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We joke and all about unhinged space besties, but Janeway literally committed murder for Tuvok, so are we really that far off the mark?

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there are viable strategies and then there’s this

Series: the reprogramming of an expendable asset Fandom: Star Trek Voyager Rating: Teen and Up Relationship: Kathryn Janeway/Seska (one-sided and barely zero percent healthy) Summary: Seksa needed relief. Too bad every place she looked on this ship had a human lurking. Too bad she’d have to use one of them if she wanted to burn the feeling of Maje Culluh from her skin.

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You can explain it away with some mental gymnastics (because the writers clearly didn’t want to put it in the work to make it clear textually).

You can assume that when they meet the Krenim at the beginning of the episode, they are so laughably week compared to Voyager that, in the moment, Janeway and the rest run on the assumption that this must either 1) not be the Krenim Kes warned them about or 2) something about Kes’s romp through time altered the timeline of Voyager at a foundational level (which, we have to assume it did because, hello, the future in Before and After didn’t show her leaving the ship).

Then, Annorax altered the timeline. You can read the outcome of that a few ways, but I’ll highlight two ways this could have made it so Kes never even told them about the Krenim, starting with the basic premise that Annorax’s changes altered the timeline so drastically that the crew we see during this part of YoH until Janeway resets the timeline hasn’t experienced the same journey as the prime timeline crew:

The events of Before and After didn’t happen at all. They had no warning of the Krenim.

This fundamentally altered what Kes saw during Before and After, and their future wasn’t supposed to include them (but did once Kes flung them closer to Earth.

Every time I watch this episode, I actually view the crew we’re watching for most of it as not the ones we’ve followed for over three seasons. I usually accept one or the other bullet above as a justification for why they don’t know what we’ve seen Kes tell them. In fact, I’d even argue that only the crew we see at the very end are from the prime timeline.

watching Year Of Hell like... i thought Kes wrote a report on this... i thought Kes warned you guys? you're not even mentioning her even once? Kes knew this would happen... hello.

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Star Trek Voyager but Kathryn Janeway takes one look at her ramshackle crew and thinks, “I need to make sure they never darken the door of the Alpha Quadrant again” and then goes the other way.

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the pitt is a comedy: 🩺 [1/?]

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Therapist: Walk me through how you handle your grief.

Me: I bury it down and refuse to cry until I get a cold, and then the backed up tears leave me as snot.

Therapists: [probably thinking they need therapy after hearing that] We’re going to have to unpack that.

Me: [blows my nose, but politely on mute]

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I always thought of it this way too. Deanna was trained to read and understand the emotions she was sensing in others and to weigh it against a context external to her own experiences. That made her invaluable. Your average telepath isn’t likely to be that knowledgeable or even-handed, and so Janeway relying on their telepathy instead of her own judgement was likely out of the question.

I think Suder was an excellent example of why she wouldn’t use her telepaths this way (particularly Betazeds not trained in psychology or diplomacy). That man could read minds and emotions, but he had no interest in caring about the people he read or why they thought/felt the way they did. He applied his myopic and cruel worldview to everything because to him that was his normal (until the mind meld with Tuvok).

Kes’s telepathy was new. Janeway was correct to 1) not put constant, high-stakes situations on someone untrained and 2) give her the room to discover herself without shackling the lives of the crew on that growth.

Watching TNG and how much Deanna Troi contributes when Picard asks her for advice, making it much easier to identify people's intentions and often avoiding unpleasant surprises, I think about how useful it would be for Voyager to have an advisor on board. Especially if it were a Betazoid. I wonder why Janeway didn't ask Voyager's telepaths to do the same in certain situations. After all, there must have been at least three or four telepathic crew members, including Kes. And she only asked for Kes's telepathic help on a few occasions. A writing inconsistency, perhaps?

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now to be fair to the emh if it was not only my first day on the job but my first day of existence entirely and i was told it was my duty to be responsible for the health of 150 or so people as difficult and petty and generally problematic as the voyager crew i would also be a huge bitch forever and ever

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Okay, hear me out, but Hologram Janeway on a weird, quantum reality adventure in the 2390s with Beckett Mariner and Bradward Boimler (who unironically call themselves the Bs), because an alternate reality Dal and Gwyn are way too charismatic and have convinced splinter cells in three realitys' Federations to wage open war and join their space cult.

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I’m still astounded at how much Star Trek Voyager fanfiction is being written to this day. I have a backlog — a backlog!—of fics to read! This is glorious.

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My favorite Star Trek OC is a Welsh guy named Qrlthlmtrly cCmndhd (pronounced John Smith), who comes from a long line of humans who once made the fictional language of Qwghlm, introduced by Neal Stephenson in Cryptonomicon, into a living language (a la Klingon here).

