Was it really Janeways fault they got stuck there?

[Guy Gardener]

Ocampa was a Kazon world.

The Ocampa were vermin it was the Kazon's job to put down.

Sometimes they trained this vermin to be slaves, but it really was a waste of time.

Imagine what would happen if one random Starfleet Captain told the Klingons or Romulans that they were not allowed to keep slaves, and that all their slaves were free on only that Captain's say so and moral fortitude?

Fleets would be sent to Earth to level the frakker until it looked like the 12th century.

 

[Guy Gardener]

From State of Flux later in season 1.

PARIS: Captain, another Kazon ship is approaching, trying to hail the disabled ship. They're not within visual range yet.
TUVOK: Perhaps someone else picked up the distress call.
JANEWAY: What's their ETA?
PARIS: At their current speed, four hours twenty minutes. Should I tell them we're here?

So yeah.. Voyager's sensors are good enough to detect approaching ships coming in a good distance away. Given Tuvok didn't report any coming in, it's probably safe to assume it's because they weren't.

Ships sensors, long and short, detect warp bubbles, not actual tiny slithers of metal trillions of miles away.

Ocampa was a Kazon world.

If they can hold a world with one city ship and two shuttles, then the Ocampa deserved to be slaves.

Maybe they didn't have more city ships on Ocampa, but they had to have had dozens more or even hundreds more shuttles which were powered down and would look like a tin out door privy to long range sensors.

Kathryn was ignorant as to how intense Kazon saturation was in the area, and Neelix was ignorant as to how powerful Voyager was at full power. Voyager was no where near full power and I think in the season two Barclay episode that they said that Voyager was operating at %10 during the pilot.

Think about this...

Did they stop by the Ocampan city after the credits, so that Kes could say good bye to her family (again) and pick up some clean clothes, or did they RUN?

 

[stj]

The plot is very clear. They could not figure out how to operate the array before Kazon reinforcements arrive. Their only alternatives were to destroy the array, to deny the Kazon overwhelming immediate superiority (and the power to enslave the Ocampa,) or to make a deal with the Kazon. Sorry, but everyone who mentions a timer on a bomb is wrong. As this very episode demonstrated, timers can be disarmed.

Further, the whole point of Tuvok claiming that denying the Kazon salvage rights is a violation of the PD, is to establish that Janeway will bend the rules to do what she thinks is the right thing, no matter the cost. In a later episode she even planned to kamikaze Voyager to stop Torres' superbomb. It is not clear what the PD means, but what Tuvok says is a writers' shout out. It may be argued that violating some mysterious phrase like "prime directive," which doesn't have any meaning, is fake drama. If so, it's not unique to Voyager, much less Janeway.

Lastly, Anwar is quite correct that there is no reason to think the return trip would be any less murderous than the journey to the array. It was a self-contradiction in the episode's story premises. But it was clearly imposed so that Janeway would have to make a choice between return at the cost of Ocampan slavery, or a possible lifetime journey, whether short (i.e., catastrophic) or long.

 

[Anwar]

If Bajor had signed a treaty with Cardassi, we wouldn't be using the term Annexed. An Annexed terriroty usually implies a certain measure of coercion.

It would be like Country A invading smaller weaker country B, and saying we've decided to annex your territory and incoperate it into ours. Please sign this document to say you are ok with tis. And if you don't we'll just get someone who will.

Which still would mean that there was formal documentation signed that would be acceptable under Galactic Law that all the major powers recognize, and that the Feds couldn't just go in without violating said Laws and making all the other Empires out there (like the Klingons and Romulans) with conquered worlds nervous.

 

[MacLeod]

In the case of Bajor it seems as if prior to the Cardassian invasion, it was a non-aligned world. If they had say a treaty with the UFP the Cardassians might not have invaded.

 

[Anwar]

In the case of Bajor it seems as if prior to the Cardassian invasion, it was a non-aligned world. If they had say a treaty with the UFP the Cardassians might not have invaded.

Maybe, but it doesn't change that they probably had the government legitimize their occupation in a way that was acceptable via whatever intergalactic law everyone obeyed.

 

[DonIago]

In the novelverse the Cardassians never invaded Bajor per se. The recognized Bajoran government permitted everything that occurred (though the Cardassians did take numerous actions that the government was unaware of).

In a sense, the Bajoran citizenry is to blame for allowing corrupt officials to remain in power until it was too late to do anything about the situation.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Lastly, Anwar is quite correct that there is no reason to think the return trip would be any less murderous than the journey to the array. It was a self-contradiction in the episode's story premises. But it was clearly imposed so that Janeway would have to make a choice between return at the cost of Ocampan slavery, or a possible lifetime journey, whether short (i.e., catastrophic) or long.

