Re: If you were the creator of VOY, what would you have done different
Neelix knew all about them.
NEELIX: If these people are who I think they are, I can tell you this is very bad news. I've never actually encountered them but from what I've heard I'm glad I didn't. Most ships that enter their space are never heard from again. Some have returned with everyone on board dead. They're a complete mystery. No one knows their name, how many of them there are, what the culture is like. Just that they reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally don't want people violating their territory.
I love how Ethan intoned the word "really" up there.
The Bynars decided that it was easier to "sorry" than "please" when they stole the Enterprise off Picard.
A lot of people hold by that maxim.
And maybe with Picard, you won't get your ass handed to you for being a self righteous prick abusing other peoples homes and toys thinking redemption after the fact is easy if even required if you can keep your shennigans under the radar.
Dude forgave the Borg.
[Sisko]The Swarmies are not Picard.[/Sisko]
They gave the Voyager crew one warning. Stunned the shuttle crew and then departed no harm no foul. Janeway tried to open the diplomatic channels, but they told her to *&^k off, or at least that was the intent we got from their general broken record tone. She refused to respect their point of view.
It took B'Elanna 5 minutes to map the entire boundaries of Swarmie space and it's tachyeon detection grid which is a device intricate enough usually to find cloaked ships because they don't even want invisible aliens who are pretending not to be there in their space there in their space, and then it barely took Janeway 10 seconds to decide that if she didn't have the good will and the permissions of the powers that be in that area of space, the Swarmies, to cross through swarmie space, then she would ignore them and apologize if she got caught (Which she tried eventually after they caught her red handed and they just opened fire harder.), because it would be an extreme overreaction to think that every one on Voyager would be executed for a little harmless trespass just because the Swarmies are obviously the sort of aliens who will kill you if they say they will kill you if you do something they will kill you for when and as you do that thing they promise they will kill you for.
You don't take short cuts through Romulan Space, Borg Space or Gorn Space.
It's just an idiot move.
She'd figured that out by the time she encountered the Devour Imperium.
(But they she was lying to those people on a completely differet level.)
15 months at max warp to go around the Swarmie empire, is a justifiable alternative to having the voyager crew massacared by the Swarm, or in turn foprced to be responsible fot thousands and thousands of swarmies being murdered by Voyagers torpedoes and that deus ex machina techno babble at Janeways behest that deonated their fleet of starships, because as we found out in Year of Hell that Janeway responds to verbal threats from civilizations without the firepower to back up those threats with small penis joke comparrisons about her opponents weapons arrays. She's almost as tactless as I am.
Years later still she sent Icheb off to be executed for tresspassing an aliens sovereign territory because it was the starfleet way to face up tot he responsibility of your actions no matter the cost (Though it's possible that she knew that Q was pulling her leg because shes smarter than a bag of inbred chickens.).
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I laughed my ass off when Exodus claimed that it was a drone fleet which Voyager encountered in The Swarm, ergo that Janeway hadn't in fact murdered any one, little lone the thousands of crew it would take to populate those hundreds of ships she blew up.
You know it's practically rape after a fashion that Janeway would not take no for an answer.
Follow your logic.about janeways claims of Self defense:
A guy gets told he is ugly and he shouldn't even try, but he tries. she assures him that she is not persuaded by his arguments that they should get to know each other, she tells him to go away or she will hurt him but he turns the light off so that she cannot see him sticking his hand down the front of her blouse, she punches him in the nose because she feels offended that he should be so silly as to not understand that his hand is unwanted down her blouse, he feels threated and knows that he is about to be kicked in the balls so he punches her in the face caving her nose into the jelly of her brain and he is safe and completely vindicated in that he did save himself from being kicked in the balls at least 12 times and that no one could possibly argue that he was not justified in defending hisself no matter how much he had to kill her.
It's episodes like this that make me think that the writers thought that Janeway would be better off as a tyrant.
No means no.
...
Actually I saw an episode of Picket fences where a drug dealer got off a cop killing because he leveled his machine gun at the door as he heard people beginning to knock it down, and because he didn't know that it was the cops that were there, when it could have just as easily been the competition, he was unwittingly threatening the policemen trying to put him into jail for drug dealing, but once the door was knocked down, all the cops saw was a drug dealer pointing a machine gun at them and he didn't have the time or opportunity to surrender. There was no way that they would not feel threatened and open fire on him immediately, so the drug dealer had no choice but to shoot the cops in self defense even through the Drug dealer fired first and I think that the cops might not even have got a single round off.
The difference of course is that Janeway is a transient with no legal right to enter anyone's home god forbid country or empire without talking to immigration first.
