Star Trek: Voyager/Headscratchers

• What in every timeline did Kes see in Neelix. He is practically the most appallingly annoying character ever. Were I Kes I would have left him when he attacks your friends because he thinks your having an affair with no logical reasoning. The only two reasons I can think she stayed with him are A.) He is EXTREMELY good in bed B.) He is abusive off-screen.
  • I really don't get the Neelix hate. I quite like the character and his actor is one of the only decent ones on voyager. He has a couple of episodes where he was annoying, but in just as many he was quite amusing.
    • He in general was The Load and had a grating annoying personality. He was also a Creator's Pet because the writers clearly loved him even when it was absolutely obvious the fans wanted him to at least be toned down. TO sum it up every time hes on screen its like you entered a Ferengi episode.
    • The man (thing...) is void of any endearing quality. He's The Load. He joins the crew under false pretenses after conning them. Gets people killed thanks to his insistence that he's a survival expert and never gets called on it. Shows a willingness to betray or lie to the crew at the drop of a hat. He's a danger to everyone around him (almost killed the ship with CHEESE). Is violently jealous to the point he will pick up fights over perceived advances on his girlfriend that have never occurred. He's a coward. Will annoy or butt in into other people's business uninvited, even giving himself a made up rank to justify his doing so. AND he's disrespectful of other people's cultures to their face.
    • I think one apt description of the Ferengi, as some involved with Deep Space Nine put it, is "cartoon characters". Hell, Neelix was based off of both Timon and Pumbaa, it is said in some places. So they have a similar annoyance factor, I guess. Now, I don't mind them as much as a lot of the haters do... but I can also sit through whole hours of kids' shows without flinching on some days. Maybe it's a matter of tolerance or target audience--are people who post about Star Trek on the Internet more interested in space exploration and kicking ass, or about some bumbling sidekick's tomfoolery? Now compare this to what the pursestring-pullers wanted (however misguided or on target): a prime-time show with big ratings; this has to pull something in from the mass market, and they probably thought (at least at the time) that what Neelix ended up being would have some draw.
    • I'm sure Neelix was intended to be some sort of breakthrough character, but that did not fly (any more than Tom Paris ended up being the hunk, when you think about it). The writers obviously had few ideas of what to do with him: in the later seasons, it seems like Icheb is getting more screen time than Neelix!
  • He did have his redeeming moments, though, like the one when Naomi's mum was lost and he looked after her(Naomi), while being well aware that she could be dead.
    • Check the WMG for a more sinister interpretation of that.
    • So what? If you start with the premise that someone's evil, you can apply Alternate Character Interpretation to every single thing they do to back it up. That doesn't take anything away from the episode.
  • I never got what either of them saw in the other. When we met Kes she was a late adolescent, and Neelix met her earlier still. True, she wasn't quite young enough to qualify for pedophilia--But who does he think he is, Mark Sanchez? And what appeal could someone who grew up in the super-duper-sheltered Ocampa reservation have to anyone who's remotely worldly? She got her ass enslaved by the goddamn Kazon--People whose idea of a jail cell is drawing a line in the dirt and telling the prisoner he'd better not cross it!!
  • Neelix likely found her optimism and naivite refreshing. Everything was new to her, the universe was a beautiful and wonderful thing to her and he got to show her each new thing himself. Plus, with her naivite he became her protector, which made him feel needed. As we see later on Neelix has a desperate need to feel needed and accepted. For Kes's part we aren't ever shown any down side to her relationship with Neeix, who introduced her to the wider universe and rescued her from he Kazon, who were using more than a line in the sand to keep her in line, more like beatings, until they got aboard Voyager and Neelix got jelous of Tom a few weeks in. Remember, Kes is a telepath she can tell Neelix's true feelings and motivations, she knew he was jelous she just never really understood jelousy. Ultimately they had little in common and that's likely why they broke up, though they always remained good friends.
  • Remember the Ocampa as a species lived a very sheltered existence. When Nelix came along he Representative adventure, I don't know why she stayed with him but it makes sense she hooked up with him in the first place.
  • Think about it though: If an alien with an FTL capable spaceship landed in your backyard and promised to take you with him wouldn't YOU jump at the chance? the problem with the whole arrangement only comes when you A) Realize that he is nothing more than a Scavenger who deals in junk B) That his Spaceship is actually pretty crappy compared to everyone else's and C) He is pretty needy and gets jealous at the slightest provocation. Once Kes had access to a Federation Starship and (more importantly) access to other men who aren't sheltered Ocampa, violent Kazon or an untrustworthy Talaxian it's little wonder she started to look elsewhere.
    • That might be a bit unfair to Neelix, though. His spaceship really isn't any worse than most anything else in that region of space; his profession and technology level seem on par with what we see from most space ports in the first two seasons, so it's more like he and Kes are just living in a bad neighborhood. And while he doesn't handle his jealousy well at all, he's mostly jealous of Tom, and Tom is both attracted to Kes and has almost no respect for Neelix. It took a long while for Tom to have his "I respect Neelix too much to make a move on Kes" epiphany, and in the meantime he was flirting like crazy (and Kes, being so naive and attracted to Tom too, wasn't really doing anything to discourage him). Still, they had little in common apart from perhaps an optimistic veneer (that, for Neelix, can evaporate pretty quickly under pressure), so it's not a surprise that they drifted apart. I just wish the writers had handled it more gracefully than having Kes seemingly break up with him while possessed. It looked at the time like Tieran was just trying to shake Neelix before he realized something's wrong with Kes, but then the series proceeded as if the split was her idea after all.
    • As for what they saw in each other, though, there's the wonder factor of Neelix simply being a guy with a spaceship for a sheltered girl, as said, and I like the idea that, as someone else said, she can empathically, intuitively tell that he really is a good person (in a part of the galaxy where good people seem to be a rare commodity). So long as it was Kes and Neelix against the world, his jealousy and insecurity weren't really issues, and he does have a few other things going for him. He did rescue her from slavery, which is a big thing in itself, and he knows how to cheer her up and make her laugh, which also goes a long way. Also, perhaps most importantly, he needs her. Kes is a nurturer, Neelix is deeply broken beneath the surface, and so they clicked naturally into a powerful, if kinda dysfunctional, relationship that more or less amounts to "I need her" and "he needs me" as their reasons for being together. Once Kes started realizing that she has needs too, and Neelix learned to stand on his own without relying on Kes as a crutch, the basis for their relationship started to fade away. Kes perhaps realized it first, but Neelix did too after awhile, which is why they remained friends.
  • Neelix was an attempt to recapture the popularity of Quark, who the fanbase absolutely adored. Fans always wanted to see Quark making good with the other characters or doing something heroic, so the writers tried to create a Quark-esque character that actually was pleasant and outgoing instead of a Jerkass Smug Snake. What they didn't understand is that the fanbase is often more interested in twisting the character into what they want rather than the character already being what they want, so even if they'd nailed this particularly difficult writing challenge anyway, people probably wouldn't have gone for it. But seriously, imagine Quark in place of Neelix for Neelix's appearance in the pilot, you can totally see how the lines would be exactly the sort of things he'd say, just with a lot of insincere smarm overlaid on them.
• How does Voyager get trashed every week and yet always prove to be perfectly repaired by the next episode? It's not like they can stop at a Starfleet base for repairs.
  • There's a season seven episode where Voyager is sitting on a planet's surface, and B'Elanna is conducting extensive repairs and renovations. Portions of the warp engine interiors are visible, panels are missing from the hull, etc. One can assume retroactively that this was done every so often with parts and components either replicated or adapted from alien technology. It's the equivalent of a starbase repair session, only the Voyager crew have to do all the work themselves.
    • They called it routine maintenence, kind of like what the Enterprise put in for in "Starship Mine." And in her log to start the episode Janeway mentions that they were long overdue. What no one seemed to notice about that episode, however, is that in the episode right before that one, they had just given themselves a fairly major tuneup.
  • It's an unstated assumption of every Trek series that, beneath the shiny surfaces, their current location (starship, space station, whatever) is being held together on spit and duct tape by that series' resident brilliant engineer. Saves a lot on actual engineering research, I'm guessing.
  • And sometimes, as in anytime O'Brien says anything about the condition of Deep Space Nine/Terok Nor or the Defiant, it's a stated assumption.
  • Because in Star Trek: Voyager, Status Quo Is God
  • After season 4 or so, there were Borg parts mixed in with the Starfleet parts. Possibly they repaired the ship.
    • Which MIGHT have been plausible if after Scorpion Torres BEMOANS the Borg technology repairing itself as she REMOVES IT ALL.
    • No she doesn't. She removes most of it but is given permission to leave in stuff that actually improve things. We don't know if it was just that one thing or if Voyager now has minor regeneration abilities. Of course we're also occasionally informed of Voyager's actual status and it's never as shiney and perfect as it seems. Basically Voyager looks fresh but has serious damage under the surface that's constantly being worked on.
  • It's possible that there were friendly/neutral space stations and the like that Voyager was able to stop at for repairs between the exciting battles and Negative Space Wedgies. They might have stayed at some of these for weeks, seeing as a lot of the time we aren't given concrete timeframes between episodes.
  • And of course the real reason: the stock footage of Voyager used a physical model, not CGI, and it would have been far too expensive to have it redone to show battle damage.
    • This. Seriously, people, sometimes you just have to make allowances for budgetary limitations. Every show has a certain amount of money to use, and Star Trek is no different... in fact if you read creator commentary, you'd be surprised just how often "We ran out of money" became a problem. They simply can't afford to build a new six foot model of Voyager every time they want to have it banged up.
  • Say what you will about Enterprise, but when the ship got beaten up in "Azati Prime," it damn well stayed beaten up for the rest of the season and on into the next one.
    • Not having replicators available can really slow repairs down. So long as Voyager had power they could fix almost anything back to near full given enough time between episodes and once they had the Astrometrics Lab with it's superior sensors and a former Borg with vast amounts of knowledge finding new power sources became a lot easier.
    • And of course the real reason: Enterprise effects were all done in CGI, so it was cheap and easy to re-render the beat-up ship model instead of the normal pristine one.
• Voyager was lost in the Delta Quadrant, correct? If I remember correctly, the Gamma Quadrant - home to the Bajoran Wormhole - was right next to it. So, why in the hell couldn't they set a course for the wormhole? Again, if I recall correctly, Voyager was lost in the Badlands hunting down Maquis, after Deep Space 9 was given back to the Bajorans with Sisko in charge and the Wormhole was discovered. Honestly, they could set a course for the Alpha Quadrant and Earth, but they couldn't set a course for the Gamma Quadrant and its terminal for the wormhole?
  • Two reasons. First, by the time Voyager embarked, Starfleet knew that the Dominion controlled large parts of the Gamma Quadrant and didn't like them very much. Better to take the long way than to get blown up taking the short way. Second, without seeing a map, we don't know if it would actually have been faster that way. I don't think there's a canonical map of the Trek galaxy, but there are plenty of ways for a point in the Delta Quadrant to be closer to Earth than to a point in the Gamma Quadrant.
  • I can't imagine going through Borg space seemed like a better idea than Dominion space, especially since if I recall correctly, the war with the Dominion had not started yet.
    • Generally speaking, Borg space might have been better even in wartime. Borg (at least at one point) had a convenient tendency to ignore you if you mind your own business. Jem'Hadar adhere to no such policy.
    • Sci-fi writers may have no sense of scale, but their critics rarely fare any better.... space is big.
    • Because Voyager doesn't know where Borg Space is. No one does at that point. When they first encountered Borg Space, the only reason they knew they were anywhere near it in the first place was because they found a Borg corpse shortly before that. The Delta Quadrant is a huge place. The only reason they entered Borg Space is because the writers said so (and because the fans wanted it).
  • Imagine an isosceles triangle superimposed on a dinner plate. Point A is about halfway along a radius - that is where the Federation, Romulan Empire and Klingon Empire meet. The Alpha Quadrant terminal of the Bajoran Wormhole is roughly a finger-width closer to the centre, and the same distance to one side. Point B is about three quarters towards the rim along a radius on the other side of the plate - this is the Gamma quadrant terminal of the Bajoran Wormhole, 70,000 LY from point A. Point C is also 70,000 LY from point A, but it is only two-thirds towards the rim along a radius - this is where Voyager ended up in the Delta quadrant. Point B is, however, 90,000 LY away.
    • Math stuff is hard for me, so forgive me if I don't follow. I also realized that the question could also be turned to why they couldn't set a course for the Beta Quadrant, which was also right next to the Delta Quadrant. In fact, it seems like the course to "home" meant "Earth", and not any of the nearest Federation or allied space stations in any of the other quadrants. Yes, most of the crew was human, and getting to Earth would put them smack-dab at Starfleet Headquarters, but one would think the more logical choice would be to set a course for the nearest bit of friendly territory, first.
    • Basically, quadrants are HUGE. Each quadrant is a quarter of the galaxy. The entirety of the original series, Next Generation, and Enterprise are spent in the Alpha quadrant (and a sliver of Beta Quadrant), and they still haven't explored the entire Alpha Quadrant. Even if the Gamma quadrant is closer (and I'm not sure it is, all the quadrants are "right next to" each other seeing as there are only four of them), it wouldn't be a big enough difference to merit all the other problems trying to find the other side of the wormhole would cause.
    • Also note that the border between the Alpha and Beta quadrants is a line that passes through Earth. It would have been almost exactly as accurate to say their destination was the Beta quadrant, but that would have been less clear. Likewise, in Deep Space Nine, they were constantly obsessing over defending the Alpha Quadrant from the Dominion, despite the entirety of Romulan and Klingon territory lying within the Beta Quadrant. Although, to be fair, the Dominion would have to conquer most of the Alpha Quadrant before they'd be able to get around to invading the Beta Quadrant.
    • Everything I've seen, and that has been suggested about where Voyager landed implies that the ship landed on the EXTREME far end of the Delta Quadrant, to the point where they would have to cross the ENTIRE thing to get to the closest point of any other Quadrant, Alpha, Beta or Gamma. Furthermore, from what was said, it seems that the Bajoran Wormhole was located on the far end of the Gamma Quadrant from Earth. In other words, the Bajoran wormhole and Voyager were on opposite ends of the galaxy, to the point where Voyager would have to travel not just through the entire Delta quadrant, but the entire Gamma Quadrant as well, just to get to the wormhole. So, they'd be traveling twice the distance as they would to get to Earth. Setting course for the Alpha Quadrant is faster.
    • Here's a map for you. For reference, Voyager got planted in the Delta quadrant by the Caretaker somewhere in or pretty damn close to Kazon space (top right). The Gamma Quadrant end of the wormhole is likewise either in or pretty damn close to Dominion space (middle of top left square. The Alpha Quadrant end of the wormhole is next to Bajor, which for the purposes of this map is just on the edge of Cardassian space (as the Cardassians had just withdrawn at the start of Deep Space Nine) and thats on the right of the bottom left square. Voyager left from Deep Space Nine in the pilot episode (of Voyager) sometime after the wormhole had been discovered so they knew it existed and likely had some stellar cartography data in their computers about where it ends up. Whichever way you look at it, it would have been faster to go catch a wormhole home.
