Star Trek: Voyager/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

• The reason the Doctor is so anti-social in early seasons is because his personality was based on his creator, Lewis Zimmerman, who is misanthropic at the best of times. Having Reg Barclay, a Starfleet officer with low self-confidence issues be the Beta-Tester for his personality probably didn't help.
• After nearly 200 years of the Enterprise being "the only ship in range" to defend Earth against a multitude of threats, Starfleet suddenly has 27 ships to throw at the Borg transwarp aperture which Voyager opens up in the finale. It's highly likely that the Dominion War is responsible for this.
• Near the middle of the third season Voyager encounters the Nekrit Expanse, a vast nebular region where ships vanish without a trace and nobody dares explore, a sort of "here be dragons" part of the delta quadrant map that Neelix and the local species know nothing about. The episode ends with the crew bravely continuing through it, without ever overtly explaining why it's so bad. But what does Voyager run into just a few episodes later? The Borg. The Nekrit Expanse marks the edge of Borg space.
• Seven's attraction to Chakotay actually makes sense, given that she became interested in him in season Seven, the season where she was generally interested in becoming more human. Chakotay, with his nature-loving and emotional personality, is possibly the most un-Borg person on Voyager.
  • Chakotay was also the first to connect to her human side, being the one who linked to her mind in Scorpion Part 2 and severed her from the Collective. Does that make this a delayed Rescue Romance?
  • Her interest in him also only arises after the males she'd be most compatable with are officially off the table. Tom and Tuvok are Happily Married, Harry and the Doctor have been rejected despite expressed interest and her one attempt with someone she didn't know well ended very badly. Chakotay was really her only option left at the time.
• Chakotay's later-season distrust for Seven of Nine, and dangerous stations in general, could have been caused by Seska's betrayal in earlier seasons.
• Why was Voyager designed with manual door releases that can go offline, a holodeck that has a different incompatable power source and gel-packs that easily can get infections and are impossible to replicate? This is indirectly the fault of Geordi LaForge. Why? Because he was mentioned in TNG as having a competition over better warp core efficiency with chief engineer Kaplan of the Intrepid, the prototype of the same class as Voyager. Because Geordi kept trying to beat him in their warp-core output, Kaplan likely got so obsessed with building the Warp 9.975 core to beat Enterprise's Warp 9.8 core, that he either didn't pay proper attention to the other systems or intentionally padded his results. This definitely would explain why Voyager seems to be so slap-dash and haphazardly built.
• Concerning the episode "Good Shepherd:" It seems odd at first, that these three crewmen have gone five years without their performance problems being noticed. But, all three of these crewmen were from Janeway's original Starfleet crew. Over the first two years in the Delta Quadrant, Voyager has been dealing with violent and insubordinate Maquis crewman, and just when that problem began to calm down, Voyager gained Seven of Nine. No wonder Celes, Billy, and Mortimer's performances weren't noticed for so long; they may have had trouble with their work, but they didn't have the outrageous attitude problems that so many of their shipmates did!

Fridge Horror

• As SF Debris pointed out, Voyager records the crews brain waves all the time.
  • Fridge Brilliance (again): It's probably the transporter that does this, and considering all the times that a transporter record has saved the day, it's not inconceivable that the records would be stored for awhile.
• Also Neelix's Myleean lineage. He tells us the Myleeans have a fused spinal column, so humanoid locomotion is impossible. They're not likely then to have developed into a spacefaring race. Since we're not told the exact details of how his greatgrandmother met his Myleean greatgrandfather, and the Talaxians have conquered worlds before, its entirely possible it wasn't consenting.
  • Another possibility is that, as the Borg would put it, the Talaxians "assimilated" the Myleeans (consensually or not). Neelix doesn't look all that different from any of the other Talaxians we're shown, and none of them ever questions him about his ancestry, so it's entirely possible most or all of them have Myleeans in their family trees too. This kind of sexual "conquest" would certainly give one a whole new perspective on the old "Make Love, Not War" slogan!
  • Or they're just another weird Trek race that have some other way of getting around. Cool your warp core.
• While it's Played for Laughs for us, the war between Dr. Chaotica and the photonic beings in "Bride of Chaotica!" was surely no laughing matter to them: that's a real and fully sentient person the fictional Chaotica casually murdered with his ray gun in one scene! Considering that the victim certainly had good friends and may well have had a family who'd be bitterly grieved and angry to hear about his death, the violent response of these aliens to Chaotica's cruelty is thoroughly justified. Captain Janeway should be grateful the photonic beings never really did figure out what was actually happening, as this first contact would have been a complete diplomatic fiasco for the Voyager and the Federation if they had.

