Wall Banger/Live-Action TV/Star Trek: Voyager: Difference between revisions

== Threshold ==

 

* The real problem with this episode was that it occurred before Voyager found a way to communicate with the Federation. All Janeway had to do was put one volunteer on the transwarp shuttle with the Doctor's newt-mutation-curing hypospray and send them back to Starfleet HQ to tell them what was going on. Instead, the whole [[Forgotten Phlebotinum|transwarp shuttle was ditched and never spoken of again]].

** Or better yet, scale the transwarp drive up, and send ''the whole damn ship'' back to Earth with the Doctor in command (so he can administer the hypospray antidote upon arrival, or at least instruct others to do so). Problem solved!

* The shuttlecraft environment is already optimized for humanoid lifeforms. Why would accelerated evolution ''in that same environment'' result in newt-like creatures who are ''de-adapted'' from their surroundings?

** It's apparently an example of [[Evolutionary Levels]] - except humanity's next level is a newt instead of an [[Energy Being]].

*** Even by the standards of Star Trek in general this episode pretty clearly proved that few, if any, people involved actually understood what evolution is. Not only is evolution not something that happens to a single individual, evolution occurs over ''many'' generations. Even among some kinds of insects that evolve in a relatively quick manner you aren't going to see this.

* One of the most outrageous claims is when Tom and Belanna claim they are trying to break the ''Warp 10 barrier.'' Warp 10 is ''infinite speed''. Wouldn't you technically be going ''beyond'' the speed of infinity?

 

* The constant search for deuterium in the first few seasons. Deuterium is an isotope of HYDROGEN and one of the most common isotopes in the universe.

** They [[Hand Wave|acknowledged it in a later episode]] by having Tom Paris say something along the lines of "Why steal deuterium? You can find it everywhere."

** It could have been simple. The Vidiians are warp-capable; the Prime Directive doesn't apply to them. Voyager's medical database probably contains complete information about all Alpha Quadrant sentients, including Klingons. Send the Vidiians the relevant information, and they can work out a cure for themselves. In return, ''Voyager'' gains a ''desperately needed'' ally with real power in the Delta Quadrant!

* Voyager is a small ship, far from home, slightly overcrowded depending on how many [[Red Shirt|redshirts]] have been killed off, and often low on resources. For much of the series, there is exactly one child on board, a child whose mother was pregnant before they got stranded. Yet, when two named characters get married and decide they want to have a baby, there is NO discussion of how this will affect the rest of the ship or why, if breeding is allowed, NOBODY else on board has done it in seven or eight years.

* The pilot and first two-parter, "Caretaker":

** An enemy ship disappears in what is one of the most dangerous regions in space. They couldn't have been destroyed, because there was no power signature left. What does Voyager do? They fly through the same super-dangerous plasma-storm (even though they know the Maquis aren't in the plasma storm anymore). WHY? You have faster than light engines - you can fly around it! (Then again, their flying through is required by the [[Anthropic Principle]].)

** A spacefaring race of desert dwellers are introduced who use ''water'' as currency because it is so scarce. On planets with oxygen-rich atmospheres. While powering their spacecraft with fusion reactors that run on hydrogen. Did they lose the recipe?

*** Seven of Nine says of that race later:

*** Considering that she also said that [[The Scrappy|Neelix]]'s race, the Talaxians, made "excellent drones," that is ''beyond harsh''. On par with what the Borg tell you in ''Star Trek: Elite Force'' multiplayer, that "your assimilation would regress us."

** Janeway had the Caretaker station destroyed, rather than using it to get home and having it blow up afterward, simply because the [[Anthropic Principle]] required that they forget that time bombs even exist.

** [[Fridge Logic|Here's an idea, rather than blowing up the Array, use those superpowereful weapons that you only have two of to blow up the Kazon ships.]]