    • Besides, the wormhole was only opened up recently, and the possibility of cross-quadrant conflict can't have escaped anyone's notice. Sealing the wormhole again would be a valid tactic for whichever quadrant seemed to be losing such a conflict, so even if its Gamma end was nearer than Earth, who's to say it'd still be open when Voyager finally arrived? At least (barring certain movie-plots) they could be reasonably sure the Earth wasn't going anywhere in the meantime.
    • It was stated in episode 6 of Deep Space 9 that the wormhole opens 90,000 light years away; Voyager was transported 75,000 light years away - they would still have to travel 15,000 light years in the wrong direction to track down a single point in the largely unexplored Gamma Quadrant. Not only that but keep in mind that the Bajoran Wormhole is also invisible to both sensors and the MK 1 Eyeball unless you are standing directly in front of it and suddenly you start to realize why Janeway decided to take the direct route home. It must also be said that given how badly this show neutered the Borg that Voyager staying the hell away from the Dominion was one of the best real world choices in Star Trek history.
• In Voyager, why did the crew not just toss Captain Janeway out an airlock? She kept preventing them from getting home with her stupid, mindless adherence to the letter of every rule. In fact, her mindless adherence to the rules was what got them all stranded in the first place. So why did the crew never mutiny? I can practically guarantee that they'd have all been home by next week if they had. And don't you dare say that it was because Failure Is the Only Option. I don't buy it.
  • When it comes to getting stranded in the Delta Quadrant, keep in mind that even though Tuvok was fairly certain that he could program the array to send Voyager back home, that it would take several hours to do so. Only with Voyager already fighting the Kazon spacecraft for control of the Array, with more Kazon on the way, they didn't have a few hours to spare. It was either destroy the Array as the Caretaker wanted, or abandon it to the Kazon. There was no third option.
  • Every rule she followed, she followed for a reason. Every instance I can remember where her adherence to the rules prevented them from getting home - including the scenario that got them stranded in the first place, as the series goes out of its way to remind us on more than one occasion - was to prevent a greater disaster from befalling somebody else. You could argue that they would realistically get tired of this and leave the next poor alien-race-of-the-week to whatever their problem was in favor of finally returning to Earth, but I guess they don't operate that way.
    • Oh really? Well, as I recall, The entire reason the ship got stuck out there in the first place was because Janeway violated the Prime Directive. What's worse, her violation didn't actually accomplish anything. They should have tossed her out midway through the first episode.
    • By destroying a powerful device, which its original owner was planning to do anyway, in order to keep it out of the hands of a belligerent, warp-capable species? That doesn't sound like a pointless violation of the Prime Directive to me.
    • A race that uses a LINE ON THE GROUND as a prison are more a threat to themselves than anyone else. They're constantly shown as utterly incompetent and the only time they ever posed any threat was when Seska - a Cardassian - was calling the shots.
    • It's easy to condemn someone for taking an incompetent race seriously now that we know they're incompetent. Janeway had no way of knowing at the time. For all she knew, the Kazon she met on the planet were just the Kazon short bus and the rest of them(or at least some of them) were genuinely intelligent.
    • Apparently she'd never heard of a time bomb. Besides she adhered to the rules when it was narratively convenient. Other times she'd say fuck the rules if it meant drama.
    • Check 9:25. A time bomb would not have worked.
    • And what about the SELF-DESTRUCT system the Caretaker says that he's activated and that will destroy the array in minutes?
    • One has to question the idiotic writing of Caretaker - it puts the Captain in a situation where staying in the Delta quadrant is not only stranding her crew (and people who AREN'T her crew), but going against the fundamental rule of the Federation and common sense. She willingly violates the Prime Directive here because the plot demands it, but then repeatedly will not be swayed from Starfleet ethics... even if last week she was. Voyager may have been fantastic if after a few weeks of this flip-flopping someone just pointed out that Janeway was insane and had stranded two crews in the Delta quadrant because she was just nuts.
    • To be fair, Janeway did not break the Prime Directive in "Caretaker." The Prime Directive prevents Starfleet personnel from interfering with the internal affairs of another species and the natural development of pre-warp civilizations. Because of the fact that the Caretaker brought a Federation vessel from the Alpha Quadrant to the Delta Quadrant, the affairs of the Caretaker and the Ocampa are no longer an internal matter. Thus, the Prime Directive no longer applies.
    • Also remember that the Prime Directive's intent is to prevent less advanced races from being taken advantage of. Even if a case could be made for her breaking the letter of the Prime Directive, she's upholding the spirit of it in this case.
    • I think that if "the plot demands it" by placing you in a dire situation where common sense can be reasonably argued as on your side, that's a reasonable time to succumb to the plot's demands.
  • On more than one occasion they did rebel in some way, such as early in the first season when Seska was still believed to be a Bajoran instead of a Filthy Dirty Cardie and they violated the Prime Directive to get an upgraded warp drive. I think most of the reason that the Federation crew didn't rebel is because this is what they signed on for: the Federation are supposed to be morally superior to the people of today, and the Maquis are mostly idealists who signed on to overthrow what they perceived to be an injustice that threatened the very fabric of the Federation itself. Besides which, Chakotay was a hippie, Tuvok was completely bad *** , and Torres was always looking to sock someone anyway; when the senior staff is fully willing to throw you out the airlock for talking mutiny, you don't talk mutiny.
    • The problem with most of these instances of people questioning the almighty Janeway is that the story almost INEVITABLY contrives to show them as either stupid or morally inferior (generally both) for DARING to question her. Chakotay is a real whipping boy for that, he regularly questions her and is nine times out of ten shown to be wrong, wrong, wrong.
    • They WERE wrong. Encouraging a sense of dissention that could lead to mutiny is the worst possible thing you can do on a starship that's decades away from new crewmen and supplies. That's part of why Chakotay became so completely on her side, he knew that to allow his crew to let their anger over being stranded would ultimately destroy them all. Tuvok realized this as well, which is why he deleted that training program about a Maquis mutiny once he saw thecrews getting along. Unless Janeway started making utterly irrational detrimental decisions, which she really only stooped to in Equinox when Chakotay and Tuvok DID call her out on her behaviour, the best thing to do is support her. Each time she passes up an opportunity to get home there's always a decent reason and her way led to several significant jumps tha ultimately got them home decades faster than they'd expected, and that was even before Admiral Janeway went back and changed history.
  • It doesn't explain, however, why she didn't ask the Q who wanted to die to send them home before he went human on them.
    • And don't forget that for a captain so eager to break the rules - she also passes up on Q's offer to send them home if they find in his favour because apparently, she's enjoying the ride.
    • Q said he could send Voyager home if Janeway would give him a kid...why the hell didn't she just say yes and ask for an anti-Borg gun as well if he wanted twins? Or perhaps more in character, volunteer Harry to act as mommy and say Q could have triplets in compensation for it being Harry.
    • Ummm... because bringing a child into the world for no better reason than as a bargaining chip is morally repugnant? Hell, if Chuck is taking Janeway's side on this, you may want to rethink supporting this option.
    • Speaking as a fan of the show, that was so out-of-left-field that it sounds like a poorly-handwaved concession to the status quo. Note that in Q's final appearance, Janeway suggests that as long as he's there, he might as well send them home, only for Q to have (somewhat more plausibly) changed his mind.
    • Consiering all she'd heard and see herself about Q trusting him isn't really a risk she was willing to take at that point. It wasn't until Q proved himself harmless, if fairly irritating to her, that she started considering his offers.
  • It's also worth remembering that even the majority of the Maquis were former Starfleet officers. You or I might well mutiny and decide that getting home is worth inconveniencing some aliens we're never going to see again. But there people are a different breed of man. Anyone who wasn't predisposed toward that sort of self-sacrifice would have washed out of the academy.
    • Where did you get this idea from? Aside from Chakotay and B'elanna, I can't recall a single indication that any other member of the Voyager Maquis were ex-Starfleet. True some of the other Maquis we know are (Eddington, Ro, Cal Hudson), but that is because they have personal relationships with series regulars, who are Starfleet. The bulk of the Maquis are colonists from the DMZ.
  • Bad writing.
  • That actually is an interesting question which gave me rise of a possible point for the presumed mutiny: why Janeway couldn't just set the array to self-destruct the very nanosecond after she used it to get everyone home? I mean, it doesn't look like transporting them to the Delta Quadrant took enough time for anyone to stop the process, so the Kazon would probably only have enough time to step on the array's bridge before kaboom.
    • IIRC, they weren't able to self-destruct it: they had to prepare a special explosive and launch it at the array. That still seems like something they could have done from, say, an expendable shuttle, though.
    • They couldn't have just stuck a time bomb on a jug of antimatter and beamed it onto the array's bridge?
    • The Caretaker had already activated the self-destruct system - the array would have blown up in a few minutes anyway.
    • They had no idea how to work the array and a Kazon attack force on the way. They were risking destruction and the chance the array would fall into the Kazon hands, which would doom the Ocampa. Janeway decided to err on the side of caution and not risk the Ocampan people simply for the chance to maybe get home, an act which was supported by the Caretaker who asked her to protect the Ocampa before he died.
  • Considering that the trip to the Delta quadrant using the array KILLED OVER HALF of both ships' crews, my problem was always that they were willing to take a return trip at all. Even if they did want to do something so stupid after the Caretaker died, maybe the tech was beyond them anyway.
  • The Caretaker Array was seriously damaged and would take several hours to repair and reinitialize. Considering they were under attack with a seriously depleted crew, their replacement crew were not up to speed on this particular ship, they took heavy damage from the initial trip, there were enemy reinforcements on the way, and a negotiated settlement looking less an option, I don't think a time bomb would have worked unless it somehow allowed them to time travel.
    • Nonsense, from the dialogue it's clear Janeway has two options - blow up the array or go home.
    • Check 9:25. It will take several hours for them to work it without the Caretaker's help. And he died less than a minute later.
    • From my memory, Janeway specifically asks Tuvok if the array can be repaired before the Kazon arrive, he tells her no, meaning the choice wasnt "use it to go home or blow it up", the choice was, "do we leave it for the Kazon to commandeer or blow it up, before we run away?"
    • The annoying thing is that the later dialogue references this moment like they actually could have chosen to go home, even though the kazon, at that point an unknown race, were swarming their already heavily damaged ship, while the caretaker array would have taken hours to restart, would have killed the remainder of the crew AND would have been commandeered by the Kazon after they destroyed voyager. This was written in the episode itself, but apparently, the writers forgot about it in favor of making Janeway having had to make a dramatic choice.
    • Actually, it's probably not so much that in at least a few cases, notably "Night", in which Janeway is pointed out to have a tendency to blame herself for things that logically are out of her control. It's fairly plausible that she has genuinely convinced herself that they could have used the Array to get home and it's her fault they're stranded, even if the actual circumstances at the time made it impossible. Similarly, most of the other people who mention the Array as a viable method of getting home are disgruntled crew members blaming Janeway, or otherwise not knowing the whole story.
    • Why not let the Kazon have it? They're so incompetent they'd probably blow it up. And even if they managed to get to the Alpha Quadrant, they're not exactly a huge threat. Voyager is a science vessel - not particularly well armed. And IIRC, they nearly managed to take Voyager out by outnumbering it quite a bit... and she was still trouncing them while heavily damaged.
    • They weren't spacefaring to begin with, but they've managed well enough with their stolen starships. It's doubtful the Array would be too difficult for them to eventually master, at least in a basic sense. The issue wasn't that they'd invade the Alpha Quadrant, but that they would use it to conquer their region of space, harming countless people.
    • They'd do that with the array that's due to self-destruct? That would be a neat trick.
    • It wasn't going to self-destruct after that Kazon cruiser smashed into it.
    • They were probably more worried that some other belligerent spacefaring race would come along and take it from them.
    • It's lightly touched on above but it seems to need being repeated Janeway couldn't set the self destruct because the self destruct system had been destroyed it's stated right there in dialogue. As to why they didn't plant a bomb, did it occur to anyone else that they simply didn't think of it? remember, it's all well and good sitting in an armchair saying what they should and shouldn't have done, but remember that not only had the Ocampans tried to help Kim and Torres without asking anything in return, not only did they have a homeless Ocampan girl aboard who had given them vital information to help rescue Kim and Torres BUT they were also standing on board a heavily damaged ship that was under attack, filled to the rafters with terrorists and had just lost a good dozen men and women. Not only did they not think of it, but to suggest they should have just forgot about the Ocampa and just saved themselves is callous at best and sadistic at worst.
    • They did think of it. It would have taken several hours to boot up the Array, several hours they didn't have given they were under attack with enemy reinforcements on the way, and probably needed more after the Kazon ship crashed into it, damaging it worse.
• Why did Voyager keep Neelix on their ship? It wasn't necessary to have a chef, and he would boost morale far more if he left. They could have killed him off in "Mortal Coil" when he became a Nietzsche Wannabe. Doing so would basically mean telling the audience that life is pointless, but it's worth getting rid of the Creator's Pet.
  • Neelix was always a depressive type, or rather that was his original characterization in episodes where he was the main character. Jetrel was the first such episode, and it was carried on with Fair Trade and so on. His apparently sunny disposition is a facade. Remember that he also used to be a small-time criminal. This aspect of his character was dropped as the series changed to being centred around Seven of Nine and the EMH. As to why they keep him around? Who knows. It seems that they've taken him far from home and it didn't seem fair to just drop him off in some far-flung part of the galaxy with Borg space between there and his homeland.
  • It's simple: as a native to the Delta Quadrant, he knew most of the area (at least in the first few seasons) and the species that resided there well enough to act as both a guide for Voyager and a diplomat; there are several times where the crew comments him on the possibility of becoming the Federation's official ambassador to the Delta Quadrant, because of his skills in trade negotiation. (They actually do it near the end of the series, after they've visited a colony of his species.)
    • And when the time came that he would lose his usefulness as a guide, it became clear that he would go back to being a roving merchant if he was allowed to leave. (He was willing to leave, especially after that drug fiasco.) Once he joined Starfleet, Janeway and co. got the right to interfere with him--he was their responsibility; and, as Starfleet officers, they just couldn't leave a member of their crew to the invisible hand.
  • He was the most ineffective guiding guide in the history of guiding! Remember when he lead them to that planet he said was full of dilithium? You know, the one with no dilithium and full of Vidiins? No? How about all those times Janeway asked him about a local people/planet/anything and his answer was a round about way of saying "I don't know?" Or how about in basics, when his survival skills got two people killed?
  • He was kept around as Emergency Rations, in case the replicators failed. Notice how despite nominally being "morale officer" he was stationed in the KITCHEN? Pretty convenient, hmmmm?
