Watching Voyager tonight and saw Neelix on the Bridge and wondered why is he there also why is he included in briefing meetings when his job is Cook, Morale Officer and Ambassador?
He reminds me of one of those crusty old tour guides you get at cathedrals who you wish would just shut up.
I wanted to marry Julie on The Love Boat when I was little. For the first two years his place at that table, and the bridge was essential. He was Janeway's asshole detector. Picard had a fricking telepath mindraping every ship in range to check how assholey the new opposition each week was. That's fricking cheating.
Why was Neelix allowed on the Brdge? Because with very little training he stopped peeing on the carpet Remember, he started off as their guide, the Cook thing was just something he added onto his responsbilities, and the Moral Officer and Ambassador things came later, so he could feel useful after his Guide knowledge had expired.
Why would Neelix be barred from the bridge? In all Trek series and films, the bridges have never been regularly treated as restricted areas. Picard kept kids off his bridge, for the most part, but otherwise crews and guests were free to come and go. TOS was the only series where a guard was even occasionally posted at the turbo lift doors. So, why exclude Neelix?
Question: Why is Neelix allowed on the bridge? Answer: 'cause he's a jolly good fellow, he's a jolly good fellow, he's a jolly good fellooooooow, and so say all of us!
Seven took over that role. She's the Sacagawea of the Delta Quadrant, using Borg knowledge to relay the same kind of information Neelix could give. In essence, only for half a season they were without a native guide. That left Neelix to his other role- ship's cook. Cooking for 140ish people around the clock keeps him busy.
It's amazing how few assimilated civilizations Voyager ran into considering Seven knew so much about everyone everywhere. It's almost like the Borg visit every one, judge them and earmark when they might be ready for assimilation, be it weeks, years or centuries off from the current date. Or... It's not just the Federation who repell the Borg so easily.
Traveller told Picard that Wes was going to turn into a god one day, and it was Picards job to make sure that Wes was a nice God who did nice things like himself, and not an angry God who spread plagues and raped cattle like Q. Ticking fricking timebomb.
Picard was trolling by putting the kid 'at the wheel of the car' so to speak, a 'car' packed with 1000 people, the flagship of the fleet. It was his sense of humor. The Enterprise-D had the worst helmsmen. Imagine if the Enterprise-D could land like Voyager could. How scuffed and banged up would it be? Paris was actually probably the best helmsman in Star Trek (now, if Harry Kim was at the helm, Voyager would have steered into one disaster after another). Sisko could have let Jake play around because the station was in park.
The Borg are like some people- they just aren't that into exploration. Look at what we saw on Voyager. Heavy assimilation off of their transwarp highways. Go a little ways beyond it and there are people who had no trouble with the Borg. How many people going down an interstate say "You know what, I'm going to get off here at Nowheresville and head down thataway just to see what's down there"? The Borg are lazy. Advanced, yet lazy. They just use their collective muscle to get new technology instead of thinking it up, though presumably there's somebody in the Borg with some independent thought/creativity that makes it compatible with all their existing technology and makes sure its fashion doesn't clash with the Borg aesthetic (we never saw these interior designer drones that still had some independence of thought). Want to know something really cool that just struck me a few days ago? Borg space probably isn't all Borg. There are probably some M-class planets that didn't have good mineral profiles for mass strip mining so they are probably left alone and some planets with pre-warp civilizations, or lousy warp civilizations. Borg space is huge, there's gotta be some race like the sponge-headed kilt-wearing louts with warp drive somewhere in there. Arturis' home system was an island in Borg space, but that was because they were so advanced and they were besieged by the Borg.