* In "Time and Again", why did Paris and Janeway join the fighting outside the power plant? They have never even heard of the government of the planet, they are trying to stay as anonymous as possible, and they are afraid of altering the timeline. Yet the second they see a police holding off a riot, with the police remaining calm and trying to avoid harming civilians, they jump in and start punching them.

* The infamous [[It Just Bugs Me|Physics-defying pickup truck]] from "The 37's". ''Voyager'' comes across a 1936 pickup truck just floating through outer space. They beam it aboard and discover that:

* In "Memorial", not only did Janeway not destroy a grossly unethical memorial that traumatized countless millions, but she also ordered that memorial ''repaired''. At least she put up a warning beacon.

** That's because it's a memorial to a Genocide. It's the only remains of the genocided culture, so destroying it would be destroying a priceless artifact. Nonetheless, what were the designers of that thing thinking?!

** There's a bigger problem. At the end of "Before and After," Janeway heads off to debrief Kes on everything she learned about the Krennin. In the "Year from Hell" arc, when the Krennim DID show up, they completely ignored "Before and After" and acted as though they never heard of the Krennim, nor that they had had warning that there would be a Year from Hell.

** There's another problem with this episode, though it's a bit complicated. Less than a year after it takes place, Kes ascends to a higher plane of existence and uses her near-godlike telekinetic powers to throw ''Voyager'' ten thousand light years closer to home as a sort of "thank you" for all of their years of friendship. This happened ''before'' "Year In Hell" and directly because Kes chose to leave the ship. Without that act, Voyager probably should not have reached Krennin space in Kes's lifetime.

** Federation copy-right Law could have been used to [[Hand Wave]] this Wallbanger from "Once upon a Time", but wasn't. Flotter is a character from a holodeck game. Neelix wants to give Naomi a Flotter doll. Harry programs the replicator by memory; he played the game 10 years ago. The computer already knows what Flotter looks like.

*** The holodeck as common tech ''should'' be only about twelve years old right then. In the first two seasons of TNG, every time we saw a character go into it, they were like "Wow, I've never seen anything like this before!" But at the end of this episode, Janeway says that she too had played the Flotter holoprogram, and it is clear that she means in her childhood. She has been in the fleet long enough to work her way up to captain, and does not ''look'' young . . . At best, her remembering a holodeck program from her childhood makes about as much sense as saying "Remember when you sent that Tweet after Bucky Dent hit his home run off of Mike Torres in the 1978 playoff game, and I texted you that we should celebrate by buying new leisure suits from eBay?"

** It gets stranger. The EMH got into this because he had written a holonovel and wanted to take it back for revision, and his publisher was refusing because he wasn't a person. (The publisher would've deserved the libel suit it would've eventually gotten if it had won.) The Federation did not declare the EMH a ''person,'' but they did say that he is legally an ''artist'' and thus has copyright control over his work. And you thought applying the Fourteenth Amendment to corporations was bad.

** Another form of Wallbanger in this episode was the existence of copyright at all. Star Trek economics works on post-scarcity production, meaning that there is no private ownership. So why does copyright still exist if information is one of the post-scarcity resources we have ''right now''? If anything, a society that prides itself on freedom and the free exchange of information like the Federation should have laws ''against'' trying to restrict the copying of data!

** And the saddest part is, Picard's biggest argument back when he was defending Data was that declaring Data non-sentient would set a bad precedent! (More on this below.)