  • Jim Wright over at Delta Blues presents a valid argument. Neelix represents the Delta Quadrant mindset. Remember, he's lived most of his life working hard, never knowing where his next meal will come from. He was scavenging in a junkyard when we find him. People in the Delta Quadrant do not live a life of luxury. They still worry about where their next meal is coming from. Peaceful exploration is unheard of. We need Neelix around to show the kind of person our crew will encounter on their journey. And as Neelix learns the Federation gospel, it gives the rest of us hope.
    • That might be a valid argument if the Delta quadrant was a single homogeneous monoculture and that he'd been all over the Delta quadrant. As it happens, it's full of different races, different cultures and Neelix's experience is limited.
    • Around Kazon space, life is nasty, brutish and short. Ditto anyone in the Borg's crosshairs. The Malon live it up but pay a nasty price for it. But the Krenim, Voth, Devore, and Hierarchy seem to enjoy decently high living standards without having to make any really unpalatable tradeoffs.
    • To be fair, Neelix had only ever seen Kazon space, the four races you mention were BEYOND the Nekrit Expanse in which Neelix had never been. The problem is that Neelix was under-utilized; the idea (in my opinion) was to create a humorous survivalist who was also a rogue - kind of like a cross breed between Han Solo and Quark. This was why our introduction to the man was him conning the Voyager crew whilst systematically being a hero by saving a girl's life. Unfortunately, through bad writing they ending up creating a character whose survival skills were a joke, his personality needy and jealous and his role on Voyager superfluous. Of course the last time they tried to make a Han Solo like character we got the Outrageous Okona so maybe Neelix was indeed a positive outcome...
  • It's a tribute to the idiocy and ineptitude of Voyager that someone whose FIRST encounter with the Voyager crew results in him conning them out of water (he's unaware it's something they can make out of thin air) so he can get his girlfriend back and put the crew into a fire fight. Yeah, that SCREAMS "trust me!"
    • Neelix was kept around because the characters saw him as a highly-skilled survival expert that knew the region intimately. The writers kinda forgot he had to be shown to be this to be treated like this though, but that goes for every character in the series.
  • Here's the thing about the "Neelix is useless" argument: It's wrong. It's made by the sort of people that think "Riker doesn't do anything but go on away missions", because they don't really pay attention or remember anything if it's not an action sequence or if there's not dramatic music playing. Besides Neelix showing some actual diplomatic ability and willingness to learn (and to put up with some of the biggest jerks in two quadrants with a smile on his face), he was also the one that was usually keeping them in food. Not just the cooking thing, but there's lots of scenes of him telling the crew what's edible, finding medical supplies for them, and in general helping them with their day-to-day survival, and the crew being completely ungrateful shits about it.
• In the Voyager episode where they are stuck around orbit of the strange planet displaced in time, after they are broken free, why didn't they just stay nearby, and wait an hour or so for the inhabitants of the planet to invent transwarp, or some other technology, and ask for it? Legends of the Skyship would obviously have continued, and the people of the planet would likely have been happy to help, or if not, they could have waited another few minutes.
  • For that matter, given the rate at which they were progressing... well, it was a fun episode, but Fridge Logic (if that) has me really grasping for an explanation as to why they weren't in a league of their own, breaking free of their planet's confines, and going galaxy-hopping in the space of maybe a few more days. (Best guess, nuclear war, anomaly over. But I really hope there's a cleaner reason than that.)
  • I don't remember if it was addressed at the end of the episode, but the fast-people synching with the normal time was fatal in most cases (at least, initially). It might also be that sending anyone out to do exploration would be near pointless, as within a few normal-time days, the fast-time planet would have made vast improvements on the travel systems and the older ships would be useless. OR, after the ships have gone out and done field testing, everyone that worked on them an understood there systems would have already died (unless they were on the ships), and the knowledge would have to be passed to people who only know the theory of the ships but weren't there for the application. Still, I would have preferred a ship from that planet showing up at the last minute and taking Voyager all the way back to Earth before they evolved into Q-like forms over the real ending of the series.
  • At the end of the episode the inhabitants of the planet have worked out how to synch with normal time without any ill effects.
    • But only for short periods.
  • I always assumed they realized that if they wanted to become an interstellar empire they couldn't do it with the seat of their civilization being out of sync with the territory they'd be colonizing. So they either had to get their whole planet to sync up or figure out how to become permanently synced with no ill effect and leave their homeworld behind. In either case, they'd be nothing special anymore. The only other option would be to leave well enough alone and content themselves to live on their one planet. And if your question is "Then why not wait till they developed into superbeings and then leave the planet behind?" I'd assume there's only so much development that can be done with only one planet. Earth poured everything it had into the NX-01, and it was nothing special compared with even modest local powers like the Vulcans and Andorians. And while the temporally displaced people knew enough about antimatter to shoot down Voyager, we never even saw them test a Warp 1-capable vessel.
• In Voyager, Kes is very young (2 years old at the start) although a member of a race who age and die much more quickly than humans (IIRC they tend to live to the age of 9). Neelix often comments on how young, inexperienced and naive she is. Neelix is in a romantic relationship with her, and seems to have been for some time before the programme started. So, perhaps he's exaggerating how young she is? Near the beginning of season 2 she starts to go through puberty and explains that she is half the usual age for this to happen. So she's basically like a 7-year-old human girl in terms of sexual development. Does nobody else on the ship have a problem with this? Even if Neelix is going to wait for her to grow up before doing anything, he's been grooming her for quite a while.
  • With so many alien species that have different life cycles, ages of sexual maturity, and so forth, Starfleet personnel are probably immunized against Squick. At least to some degree. If they try to apply human standards to aliens, even in terms of "a 2-year Ocampa is 14 in human years," they're going to end up making fools of themselves over and over because of misunderstandings. So they give up, even when they shouldn't give up.
    • They couldn't use the "equivalent in human years" standard even if they wanted to. Every species grows and matures at different rates. For example, the old adage that "1 human year is 7 dog years" is a fallacy, based on the semi-true belief that a dog's natural lifespan is about 1/7 that of a human. While dogs do live shorter lives than humans, their biological development is vastly different. See here for a more thorough explanation.
  • Minor point to start. Kes actually turned two in a very late first season episode. She was only a little over one year old in the pilot. But on to the main point. Kes does not "go through puberty" in that episode. The process going on is a once in a lifetime process that allows her to have a baby ONE time in her entire life. Ocampa, however, seem to be like humans and able to have sex for pleasure at any time. In other words, the Ocampa reach sexual maturity and are able to have sex LONG before they can actually have a baby. At 7 or 8 months she's like a teenager to her species. At 1 year it's like she's 20 or so in human terms. Ocampa can't even have kids normally until middle age. It's like a human being able to have sex when she's 16, but not actually being able to get pregnant until she's 40.
    • How did the writers not realize the problem with Kes only being able to have one baby in her lifetime? A species with males and femals in which each female is limited to one child will have reproduction rate below replacement and eventually dissapear. If the Ocampans are about 50% male and 50% female, as they seem to be, and a generation is only a few years long (the time it takes a female to become fertile) this would happen rather quickly.
    • This is actually one of the (rare) moments of presumably accidental Fridge Brilliance in Voyager. We're never told that Ocampan pregnancy is female only -- the other member in an Ocampan-Ocampan relationship could well end up a Mister Seahorse -- and they were pretty heavily monitored by a stupidly powerful being. Combined with the events of Elogium, where Ocampan estrus was artificially induced and the Doctor thought this would allow Kes to have a second estrus, this starts to make sense. If there's a one to one replacement ratio and the offspring are more directly related to their individual parent, this seems like the perfect way to prevent the species from either having a population explosion or mix of mutations likely to cause a population explosion, while still being able to replace the population in the case of accidents, early death, or violence. Unfortunately, it's not really enough to save the crappy, crappy episode.
    • Alternately, Ocampans could (like many Real Life invertebrates) be a sperm-sequestering species. The females may only need to mate once to obtain sperm, which are stored internally and then doled out at intervals, providing for a lifetime's worth of pregnancies.
  • This raises more Fridge Logic about when the heck Neelix even met Kes. Putting aside the question of how they met each other, since any number of crazy scenarios might've done it, how fast did she grow up into a seemingly adult female? If she was only about one year old at the beginning of Voyager, and he and Kes were implied to already be in a serious relationship, was she only a few months old when they met? How old did she actually look at that point? Ocampans must reach apparent maturity really quickly, and it's possible Neelix didn't know what he'd gotten into until they were already a couple, but it's still kinda squicky to think about.
    • I don't think Neelix's age was ever stated, so maybe he is a shorter-lived species too, with a maximum age of thirty years? All wild guessing of course, but it would explain why his relationship with Kes developed this quickly and he quickly latched on to the voyager: short-lived species like Kes have been shown to develop personal relations far faster.
    • Here's my problem with the above point that Ocampans appear to be able to have sex for pleasure at any time... not to put too finer point on it, it's been shown that the mating process involves the couple to hold their hands together (no joke) and after an undermined time the child grows out of a sack on their back. In other words Ocampans shouldn't have a penis or a vagina because their reproduction simply doesn't work that way - in fact, outside of the Elogium they shouldn't even have any sexual impulses of any kind because biologically, a sexual impulse is the subconscious desire to want to reproduce - the situation would be far more similar to a dog on heat than anything we would term as sex. Going further with this concept, Kes shouldn't even have permanent breasts considering that they would only be used once in her entire life; they should, again, function like a dog. Basically, if this reproductive system was in anyway realistic, male and female Ocampa would have such spectacularly limited sexual dimorphism you would barely be able to tell them apart.
    • Um, the series didn't really establish very many of those claims at all. The sticky stuff grows on the Ocampa hands, but that doesn't necessarily mean they lock hands with each other: maybe those sticky palms are supposed to be stuck to the mate's body the way tree frogs sometimes do with each other when mating. No penis or vagina? We don't know that. Just because the Ocampan equivalent of a uterus is a temporary sack that grows on the woman's back (and maybe the man's back too) doesn't mean she doesn't have an entrance to it somewhere. A male from one species shown in a Star Trek movie had his testicles on his knees; maybe an Ocampan woman has her vagina in the small of her back! That would lead to some interesting and potentially dangerous social situations (hugging being an easy way to cop a feel, for instance), but it wouldn't necessarily prevent a bit of inter-species romance and sexuality.
    • Out-of-estrus sexual behaviors aren't unprecedented as a bonding mechanism among social mammals. Ocampans' non-reproductive sex might serve a social purpose, like it does with bonobos or many cetaceans.
    • Bringing up the Bonobo is a brilliant point; after all Ocampan's seem to be a very emotional and social species that would probably appreciate such contact. However it still doesn't explain how a non-Ocampan could possibly have sex with Kes. Again, trying to be as family friendly as I possibly can be, wouldn't a race who technically shouldn't have genitals (even without the application of Fridge Logic, that is exactly how their reproduction is presented to us) having sex with a race with genitals be incredibly one sided?
  • I would summarize everything said above as: the idea of having a sentient species that only lives about 9 years is completely stupid and impractical, and should have died before making it into any script.
    • Oh, come on. The Ocampa aren't even the silliest sci-fi weirdness that Star Trek has ever done. Maybe Star Trek just isn't for you, man, maybe try a NASA technical manual or something.
• Ok, Voyager's been tossed into the Delta quadrant. Why did their uniforms update when Deep Space Nine's updated? Heck, why did Voyager's uniforms change, PERIOD? Were they still getting updates in the uniform handbook or something?
  • Huh? They changed? I swore they were always black bottom, department-color top with plum undershirt. Even in the last episode. The Deep Space Nine/Movie change moved it to black bottom, plum top with department-color undershirt, and Voyager didn't make the switch, even after they made contact with the Federation and the new wardrobe.
    • Answer - they didn't change.
  • Even more buggy is why does Starfleet seem to change its uniforms every other year? No military has ever gone through uniforms that quickly. Next Generation should have kept something similar to the nice red tunics they had in the films up through Undiscovered Country.
    • The blue jumpsuits with service color piping of the ENT era; the corded sweaters of the TOS pilot(s); the uniforms worn on all the other TOS episodes; those ugly-ass things from the motion picture; the red tunics from Wrath of Khan through the time Wesley was born; the TNG uniforms without the collars, which went into service around the time Jack Crusher was killed and were phased out over the course of TNG Season 3; the TNG uniforms with the collars that were worn from Season 3 or 4 up through Generations; the Generations/early Deep Space Nine/Voyager uniforms that went into service in some areas (like Deep Space Nine) at the Deep Space Nine pilot and became standard for everywhere (except Earth, apparently) in Generations; and the uniform with the colored undershirts that went into service while Bashir was being held with Martok in that prison camp while a Founder impersonated him. That's the uniform that was in service up through Nemesis. Whether it was still in service eight years later when the Romulan sun went nova and Abrams kicked Trek canon to the curb, I don't know. I do know that that's nine uniforms in a 228-year period, from 2151 to 2379. I also know that the US Army issued its first set of Service Uniform regulations in 1779, and that by 2007, which covers the same period of time, it had been modified on 25 separate occasions.Take a look.
    • Flashbacks in TNG indicate that the change from the red tunics of the films to the TNG-style uniforms occured recently - they were still using the red tunics when Wesley Crusher was born (when his dad made a holorecording of himself at the time, he was wearing a tunic). In all probability, most of the Enterprise-D officers had been in service when the changeover occured.
    • What I heard was that the plan had been to have them wear the tunics on TNG but it didn't work with the TNG set. Considering how much better the tunics looked than the Season 1 and 2 uniforms (especially the ones with the little short skirts) and how the set at first had a pretty blase feel to it, they might have done better changing the set to match the costumes. (I know, I know, the costs would be prohibitive.)
    • Also, the TNG-style uniforms were obviously in something of a beta test when we first saw them, as they were refined later on to be more comfortable (presumably while Gene was looking the other way in real life).
    • The Uniforms on Voyager didn't change. Only the Uniforms of people still in the Alpha quadrant (starting with the Prometheus EMH and then moving on to the Pathfinder staff) changed to the First contact/ Late Deep Space Nine style.
    • Looks like someone Did Not Do the Research.
    • Considering that Starfleet officers' uniforms are probably replicated on the spot, it's bound to be a lot easier for such a design change to be disseminated in-universe than in any Real Life military organization. You don't have to manufacture the outfits and then ship them to where they're needed, you just transmit the new clothing designs to the fleet's replicators and let the various vessels' crew members input what size they need.
    • What the above says, plus most of the changes that we see occur for a reason. The TNG uniforms are new, and they've clearly decided to show the difference between ship and space station personnel with two different uniforms. Later on as the conflict with the Dominion is revving up, they start switching everyone over to the space station uniforms which don't have a nice big colored splotch on the chest like a target. As the Dominion war goes fully hot, they switch to the variant with the grey shoulders and the colored undershirt so that it will be slightly harder for enemy combatants to tell the various departments apart and do things like sniping the medic or the guy who's keeping your base's shield emitters working.
