Why didn't Janeway...

[Skywalker]

Why didn't Janeway just plant a tri-cobalt bomb on the Caretaker's array, send Voyager through it, and then stay behind to detonate the bomb afterward? I mean, sure, she still would have been stranded in the Delta Quadrant, but at least the rest of the crew would have gotten home.

That ending could have made for a cool miniseries, now that I think about it.

Or were there some other extenuating circumstances I can't remember?

 

[Finngle Bells]

Wow! You just thought of something nobody has in the past 15 years.



Well, then there wouldn't be a show.

 

[Skywalker]

Yeah, I'm sure plenty of other people have thought of this before, but for some reason I just felt like I had to ask.

 

[Timo]

For some reason, nobody seems to really bother to watch the episode...?

Janeway didn't have the faintest inkling of how to send ships to Alpha Quadrant with the strange alien array. She didn't build the thing, she didn't have a manual, and the only licensed operator was a senile old monster who just died on her.

There was a time limit on what Janeway could do. In a very short time, her ship would be destroyed by the Kazon, unless she stopped them by blowing up the station. In that time, she had no chance to learn how to operate the array; she could have learned it in a few more hours, but then she would have condemned her crew to death in the hands of the Kazon.

Staying behind and heroically blowing up the station would solve nothing: the end result would be the same, with the ship stuck in Delta, only now without her captain.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Pemmer Harge]

Speaking as someone who's just now bothered to re-watch Caretaker...

Tuvok went off to investigate the technology and came back and told Janeway he'd be able to send them home. The Caretaker then started a self-destruct sequence, meaning Janeway and Tuvok wouldn't have time to do that. Then the Kazon ship crashed into the array (why do they call it that, rather than "space station"?), disabling the self-destruct system. All the holographic stuff then went offline and the Caretaker appeared as a big blob and told them that they had to stop the array falling into the hands of the Kazon, or else they'd annihilate the Ocampa. So Tuvok and Janeway had a conversation about whether they should stay in the Delta Quadrant and help the Ocampa or go home. They returned to Voyager and got the Kazon leader on the line, telling him to bugger off so they could blow up the array. The Kazon said "no", so Janeway just blew up the array anyway and the Kazon went all "grrr, you have made an enemy today" and flew off.

I think it was somewhat ambiguous whether Voyager would be able to defeat the Kazon or not. They thought they wouldn't be able to, but then Chakotay rammed the big Kazon ship and destroyed it. Certainly the Kazon didn't destroy Voyager after the array was destroyed, even though as new "enemies" one would have expected them to do so if they could.

The. impression I got was that Voyager might or might not have been able to do what Skystalker says. Ultimately we don't know whether the Kazon were beatable, or whether the array would even have still worked after the damage it sustained (although the implication is that it would have).

 

[Guy Gardener]

Timo you know better.

Janeway could have sent the crew home. Tuvok found a big button marked "undo" but the program would take several hours to run through the process till it zapped the ship back to the Alpha quadrant.

TUVOK: Captain, I can access the system to send us back to Federation space, but it will take several hours to activate.
JANEWAY: Unless you help us.
CARETAKER: Oh, I wish I could but I have very little time left, so I have initiated a self-destruct programme.
JANEWAY: If you destroy the array, we'll have no way to get home.
CARETAKER: The Ocampa's enemies can not be allowed to, to control this installation. In minutes, it will be destroyed. You have to go. Go now.
TUVOK: The Caretaker?
JANEWAY: Voyager, report.

[snip]

CARETAKER: The self-destruct programme has been damaged. Now this installation will not be destroyed. But it must be. The Kazon must not be allowed to gain control of it. They will annihilate the Ocampa.
TUVOK: Shall I activate the programme to get us back?
JANEWAY: And what happens to the Ocampa after we're gone?
TUVOK: Captain. Any action we take to protect the Ocampa would affect the balance of power in this system. The Prime Directive would seem to apply.
JANEWAY: Would it? We never asked to be involved, Tuvok, but we are. We are.

Did I really have to cut and paste the same paragraph again from that transcript website I so enjoy?

