Ocampa Theory...

[Oddish]

I would like that just fine... if they just let us know. I would sinilarly be fine with Voyager (which couldn't even give Janeway a cup of Joe in Season 1) being able to spawn endless numbers of shuttles and torpedoes, plus two experimental super-shuttles that not even Starfleet had... IF THEY HAD GIVEN US AN EXPLANATION.

 

[Swedish Borg]

They can replicate enough parts to repair the ship after it's been badly damaged at a moment's notice, they can replicate all the parts of a shuttle and build one when they need it, plus then Delta flyers but everyone must eat Neelix slop because they can't replicate enough food for everyone... It would be like someone living in a mansion with a brand new stretch limo but he struggles to feed himself!!!

 

[Timo]

I guess I just don't get the "explanations" part. Nobody in TOS ever "explained" why transporters fail to work when they'd be at their most useful, or how Kirk can go on having hordes of underlings killed and breaking the very rules he quotes and never getting anything but medals for it, or why they never sail to danger with shields up yet never are in any hurry to drop shields once they are up. Supposedly the heroes just knew what they were doing and didn't feel the need to spell it out for us.

A broken ship getting better sounds pretty natural and not particularly mysterious. Janeway running a tight ship even when (and especially when) things get better is what we're given, and is not particularly different from Kirk being commended for sacrificing redshirts or committing acts of war: it's a character thing for which the audience is required to think up their bullshit rationalizations, leaning either on real world precedent or then on the "it's future scifi" crutch.

Say, replicators do provide food and beverages and luxuries just fine in the later seasons, but Neelix gets to cook anyway. A mystery? Not really. Janeway wants to have Neelix around even when his local knowledge has been left far behind and the crew won't starve without him; letting him cook is a small price to pay for having the morale-raiser and diplomat around. Plus, his cooking is a more credible threat than a cat-o'-nine-tails if somebody ruffles Janeway's feathers.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Swedish Borg]

In "A Taste Of Armageddon", the Enterprise moves to a solar system regardless of a message sent by the inhabitants telling them not to. Once there they are considered to be dead by that society's standards and some of them are taken, hostage, then instead of negotiating the return of the hostages or settle for breaking them out of there and getting the hell out of there. Kirk decides on his own initiative to radically change these people's way of life, forcefully and in spite of their leader's protest. Risking a war between two planets in this system that could have meant their mutual annihilation because HE gambled that they would choose not to.

Yeah, so much for the prime directive!!!

 

[Swedish Borg]

TOS prime directive: It's whatever we say it is when we feel like it.

 

[Lynx]

In retrospect, I think this could be read wrong. No offense or dismissal was intended!

But scifi really works best when the writers don't think through the implications of the wonders the introduce. Larry Niven is insufferable for ostensibly having worked it all out from the get-go, even directly channeling that to his Pak species eventually; finding different interpretations to what he created isn't all that difficult to do, and the writers he allowed into his Known Space sandbox eventually had a ball with that! Trek writers know they aren't Larry Niven (except perhaps when they are): they realize that their successors will chop their work to pieces for the sheer fun of it, and won't try and nail down anything with nails thick enough to unduly damage those chopping blades.

Timo Saloniemi

I have to disagree here.

Scifi might become ridiculous when the writers don't think through the implications of the wonders the introduce. There are dozens of examples when this has happened. Especially in Star trek when the fans just love to dissect every possible error and bring it up in the cold daylight.

The problems with the Voyager writers was that they didn't even seem to care. As for all the craziness they posed on the poor Ocampa which actually made me wonder what they were on when I watched Elogium, they seem to have no clue in what they were doing.

Like the silly short lifespan, the one-child thing and the whole Elogium process itself. They just seem to think that "Oh, this is new, we have never had that in any Star Trek Series before".

Their whims could easily have ben used to give the Ocampa a lifespan of 500 years or to a species which change skin or body each 25th year to stay alive for hundreds of years. It would also have been like "Oh, this is new, we have never had that in any Star Trek Series before".

And when they realized that their idea didn't work or was highly unrealistic, they just plowed on like a locomotive in a glass shop, just like "Ah never mind, the viewers won't notice". No explanations, not a single attempt to correct the errors in any way.

Which was just what happened with the problems with shuttles and torpedoes. They were happily crashing shuttles and blasting torpedoes like hail without even thinking about the fact that Voyager was supposed to have only two shuttles and a limited supply of torpedoes. "Never mind, the viewers won't notice".

The point is that the viewers did notice and then is when scifi become ridiculous.

However, there is a positive aspect of it too which is to come up with logical explanations for all the errors and odd things which have occurred in certain episodes, something which has given me great pleasure and a lot of fun for many years.

There's a page on the Kes Website which is dedicated to this, it's called Voyager's Mysteries-and how to solve them. There you can find a lot of explanations for many things, like the Ocampa life-span, the never ending supply of torpedoes, what Threshold really was about, the secret with Owen Paris and who Nicole Janeway really is.

 

[Lynx]

Yes, I remember when she mentioned her uncle which convinced me that the writers had their heads up their asses.