  • Here's one for you, though: In the episode where they meet that Klingon generational ship that left Klingon space 100 years ago, the Klingons look like 24th century Klingons. And I'm not talking about the cranial features; we'll just leave those be for now. But they were wearing the same uniforms that Klingons wore on TNG and Deep Space Nine. If Voyager, which had been in contact with Starfleet since the last uniform change, didn't change, why would these Klingons, who had not been in contact with the KDF, change? How would they even know what to change to? A lucky guess? Did the Klingons plan the change out a century in advance and say "Remember, at such-and-such a stardate you have to start wearing these"? Those Klingons should either have worn civvies (since they'd despaired of ever reforming the corrupt Empire, they wouldn't be KDF at all) or worn the TOS Klingon uniforms, which would have been a pleasantly nostalgic throwback.
    • Gold lame and bubble wrap belt buckles are never pleasant.
• Also, why did the Voyager writers not go with the obvious couple of Janeway & Chakotay (which they were clearly considering) and instead throw Chakotay and Seven together at the last minute? I know there's the whole fraternisation protocol, but that applied just as much, if not more so, between Seven and Chakotay - and at least Mulgrew and Beltran had some freakin' chemistry!
  • I'm more bothered by the Doctor and Seven's relationship getting derailed than by Janeway and Chakotay, but I see what you mean. I read somewhere--maybe here--that Seven was kind of a consolation prize to Chakotay, since the actor was complaining that they were underusing his character. And anyone who would complain about making out with Jeri Ryan is either a moron or a terrorist.
    • Or, you know, gay, married to someone really jealous, asexual...
    • Err, I can think of more romantic environments than in front of a filming team and a director who keeps complaining about your performance and repeating the scene, additionally possibly under the eyes of her reallife boyfriend who makes sure you dont do anything thats not absolutely necessary.
    • Also, what exactly is the point of insulting people who do not lust after the same women that you lust after ? Whats to gain from that ?
    • Perhaps, but no matter what they looked like, Doctor and Seven would certainly have been far more interesting than Janeway and Chakotay. Also, it would have evolved naturally, as opposed to being force fed every six months or so when Jeri Taylor wrote an episode herself.
    • I got the sense Seven saw the Doctor as more of a father figure, even if the reverse wasn't true.
  • Chakotay was a terrorist! The guy should have tried to be more "Method".
  • Rumor has it that Beltran complained about not getting any character development, and to shut his mouth they put Ms. Fanservice in it.
    • Which in itself doesn't really make any sense as it was such a thrown-in-at-the-last-minute occurrence, the guy should have been looking for his next job.
  • What was so obvious about Janeway and Chakotay as a natural pairing? It would be against protocol, and that's a protocol that's there for a good reason. Look at how badly Picard was rattled in "Lessons," and reimagine that but without the option of Chakotay transferring to another command like Picard's girlfriend did. And there really wasn't any chemistry between them, except for a handful of Jeri Taylor episodes where she forced it on them out of nowhere.
    • It's been stated repeatedly that Starfleet has no fraternization protocol. Janeway has a personal belief that she probably shouldn;t date members of ther crew, but there's no directive against it.
    • All right, so Janeway is personally committed to the idea that captains should not fraternize with their subordinates. Sounds like we've figured out why the writers didn't give her a love interest in the crew. . . .
      • Has any Starfleet captain that headed any of the various shows had an actual relationship with a subordinate while they were a subordinate? Picard and Crusher had ridiculous mountains of UST but there's no indication they actually ever carried out an actual relationship beyond friends during the time they were both posted to the Enterprise. Most of Kirk's relationships were with women from off of the ship (and usually only lasted an episode anyway), Picard never had a lasting relationship, Sisko's sporadic relationship with a non-Starfleet freighter captain was pretty Out of Focus. The captain not having an ongoing relationship is actually pretty typical for the series. I think the first Starfleet captain we've seen to have a relationship with a subordinate would be Riker since Deanna went to his next posting with him after they were married, but the results of that are in a mildly terrible series of EU novels, so.
• I realize that this was supposed to be a plot point, and it had some interesting potential, but the execution was abysmal. There was an episode in Voyager where the Doctor had to make a choice on which person he had to save, and chose his friend over the random blue shirt despite the fact they had an absolutely equal chance. The Doctor has a nervous breakdown as a result as his programming could not resolve the issue after the fact (saving his friend over random crewmember). Fair enough, it helps to establish some of the underlying aspects of the Doctor as a program. However, what happens is that they under go a massive cover-up, excising the blue shirt from all records and modifying the doctor's memories. In addition to how cold this was, I can't help but think it would have been easier to just rewrite a few memories that her body had a bad reaction to the attack (or Harry was somehow less effected, even slightly) or that she banged her head as she collapsed, giving Harry a microscopically better chance at survival (which his programming would have been able to accept).
  • I'd guess that it was because they could only delete the Doctor's memories, not insert false ones. The EMH was likely designed so that you could delete its memories (after all, we saw in "The Swarm" that it's possible to overload an EMH's memory), but not so that you could implant fake memories, because why would you need to give one fake memories? They aren't supposed to be sentient, after all; the Doc becoming so was an accident.
  • I haven't seen that episode, but it sounds to me like an enormous flaw in the EMH Program. The entire point of an Emergency Medical Hologram is to provide support to overwhelmed medical staff in an emergency. That necessarily includes life and death situations where every second counts and you can't save everybody. An EMH would have to have a Triage Protocol where he can make those decisions instantly without hesitation or remorse. The Doctor should have said, "My program dictates that I save X" and that would be it, unless he received a contrary order from the Captain.
    • No that part was addressed. The two characters in the situation had the exact same chance of dying (don't ask me how, given potential differences in biochemistry from person to person). Normally, he'd just pick the one his program decided had the better chance, even if the differences between the two were minute and not be bothered to the extent that he was. For example, based off what he said, let's say we two fatally injured crewman, crewmen A and B and only enough time to potentially save one of them, if crewman A had a 31.334% chance of survival, and crewman B had a 31.335% chance of survival, the Doctor would pick crewman B with no problem (beyond that normally associated with doctors being unable to save patients they can't save). However, if crewman A and crewman B were to each have 33.333% chance of survival, and picks crewman A because he's friends with A but not B, he later cannot justify to himself saving A over B since B had just as much chance of survival.
    • That's precisely the flaw: The EMH has only one criterion to determine who to help. None of the programmers foresaw the possibility that they would encounter this situation? What if the two patients were the Captain and the janitor? Obviously the Captain should have first priority, right?
    • True... but the choice here was between random ensign, and main character ensign. Not exactly a major difference in rank.
    • The problem wasn't precisely that they had the same chance of survival. Presumably, if Blue Shirt A and Blue Shirt B were both on his table, both with the same chance of survival, and he didn't really know either of them, he'd just pick one. Maybe the first one who came in, maybe the one who was closest, whatever. The problem was that he picked Harry Kim not because he had a superior rank (which, being a member of the senior staff, he did) or because he was closer or whatever. He picked Harry because he was the EMH's friend. One assumes that the reason the programmers didn't think of this is because they didn't foresee an EMH becoming friends with anyone.
    • They explained it all in the episode that it wasn't just a matter of a Logic Bomb or other computer failure but the fact that his program "evolved" to include a real personality and not just be an emergency doctor. The Doctor had added to his program many other things he did not originally have, including ethics not connected to the Hypocratic Oath. As the original EMH, the doctor would have performed without any problem but as the "Evolved" form, he went into an ethic loop.
    • Presumably, if this could happen to a 'regular' EMH, the engineer would just reset it to zero. Nobody foresaw that the EMH would evole into sentience or that the crew would get attached.
    • Which was the problem, as Janeway described it: the Doctor's emerging personality had chosen Harry, and both his programming and his own sense of guilt were railing against that choice. Had he been a standard EMH, a random number generator would've probably kicked in to break the tie. The Doctor's dilemma was that he logically knew it was supposed to be a random decision, and it wasn't.
    • Interesting bit of trivia supporting that: apparently in the original version of the script, Ensign Jetal had a bit of the thing for the Doc. He didn't return her feelings and, having never been on the receiving end of an unrequited crush before (and it being only a little while after the trauma of Real Life) had difficulty dealing with it. His guilt came because he was influenced not just by his preference for Harry, but by his desire to find a way out of the uncomfortable situation with Ahni.
  • Another case of discontinuity in the show, in another episode, B'Elanna and Tom were stranded in environmental suits in space, Tom give B'Elanna a not so serious order, and she says he can't give her orders, because they're the same rank. He responds by saying that since he is a bridge officer, he in fact DOES out rank her. There's no way of telling if he was just saying that as a joke, or if it was actually Fed protocol, but if it was, dilemma solved. Harry was a bridge officer, and therefore outranked the woman.
    • In real-life militaries, procedures exist for determining relative seniority between people of identical rank/pay grade. The first one would be 'chain of command', which is what Paris is apparently invoking. After that would be date of rank/commissioning (you're both the same rank, but whoever's been it longer is senior if seniority counts). Assuming they were both promoted on the exact same day, it would then be date of rank of their last promotion. Assuming the mind-boggling coincidence of two officers with absolutely identical career tracks all the way back to graduating officer school, they'd then be comparing class rankings (which don't have ties). In short, officers of exactly equal seniority are impossible.
  • What bugs me is that we're dealing with a hologram here. A hologram which could probably be (at least temporarily) duplicated. Now they can save both patients at once! And they can keep the spares around to ensure that the sickbay finally has enough staff to run properly!
    • The Doctor's hologram is ridiculously advanced. It would probably be too much of a drain on the Sick Bay computers to have two of him running around. Remember, not all holographic programs are the same: in one episode, he had to shave off some of his less-important programs to be able to be sent to Earth without any other messages, while in another he sent an entire holonovel to a publisher. It's probably possible that they could have rerouted power to the Sick Bay computers, but they didn't have the time right then, and doing so all the time would, once again, be a drain on ship's systems when there's already at least one doctor available at virtually all times.
    • It wouldn't be a drain on ship's resources if one used the mobile emitter. But they established firmly that the Doctor's program can only be stored in one place at any given time, a Voodoo Shark against a thornier issue: self-identity when the self is copied.
      • The episode in question happened long before the Doctor got the mobile emitter. Besides which, the Doctor is only ever mentioned as being transferred to the mobile emitter, not copied with only one running at a time.
    • Except that one time
  • There was also that episode where the Doctor was off the ship and Paris and Kim spent most of it trying to duplicate him in case something dire happened and he didn't return. It was established that they couldn't even produce a simple, basic EMH, the program was simply too complex, even at its simpliest level.
    • The EMH is supposed to have an applied encyclopedic knowledge of every form of medicine known to Federation science. He's supposed to be better than Phlox, McCoy and Crusher put together because he basically is all of them put together and then some. He's an aggregate of every great medical mind in recorded history and he can learn and improvise. Think of it this way, in DS9's "Our Man Bashir" we learn that the station's computer can hold the neural patterns of 5 people at the expense of erasing pretty much every other program. The EMH likely runs off a dedicated computer in sickbay that adds up to at least one whole person's neural pattern—and that's before the Doctor became sentient. There likely just isn't enough room for the Doctor to be in 2 places at once while using the main computer. As for why not have 2 Doctors running at the same time (like they did in Equinox) it could be that they have a backup copy of the Doctor in the sickbay computer so they don't lose him forever if the mobile emitter is destroyed. Whenever he transfers back to sickbay he overwrites the backup copy, so the backup would only be as up to date as the last time he was active without the mobile emitter. Given how much he enjoys his freedom that could easily be a few days or a week. And we have no idea how long it would take to do a system restore of the Doctor (since they probably don't just copy/paste him to and from the mobile emitter), it could take a few minutes to bring him back online. In the episode in question, "Latent Image," the Doctor has only minutes to save them and he can't talk Paris through it. Restoring the backup Doctor (essentially having an Emergency Medical Hologram for the Emergency Medical Hologram) might have taken too long for it to be useful.
    • The real question, in the end, is why they didn't seek out a method by which they could essentially duplicate the Doctor's body, with the one Doctor in control of both bodies. Such a modification should have only required minor modification to a few of his movement and observation subroutines to enable him to split his attention between two bodies, and then some time for the Doctor to adapt to the new subroutines (but only when necessary). Obviously, as this would only have been thought of after such a need arose, it wouldn't have helped the Blue Shirt, or prevented the Doctor's meltdown at the time, but it would provide a helpful way to handle multiple problems simultaneously in the future (and one body would only be needed for most of the time).
• Why is it that Ensign Harry Kim is a member of the senior staff when there are lieutenants running around all over the place? It's possible that he's just the highest ranking science officer/operations officer available, but it never occurred to any of the lieutenants to take a Bridge Officer's Test and show that little shit what's what?
  • Janeway personally asked for Harry when picking her crew to be a bridge officer. He was on the fast track to a stunning career and she wanted the best for her bridge. It was stated in the show that he would have been a Lt. Commander by the end of the series if they hadn't been stranded. (He would have taken Geordi La Forges's career path in other words.)
  • Probably those other officers run the Bridge during the night shift. Not as glamorous or fast-track as being a part of Janeway's senior staff, but there's prestige in occupying the captain's chair when she's off-duty or sleeping, too.
    • It's specifically stated a few times that Harry himself takes the night shift as a way of getting command experience. This however brings up another It Just Bugs Me...
• Why is there a night shift on a space ship? In space. With no day or night other than that set by a random clock? Why does most of the crew appear to pop off to bed at the same time leaving a skeleton/junior gang in charge half the time? On a planet bound ship there's the excuse that less goes on at night, and night is the same time for everyone in the area. This is not the case in space.
  • Well, the crew's mostly human, and humans still function on a 24-hour sleep cycle, so they just designate 12 hours of the day "day", 12 hours "night", and schedule the work shifts accordingly. Though I don't understand why the "night shift" is expected to have it any easier than the day shift: it's not like Negative Space Wedgies and Big Dumb Objects know to hold off until the regular crew's finished breakfast. Then again, maybe Starfleet didn't want two competing, parallel chain of commands on one ship, and so the night crew's supposed to just wake up the senior officers if anything big happens.
    • Clearly they do. They also know to only mess with the better run Starfleet ships and not ships run by the likes of Harry Mudd. Otherwise some yo-yo crew would have destroyed the universe by now.
  • How do you know there aren't three 8-hour shifts, and that crew don't change their sleep patterns to match their shift? I think you're making assumptions. For all we see in the series, it's quite possible that there are two or three full crews, the "day shift" is just the arbitrary designation of whatever shift the Captain decides to head, and the other "shifts" live and work completely separate schedules, except for meeting with superiors, etc. (Of course that brings up the issue of, "why does important stuff always happen during the same shift?)
