Was it really Janeways fault they got stuck there?

Discussion in 'Star Trek: Voyager' started by bbjeg, Jun 6, 2013.

  1. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Apr 15, 2000
    Location:
    In the lap of squalor I assure you.
    Ocampa was a Kazon world.

    The Ocampa were vermin it was the Kazon's job to put down.

    Sometimes they trained this vermin to be slaves, but it really was a waste of time.

    Imagine what would happen if one random Starfleet Captain told the Klingons or Romulans that they were not allowed to keep slaves, and that all their slaves were free on only that Captain's say so and moral fortitude?

    Fleets would be sent to Earth to level the frakker until it looked like the 12th century.
     
  2. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Apr 15, 2000
    Location:
    In the lap of squalor I assure you.
    Ships sensors, long and short, detect warp bubbles, not actual tiny slithers of metal trillions of miles away.

    Ocampa was a Kazon world.

    If they can hold a world with one city ship and two shuttles, then the Ocampa deserved to be slaves.

    Maybe they didn't have more city ships on Ocampa, but they had to have had dozens more or even hundreds more shuttles which were powered down and would look like a tin out door privy to long range sensors.

    Kathryn was ignorant as to how intense Kazon saturation was in the area, and Neelix was ignorant as to how powerful Voyager was at full power. Voyager was no where near full power and I think in the season two Barclay episode that they said that Voyager was operating at %10 during the pilot.

    Think about this...

    Did they stop by the Ocampan city after the credits, so that Kes could say good bye to her family (again) and pick up some clean clothes, or did they RUN?
     
  3. stj

    stj Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Dec 27, 2006
    Location:
    the real world
    The plot is very clear. They could not figure out how to operate the array before Kazon reinforcements arrive. Their only alternatives were to destroy the array, to deny the Kazon overwhelming immediate superiority (and the power to enslave the Ocampa,) or to make a deal with the Kazon. Sorry, but everyone who mentions a timer on a bomb is wrong. As this very episode demonstrated, timers can be disarmed.

    Further, the whole point of Tuvok claiming that denying the Kazon salvage rights is a violation of the PD, is to establish that Janeway will bend the rules to do what she thinks is the right thing, no matter the cost. In a later episode she even planned to kamikaze Voyager to stop Torres' superbomb. It is not clear what the PD means, but what Tuvok says is a writers' shout out. It may be argued that violating some mysterious phrase like "prime directive," which doesn't have any meaning, is fake drama. If so, it's not unique to Voyager, much less Janeway.

    Lastly, Anwar is quite correct that there is no reason to think the return trip would be any less murderous than the journey to the array. It was a self-contradiction in the episode's story premises. But it was clearly imposed so that Janeway would have to make a choice between return at the cost of Ocampan slavery, or a possible lifetime journey, whether short (i.e., catastrophic) or long.
     
  4. Anwar

    Anwar Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Dec 11, 2006
    Location:
    Moncton, NB
    Which still would mean that there was formal documentation signed that would be acceptable under Galactic Law that all the major powers recognize, and that the Feds couldn't just go in without violating said Laws and making all the other Empires out there (like the Klingons and Romulans) with conquered worlds nervous.
     
  5. MacLeod

    MacLeod Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 8, 2001
    Location:
    Great Britain
    In the case of Bajor it seems as if prior to the Cardassian invasion, it was a non-aligned world. If they had say a treaty with the UFP the Cardassians might not have invaded.
     
  6. Anwar

    Anwar Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Dec 11, 2006
    Location:
    Moncton, NB
    Maybe, but it doesn't change that they probably had the government legitimize their occupation in a way that was acceptable via whatever intergalactic law everyone obeyed.
     
  7. DonIago

    DonIago Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 22, 2001
    Location:
    Burlington, VT, USA
    In the novelverse the Cardassians never invaded Bajor per se. The recognized Bajoran government permitted everything that occurred (though the Cardassians did take numerous actions that the government was unaware of).

    In a sense, the Bajoran citizenry is to blame for allowing corrupt officials to remain in power until it was too late to do anything about the situation.
     
  8. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Apr 15, 2000
    Location:
    In the lap of squalor I assure you.
    Never say that Anwar was right, you might as well be feeding Mogwai after midnight. Think about how the crew of the Val Jean and Voyager died. No one ran awry of strange radiation that turned them into frogs, and no was thrown against a bulk head at the speed of light with such concussive force that the crewman turned into gas.

    Crew died because consoles that could have been powered down exploded in their faces, and crew died because they fell over at significantly less speeds than one would fall when falling off a merrygoround.

    That's it.

    With a 10 second countdown to a launch, after several hours warning as to when that ten second countdown would start, and the crew was seated and buckled down into crash positions, with all the explodly consols powered down, unless they were absolutely necessary, then everyone made sure that they did not have their their faces right up to any of those explody consols... No one had to die on the return trip.
     
