- Rank: Commanding officer, U.S.S. Voyager
- Current assignment: Commanding officer, U.S.S. Voyager
- Full name: Kathryn Janeway
- Home region: Indiana, North America, Earth
- Parents: Late Admiral and Mrs. Janeway
- Siblings: One sister
- Education: Starfleet Academy graduate
- Marital status: Single, engaged
- Office: U.S.S. Voyager, Deck 1 Ready Room, adjoining Bridge
Janeway is a tough captain who is not afraid to take chances, while her intelligence, thoughtfulness, dedication and diplomacy have earned her respect and recognition as one of the best in Starfleet. Her talents in engineering and science allow her hands-on expertise, if necessary; as such she has shown a tendency to defy the Starfleet protocol against beam-down of commanding officers into unsecured away team missions. She prefers to be addressed as "Captain" rather than either the gender-based "sir" or "ma'am." Aside from math and the sciences her studies have included chromo-linguistics, American Sign Language, and the gestural idioms of the Leyron.
This subject's penchant for the scientific method and clear-cut choices has given her a healthy dose of skepticism, which usually provides a command asset in dealing with new situations. Her preference for difficult studies is self-traced back to childhood, when she would prefer that to outdoor play. Since then she has indicated no pleasure in outdoor camping, hiking, or cooking.
For relaxation, Janeway enjoys role-playing and recreation in Holodeck programs, such as Gothic novels, skiing and sailing. In her youth in rural agricultural Indiana she played tennis, and at age 12 walked back from a match she lost for 7 km in a thunderstorm; however, she has not played the game regularly since 2354, when a member of her high school tennis team. As a child she also studied beginning ballet and performed the "Dying Swan" at age 6, but in all her activities - many of them pushed by her parents, such as gardening - she never studied a musical instrument. She has often ascribed this situation to her sister being the artist of the family.
The subject reports one severe depression in life, when her father died under the polar ice cap on Tau Ceti Prime in the mid 2350s. She stayed bedridden with grief until her sister finally coerced her into accepting the fact and moving on, literally dragging Janeway out of bed. The captain has credited her father with forcing her to learn her own lessons and not shielding her from life.
In 2171, Janeway gambled on giving troubled Starfleet renegade Tom Paris a reprieve from his Rehabilitation Settlement in New Zealand by tapping him as a scout for a search-and-rescue mission of her security chief gone undercover aboard a Maquis vessel. However, contact with her new ship, the U.S.S. Voyager, was lost after SD 48307.5 and all hands were presumed lost.
As with all captains through the ages, Janeway looks to her crew like a flock of sheep, but being thrown into the Delta Quadrant and being utterly cut off from home has intensified that burden to levels few commanders may have endured. The loneliness has also led her to relax at times the separation that commanders usually impose upon themselves purely to maintain the "respectful distance" - such as an occasional Sandrine's Bar pool game on the Holodeck.
Her Starfleet training and the graciousness and grit obviously instilled in her upbringing are to blame and to credit for the situation her ship is in: following the Prime Directive to the letter, even if it means stranding oneself 70 years from home, and melding a crew of Maquis and other non-regulation members into an effective force and family that can live as well as merely survive.
Although we have our differences, my respect and admiration for her grow with each day. I appreciate her gamble in my suggestion to select B'Elanna Torres as chief engineer, while we all now know her instincts were correct when she originally opposed my desire to enter alliances with the Kazon or Trabe. We see eye-to-eye on numerous issues, especially a healthy respect for life and other cultures no matter what shape or form, and I cannot fault her on the handling of our encounter with the suicidal Q and his Q pursuer.
She has not only refrained from creating a shipboard fraternization policy but feels eventually the crew will pair off anyway - except for her; I can sense the captain yet fears to "give up" and fully separate emotionally from her fiance Mark. Her trusted Tuvok's disobeyal of direct orders on the grounds of logic when it seemed to help our trek home clearly hit home as well, though overall she takes confidence in the strength of her people.
Amelia Earhart was a personal heroine, so meeting her on the '37s planet was an indescribable event - as was the gratification that not one of the combined Maquis-Starfleet crew would choose to stay behind on the human colony.
While amazed at her durability and courage, I must go on record after over two years with my concern at the captain's bent toward constantly putting her personal security at risk. I trust it will not be her undoing, and this ship's.
While my confidence in her mental state has not wavered, I am pleased she has taken my shipwide advice to pursue arts and recreation forms as a diversion to our long journey. The captain has returned to tennis after 19 years, taken up watercolors, and even shared a childhood ballet with the ship on talent night.
The captain would never admit it, but for the record I would note her action beyond the call of duty in almost single-handedly saving this ship from the strain of macrovirus that nearly killed its crew. The captain also amazed me by offering to sacrifice her life to save Kes on Nichristi, even though its spiritualism was a puzzle to her, and her strength of will was never stronger than when defeating what I would call a life entity succubus.
As our journey grows I cannot help but grow in respect and affection for our captain, stirred on by our short-lived planetary abandonment before our viral infection could be cured. Thanks to that incident I have every confidence that Kathryn Janeway will see us through our predicament with high spirits in, dare I say it, the best Starfleet tradition.