    • 1) Most Starfleet ships run on either three eights or four sixes, with the decision made by the captain based on personal preference or whichever they find to be the most efficient for their particular crew. (Kira and Sisko discuss this in an episode of DS9, with Kira saying they've been trying out the four sixes rotation and it's improved productivity due to more downtime, and Sisko okays a permanent switch.) 2) In-universe, the night shift is probably perceived as easier because most of the crew is asleep. There are fewer people working and thus fewer people making requests for resources or help, and probably fewer people breaking things or doing things that would require the bridge crew's attention. Also, since the Captain's probably asleep, the ship's probably on standing orders not to go poking its nose in anything too interesting like any random nebula or quasar it happens across... it may even slow down to "rest" the engines, thus decreasing the ground covered and the likelihood of running into one of those. 3) Out-of-universe, obviously vastly more interesting things happen when the main characters are on duty because they're the main characters.
• In "Future's End" Voyager ends up in Earth-in-the-past. Why didn't they just do the same slingshot-around-the-sun technique Kirk + company used in The Voyage Home? They could have warped back to their time and been home with a few freaky effects.
  • Good thought, but by the time the dust settled, Captain Braxton and company had a close eye on them. Since he refused to send them back to Earth-in-the-future, he probably wouldn't have taken kindly to them doing it on their own power, either.
    • But they'd already blown his dinky little ship out of the sky once, and he came back none the worse for wear. Why not just shoot him again, confident that he'll be fine in the future, then use the Light-Speed Breakaway before he got back? Or just do it the slow way; drop The Doctor on Earth with his new mobile emitter, tell him to wait 700 years then rise up the chain of command high enough that he can order Braxton to help, instead of being a useless jerk-ass.
    • I'd be willing to bet that if they shot his ship down more than once, Starfleet would stop screwing around and send an actual starship to put them in their place. Braxton was desperate the first time, and it was obvious no one sent him. They'd probably also catch on catch on to the Doc messing with the timeline.
    • Also, Braxton is kind of a Starfleet officer? Shooting down another Starfleet vessel just because it won't let you do whatever you want is sort of a Bad Thing. They fired on him before in self-defense, but the version of Braxton they're talking to at the end is from a different timeline and not offering them any threat... he's just returning them to the place and time they were before anything happened.
• In the episode "Mortal Coil", when trying to calm Neelix down as he freaked out over apparently not experiencing the Talaxian after life after spending a brief amount of time dead, Tuvok was apparently open-minded enough to at least suggest that he wasn't dead long enough rather (an idea Neelix quickly shoots down by saying it should have been instantanious). Now, all things considering that openmindedness, you'd think the writers might have considered the explaination that an experience by a hypothetically temporarily disembodied soul might very well not have been recorded on his physical brain, thus he wouldn't have had any memory of his experience there (hypothetically, of course).
• Bringing back the Borg Queen in Voyager. This really bugs me, since it completely invalidates all of First Contact. First Contact was about Picard confronting his issues with the Borg and facing them down, ultimately killing the Queen, the single personification of his greatest enemy in an emotional climax. But then she just comes back in Voyager so that their writers can give Janeway the glory of defeating the Borg Queen for good. So all that stuff that Picard went through? Totally doesn't matter. Great job Voyager.
  • Voyager retconned it into either that there is one Queen for every Unimatrix, or that every time the Queen is killed, a drone is promoted into a new Queen. The books take the latter side. It can also be read pretty easily that the Queen in Voyager was grooming Seven to be the next one.
    • Now, what bugs me is that they got Alice Kriege back for the finale. Suzanna Leigh was different enough to be used as evidence that she was a new former drone.
    • Some of the post-Nemesis novels explain that the "promotion" of a drone to a queen involves a biological transformation induced by immersion in a hormone-saturated royal jelly. It may include some sporadically expressed genetic component, which would explain the fluctuation and recurrence of the Queen's appearance.
  • Picard saved Earth, and the Federation TWICE, and you're saying it doesn't matter just because he didn't destroy the borg as well? Besides, the borg have suffered enough Villain Decay without the death of one queen bringing down the entire collective. Especially if they are then dumb enough to send their one and only queen on a mission to Earth with only one ship.
  • In a way, the creation of a new Queen is somewhat logical in a screwy sort of way. This is admittedly Fan Wank most foul, but consider that it could be the case that the removal of the Borg Queen from the 24th century in First Contact would have immediately have severed her contact with the collective in that time period - something she surely wouldn't have done without the certainty of a replacement taking over straight away. It also explains the apparent contradiction of why her death causes the Borg around her to stop functioning in that time period - they were all that was left of the collective she was in control of (the Delta Quadrant Borg of 2063 having their "own" Queen, a seperate collective), and the limited technology they had aboard the Enterprise couldn't produce a second replacement to pick up the mantle.
• The SFDebris review of "Good Shepard" brings up an excellent point. We've got a guy with multiple cosmology degrees doing monkey work in Engineering and an incompetant gal in Astrometrics. It does seem like trading their assignments would solve a lot of problems. It does bug me that Seven wouldn't have realized this.
  • Seven did bring up part of it and was told with absolute certainty that he was wasting his experise because he wanted to be down there and refused to do the extra work when he was given it.
• Where was Naomi Wildman every time a shipwide chrisis occured? Okay, when the ship is under attack by aliens or a space anomaly, viewers can safely assume that Naomi is in her quarters with some adult guardians. But what about episodes like "The Killing Game," or "Workforce," where the entire crew is captured or brainwashed? Durring "The Killing Game," for instance, was Naomi a slave like Harry, being forced to serve the Hirogen lemonade between hunts? Or was she brainwashed in the WWII program, thinking she was a little Jewish girl hiding in an attick? How about "Memorial;" we saw Naomi's reaction to Neelix going bonkers, but did they mention later, when the alien memories attacked the entire crew, how Naomi herself was affected by those memories? (That must be traumatic for someone her age, of all people.) It seems that the writers had no problem bringing up Naomi when it meant showing her everyday life on Voyager, or showing her reaction to other characters' problems; but, when something occured that would have a huge impact on Naomi herself, the writers suddenly forgot she existed. Why?
  • Precisely because they would have been traumatic and not very fun to watch happen to a little girl.
• Neelix's holographic lungs in "Phage". How exactly do you project a hologram through someone's chest? They didn't even bother taking off his jacket.
  • Because holo-transmitters in Star Trek don't need a line of sight? This has been shown pretty much every episode with either the doctor or the holodeck.
  • Also, how is it that the Vidians could graft organs from completely alien races into their bodies and make them work, yet the possibility of using organs from non-sentient animals never seemed to cross their minds? Surely there must be some planets in the quadrant with vertebrates but no sapients, or a civilization that keeps livestock and can sell them a few tons of slaughterhouse leftovers.
    • Perhaps it's a matter of size. Maybe most of the planets within Vidiian space only have particularly large or particularly small nonsentient animals, making them unsuitable donors purely because they either wouldn't work well enough or wouldn't physically fit inside a humanoid body.
• Two JBM's from real life:
• The random character generator for the holodeck contains teenagers who want to brutally attack a random stranger and little girls who die by playing a violent game. Why would anyone include these parameters in the standard list? They apparently have a pretty decent chance of appearing too, as no one was shocked by the doctors situation. (and yes, they were stated to come from the standard list of attributes)
  • These events didn't occur until B'Elanna added "randomized behavioural algorithms" to the scenario; they're not at all part of the standard character sets, they're randomly generated events that could realistically happen within this scenario. Parisses' Squares (the game the little girl plays) is known to be a sport with a high risk of accidents; this doesn't mean that she shouldn't play it. The accident could've happened to anyone.
  • Why do they bother to include homicidal mania in their list of possible behaviours.
    • Because it's a Klingon ritual, consistent with his son's Klingon friends.
• Having the doctor see klingons as bad high school friends and vulcans as good high school friends. I can't imagine why anyone would program the doctor with such a racist attitude
  • Well, it seems the person who programmed the Klingons to be bad influences was the only person with Klingon ancestry on the ship!
    • Who held a rather intense dislike towards said ancestry, demonstrated on several occasions.
  • If anything, the Doc's programmer doesn't like Vulcans - I think "pointy-eared blowhards" was the phrased used.
    • The Doctor's programming is modeled primarily after Dr. Zimmerman but has parts of hundreds of other medical professionals' profiles in his makeup, as well. In "Darkling" we're shown that adding personality traits from historical figures can create unanticipated behavioral changes. Maybe including the medical officer logs of one Leonard McCoy, no doubt sprinkled with his colorful opinions on Vulcans and Klingons, left the Doctor with some peculiar baggage. And besides, it's not their species that the Doctor has a problem with it's their culture, one that's largely antithetical to the core essence of his being. He is programmed to follow the Hippocratic Oath and is going to try to pass that value on to his kids, and here are these Klingons who are all about doing harm. Vulcan culture is based on logic tempered with ethics and is more in line with what a medical program would consider "correct."
• This one is about the writing staff: why, for the love of science, did the writers decide to write the characters differently than they characterized them. The scary thing is that the characterization is consistent (seen when other characters describe a character), but the writing is also (fairly) consistent. Didn't any of the writers actually catch this in the seven years they were writing for the show?
• Neelix is the worst offender, with only the loyalty shared between characterization and writing
  • Characterization: competent survival specialist with intimate knowledge of the sector, great loyalty to the crew. Hardened by a life in the delta quadrant.
  • writing: comedy relieve bumbling cook. Doesn't know anything but makes tries to make up for it by being highly social
• Kes
  • Characterization: naive young girl that always stands ready to give psychological advice to the characters
  • Writing: highly competent medical expert that always stands ready to give psychological advice to the characters
• Tom Paris
  • Characterization: A former mercenary with few morals that is coming to terms with having friends and a purpose. Is specialized in piloting.
  • Writing: Best friend with every member of the crew, friendly, outgoing and loyal. Is expert on every aspect of a starship, from maintanance, to astrophysics, to his actual job; piloting.
• Cathryn Janeway actually occasionally acts like her characterization.
  • Characterization: Got stranded in the delta quadrant through no fault of her own. Is a motherly figure to her crew and all adore her. Is a firm believer in the scientific way. Strictly follows any and all rules.
  • Writing: Someone who had to make a tough decision that got her crew stranded and, though unwilling to break rules before, will do anything to get them back. She is socially stiff and awkward.
• Chakotay, like neelix, has opposite characterization and writing
  • Characterization: native american that gave up on the ways of his tribe, is a former terrorist and often disagrees with Janeway, being more militant and distrusting
  • Writing: native american that still follows the beliefs of his tribe, is one of janeway's most loyal followers
    • Not always. He could be insubordinate in extreme situations: "Scorpion," "Equinox."
• Harry Kim
  • Characterization: a young prodigy who is quickly moving up through the ranks.
  • Writing: an insecure kid who is at best mediocrore at his job
    • Dont forget maladjusted sexual deviant.
    • Do you mean A Man Is Not a Virgin? It bugs me, that episode where he got some hot Green-Skinned Space Babe action and Janeway Ass Pull-ed fake Star Fleet Regulations which imposed celibacy on the entire Federation. If she had Ass Pull-ed a regulation that you gotta be Lt.-Commander rank or higher, it wouldn't have violated 30 years of continuity. Sarek and Lwaxanna Troi both married Humans. From their POV they were getting Green-Skinned Space Babe-s too.
    • The two incidents that come to mind are the episode your mentioning where he had sex with an alien that was alien enough that I really dont want to think through the implications, and his nightmare from the episode (I think Waking Moments) which was seven having sex with him despite him having been flirting with her for the entire season.
    • Might you be thinking of SF Debris' review of "Waking Moments"? He took some creative liberties there. The nightmare Harry had was because he was making out with Seven and when she pulled back he saw she had become a hideous (male) alien. As for scoring with the alien with different genitals than humans, maybe they've added an an X (for xenosexual) to LGBTQQA in the 24th century and it's only deviant according to our less evolved sensibilities. Besides, are we to believe that in all of their sexual escapades Kirk and Riker never scored with a "sufficiently weird alien"?
• B'ellana Torres
  • Characterization: the genius engineer who keeps the ship working even with all the damage they take. Is torn between her human and klingon ancestry
    • More than her mixed ancestry, she was supposed to have a painful backstory which had left her with a lot of anger and resentment toward Federation society that she would have to work through. This came up once in a while, but very intermittently.
    • And that gets into the whole problem that the writers almost immediately forgot that mixing the crew with the Maquis was supposed to lead to some culture shock.
  • Writing: the engineer that nearly always requires help from other characters to solve her problem. Is torn between her human and klingon ancestry
• Naomi Wildman
  • Characterization: Executive Meddling demanded yet another Creator's Pet.
  • Writing: she was a Creator's Pet in "Mortal Coil", but that actress was unavailable for "Once upon a Time". Naomi became a sympathetic character and was replaced by Icheb.
• Icheb
  • Characterization: Creator's Pet.
  • Writing: Creator's Pet
• Why in the cosmos didn't poor Harry get a promotion at some point? Tuvok got promoted, so why not Harry? With all the random lieutenants running around the ship, it really makes no sense that he wouldn't have been promoted at least to lieutenant J.G. in seven years.
  • I've heard it suggested that because the ship was self-contained there was no room for advancement. With the rest of the fleet you could transfer people to higher-ranking openings on other ships or starbases or at HQ, like when O'Brien went from transporter operator of the Enterprise to chief of operations on Deep Space Nine, or when Dr Crusher went to Starfleet Medical (only to return after the writer who sexually harassed left the show). You'd also have people retiring and jobs opening up that way. On Voyager, everyone has to stay onboard the same ship, so there just aren't any new openings. So promotions can't happen, or very rarely, because no one's going anywhere, and they keep doing the jobs they've always done.
  • The problem is, that's bullshit. There was attrition through the many characters who died; most of them were at the bottom of the rank structure, but a fair number of lieutenants bought it, like Carey. When Tom got demoted they could have said "There's room for another lieutenant, let's give it to Harry," though that would have added some tension to their relationship. They could have given him the lieutenant's spot opened up when Tuvok got promoted--and when they promoted Tuvok, they didn't fret over "What will this do to our ratios, or whatever?" They just did it because he deserved it.
    • The bigger problem here is that as a member of the command staff and alpha rotation bridge crew, Harry doesn't "advance" with being given a higher rank... he's basically already as high as he's going to go on Voyager, can't get higher without someone stepping down from another position. And since Harry's not security or trained in tactical, even then. Giving him a promotion would basically just be acknowledging his contributions to the crew. The fact that Tom got commissioned from nothing, to Lieutenant, busted to Ensign, and then earned Lieutenant again while Harry remained an ensign definitely seems like an insult.