Fridge Logic

• When the show announced that Ocampa only go into estrus once in their lives, fans started asking how the species managed population growth.
  • Twins?
  • The Ocampa were a dying species who had not only lost the bulk of their telepathic abilities but their lifespans had regressed so far they die at around nine years old. They DON'T manage population growth as they're dying out because they don't live long enough for multiple fertile cycles.
• Chakotay also talks about the standard Native American "A man does not own land." This is despite him becoming a terrorist to defend his land.
  • To defend land that somebody else decided they owned, people already living there be damned.
    • Even though not all groups of First Nation tribes and empires had that philosophy about land and the Federation offered everyone on those planets a new home.
• Star Trek has always been (correctly) vague about the exact velocities of warp drive, to allow Traveling At the Speed of Plot. But in this series Tom Paris mentions that Warp 9.9 means going about 4 billion miles/sec. Light itself only goes 186,000 miles/sec. The Hand Wave is that Voyager can only sprint at 9.9 for very brief periods of time... because, if that speed was sustainable, they would have gotten home in 3.2 years.
  • To its credit, that Hand Wave has been with the franchise pretty much from the start: whenever the plot demanded it, Kirk could always tell Scotty to give the Enterprise an extra-hard push over its top speed, but it was always for some emergency, and of course Scotty always got to complain that "she cannae take much more o' this, Captain!" The Voyager presumably had a higher top speed, but the same general idea applies: Torres can't push the speed up over warp factor 9 for very long, or she'll blow the warp engines. Moreover, unlike Scotty, she's generally not exaggerating when she assesses Voyager's vulnerabilities or how long repairs will take if Janeway pushes the ship too hard.
• The Doctor's Heroic BSOD after choosing to save his friend over someone he barely knew could have been resolved in a much simpler manner: by assigning a higher priority to a member of the ship's senior staff than to a below-decks nobody.
  • Which would doom Kes, Seven and Neelix to lowest priority as they're not actually members of Starfleet, same would go for most of the former Maquis crew.
  • A bigger question is why an emergency hologram wouldn't be equipped to handle this sort of decision. An emergency hologram that can't perform triage? What good is that?
• By the beginning of Voyager, they already know that there's a stable wormhole in the Gamma Quadrant that would take them home; it's almost guaranteed to be closer to Voyager's location in the Delta Quadrant than a straight line drawn to Earth would be and at this point they've never heard of the Dominion. Yet the possibility of making a bee-line for this potential shortcut is never raised
  • It wouldn't be any closer and they'd still have to cross a large portion of the Delta Quadrent to even get to the equally unexplored Gamma Quadrent. And by that point they were vaguely aware of the Dominion so they knew there was a hostile force waiting for them in the Gamma Quadrent.
  • There is no way to know the exact locations between Voyager, Earth, and the Gamma Quadrant end of the Bajoran Wormhole. It's possible that it could be even farther from Voyager than Earth. Granted they could have just thrown it away in a few lines ("Could we head for the Bajoran Wormhole instead?" "No, it's actually farther away from us than Earth, and there's no way to know if it'll still be stable by the time we get there." "Oh, ok.")
  • In point of fact - Voyager launched from DS 9 after the incident with the Dominion mounting a suicide run against the Galaxy-class U.S.S. Odyssey as of DS 9 season 2 finale - they had to have known about the dangers of the Dominion in the area.
• Basically all the times when the Department of Temporal Investigations don't show up when there's time travel causes a great deal of Fridge Logic. They do, afterall, have time machines, it's not as if they can't find Voyager. After having been introduced, they're conspicuously absent from the two occasions when Voyager is saved by people deliberately breaking the Temporal Prime Directive in order to alter the past and, ironically, the only time they actually do show up it's to solve problems which they themselves are the cause of. The only explanation - not just for this but for why they don't pop up all over the franchise - seems to be that they're willing to turn a blind eye to anything that benefits the Federation
  • Actually, it makes perfect sense, once you think about it - the Department of Temporal Investigations is itself subject to the Temporal Prime Directive. Any time travel that occurred exclusively prior to the formation of the Department would not be in any way subject to alteration by them, as that would itself change the future, possibly screwing with their own timeline. While Voyager's regular temporal mechanical complications are difficult for the DTI to keep track of, they're also entirely built into the DTI's timeline, especially given that some things that led to the formation of the DTI were likely inspired by discoveries made by Voyager and events triggered by Voyager. Indeed, the big question is why the DTI don't consider Voyager to be kind of an essential part of their history, and thus worthy of real fascination (rather than simple frustration).