  9. JirinPanthosa

    JirinPanthosa Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Nov 20, 2012
    Location:
    JirinPanthosa
    Cardassia was the legal owner of Bajor the same way Britain was the legal owner of India or France was the legal owner of Algeria or China is the legal owner of Tibet.

    Legality is in the eye of the beholder. An occupation is legal when it would be politically disastrous for other countries to say it's not legal. Powerful countries give legal permission slips to other powerful countries to invade less powerful countries because they want to make nice with said powerful countries. It makes the occupation 'legal', but doesn't make it legitimate.
     
  10. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Apr 15, 2000
    Location:
    In the lap of squalor I assure you.
    Britain didn't "legitimately" hold India for a couple centuries?

    Might equals right.

    The Ocampa were underground having abandoned the dead surface.

    Caretaker was in the sky with enough weapons to exterminate the kazon, but he didn't.

    Here's the real pickle to question the legitimacy of claiming a dead world with no noticeable civilization whatsofuckering ever...

    They have a cormaline mine and a cormaline refinery and a cormaline shop which everyone in the quadrant uses.

    As legitimate as "blood diamonds"?

    Don't be an ass.

    The Ocampa had no interest in the surface of their planet or space.

    Pets in a kennel.
     
  11. JirinPanthosa

    JirinPanthosa Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Nov 20, 2012
    Location:
    JirinPanthosa
    False.

    Unless you're a character on the Game of Thrones, a foreign power coming and forcing their will on a local population is a bad thing.

    Then again, I'm not convinced you actually believe the things you say, because you have a tendency to push buttons for the sake of it.
     
  12. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Apr 15, 2000
    Location:
    In the lap of squalor I assure you.
    Might equals righteousness?

    Is that better?

    Was Queen Victoria the Empress of India an asshole or a liar?

    As your current theory stands, the Native Americans could ask all non Native Americans to leave North America, so that they could have their home back, and good manners would force all non Native Americans to eject themselves off the continent.

    That would be pleasant and hilarious, but it's not going to happen without some massive cultural shift on par with a literal apocalypse.
     
  13. doubleohfive

    doubleohfive Fleet Admiral

    Joined:
    Aug 17, 2001
    Location:
    Hollywood, CA
    Nor I.

    Janeway's decision is made quite clear as are her motivations for said decision.
     
  14. bbjeg

    bbjeg Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    May 24, 2013
    Location:
    Right here buddy.
    That's the issue though. Janeway blamed herself but there were so many factors that were dismissed in the series. Chakotay never says "We could have made it back if I waited for that Kazon battleship to be further away from that station before crashing my ship into it.", nor did B'elanna say something like "I shouldn't have engaged that Cardassian ship then plot that course into the Badlands."
     
  15. DonIago

    DonIago Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 22, 2001
    Location:
    Burlington, VT, USA
    I suppose it is a bit of a missed opportunity that we never got a good "It's a Wonderful Life" episode showing what would happen if Our Heroes hadn't been yanked into the DQ.

    I could easily see such an episode being a two-parter.
     
  16. QuarkforNagus

    QuarkforNagus Lieutenant Red Shirt

    Joined:
    Jun 8, 2013
    Even if one were to grant that her decision to destroy the array got them stranded there, there were plenty of subsequent opportunities to get her crew home.

    I would contend that, more than one poor decision, it was her refusal to accept other offers that resulted in them being stuck in the Delta Quadrant for as long as they did.

    If she just gave Q that damn baby he wanted, or returned that suicidal Q to the continuum for punishment, he could have snapped them all back home.

    She could have, at the very least, asked if there was some kind of arrangement they could have made. It's just plain negligent on her part not to at least ask.
     
  17. Kevman7987

    Kevman7987 Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

    Joined:
    May 20, 2013
    Location:
    Erie, PA, USA
    That would have made for a good episode if written well. I get the feeling they just would have had most of the characters get killed by the Dominion War though.
     
  18. Anwar

    Anwar Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Dec 11, 2006
    Location:
    Moncton, NB
    All their attempts to get home faster had to fail, that's the "Gilligan Syndrome" the show suffered from.
     
  19. JirinPanthosa

    JirinPanthosa Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Nov 20, 2012
    Location:
    JirinPanthosa
    A dictator.

    Your analogy is ridiculous. No government has the right to take away the individual freedoms of any person, regardless of ethnicity or whether your ancestors 500 years ago were born there or not.

    Supreme executive powah derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical military entitlement. If you need to threaten a populace with violence and imprisonment to stay in power, you do not deserve that power. If you treat one group of people as automatically inferior to another group of people based solely on birth, you are a dictator.
     
  20. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Apr 15, 2000
    Location:
    In the lap of squalor I assure you.
    It's like you haven't been paying attention to history.

    Every leader there has ever been has been a dictator in someone's eyes and Utopia, which is what you're talking about, does not exist. What a government shouldn't do has nothing to do with what a government has to do.

    Considering your idealism, it seems impossible for you not to raise arms against your own government immediately if you are a truly moral person, no matter where in the world you are living, if theses bodies do not rise to your impossible standards.