  • And even if there is some magical ratio they need to keep, how does it not include "The Operations officer needs to be a senior officer"? Harry's doing the same job Data did on TNG, and Data was a Lieutenant Commander. Maybe since Voyager is a smaller ship they'd want to make that a lieutenant's job, but no lower.
  • The producers had a theory that "someone has to be the Ensign."
    • Probably also had something to do with the producers having a hate-on for Garrett Wong after he badmouthed the show.
      • Well, y'know, generally bitching out your workplace is a bad thing to do. Most people get fired for that, actors are kind of lucky that usually the worst thing that happens is their characters suffer a little.

• Eventually we learn that the Brunali, Icheb's people, live right next door to a major Borg transwarp hub and are constantly coming under Borg attack. If they can't find a way to stop the Borg from attacking them, they'll go extinct. In desperation, they've developed a virus which will transfer from the Brunali to the Borg and will disrupt the Borg's ability to . . . do something or other, rendering their ships inoperable. Kind of like the impossible shape on TNG's "I Borg," except it requires the Brunali to sacrifice one of their own to introduce the virus into the Collective.
  Or does it? I'm pretty sure I remember that the virus had no effect on the health of a Brunali individual. So why not just inject it into everybody and warn the Borg not to fuck with them? After the Borg assimilated a few Brunali and lost a whole cube each time, they would quickly realize that it was no longer safe to do so, and would be no more inclined to assimilate the Brunali than a rapist would be to rape someone whom he knew would infect him with HIV. But unlike HIV, this virus would not affect the Brunali and they could just go about their business with nothing to fear from their nasty neighbors.
  • The Borg destroy what they can't assimilate. They wouldn't be much better off.
  • The virus wasn't something injected. Icheb was a living bioweapon, designed to manufacture the virus. All they did was trigger the process. They'd have to engineer the entire civilization with the bioweapon, and even then they would have to be assimilated anyway. There's no benefit. It was a ridiculous plan, anyway. They were clearly too stupid to realize the fact that Icheb's return was obvious proof that their idea had failed, only destroying the cube they had to sacrifice a ship to attract in the first place. The Borg would just keep coming.
    • I don't think they ever thought the plan would destroy the collective; they just thought that if the Borg lost enough ships in that area, then they'd eventually start avoiding it. Of course, that's also ridiculous, and it makes the same mistake the Hansens made when they studied the Borg: it assumes they're robotic scavengers running on mindless instinct. In reality, if the Borg lose too many ships in that area they'll just get even more interested in what's going on, and start coming in force to investigate it.
• "Ship in a Bottle:" The Doctor beams himself to the Alpha Quadrant temporarily and makes contact with Starfleet aboard an experimental new warship. It's got a lot of shiny new secondary systems, which is usual for experimental new warships (the USS Monitor was the first US Navy ship on which you could flush the toilets) but the main thing with it is that it can divide into three parts which can attack an enemy in unison. Is it really that big a deal? Why not just send three ships into battle with orders to operate as a unit? I know Starfleet is Mildly Military, but is it that hard to find two captains in the entire fleet who are NOT such insubordinate hotheads that they will disregard orders from the flagship the second they see a Jem'Hadar fighter?
  • Apparently not. After the experimental ship was hijacked, what did they do? Sent a three-ship task force after it!
  • I'll put this as lightly as possible. Starfleet's status as a military organization has...degraded quite a bit since Kirk's day. The TNG era does a lot of things that would not be tolerated in any real military, so you could ask a similar question about a lot of things seen in Voyager, Deep Space Nine, and The Next Generation. For instance, why did they change the shape of the phasers from the conventional gun-shape of TOS to the ergonomic nightmare tv remote design of the TNG era?
  • It makes as much sense as the saucer separation design of TMP (All There in the Manual) and TNG. My guess is that since a separated saucer is slow, weak and immaneuverable they were toying with the idea of having a saucer section that is semi-autonomous. In case the stardrive section was destroyed in the battle that required the saucer to stay behind, they wanted the survivors to have a chance to escape or fight. And since Starfleet was designing ships specifically to counter the Borg, and Riker had successfully used the saucer and stardrive in "Best of Both Worlds" as two combat-active platforms against a single target, they wondered if three autonomous, explicitly combat-oriented sections would be even more effective. As for why not send three ships instead, when it's a large battle they always do but when it's a lone ship entering a skirmish (like what happens in every Trek series) it's usually somewhat unanticipated.
  • Bear in mind that one ship in three parts isn't the same thing as three ships: it's probable that the separated components don't really have much in the way of secondary systems (fuel, repair systems, decent engines... I don't know) and are really just weapon platforms; only the unified ship being able to properly power, repair, maintain itself etc. Thus delivering more weapons to the battlefield at a much lesser expense, something that fits in neatly with the plot of DS9 happening in the background. So its real advantage is efficiency/economy (compared to wasting a whole Galaxy-class cruise-ship-with-weapons-tacked-on).
  • it's possible that the design, power systems, weapons distribution etc. we're designed so that the captain had a choice of fighting with three quick knives or one big claymore. There are situations where one would be preferable to another. It also represents a return to form for the Fed designers, who seem to really like versatility. The Defiant, built with the same philosophy as the A10 Warthog (BFGs strapped to an engine) was a major departure for them.
  • It's also possible the design was stupid, and a failure, and was never produced in number. It was an experimental ship. Hell, the Russians built two circular battleships in the late 19th century before they realized the concept was awful. Or, more recently, the US built the Sea Shadow stealth ship concept in the mid-80s and proved to be a mostly useless, unworkable design.
    • Jossed. The multi-vector attack cruiser is in production and in use in Star Trek Online. Which takes place many years later and it's implied to be a rare design even then, so working the bugs out clearly took awhile and probably most captains prefer to keep their ship in one piece even if the separation is effective for combat.
• No-one has considered that in Caretaker, given how over powered the torpedo's were that it totally annihilated the Array, why didn't they think to fire them at the Kazon Ship instead? Granted they only a limited amount and there were more ships on the way, but it would probably have made the Kazon consider backing down when they saw what firepower they had.
  • The Kazon were already outmatched and they just got more belligerent rather than realizing that it was a bad idea to pick on Voyager. As for a display of force, they blew up the entire caretaker array, a force which until then they were utterly incapable of handling. If that didn't make them back down, nothing would.
• If Water is such a precious commodity, why don't the Kazon consider using the Starships at their desposal to find a planet with water? Granted the Kazon we saw were pretty pathetic and another rival sect may control planets with abundant water, but it does seem ridiculous that they don't just leave Ocampa which is stated to have NO water at all.
  • They seemed to be obsessed with getting at the water beneath the planet. Also, if I remember correctly, the Kazon were not independently space-faring, but rather former slaves with stolen ships. Since they are too dumb to realize that their ships are powered by heavy water, then going somewhere else is equally out of the question.
• In the episode 'Virtuoso,' the Doctor attempts to leave the ship in a fit of ego because he's 'appreciated' by the alien race and actually attempts to resign his commission. Fine, I'll grant him that one because he'd become far more than just a piece of technology, so he can be said to have a commission rather than just being a piece of technology created by Voyager, but he is THE ONLY DAMN MEDICAL OFFICER ON THE ENTIRE SHIP. And NO ONE brings this up. Not once.
  • Probably because it would have cheapened the issue if they just said "you leave and we have no doctor". Still stupid, but understandable from a writing standpoint.
  • How could the Doctor resign his commission? He doesn't have one -- or at least he wears no rank pip.
    • Resigning his commission would be a symbolic act. Janeway said early on that he's to be treated as a full member of the crew, with as many rights and privileges as he can make use of that other crewmembers enjoy. She can't do that and then say "No, stop it, you're a bit of sickbay equipment, get back to work" without pretty much admitting that the Doctor is a slave. Thus she does give him the option of leaving, just as she'd give the same option to any crewmember.
• And, while I'm on the subject, WHY, exactly, is the ship's primary pilot considered the only suitable medical assistant for the Doctor both prior to Kes taking the position and after she leaves? The Hand Wave given is that he took two semesters of biochemistry at Starfleet Academy, but in a situation where the Doctor would need his medical assistant, the ship's best pilot is likely going to be needed at the helm. What's he supposed to do say 'Sorry, need to pilot the ship through a debris field to dodge the Borg cube, your gaping wound is going to have to wait' or 'Yes, I know there's a fleet of Viidian ships hunting for our organs, but Ensign Andrews has a compound fracture that needs mending'? Hell, this could even have been a story for the Doctor in the first couple of seasons, about teaching a group of Voyager crewman medical technique and working to be taken seriously by them!
  
  And why didn't Chakotay's ship have a medic on it? I'd take even a line of dialogue saying 'he/she/it was killed as well,' but give me SOMETHING! A ship of 150 should not have to depend on a two-person medical staff.
  • The Enterprise D had a crew numbering over 1000 and a medical staff barely in the dozen. The first likewise had a single doctor and maybe three or four nurses. Starfleet obviously feels they don't need a high ratio of medical personnel to patients. As for Chakotay not having a doc on board, he isn't exactly in a position to be picky about his crew. He's a revolutionary, he takes what he can get.
  • Further, wouldn't they place a priority on training up more medical personnel?
    • I think the issue was that they were stretched thin as it was. They had a severe scarcity of trained crew and an overabundance of untrained Maquis. And while it's easy to say "Well just stick a few of those untrained crew with the Doctor until they turn into nurses", it's good to keep in mind that life is not an RPG... you can't just assign someone a class and have them keep grinding in it until they level up. Tom was pretty much the only one with prior medical training, so he was the acting nurse, and considering that he ducked sickbay duty every chance he got, they probably wouldn't have had much luck with anyone else either. (The Doctor's implied to be a really lousy teacher where medicine is concerned.) Anyway, the out-of-universe answer is that they didn't want to expand the roster of regulars any further by adding a "nurse" character... that was Kes' job until she left, and when she did leave her meta role of "newcomer who has to adapt" was filled by Seven. So they switched nursing duties back to Tom because, again, he's a main character.
• Once upon a Time, Harry makes a Flotter doll for Naomi. He programs the Replicator from memory of playing the Game when he was young. But Flotter's parameters are already in friend Computer. Flotter is a popular game. Janeway and Samantha played it. The Computer ought to have a standard macro "create moichandize from common holodeck programs".
  • The Fed has no money. Fed copyright law is about the Artist's control of their work. Under Earth Law, Disney can sue anyone who makes a Mickey Mouse doll and don't pay Disney their percentage. Under Fed Law, Disney gets no percentage and can only sue people who make an inferior doll because it brings their brand into disrepute. Harry making an inferior doll does not get around either Earth Law nor Fed Law.
  • It could also be that between all the anomalies Voyager has flown through, aliens deleting files and having the main processor beamed off the ship that the original files for the Flotter doll were corrupted (it's probably a low-priority file when it comes to backups and recovery, anyway). Harry then had to recreate the parameters for the doll from memory.
• In Nothing Human the alien sucking off Torres is beamed away, leaving behind a pristine uniform. Um, what? If this thing was acting as a parasite to heal itself, it has to actually touch her, right? Was it impossible to either do the transport offscreen and cut back to Torres after the wings of the surgical bed have covered her (and the blood, etc.) up, or put some cosmetic blotches of blood and gore on tears in her uniform in strategic locations?
  • Ignoring the episode's strange opinion on morality and the rights of holograms, the conflict itself doesn't make any sense. If they were able to make a hologram with knowledge of how to cure the disease that means that the information on how to cure the disease was already on the ship's computers. In other words the episode could only happen by everyone forgetting that they already have what they need. There was never any need to create the holographic Cardassian doctor.
    • I'm fairly certain it's implied(or even outright stated) that a great deal of the information they were using from the ship's computers was obtained by Krell, which would also explain why the Doctor was so adamant on using Krell's appearance and personality specifically - the best personality to give the hologram would obviously be the one most familiar with the information it would be using. The hologram being based on Krell wasn't the main issue so much as the Bajoran recognizing him gave the crew the opportunity to figure out how the information they were using was gathered.
    • As for why the hologram needed to be created at all, the information was in the computers, but it wasn't in the Doctor; his program simply can't hold all the medical information needed to treat every known condition for every known form of life. Granted, he probably could've tried temporarily tossing out some of the information that wasn't relevant at the time and dropped the exobiology information in its place, but it would probably make more sense to take a crack at creating a new, temporary hologram with that information then to go mucking about in the programming of their only medical officer.
    • My understanding was that the EMH is such an amazing achievement precisely because it can hold all the medical information known to the Federation and has the applied wisdom to use it (as opposed to simply reciting Grey's Anatomy). Crell's research was probably filed under "war crimes" instead of "medicine" which is why Voyager's computer had it but not the EMH's computer.
    • So the Doctor literally cannot comprehend any more medical information? He clearly can remember things that happened to him some time ago, he's capable of recognizing that things are happening in the present so what's stopping him from learning more about medicine? Even if there is some semi-plausible reason for why he can retain data about new crew members but can't keep the data about the procedure why don't they remove his nonessential data such as a particular opera? Besides that, how do they have enough information on Krell to know exactly what kind of mind to create and yet they were unaware of his crimes?
    • A set of contrivances allow the episode to take place (didn't "The Swarm" or some other episode state that only one hologram can run in sickbay at once?), and it ends up being a stunning example of how Voyager falls on its face when it tries to take on TNG-style "big moral questions"... in this case the morality of using medical data acquired through horribly unethical means, with Crell Moset as a stock Mengele stand-in. The roundtable discussions in TNG episodes like "Pen Pals" are transfixing compared to the limp copy "Nothing Human" presents, but one wonders why nobody simply says something to the effect of: "this data exists, and not using doesn't make it stop existing, or erase the circumstances under which it was acquired." It doesn't particularly make sense to let somebody die by not using it, which might actually be interpreted as adding to Moset's death count.
    • If I was to WMG an answer to the Krell problem I would say that Zimmerman never felt research conducted in a Cardassian death camp was appropriate for his Federation medical program; after all Zimmerman was bit of a dick but he wasn't cold hearted nor was he blind to the moral implications that could have stopped the ultra-politically correct Federation from publishing his proudest achievement to avoid offending the Bajorans. Perhaps also, given how Voyager was launched from season 1/2 Deep Space 9, we can reasonably assume that he started development of the EMH during a time where the Cardassians and the Federation weren't the best of friends - he may have assumed in depth Cardassian knowledge would be a waste of time or he resented including the spoon heads into his work of art. There are numerous problems with my theory but it's the best I've got.
  • In Nothing Human the Doctor was going to add the necessary files to his program and when Torres found out she was pregnant the doctor talked abought adding neonatal data to his program. So in all likelihood he adds and removes specific medical information as needed. He probably cant have all the data running at once like he only has so much RAM so he zips other data until necessary
  • "Nothing Human" is a strange title, when you consider that none of the principle players in the episode's moral dynamics -- Moset, the Doctor, B'Elanna, the Bajoran victims -- are human (well, B'Elanna is half human but you take my point). Okay, sure, so "Nothing Human" is literally true but... so what?