Everyone keeps trying to pronounce it phonetically, much to his annoyance

Add realism to your fantasy stories by having characters from different backgrounds struggle to pronounce each others' names.

"My name is [low guttural sound] but I don't want to hear you butcher it. So you may call me She Who Arises With The Cold Mountain Sun."

"...Is that what your name really means? All that in just one word?"

"Yes. If you stress the wrong syllable it comes out as 'She Who Coldly Wakes Up The Mountain Sun', or 'The Cold Woman Who Wakes The Mountain Sun', and you will not call me that."

"Oh, huh. Could we just call you Mountain Sun, for short?"

"Hmh. It's boastful, almost bordering on blasphemy, but it is flattering. I accept it."

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If the writers had just thought a little ahead, they could have had Seska reveal herself as Cardassian to Janeway and request protection from the Maquis.

There you go, a Cardassian. A whole ass Cardassian, hanging around the ship. She’s forced to follow Starfleet protocol like the rest of them, but she’s embittered and morally dubious and almost everyone hates her. Some Starfleet and Maquis bond over it, others genuinely throw down over supporting/not supporting Janeway’s decision to keep her on board. Chakotay actually gets to have arguments and make real points for more than a total of six episodes across the series.

Genuinely the only people who try to like her are Neelix and Kes, because they have no skin in the game. She develops weird frenemy relationship with the EMH because he has to reset her genetics and they’re both basically tools created by their states.

I keep thinking about that Maquis post from Robert Hewitt Wolfe, and it's starting to make a lot of sense why Voyager ended up so far off from the original premise...

like, the Maquis were created for Voyager, but it really doesn't make any sense if you think about it... the only reason the Maquis exist as a movement is to defend their home colonies from Cardassian occupation... so the second they are flung into the Delta Quadrant, they now are completely separated from their own movement, and the only goal they have left is getting home

But for the Starfleet crew, their mission was to find the missing ship, but their overall objective has always been exploration... that doesn't change in the Delta Quadrant. Now they are explorers who want to get home

So now there's no conflict between the Maquis and Starfleet, in the Delta Quadrant. The crew of Voyager are not the people who made the treaty with the Cardassians, and they are doing nothing to help maintain it, so the Maquis have no reason to fight with the Voyager crew.

Voyager was supposed to be about these two opposing groups being forced to work together, and the first thing they did was remove the one factor that make them oppose each other, which was the Cardassians... if they wanted Voyager to work on the original premise, they should have had the Maquis be primarily against Starfleet, but they made them primarily against the Cardassians, and then also had them feel like they were abandoned by the Federation...

I think where they really missed the mark is that they (the writers) seemed to keep forgetting that the Maquis are Federation citizens who either want to defend their own homes, or who are sympathetic to the cause and want to help defend the people who lost their homes. They are not antagonistic to other Federation citizens. They are antagonistic to the Cardassian Union and feel betrayed by the Federation itself.

They have no reason to have long-term beef with the Voyager crew. Voyager is not the Federation. The crew is made up of Federation citizens, just like the Maquis. Why would they continue to fight each other when they now have the same objective (getting home), and no one on Voyager is defending the Cardassians or the treaty... Janeway herself literally fought against the Cardassians in the war.

But that post is making me think about this because like... they wrote the Maquis with a very specific ideology that remained consistent cross TNG, DS9 and Voyager, and then you've got one of the actual writers claiming that they didn't have an ideology, and also presenting theories about the Maquis that completely contradict canon... like, the Maquis wanted to secede from the Federation and this guy's saying that they wanted the Federation to expand by force? They didn't want the Federation to expand at all, by force or otherwise... they just wanted to stay where they already were.

It makes me wonder how many of the writers just didn't understand the Maquis, even though they were literally writing them...

Like, the DS9 writers often compare Bajorans to other oppressed populations, including the Palestians. Palestine has been cited as one of the inspirations for entire Cardassian occupation of Bajor... like, they got that one exactly right, and yet here's one of the writers claiming that the Maquis are like Israeli settlers in the West Bank? If Bajor is Palestine, then the Cardassians are Israel, but somehow the Maquis is also Israel??? How????

And I wouldn't like to make that comparison if they didn't literally use Palestine as a source of inspiration, because obviously one is fiction and the other is facing a real life genocide, but they did write Bajor as an allegory for real life occupation and genocide, so...