* In a previous episode, some living deuterium goop replicated Voyager's crew because they wanted sapience. That's all well and good. Then comes followup episode "Course: Oblivion", where the writers only seem to remember the words "shapeshifting goop" from the original script. To elaborate, the same living goop somehow replicates a fully functional, warp capable, EMH-equipped, fifteen deck, 700,000 metric ton ''anti-matter powered'' '''starship'''. And no, they didn't build it, the deuterium goop literally formed itself into a working starship. *BANG* Another point is the replicants themselves. The first two replicants copied didn't know what they were at first, but the Harry Kim replicant caught on. After the entire crew is replicated, they clearly realize what they are since they don't seem pissed Voyager is abandoning them. Then, against all logic, this crew of replicants, including the original Kim replicant, ''forget they're replicants''. Furthermore, it was a point that the original replicants could only breathe the totally inhospitable vapor that passed for atmosphere on their planet, yet these replicants go around breathing human air like it's nothing. Then they go back to breathing an approximation of the death air with no transition. *BANG BANG* The episode didn't even have any point, either. The replicants somehow built a spiffy new warp drive that killed all of them due to radiation harmful to their kind, ended up flying back to find Voyager, and died before they could make it. It amounts to a footnote in Janeway's logs.

** This episode has some [[Mind Screw]] in it, but here goes: Chakotay is a descendant of [[Mayincatec|a South American Indian tribe]] who relocated ''en masse'' to a planet which, as of the start of ''Voyager,'' is in Cardassian space. He had set his cultural heritage aside before entering Starfleet before entering the Maquis, but he owns and carries a medicine wheel anyway. In this episode, he is brought back to the religion of his people by the deities of that religion and goes on a vision quest. His religion is treated as ''real'' and true - only people of his heritage can fully subscribe to it, but it has power behind it. Even the Bajoran Prophets were shown to be [[Sufficiently Advanced Aliens]] before they were treated as gods; there is no such unmasking here. And his doing this quest is plot-critical -- it's this or coma, pretty much.

** It says his ancestors had ''no culture'' until the aliens gave it to them. Human beings create culture by virtue of being human beings -- we couldn't stop doing it if we wanted to. But, for these people to have a complex and true religion, it has to have come from aliens?! And why is no one on the ship even tempted to go after these beings for what they did to these people? If the Q had tried that on a civilization and gotten caught, then there would be hell to pay...

* "Good Shepherd" (an analogue to TNG's "Lower Decks") involves three minor crew members who are taken by Janeway on a mission in order to become more productive members of Voyager. The first is Mortimer Harren, who has five degrees in theoretical cosmology but slacks off at a sensor station at the bottom of the ship. The second is Tal Celes, a sensor analyst who can't do 24th century math to save her life. The third William Telfer, a hypochondriac who avoids every away mission by complaining to the doctor. Instead of simply switching the first two crew members around, and after blatantly ''ignoring'' the advice given to her by Seven, she elects to take all three people (who have never been on an away mission before) to investigate an anomaly - pretty much the only consistent source of danger in the show. '''Really''', Janeway?

** At one point, an unknown lifeform beams aboard the Delta Flyer and begins interfacing with the ship's systems, which causes massive power fluctuations. Janeway attempts to reason with it (which doesn't have any effect), before Harron pulls out a phaser, killing it and stopping the drain on the ship's systems. Janeway then proceeds to severely admonish him, saying that the creature could have been friendly. At no time does she bother to take into account that the creature ''couldn't understand her'' and was actively threatening their lives. At best, the creature would have sapped all the power out of the Flyer (which would have killed everyone onboard due to a lack of life support), and at worst, it would have destroyed the ship, or at the very least made the atmosphere unbreathable. Yet, the audience is supposed to be on Janeway's side as she chews out an ensign who just saved the ship from certain destruction because she's playing fast and loose with the Prime Directive...why?

** A little bit of extra stupidity: Janeway's rationale in this whole thing is that it will help them become more productive, but this flat out will not work as she planned it. Mortimer Harron was never motivated to change to a more productive job. This isn't going to change his mind. Tal's problem wasn't motivation but skill -- she simply did not have the proper knowledge to do her job, and this would not teach her. Finally, William's problem is psychological, and the only reason he's "cured" is because he's attacked by one of the aliens. In other words, in order for Janeway's plan to work, she had to risk their lives. Scaring someone straight is one thing, but '''damn''' Janeway, that's harsh.