• How is a person supposed to progress through a holonovel if they have no prior knowledge of it? For instance, the Doctor's Photons Be Free novel apparently requires the user to have enough medical knowledge to diagnose several patients. How do users without medical training get past that part? And the only reason Tom and Harry know what to do in Captain Proton is because Tom wrote the story and kept telling Harry what came next. In short, how are holonovel users supposed to follow a prewritten plot in the ultimate Wide Open Sandbox if they avoid spoilers?
  • The Doctor's ego at work. He didn't consider that using minor variations on Voyager's own situation and crew might upset his friends, all (excluding Seven and Neelix) cast as the villains of the story, he likely wasn't actually thinking about the average person's own medical experience - it's important to him, that should mean it's important to anyone.
  • I'd imagine most holonovels have some form of railroading to keep people on track. One of Geordi's complaints int TNG was that Data had read the novels prior, and thus could solve them instantly. From this, one could assume that the program probably has a cheat sheet of sorts to keep players on track.
  • I imagine most people in the Trek-verse know how to operate a tricorder, so the one provided in the story probably gives dumbed-down readings for the laypeople, providing a diagnosis for the player and giving instructions on what motions to go through to emulate a treatment. Most of the patients of that part had injuries that seemed like they wouldn't be too complex to treat with Trek technology, save one, and the story was dead set on preventing the player from working on him.
  • 1) Most popular holonovels are probably written by actual writers, who know how to deliver story in a fashion that subtly guides the player through the plot, and the Doctor and Tom are not full-time writers; and 2) diagnosing the patient isn't that different from having to learn dialogue and dress up for Janeway's weird 19th-century governess program; many works in real life are better appreciated either in-character or after varying amounts of background reading.
  • Probably, in the same way someone progresses through first-person shooters: the world itself is supposed to guide the player through it. With this comparison, Harry's behavior is similar to that of a noob who pesters a more experienced player asking constantly "What do I do now? Where do I go now?"
  • A few episodes of TNG sort of addressed this and confirmed that it does indeed work much like video-game railroading. Whenever the crew members started to go off the rails somehow, the holodeck characters would usually just ignore whatever doesn't match up with the story and then carry along with the script (like they'd mention Picard's Starfleet uniform by jokingly asking "Dixon Hill" why he's wearing pajamas, and then go right ahead with whatever they're supposed to say anyway).
• In the episode Night, Tom and Seven are running one of the "Adventures of Captain Proton" in the holodeck. A ship-wide power loss occurs, causing everything, even the warp core, to go offline; the only things that seemed to continue working were wrist-bound flashlights, tricorders, etc. Why, then, did the holodeck's monochromatic (black-and-white) program act as if it itself had lost power rather than shut down the program?
  • Seven explains that independent sub-systems (like life support and holodecks) are still operational. OK, fine...but still, why'd the program act as if it had also been hit by a power loss?
  • That being said, when they're later attacked by an alien on the holodeck, Seven's still able to tell the computer to disengage the safety protocols by vocal command. Wouldn't the main computer be off-line, too?
    • The holodeck probably runs off of a separate computer system.
  • In Night the aliens didn't cut all power, they just cut the lights and anything generating large amounts of light IE the warp core.
• The pages for Canon Discontinuity and Discontinuity Nod both claim that the writers disavowed "Threshold" by having Paris say "I've never been in transwarp" at some point. Yet web searches for this phrase fail to return anything definitive. Did Paris ever actually say this, and if so, where?
  • IIRC, it was in dark frontier.
    • I can't find it in this transcript: http://www.chakoteya.net/Voyager/517.htm.
    • Can we just declare that somebody was overzealous (and probably suffering from the "false scene memory syndrome" which has struck us all at some point) and remove those entries?
  • In Day of Honor Tom states "I've never navigated a transwarp conduit" while discussing Seven's nascent attempt to duplicate Borg technology. On one hand, it's easy (and perhaps preferable) to interpret this as intended Discontinuity Nod. On the other hand, his line fails to do this effectively, owing to the fact that transwarp is a generic term. Transwarp speed is explicitly achieved in Threshold by using a new kind of dilithium to break the warp 10 barrier and be everywhere in the universe simultaneously. Depictions of Borg transwarp in TNG's Descent and all VOY episodes are more akin to artificial wormholes - incredibly fast, but not infinitely fast. Narrowly defined, Tom is simply saying that he's unfamiliar with how the Borg do transwarp. Ultimately, based off of this, I would say his statement that he's "never been in transwarp" is almost certainly a Beam Me Up, Scotty.
    • Indeed; Borg Transwarp appears to identical in both function and in visual effects to the Hyperdrive from Stargate by using a subspace tunnel fast enough to travel between galaxies in days (although ironically the FTL drive featured in Stargate Universe appears to operate in a similar fashion to Star Trek style Warp Drive and that is even faster.) I agree with the interpretation above that Tom's statement is a misconception; Borg Transwarp would appear to be something in the region of Warp 9.99999 (Voyager at Warp 9.975 would take 75 years to cross the galaxy) fast certainly, but not in any way close to Warp 10.
  • From here: Of course, the one I'd just as soon forget is called "Threshold." says Braga. So while that's not "I wrote other episodes as if it hadn't happened", it's probably close enough for government work.
• What happened to the Borg during The Year of Hell? think about this: At the hight of their power the Krenim possessed a vast interstellar empire which was powered by their knowledge of temporal weaponry - the Time ship or the chroniton torpedo which is superior to the photon torpedo against probably 90% of all enemies (I.E. the ones not capable of creating decent temporal shields) so why exactly don't the Borg want a piece of that action? Borg space is close enough to Krenim space for them to send a fleet of Cubes and the Borg are smart enough to adapt to the weaponry (assuming the chroniton torpedo would even cause significant damage against a Cube's armour regardless of how ineffective it's shields are.) I'm going to make the WMG here that, if the Borg DID partially assimilate the Krenim during that timeline, the Borg would have won the First Contact battle and Voyager really was the last Federation starship OR the Borg should have completely destroyed the Krenim and Voyager would have spent a year fighting off Cubes instead of Krenim fighters. Time, as Annorax stated, is unpredictable like that.
  • If they knew where the Borg homeworld was, a clever sneak attack might well have been one of Annorax's first moves. Not having to deal with the Borg later might simplify his calculations. (Additional note: the Borg are unlikely to think their homeworld is especially important, meaning it may well be only lightly defended or even completely abandoned, potentially making them a really easy target for the Weapon Ship.)
• Tom Paris, the pilot, does all the important engineering work, like building the delta flyer. B'ellana Torres, the engineer, does all the scientific analysis, like analyzing the treknobabble radiation of the week. Seven of nine, the science officer, does all the navigation, even having her own station dedicated to stellar charts. Harry, the ops officer, spends most of his time doing menial engineering jobs. Chakotay, the first officer, acts like the ship's spiritual therapist. Neelix, the morale officer, spends most of his time advising the captain, cooking or doing diplomacy. Tuvok, the security chief, flies shuttles and handles weapons. Are Janeway and the Doctor the only ones who actually do their job?
  • Let me ask you this: Just because you never see one of the characters sitting on the toilet, do you assume that they never poop?
• So the Holodeck has a completely independent and apparently near inexhaustible power source. Fine, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever, but fine. Now it's already been proven that Holographic food and drink can be consumed because we've seen it happen dozens of times across TNG, Deep Space 9 and Voyager. So here's an idea... set up the Mess Hall in the Holodeck. We have a room that can produce an unlimited supply of food that doesn't drain the rest of the ships power in any way and yet we are reduced to eating Neelix's assorted creations and using our limited Replicator rations; Anyone else see the contradiction here?
  • There is a possibility of it simply giving the experience of eating and drinking rather than the actual material. Of course it's stupid that this is never answered in the series considering how often Star Trek writers go to the Holodeck for episodes. Another question would be why technology from completely different parts of the universe is compatible with Federation tech but they can't simply hook the replicators to the Holodeck source.
  • It's not inexhaustible, they ration that power in tight situations on Voyager too. And it may be that under normal conditions they replicate/beam food into holodeck and when they're running low on power you just can't run programs that have food in them.
  • Word of God does pretty much just Hand Wave the question about diverting holodeck resources by claiming the power source is incompatible with the rest of the ship. As for eating in the holodeck, holographic food probably tastes just as good or bad as the real thing and fills one's stomach just as much as the real thing, but it's the ultimate form of empty calories: without the projectors to keep the photons and force fields in place, it immediately dissipates. It can kill feelings of hunger, but it won't prevent anyone who eats it from starving to death. This may be part of what keeps the crew from getting overweight: you can chow down on all the holographic prime rib and fudge sundaes you want, but your digestive system won't be able to draw any nutrients from the food and the moment you leave the holodeck, your belly will be just as empty as it was before.
  • Actually, in some places it is suggested that the holodeck utilizes a replicator for edible stuff.
• What the hell happened to the Borg Baby from Collective? it was the focal point of half the episode that gaining the trust of the Borg children was vital to saving the life of the baby; they beam it aboard and it's life is saved on-screen and we're pointedly told that it'll survive. By the very next episode not only has it completely vanished but completely forgotten about too; in fact Child's Play a mere two episodes later focused entirely on the Borg kids and still not a sight nor sound.
  • Says Braga, "The Borg baby was prepared in a delicious orange glaze sauce by Neelix" http://www.trektoday.com/news/191000_04.shtml
  • Brannon Braga AKA the laziest writer alive. Not content with just not showing anything on screen he decides to joke that one of the lead heroes is a cannibal. Nice.
  • The real answer was that they wanted to do a scene of the baby being returned to its people and Seven being upset about it, but could never properly work it into an episode and so just had it occur offscreen without bothering to mention it. You can't really blame that specifically on Braga, it's been going on for a long, long time in Star Trek... in fact it happens a lot in the much better-beloved DS9, that show was just better at distracting you from it. Braga's probably just being a dick because a lot of the creative staff apparently really get annoyed at being asked certain things by fans.
• It's somewhat surprising, given what a controversial episode it was at the time, that "Tuvix" has no place here yet. Of course it's aimed at creating moral debate, but one of the reasons it doesn't work is that it fails to work in a time element. At the end, Janeway is so completely full of moral conviction that she insists on separating/executing Tuvix, essentially at gun point. For the record, I am of the "Janeway is a murderer" school but I can understand other perspectives. But what I can't for the life of me figure out is: why does this need to be done immediately? The procedure can wait; Tuvix's claims could indeed be heard and given proper process. Janeway acts more like a fascist than ever, insisting on enact her brand of justice immediately seemingly just so can forestall debate. It sure would have been fun to see her court martial when they got back to Earth.
  • Janeway had to do it immediately because it had already been too long (by her standards). The longer she waits, the longer Tuvix has to turn the rest of the crew against her. Janeway wasn't willing to lose her friend to the new guy.
    • As was said, circumventing due process and prohibiting debate. Janeway the fascist dictator.
    • I'm sorry but I'm completely against the whole Janeway is a murderer argument. I notice that no one ever brings up what Neelix and Tuvok would want - and at the end of the day aren't they the most important people in this situation considering it is their lives at stake? (and no being trapped inside someone else's body isn't life.) By allowing Tuvix to live you are essentially condemning them to death; figuratively if not literally. And that is the reason why no one ever argues it from their point of view; because to do so basically means you condone sacrificing two lives in the effort to save one. I would be very interested to see someone morally justify a 2 for 1 situation without sounding like a Nazi.
      • Challenge accepted. Let's change TV shows to, oh, let's say Angel. I'm now Wolfram & Hart, and the hypothetical scenario is now that Angel has the opportunity to resurrect Buffy from the dead, but only if he serves Cordelia up to W&H as a human sacrifice. No, forget Cordelia, that's somebody he knows. I'll change it to 'serves up this random bystander' as a human sacrifice. Hey, and just as a bonus, I'll throw in resurrecting Joyce too! Is Angel still doing an evil thing if he takes the deal? Hell fucking yes. It's still deliberate human sacrifice, it's still cold-blooded murder, and its still being justified by 'Hooray! At least the people whose names I know will live again!' What Measure Is a Mook?, indeed.
      • Also, while we're on the topic of 'what Neelix and Tuvok would want' -- I have no idea about Neelix, but being both a Starfleet officer and a Vulcan, I would presume that Tuvok would do the principled thing and refuse to have an innocent being murdered for his own selfish benefit even if he would have a strong emotional desire to not be dead.
        • It's also instructive to note that Tuvix's personality was composed of a synthesis of the combined personalities and memories of Neelix and Tuvok, and would thus be a pretty strong indicator as to what they might want in this situation. Not that anyone listened to him.
    • I would be interested in hearing how how anyone would deny that Tuvix (a living being, which at that point Neelix and Tuvok are not) deserves due process.
    • Once again the question is ignored - what about what Tuvok and Neelix think? Tuvix has life because he, figuratively or literally, stole it from them. Oh and that comment about her being a fascist dictator; her job as a Starfleet Captain is first and foremost to protect the lives of her crew from any and all threats - and that means Neelix and Tuvok not the accidental mutant they created. Her actions clearly have the full backing of the Federation Council (she's a very high ranking Admiral in Nemesis) and I can guarantee that if you put Kirk in this situation he would chose the lives of his crew without hesitation every single time - hell Archer faced a similar situation in Simlitude and he chose Trip over the life of his sapient clone. The only Captain that might hold some kind of due process is Picard and that would fully depend on whether you're dealing the with TV series or movie version. To argue that Janeway is a fascist to kill Tuvix is to argue against not only the entire Federation but also against the other main Captains of the franchise.
      • No, he did not 'steal' it from them. Tuvix was created by an accident. An accident that tragically claimed the lives of two people, but still an accident. There was no criminal intent, there was no pre-existing plan, Tuvix wasn't even alive at the time, much less able to steal anything. If someone else benefits from the results of an accident, that still doesn't necessarily mean they're at fault for the accident or that they don't deserve to benefit. If my life is saved by a heart transplant, and it turns out the donor of that heart died in a car accident the day before, am I legally or morally guilty of that person's murder?
    • Another point that I have yet to see anyone consider: Tuvok and Neelix's family and friends. Tuvok had a wife and children; Neelix had Kes(at the time), and a number of friends in the Delta Quadrant. I'm sure Tuvix advocates wouldn't care about how Janeway would eventually have had to face Tuvok's family and tell them, "Yeah, I could've saved your husband's/father's life easily. No, I didn't; I liked the new guy better."
    • This is by no means ignored; in fact, Kes's considerations are a major factor in Janeway's unilateral decision. But at risk of sounding cold, I don't see why this should, from a legal perspective, make a particle of difference. Convicted murderers often have family and friends; I mean, who doesn't? That doesn't carry weight in sentencing. And while technically not existing, neither Tuvok nor Neelix should have any rights.