It's just wild to me that DS9 literally had banger lines like "Nothing justifies genocide." and "What you call genocide, I call a day's work.", which very clearly illustrate the real life stances in these situations, including the stance of the side doing the genocide and treating it like it's no big deal, but then one of the writers has the nerve to say the Maquis position is questionable?

Their position of being against occupation and against genocide is questionable???

I truly believe the real reason they wrote the Maquis off so suddenly in a mass slaughter was because they wrote themselves into a corner, by making the Federation look look like bad guys in that storyline (because they were). It would have been difficult to write the Federation as the heroes of the Dominion war, and also the villains in the Maquis storyline, simultaneously.

Difficult, but not impossible... I think the Maquis brought an element to DS9 that made the show work in a way that it wouldn't have otherwise. It's always the good guys versus the bad guys, but the addition of the Maquis made it impossible for the show to be that black and white... instead, the Federation was the good guy in some scenarios, and the bad guy in others, which made the entire show more complex, but also more realistic.

And it was often handled really well, because you had the Federation with their specific stance on the Maquis, and the Maquis with their specific stance on the Federation, but then you had the DS9 crew that was conflicted, with some being openly sympathetic to the Maquis cause, and others being vocally opposed to it. The Federation had their own official stance on the Maquis, but the people of the Federation didn't just automatically fall in line with that... they looked at the situation themselves and formed their own opinions.

And like... if you had the DS9 crew, actively having to deal with the Maquis and trying to uphold the treaty with the Cardassians, and they still had Maquis sympathizers on that station, how on earth did they expect the Voyager crew to be actively opposed to the Maquis for any real length of time? Like, Voyager didn't mishandle the writing when it came to the Maquis, the entire premise itself was flawed.

And it's kind of wild because it's not like they took a pre-existing idea and tried to force it into Voyager... they created the Maquis FOR Voyager, and still fumbled it. They could have just as easily made the Maquis an antifa type of group, whose main ideology was opposing Federation imperialism, and then it would have worked. The Maquis would have been actively hostile to Starfleet because they would have seen Starfleet as an extension the Federation imperialism, and they would have had a much harder time integrating into a Starfleet crew while actively opposing everything they stand for.

But they didn't do that... they made the Maquis oppose the Cardassian occupation, and the Cardassains, historically, have been an enemy of Starfleet and a hell of a lot of Starfleet officers don't like or trust the Cardassians, so it's super easy for them to sympathize with the Maquis cause.

I don't know... I have so many thoughts about this... I've said before it's sort of odd that the Maquis were written for Voyager, but the fac that they were Maquis really added nothing to the show, but it added a TON to DS9, and DS9 ultimately destroyed that storyline for no good reason... especially since DS9 ultimately proved the Maquis were right, but never acknowledged it.

They also really missed the mark by not making Kira a Maquis sympathizer... that was WAY out of character for her, but that's a whole other essay lol

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okay this is kind of a stupid thought but I was thinking about the internal debates that Vulcan society must have around logic and it occurred to me that Vulcan must have “logical relativists” in the same way that human philosophy has moral relativists…I just know that there’s at least 30 Vulcan philosophers who want to KILL the noble Storek House of T’Nel (or something) because he can’t stop telling everyone that All Behavior is Inherently Logical as it Makes Sense to the Acting Party at the Time. Humans are Illogical Therefore it is Logical That They Act Illogicaly, thus All of Their Actions are Logical. All Thought, Conscious or Unconscious, Proceeds from Biological and Neurochemical Impulses. Therefore, the Sentient Being Behaves Much like a Computer, Following its Compiled Commands. No Behavior, Knowing the Chemical Commands that Preempt Consciousness, Can Be Considered Illogical.

and everyone else is just like “ohhh my fucking GOD Storek, shut UP!”

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Unfortunately Lewis Zimmerman figured out holographic ray tracing.

would've been very fun voyager if they made the doctor like not interact with any light sources at all. like he casts no shadow and always looks like he's in a well lit room. it wouldve been expensive and bad to look at but it would be fun

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To be fair, as a part of my regular day job, I spend hours staring at sentences trying to make them better with minor nudging. It feels less like a chore or being over critical and more of a word puzzle, “Oh, I wonder what someone might take away from this?”

it’s so crazy for a writer to spend hours rewording and editing on something as simple as one paragraph never feeling it’s good enough only for the reader to spend maybe 30 seconds on reading it.

it isn’t a diss to either the reader nor the writer but it makes you realize how overcritical we all are. what you, the writer, may feel is average or non satisfactory to the reader is exciting and new to them. they can’t wait for your next words and where the story will go. you see endless errors and insecurities but they see the beauty of your words, the effort into the story and how well you bring it all together.

overthinking will ruin happiness and your work. give yourself some grace.