Thanks!
I forgot to mention that in an earlier post when I brought up when Benaren called Kes "my favorite daughter" which could be interpreted that she had at least one sister or maybe more.

Since she had at least one uncle, we can assume that the Ocampa have more than one child.

 

[Swedish Borg]

Thanks!
I forgot to mention that in an earlier post when I brought up when Benaren called Kes "my favorite daughter" which could be interpreted that she had at least one sister or maybe more.

Since she had at least one uncle, we can assume that the Ocampa have more than one child.

Then why is it that everyone is convinced that the Ocampa can only have one child per couple?

As for "favorite daughter", it's a joke that people do all the time. Like when you say to you mother that she's your favorite mom. I mean it's understood a cute sweet joke between relatives. That's how I understood it. The uncle thing is just a brain fart IMO.

 

[Tosk]

Then why is it that everyone is convinced that the Ocampa can only have one child per couple?

Because they are ignoring some of the evidence?

 

[Timo]

Probably not, because why would evidence arise as a thing in the first place? What could possibly make people turn off their sets at the conclusion of "Elogium" and start thinking "Weird how this episode implied/established the Ocampa can only have one child per couple"?

I mean, it's not something stated in the episode. It's not the dramatic point of the episode. It does not happen in the episode. To put it in the episode takes mental effort. So why would anybody be "convinced" of it?

Beats me. Really beats me. I mean, people can go to the fridge thinking "Ah, this episode was about pedophilia" - there's a thread or two on that very interpretation right here. It's not difficult to understand the train of thought in that case. A character in distress and psychologically lost, her single-digit age emphasized over and over again, with a creepily pseudo-avuncular character looming over her, all that. It's clearly nothing the writer would ever have considered for a second, but it can be read into the episode if one must. The "one child per couple" thing is a construct - you can't just read it into the episode, you have to write it into it.

Once you do, it of course fits right in - scifi is malleable like that. But the impetus for doing so... Where does it come from? Perhaps it's a Phil Farrand kind of thing: wow, I found a potential logical hiccup here, cool, now let's consider the weird implications. But it could also be more of a "VGR sucks and here's the proof" thing, with no opening left unexploited to portray the show in a negative light. Hard to tell.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Tosk]

What could possibly make people turn off their sets at the conclusion of "Elogium" and start thinking "Weird how this episode implied/established the Ocampa can only have one child per couple"?

Because they talk about "now or never" and use the singular "child" over and over. Kes yelling, "If I am ever going to have a child, it has to be now!"

It forms a mental image that, apparently, is not easily shifted.

 

[Boris Skrbic]

I searched the dialogue again and the writer seems very careful not to use ‘children’ in reference to Kes or the Ocampa as a people, although the plural does appear when characters are talking about children in general. All it would’ve taken is one occurrence, perhaps in this line which isn’t about Kes’s child:

“As the child has her own child, the parent must acknowledge her true adulthood.”

The way it stands, we really have to imagine that Kes isn’t thinking about more than one child because of an earlier personal decision or another offscreen reason that need not be restated, but no, I can’t argue that anything on the show requires only one child, especially given the evidence from elsewhere in the series.

 

[Swedish Borg]

Because they talk about "now or never" and use the singular "child" over and over. Kes yelling, "If I am ever going to have a child, it has to be now!"

It forms a mental image that, apparently, is not easily shifted.

There's also the fact that in the alternate timeline, Kes and Tom Paris only have one girl and then that girl and Harry Kim only have one boy... That definitely reinforces that impression.

 

[Oddish]

There's also the fact that in the alternate timeline, Kes and Tom Paris only have one girl and then that girl and Harry Kim only have one boy... That definitely reinforces that impression.

And it would have worked fine... as long as they made us aware that Ocampa could and did bear multiple offspring, if they chose to.

Star Trek is super flexible, if you apply enough technobabble, mystical alien physiology, or temporal anomalies. But you di have to explain yourself. Your audience is paying attention!

 

[Bornin1980something]

^Another option is to keep things mysterious, but acknowledge the mystery in story. E.g, "We do not dicuss it with outsiders."

 

[Oddish]

^Another option is to keep things mysterious, but acknowledge the mystery in story. E.g, "We do not dicuss it with outsiders."

That would have been acceptable if they'd left it at that: it acknowledged that there was an in-universe explanation. But I was also fine with Enterprise telling us how it happened, and even integrating it with the story of Soong's augments.

 

[dupersuper]

breaking the very rules he quotes and never getting anything but medals for it,

Kirks rule-breaking is greatly exaggerated.

 

[Lynx]

Then why is it that everyone is convinced that the Ocampa can only have one child per couple?

As for "favorite daughter", it's a joke that people do all the time. Like when you say to you mother that she's your favorite mom. I mean it's understood a cute sweet joke between relatives. That's how I understood it. The uncle thing is just a brain fart IMO.

Yes, but when I try to explain and correct all the errors and contradictions when it comes to the "writing" of this series, then I have to clutch every straw I find to stay afloat.