      • You keep talking about legal standpoints in your arguments. Clearly (as I previously pointed out Janeway gets promoted with Starfleet having full access to her logs) she followed Federation procedure in dealing with this situation. If she didn't it would have been pointed out at some point. Despite what either of us may think about the rights and wrongs of this discussion and despite what either of us may see as an injustice in their legal system; under Federation Law it is absolutely clear that the rights of whoever came before takes precedent - I see no other way to interpret this situation. As much as you don't like it; under the Federation system Neelix and Tuvok have rights. Changing the subject slightly this legal standpoint is probably why Riker and Pulaski were allowed to kill their own clones despite thousands of fans claiming they should have faced a murder charge.
      • If Federation law were as clear as you seem to think, then the episode would have said as much. But it doesn't. It chooses to depict Janeway as reckless cowboy (because, to paraphrase The Simpsons, "That's the kind of Captain I am this week!" -- Janeway being the poster child for Depending on the Writer). Why would she needed to have grabbed a phaser if it was simply a matter of citing a lawbook?
      • Why would she need to grab a phaser? Why do guards on Death Row carry weapons despite acting within the law? to make sure these desperate men don't try and escape and/or injure those around them. My theory on on Federation Law is just that: a theory. But please explain to me how and why Janeway gets away with this murder when they return to the Alpha Quadrant if it wasn't completely legal?
      • Janeway needed a phaser because none of her own people were willing to follow her dubious orders (to extent your metaphor, prison guards carry guns, not the warden). And I'm afraid pulling "Janeway was eventually promoted! That must mean everything should does is automatically okay!" as a get out of jail card to forgive her many, many lousy command decisions does nothing for me. It's a post hoc argument, for one thing, and we're not party to the circumstances of her promotion. I mean, we're used to Star Trek captains getting a way with an unrealistic violations(Sisko in "For the Uniform," Kirk in Star Trek III, Picard in Insurrection just to name a few)... but even so, Janeway transgressed that line a lot. Voyager's return to the Alpha Quadrant must have involved some sort of general amnesty.
    • Tuvix is an accidental creation, but no less than Tom Riker, who presumably has the same rights as anyone else -- shouldn't Tuvix too? Like Tom Riker, nobody seems to even deny that Tuvix is a Starfleet officer. His rights should include the right not to be summarily executed because an authority figure things it's the right thing to do (and that's irrespective of whether or not it is, in fact, the right thing to do). "What would other captains do" is a nonstarter it would all depend on circumstances -- at least in Similitude everyone acknowledges that what they are doing is of dubious morality but they do it anyway because of the crisis situation that faces them. "What Tuvok and Neelix would think" is also a nonstarter, because that's impossible to know (literally, because the show never gets around to even showing the two of them reflecting -- in typical Voyager fashion, it's all papered over and never mentioned again); I seriously doubt either of them would be without sympathy for Tuvix and his sad plight. One can certainly endorse Janeway advocating that Tuvix should be separated. That's a valid position to take. But in an enlightened civilization this would need to be done of Tuvix's volition. Putting it into affect at gunpoint is simply overstepping her authority, and it all feels so needless. Again, the lack of a time element, the lack of a crisis, the lack of the sense of urgency and desperation (something that Similitude does well) is Tuvix's greatest shortcoming.
      • 1) No one was harmed in the creation of Tom Riker. Two people were effectively killed in the creation of Tuvix... two people who could be brought back by his sacrifice. 2) It's one thing to say that Tuvok and Neelix would probably have advocated letting Tuvix live... except that no one can ask them, since they're effectively dead, and the one person who would have the closest insight into their thought processes is kind of biased. Sure, Tuvok or Neelix might have thrown themselves on a grenade to save a fellow crewman... but in this case they weren't given that choice, especially since the crewman didn't exist before the grenade went off. Tuvix is effectively throwing them on top of that grenade after the fact. What if cool, logical Tuvok would have pointed out that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and that thus saving two crewmembers at the expense of one would be the only logical choice? What if Neelix would have been just as appalled at leaving Kes in that situation as Kes was at being in that situation? Everyone seems to take it for granted that Tuvok and Neelix both really would happily die for this guy that didn't exist before a transporter accident, when that really seems to be a big assumption. (For one thing, if they really felt so strongly about it, they could always have grabbed another of those flowers and taken another ride through the transporter, recreating him. Neither apparently felt like doing so.) 3) What is with this assumption that Janeway's decision was either Right or Wrong? Voyager, like DS9 before it, worked in shades of gray. Sure, if it were TNG or something, then probably someone would have pulled a third option out of their ass in the last seven minutes of the show, found some way to keep Tuvix while separating Tuvok and Neelix, and Tuvix would have wandered off to disappear into the EU... and it would have completely robbed the moral dilemma of all meaning, just as those asspulls tended to always do. Being forced with a tough decision is pointless when you can always just invent your own good decision. So Janeway picks a decision out of a bad lot (and again, for the fans of Tuvix, remember that him living means Tuvok and Neelix dying, so that is a bad decision whether you like it being classed as one or not), and lives with it. Frankly I think that makes her stronger than Picard, even if she's not more morally pure.
    • I would add that this episode illustrates starkly a sad difference between the captains. Whenever Picard makes a difficult moral decision, one gets the impression of a deep thinker who weighs all options carefully and defends his position with such an eloquence and care that even his opponents must appreciate. Janeway, on the other hand, comes off as petulant.
      • I've no argument there - its what makes him my personal favourite. However I still believe that if Kirk was in this situation he would not only behave the same way as Janeway but would probably have punched Tuvix in the face when he refused.
        • Kirk would not have done that. Kirk would have let Tuvix stay alive even if the price were letting Spock and McCoy, his two best friends, stay dead -- because Kirk would acknowledge that neither Spock nor McCoy would have wanted an innocent newborn to die so that they could live. And let's face it, they wouldn't have. Unless Tuvix was evil, of course, at which point Kirk would cheerfully rip their head off with his bare hands. But that's a completely different scenario than the one faced on 'Voyager', so of course different outcome.
      • Or deliver a Kirk speech that convinced Tuvix to separate on the spot. But then, a TOS Tuvix would probably have been as sympathetic as the anti-matter universe Lazarus or the evil Kirk from "The Enemy Within," so, kind of apples and oranges.
• In Dark Frontier what were the Hansen's thinking bringing their daughter with them? They knew that the Borg were dangerous and aggressive enough to turn at least one civilization into a population of refugees and they still chose to go looking for them with her on board? It gets even more ridiculous when we find out that to follow the Borg they crossed into the Romulan Neutral Zone meaning that they put their daughter in danger of being killed/assimilated by at least two different species. Even if we ignore the serious danger they were putting her in without hesitation what did they think spending years on a ship with only her parents for company would do her social skills?
  • Pretty irresponsible, though perhaps only marginally more so than the Enterprise gallivanting into danger with a full company of schoolchildren. But yeah, it would have been nice, just once, to see somebody call out the Hansens for being cavalier, reckless scientists who got what was coming to them.
    • If not to their faces, the Hansens were called terrible parents several times, the Doctor and Seven herself among those doing so.
• Repression: Vedek Teero, an ex-Maquis fanatic back in the Alpha Quadrant uses a subliminal message to turn Tuvok into the Manchurian Vulcan and brainwash the rest of the ex-Maquis to mutiny and hijack Voyager in order to....what? What the hell does a fanatical Maquis need with a starship stranded on the other side of the galaxy? For that matter, given that the Maquis formed to liberate their colony worlds from the Cardassians, and that said Cardassians have just been on the losing end of a major war and have been stripped of their non-Cardassian subjects (and probably put under three-power occupation themselves), just what is Vedek Teero's motivation at all?
  • Teero brainwashed Tuvok back in the Alpha Quadrant at a time where the Maquis were still at the hight of their rebellion. Seeing as all the Maquis have are a few small fighters I imagine that converting the tactical officer of one of the Federation's most advanced and powerful starship's would have no end of benefits - even if they couldn't capture it they would still have gained vital intel from it's data banks. Also remember the DS 9 episode Defiant where Tom Riker captures the titular starship and proceeds to wipe the floor with the Cardassian fleet to the point they had to send an armada to stop him. Now we can debate all day whether a Defiant class is superior tactically to an Intrepid class but given just how much damage we see Voyager endure across its seven year mission I refuse to believe it wouldn't have far outclassed your standard Galor class warship.
    • That's all good and well, except for the facts that Voyager is still tens of thousands of light years from Cardassian space, Teero pulls this stunt 2 years after the end of the Dominion War and the Maquis are long dead back home. The plan to have Tuvok funnel information to the Maquis made perfect sense before they got stuck in the Delta Quadrant, but there's no way Teero planned to have the Maquis integrate into a Starfleet ship. My best guess is that Teero was just insane and thought even after the Cardassians lost 900 million to the Dominion that they deserved whatever extra punishment Voyager could dish out when/if it got back home.
  • It was basically a "Fuck you". No, seriously. Teero was one of the last living members of the Maquis, a group that hated the Cardassians and wasn't exactly too fond of Starfleet either. Basically he did it because he could, and because it would screw over a bunch of Starfleet people. For more practical reasons, while they're all trapped on the ship in deep space, he can get at Tuvok via the message, but more importantly Tuvok can get at everyone else... thus Teero maximizes the number of Maquis he'll have if the ship ever gets home, and will give him a starting point to rebuild the movement and kill more Cardassians.
• In Threshold what was the point of having simulations of going to warp 10? If it's never been done before then the computer has no idea what the result will be. It can have a theory but that's no better than anything a human can create by going through calculations. In the early days of studying nuclear power there was a fear that setting off a nuclear bomb might ignite the atmosphere^[1]. A computer simulation during that time could have easily resulted in a simulated atmosphere catching fire and it would tell the scientists nothing of any scientific value.
  • The point was to make sure the test shuttle didn't destroy itself. That's what the simulations were for. "Holodeck says the shuttle will survive? Good. Now we move on to practical trials."
    • But the computer won't know if it'll survive until they actually try it. If you could simply put in the variables and get a perfect answer there wouldn't have been any need to keep sending shuttles up during the Space Race, they would have known what was going wrong and fixed it after the first one.
    • If you want to be really, really, overly generous to the episode... the simulations don't necessarily have to test for everything, only certain things they know will be among the consequences of the real-life test. e.g. "in the buildup acceleration, the shuttle frame will be under increasing amounts of structural stress in the following places...", so they can test and fix the elements of the design that are working within known physics. Then you can read the "successful" simulation as "assuming the magical parts actually work, they won't break the ship trying to reach Warp 10". Of course the episode itself doesn't even try to make this much sense (why a cockpit simulation is needed for any of this is another question...).
• The whole "The Doctor's line of EM Hs is obsolete" subplot just bugs the hell out of me. The reason The Doctor's line is considered a failure by Starfleet? Their bedside manner was lousy. Ummm... doesn't EMH stand for the Emergency Medical Hologram? Only meant to be used at all in the worst situations, where people really should be more concerned with staying alive than hurt feelings or bruised egos? Sure it would be something to improve on, but declaring the whole line useless just for that makes Starfleet look like a bunch of whimpering babies. It's especially bad when you consider that The Doctor's bedside manner is no worse than a lot of the human doctors we've seen, and the so-called "improvement", the Mark II, is even more obnoxious than The Doctor ever was.
  • I thought there was more to it than that. Given how many problems the Voyager EMH ended up having, they probably realized the model was flawed. In DS 9 Zimmerman was working on a Long-Term Medical Holographic Program suggesting this is something they've already discovered a need for, even before they knew Voyager was in the Delta Quadrant.
  • Actually in theory the fact that he's an emergency medical hologram might mean that a good bedside manner would be even more important. DS9 shows us just what war trauma can be like even in the 24th century... it leaves its own kinds of scars. Undergoing severe stress, being horribly injured, and then on top of that being put back together by someone that treats you like you're just a sack of organs he's kind of annoyed to be bothered with probably doesn't do a lot to help lessen PTSD. Maybe Starfleet counselors got tired of hearing patients come back from the front lines and saying some variant of "And then that damn holographic doctor told me that next time I should duck!"
• In the episode Prophecy Neelix is forced to double bunk with Tuvok because he gave up his quarters to some Klingons. The question on my lips is why would Neelix ever have to share quarters with anyone for any reason? he has his own ship parked in the shuttle bay why can't he just go sleep in that? given how long he lived in it I don't think its unreasonable to assume he has some kind of bed in it; even if it's just a hammock or a mattress in the corner. But... taking this to its logical conclusions opens up whole new questions for me: Why was he allocated quarters in the first place? Why aren't other crew members told to go sleep in Neelix's ship or the shuttlecraft in such episodes where energy is at a premium? The Cloud, Demon and even Year of Hell spring to mind here. Remember that these vehicles are completely independent of Voyager; they have their own life support, power supply, environmental systems, free from any disease or toxin that's plaguing Voyager that day (due to being airtight) and even come equipped with weapons and shields should the need arise. By my count if they put at least two crew members in each shuttle and at least four in Neelix's ship that would free up the burden on Voyager's systems having to support at least twenty people. This ship is supposed to have limited supplies and resources after all.
  • Shuttles are not completely independent of their host ships, their range and supplies are too limited for that. Then you're draining the resources on smaller craft that are still dependent on Voyager for refueling and resupplying. Neelix's ship is likely more like a runabout than a starship: good for hopping around known solar systems but not for cruising through deep space. It's probably more efficient to use an extra room on a starship than to have a shuttle just idling in the bay. By that logic, they might as well sleep in the escape pods since they have independent life support systems.
    • (op) Whilst you are accurate in saying that shuttles are not fully independent of their mothership the fact remains is that these things have enough power for several weeks (there is an episode where Paris moans that the Academy used to pack cadets into a small Class-2 shuttle for weeks at a time) meaning that in episodes where power is dangerously low such as Demon you would prolong Voyager's life support by a considerable amount by dumping off-duty or inconsequential crewmen in the shuttles and just keeping them parked in the shuttlebay. Personally I think your idea about the escape pods is a good idea; again what is the point of wasting Voyager's power in episodes where they are hours away from suffocating if you have vehicles with their own oxygen reserves? it's like having just enough oxygen for two men in your three man submarine whilst completely neglecting the fact that you have a spare aqualung on the back seat. Just refuel them when you do have the resources to spare.
    • Neelix doesn't camp out in his ship because there's probably some Starfleet regulation against crewmembers bunking in sub-craft. Among other things, what if the Captain needs to use one of the shuttles, turns up with the away team, and finds whoever's been assigned to sleep in that one is in the middle of a shower? (Or various other things that crew are allowed to do in the privacy of their own quarters.) Basically the shuttles need to be ready to use as shuttles at a moment's notice, not as spare beds. Neelix's ship is probably regulated like a shuttle as long as he's a crewmember.

1. ↑ this theory was discarded before they did the testing during World War II