick Stewart) as precedent. Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix 01, is selected as the Borg drone to act as liaison between the Collective and Voyager, likely because Seven of Nine had once been a member of Species 5168, like most of Voyager’s crew — in other words, human.

After Seven’s link with the Collective is severed, more information about Seven’s human origin comes to light. In Voyager season 4, episode 6 “The Raven”, when Voyager nears the Hansens’ ship, the USS Raven, memories of Seven’s early life surface, revealing that Seven had been six-year-old human Annika Hansen, the daughter of Magnus Hansen (Kirk Baily) and Erin Hansen (Laura Stepp), Federation scientists who were studying the Borg when they were assimilated. Voyager season 5, episodes 15 & 16, “Dark Frontier” provides even more detail of the Hansens’ fateful journey, showing the Raven arriving in the Delta Quadrant by following a Borg Cube through a transwarp conduit.

Star Trek: Voyager links back to the greater Star Trek universe with people and starships from the Alpha Quadrant. Connections to the familiar were especially important early on, because Voyager‘s place in the Star Trek franchise was established and aided by the legitimacy these finds offered. Later, when the USS Voyager used the Hirogen communications array to communicate with Starfleet Command, links back to the Alpha Quadrant were plentiful again, not only to prove that the USS Voyager was closer to home, but to help Star Trek: Voyager maintain connections to Star Trek and carry the franchise in its final years.