For me this was one of the most important episodes in the entire series. In my opinion, this was the biggest blunder they had to endure.
Voyager finds an old unstable TNG wormhole, complete with 2 lost ferengi. The crew knows this is their best shot to get home, and they actually make the wormhole stable. That's it, that's all they needed. It could have clearly ended there if their officers were competent.
Instead we got an over-righteous Janeway picking her priorities out of a hat at random, and blind Tuvak who should have clearly noted that logically the ferengi would try to sabotage their extraction from paradise at any cost. What happened next wasn't a shocker, but simply the dumbest intervention in history. If you have not seen this episode yet, the amount of episodes after this will clearly give away the ending.
So what were the alternatives? 1. Ignore the ferengi, travel home and then report the ferengi crimes, so somebody else returns through the now stable wormhole to arrest them. 2. Extract the ferengi by a simple confrontation or transporter, lock them up in a cell or something, with guards posted around, preventing all possible ferengi mishaps. 3. Expose and arrest the ferengi and let the local population deal with them. Personally, 1 was my favorite.
But what about the rest of the series, you ask? Well, who says we have to end it? Why not build an outpost in the Delta quadrant next to the wormhole, restock the Voyager crew and send it on the longest mission in history of star fleet to answer if Voyager could actually get home without the wormhole. Is that hard to grasp? For the writers it was apparently so. Sad, new characters, new stories, new possibilities, all lost.
