One of 2021’s best Star Trek surprises of 2021 has been EXO-6’s arrival to the collectables market, announcing five and delivering three of its first-wave 1:6-scale character figures in the first twelve months of business — and the company’s second Star Trek captain has finally beamed down.
Announced in August, EXO-6 began its Star Trek: Voyager lineup with that starship’s caffeinated captain, Kathryn Janeway, well-timed to align with actor Kate Mulgrew’s return to her Starfleet alter ego in Star Trek: Prodigy. (Amazingly, this new 12″ figure is the very first Captain Janeway character figure produced since Voyager left UPN’s airwaves back in 2001!)
Based upon Mulgrew’s later-season look, Janeway features not only a variety of hands for posing and holding its paired accessorily items, but also the first early-2370s Starfleet uniform from the EXO-6 team.
Less complicated than the Star Trek: First Contact uniform design used on their initial figures, the Voyager uniform seems well-tailored to this figure, including sleeve length — which finally fixes the exposed-wrist-joints issue seen anytime the Data and Picard figures are posed with raised arms.
Janeway’s hair is sculpted in her Season 7 coiffure, and while there has been a small amount of discussion about sculpted vs. rooted hair as a collector preference, it’s probably a good thing that there’s no need to brush and style the figure’s hair for display.
Interestingly, though, the figure’s head is removable — using a much easier connector than the two-headed Data figure last summer — so perhaps we’ll get an optional “bun of steel” Janeway head from EXO-6 down the road to replicate Mulgrew’s early-season Voyager styling. (That’s really the only thing missing from this release!)
Complete with a bevy of accessories as usual, this Janeway figure outfits Voyager’s captain with not only a standard Starfleet Type II phaser and Mark IX tricorder (carried by previous Data and Picard figures as well), but also the bulky compression phaser rifle favored by the Intrepid-class crew, a Starfleet padd with an appropriate science graphic… and of course, Janeway’s trusty silver coffee mug filled with the finest organic suspension ever devised.
It was a little tricky to find the right hand positioning to hold all of the figure’s accessories when posted — that compression rifle is a challenging one to get the proper “grip” in place — but swapping out the different hand options is a marked improvement over the difficulty experienced with the Picard figure, for sure.
While Janeway is the first, it’s certainly not the last Star Trek: Voyager release EXO-6 has planned — preorders have already opened and closed for The Doctor, and Seven of Nine has already been teased for an early 2022 offering.
(The three most popular characters make sense to be in the first round of Voyager plans, but they are not expected to be the last — so stay tuned, Voyager fans.)
EXO-6’s figures are getting small refinements with each new release, and as noted here, the Janeway figure already corrects a few issues we experience on the two prior offerings — so as the company continues to roll out new figures in 2022, we’re expecting only continued improvements as the character roster expands.
The company’s next releases are Voyager’s EMH and Mirror Spock from the Original Series; both are sold-out at EXO-6’s direct store but can still be preordered from Entertainment Earth.
Additional teased figures for 2022 include Seven of Nine, Judge Q from “Encounter at Fairpoint,” Michael Burnham, Saru, and Emperor Georgiou from Star Trek: Discovery, and more; the company has also announced plans (on an unspecified timeline) to release Captain Sisko from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Captain Archer from Star Trek: Enterprise, plus additional crewmembers from the Berman-era television shows.