We know how pathetic kazon tech is, and we know how badly damaged Voyager was, but a Torpedo built by Starfleet engineers is still a torpedo built by starfleet engineers, damage to voyager in no way limited the accuracy or fire power of a torpedo even if Janeway had to use her transporters to fling them at her opposition.

Personally I don't get into fights any more because I know that I can't win without blinding or crippling any bugger stupid enough to challenge me. It's really hard to win a fight without crippling someone, and that goes for the guy baring down on me as well. I would honestly rob someone of sight forever if it stopped them kicking me in the nuts. Unfortunately there's a whole lot of consequences after the fact, like guilt or jail, when doing that to someone that it's far easier to walk away than "easily" win a fight... And that's possibly how Janeway felt on some level. her conflict with the kazon, every conflict she had with the kazon despite appearances was machine guns vs Zulu warriors with sharpened fruit. She could have built an empire in a couple days if she wanted to, but that would have required a good weight of dead bodies supplied to the cause.

As a civilized (cough! cough!) human being, how many Kazon was she willing to kill to hold the line? How many hundred? How many thousand? And how few Ocampa was she willing to sacrifice her entire crew for? were their dozens or thousands or millions of them living underground? Wouldn't it be a laugh if all that pissing in the wind was to save less Ocampa than Kathy had crew that it just would have been as easy to conscript them and take the entire species back to the AQ?

It's always a numbers game but I don't think the writers thought this at the time, but the notion does fit the facts.

 

[Anwar]

And also, being brought to the DQ by the Array damaged the ship and killed a lot of people. Logically being sent back would do the same.

So it wasn't a real option to use the Array in the first place.

 

[Guy Gardener]

People died because they fell over at odd angles. As if they were pushed whilst unprepared. Given a more ardent command to brace for being punted though space at equivilent speeds to warp 9.9999999999999999999999999999999999999983 would have reduced the accidental deaths to near zero. Shutting down the warp core and other "active" sections would have also helped keep the trip uneventful.

The smallest accident with inertial dampeners while impelling with even the docking thusters at merely hundreds of miles an hour towards the sound barrier would turn the entire crew into jelly. As the crow flies they were moving literally billions of times faster than that, maybe trillions and no one, even the deadest of the lot of them was not jellied.

Oh. And Caretaker was senile enough that his every action and accredation of skill should be treated as wearily as you would trust a drunk sculling gin behind the wheel of a school bus.

Tuvok would have been a much better driver.

 

[Pemmer Harge]

And also, being brought to the DQ by the Array damaged the ship and killed a lot of people. Logically being sent back would do the same.

So it wasn't a real option to use the Array in the first place.

Janeway and Tuvok seemed to think it was.

 

[Guy Gardener]

But they also thought it was a good idea to stay put.

They're just full of prime thinking.

 

[Skywalker]

I do appreciate the in-depth explanations and reasonings. I haven't seen "Caretaker" in years, and don't really make an effort to go back and rewatch VOY. I didn't mean to bring up a possibly old and tired topic, the question just popped into my head and I just felt like I needed to ask it.

 

[Guy Gardener]

It popped into Janeway's head too during season 5's première episode"Night" as she had a 4 month long psychotic break in her quarters. Just rocking and drinking and asking herself over and over again "Poohbuggerbumshit! Why didn't I let the kazon eat the Ocampa? Why?"

And again in the Omega Directive when the crew had to mutiny to avoid Janeway second guessing herself into a space burial because she'd finally calculated how bad she'd fouled up during Caretaker that it was obvious to even a blind woman that a kamakazi shuttle mission could accomplish almost anything a Starship can.

Sentimental bollocks.

 

[Jerikka Dawn]

And also, being brought to the DQ by the Array damaged the ship and killed a lot of people. Logically being sent back would do the same.

So it wasn't a real option to use the Array in the first place.

There's only one reason why idiots like Lt. Cmdr. Cavit died when the Caretaker flung Voyager across the galaxy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1UIWrkswvA

 

[JayOwl]

The Only reason she didn't get them back in Caretaker was because the writers wanted to keep the series

 

[Guy Gardener]

Sisko came back from the other side of the galaxy in his pilot and that all fared very well for me, even if the show wasn't such a financial success... But then neither was Voyager really? So if neither formula worked why bother being so proud of either lemon?