There are many fans of Voyager who assign an mental illness to Janeway due to how the various writers have created the various episodes. Would it be therefore possible to create a list of all conflicting actions and statements of Janeway and sort them into separate lists? Think column A vs column B, and if we must we may include column C, D,... Hopefully this will help us find some commonalities and perhaps even find a system.
I would rather create a list of all continuity errors made by Berman, Braga, J.Taylor, Fuller and M.Taylor.
Her only two major stinkers are Scorpion and Equinox. Tuvix depends on how you view sapience. There's a few minor ones like Night which are due to unique circumstances but the rest are debatable.
I can sort of understand Night. That would be freaky, out there with no stars and nothing to explore and distract one from the emptiness around. This would feel like sensory deprivation torture. Holodecks for recreation are fun (I imagine, at least), but its like watching TV all day - not so fun after like a day or so.
Janeway was never "mentally ill". On the other hand, those think she was... well... maybe they have a problem.
In "Year of Hell", she encouraged the crew to spread out amidst the galaxy, and share knowledge and make new alliances. From escape pods. EVER-LOVING ESCAPE PODS. If that's not the very soul of insanity, well...
I view that as a desperate last attempt to give the crew hope and purpose. It's not as if they had much of a choice but to try.
I'm not the kind of nerd who can rattle of stats about fictional vehicles, but... oh, hell. Intrepid-class escape pods only have thrusters, and no warp capacity, obviously. And apparently they can house up to six. Up to six people eating ration bars and doing whatever excretory business can be conducted there. And bugging the hell out of each other. While they all thrust around... with a genocidal maniac on their tail?! And Voyager was battered, but still operational. There isn't enough fanwanking in the world that can convince me that that Janeway was still in her right mind. Worst. Order. Ever.
Even worse than: "Deanna, take the helm. Get us out of orbit." Or: "Get the cheese to sickbay." Seriously though, it does seem rather ridiculous, given they were in open space and hadn't made any meaningful relationships with other races in a full-blown starship, casting the crew out in helpless pods is a serious gamble. Though the ship was extensively damaged, her life-support systems may no longer have been able to cope with 100+ crew, so they may have faced certain death had they remained onboard. They should've at least sent out a few shuttles as well, or dropped them off on the edge of star system with a planet they could settle on.
Does anyone happen to know when and where it was that Mulgrew said she believed Janeway was suffering from a breakdown? I did a search and couldn't find anything. Did she really say it?
In "The Swarm" Janeways says that Starfleet is 70 light years away and gives orders to violate the Prime Directive in order to get home faster. You could say she also violated it in episodes like "Scorpion" or the "The Killing Game", by offering Federation technology. On the other hand, in episodes such as "Thirty Days", she maintains that the Prime Directive must be followed at all costs, even if it means letting civilizations colapse or, like in "Equinox", getting home faster. In the latter episode, she even claims she never violated the Prime Directive, only bent it. She also denied giving technology to the Kazon due to the Prime Directive. Now, it seems that, for a moment, the writers intended for Captain Janeway to become more lax about the Prime Directive, but some of her hardest defenses of it came in the latter half of the show. So they messed up.
I always feel Janeway generally reacted properly [I agree with her in Equinox & Tuvix, I understand why she handled promotions the way she did] and I equate her command style to the extreme circumstances in which she has been placed. I also think trying to label her with a variety of mental-illnesses is not only innacurate but disrespectful to those who actually have those conditions.
More like murder. A good analogy would be Captain Smith ordering Titanic passengers to never mind the lifeboats, but to go out and swim for help from a passing ship.
I'd think a better analogy would be to tell the passengers to swim instead of giving up and drowning since they didn't have lifeboats. An analogy with lifeboats being ignored presumes Janeway was ignoring a much better option.
I think the biggest problem was the writers hhad her flip flopping on the PD. One week she was for it the next she wasn't to varying degrees. Either have her for it or not, pick one and keep to it.
Now now! Deana did in fact follow orders precisely and "get the ship out of orbit". (My working theory is that Picard allowed her to wear casual clothes for years to forestall any incidents of any crew members actually thinking she was an officer who knew anything about the ship, space travel, or what the pretty buttons do.)
I wish we'd seen more of Troi as an officer, she went through the Academy and was good enough to be promoted to lieutenant commander before the series began, but little was ever done with that fact. She was definitely someone whose full potential was never realised in the show, other than showing off cleavage. I really hope Trek 17 does away with this (probably quite literal) fanwank. We get it, women have boobs and curves, now have them put some damn clothes on!