* In "Endgame" (the series finale), a future version of Janeway travels back in time to get Voyager home earlier. (It seems that the death of Seven of Nine in transit is, in hindsight, completely unacceptable to her, far more so than ''the deaths of everyone else who has died throughout the series!'') In prior episodes, it was established that, in the future, the Federation monitors time travel and prevents interference in the timeline (the Temporal Prime Directive). Getting the ship home 16 or so years earlier, affecting the lives of possibly trillions of people, including at least two on purpose, should have got their attention.

** There is an earlier (by definition) episode in which a future Tom Paris and Harry Kim go back in time to save those left behind. They get berated for it by Janeway. But at the end of season 7 and the series, with no natural end in sight, a time travelling Janeway comes back, destroys a critical portion of the Borg Collective, and sacrifices her life to provide a shortcut home. Under the circumstances, this must be a [[Deus Ex Machina]]; a natural ending for season 7 would've been [[No Ending]], or else something like TNG's "All Good Things".

** She also ignored how it would affect people born to crewmembers after the time she jumped in. These people may [[Ret-Gone|never exist]] or may have wildly different lives if they do, but that doesn't seem to matter to her.

** It's not ethical, but it is tactically sound to decapitate your enemy's leadership to give yourself an advantage. Unfortunately for ''Voyager,'' instead of getting a Kazon Civil War that would have kept them busy, the Kazons got Seska.

** Somebody's remembering the episode wrong. The ship ''did'' shoot up the meeting, but thanks to a warning from Janeway, ''and Voyager successfully shooting down the assassin ship'', nobody got killed. The Kazon leaders were ''not'' grateful, and the regular infighting between tribes (which never kept any of the Voyager's crew out of the line of fire in the first place) resumed unabated. This meeting was definitely ''not'' one of the better moments for the Federation's diplomacy, but Janeway is hardly to blame for its failure.

* In the episode "The Voyager Conspiracy", all of the mutinous accusations against Janeway and Chakotay are eventually revealed to be figments of Seven's imagination. However, Neelix's sensor data '''is completely forgotten.''' Problems:

** Also, Photonic Fleas? seriously? The definition of "photonic" is ''the technical application of the science of light.'' The definition of "flea" is a ''tiny, wingless blood-sucking insect''. These Photonic Fleas have wings, are made of light, and show no inclination to try and suck Seven or Janeway's blood because, according to Seven, they consume plasma particles - which should mean they eat nothing but superheated gas. The name is misleading.

* In the episode "Warlord", Kes' body is taken over by an enemy dictator, who then proceeds to break up with Neelix. Given how it is outright shown that it ''wasn't'' Kes, you would imagine that when she reclaimed her body their relationship would resume like nothing had happened...right? Instead, in every single episode afterward, not only is the body swap never referred to again, but it's outright stated in "Darkling" that it was '''Kes''' that broke up with Neelix - and not her captor. This implies one of two things: that Kes is ''such'' a coward or that Neelix is ''such'' a manipulator that she used it as an excuse, or that the script writers completely forgot about the events of this episode.

** There was a scene cut from a later episode where they formally break it off.

* The convenience of Janeway, Tuvok and Torres's assimilation from ''Unimatrix Zero.'' Follow along with me here: When Picard was freed from the Borg he still had enough technology in his brain to still tap into the Collective when in proximity to a Cube (First Contact), when Seven of Nine was freed from the Borg she needed a false eye and still had enough nanomachines in her blood to activate her Borg Shields, the Borg Individuals from ''Unity'' and the Borg children the Voyager crew later came across were still covered head to toe in various small pieces of Borg tech that they couldn't remove. These three? Completely recovered. Not a trace of Borg tech or a single nano to be found. Amazingly enough the scriptwriters manage to supersede even ''this'' piece of nonsense by revealing the fact that now a simple injection is enough to completely shield you from the Borg Hive Mind for twelve hours... given how badly that destroys the entire premise of the Borg it's no wonder they were killed off during ''Endgame.''