Never say that Anwar was right, you might as well be feeding Mogwai after midnight. Think about how the crew of the Val Jean and Voyager died. No one ran awry of strange radiation that turned them into frogs, and no was thrown against a bulk head at the speed of light with such concussive force that the crewman turned into gas.

Crew died because consoles that could have been powered down exploded in their faces, and crew died because they fell over at significantly less speeds than one would fall when falling off a merrygoround.

That's it.

With a 10 second countdown to a launch, after several hours warning as to when that ten second countdown would start, and the crew was seated and buckled down into crash positions, with all the explodly consols powered down, unless they were absolutely necessary, then everyone made sure that they did not have their their faces right up to any of those explody consols... No one had to die on the return trip.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Cardassia was the legal owner of Bajor the same way Britain was the legal owner of India or France was the legal owner of Algeria or China is the legal owner of Tibet.

Legality is in the eye of the beholder. An occupation is legal when it would be politically disastrous for other countries to say it's not legal. Powerful countries give legal permission slips to other powerful countries to invade less powerful countries because they want to make nice with said powerful countries. It makes the occupation 'legal', but doesn't make it legitimate.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Britain didn't "legitimately" hold India for a couple centuries?

Might equals right.

The Ocampa were underground having abandoned the dead surface.

Caretaker was in the sky with enough weapons to exterminate the kazon, but he didn't.

Here's the real pickle to question the legitimacy of claiming a dead world with no noticeable civilization whatsofuckering ever...

(Parched red clay, cracked under the red sky. Janeway, Paris, Chakotay, Tuvok and Neelix beam down. People run to a building nearby.)
PARIS: Why would anyone want to live in a place like this?
NEELIX: The rich cormaline deposits are very much in demand.
CHAKOTAY: The Ocampa use it for barter?
NEELIX: Not the Ocampa, the Kazon-Ogla.
JANEWAY: The Kazon-Ogla? Who are the Kazon-Ogla?
NEELIX: They are. Kazon sects control this part of the quadrant. Some have food, some have ore, some have water. They all trade and they all kill each other for it.

They have a cormaline mine and a cormaline refinery and a cormaline shop which everyone in the quadrant uses.

As legitimate as "blood diamonds"?

Don't be an ass.

The Ocampa had no interest in the surface of their planet or space.

Pets in a kennel.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Britain didn't "legitimately" hold India for a couple centuries?

Might equals right.

False.

Unless you're a character on the Game of Thrones, a foreign power coming and forcing their will on a local population is a bad thing.

Then again, I'm not convinced you actually believe the things you say, because you have a tendency to push buttons for the sake of it.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Might equals righteousness?

Is that better?

Was Queen Victoria the Empress of India an asshole or a liar?

As your current theory stands, the Native Americans could ask all non Native Americans to leave North America, so that they could have their home back, and good manners would force all non Native Americans to eject themselves off the continent.

That would be pleasant and hilarious, but it's not going to happen without some massive cultural shift on par with a literal apocalypse.

 

[doubleohfive]

Folks just want to blame Janeway for everything at every chance they get.

Not me.

Nor I.

Janeway's decision is made quite clear as are her motivations for said decision.

 

[bbjeg]

Folks just want to blame Janeway for everything at every chance they get.

Not me.

Nor I.

Janeway's decision is made quite clear as are her motivations for said decision.

That's the issue though. Janeway blamed herself but there were so many factors that were dismissed in the series. Chakotay never says "We could have made it back if I waited for that Kazon battleship to be further away from that station before crashing my ship into it.", nor did B'elanna say something like "I shouldn't have engaged that Cardassian ship then plot that course into the Badlands."

 

[DonIago]

I suppose it is a bit of a missed opportunity that we never got a good "It's a Wonderful Life" episode showing what would happen if Our Heroes hadn't been yanked into the DQ.

I could easily see such an episode being a two-parter.

 

[QuarkforNagus]

Even if one were to grant that her decision to destroy the array got them stranded there, there were plenty of subsequent opportunities to get her crew home.

I would contend that, more than one poor decision, it was her refusal to accept other offers that resulted in them being stuck in the Delta Quadrant for as long as they did.

If she just gave Q that damn baby he wanted, or returned that suicidal Q to the continuum for punishment, he could have snapped them all back home.

She could have, at the very least, asked if there was some kind of arrangement they could have made. It's just plain negligent on her part not to at least ask.

 

[Kevman7987]

I suppose it is a bit of a missed opportunity that we never got a good "It's a Wonderful Life" episode showing what would happen if Our Heroes hadn't been yanked into the DQ.

I could easily see such an episode being a two-parter.

That would have made for a good episode if written well. I get the feeling they just would have had most of the characters get killed by the Dominion War though.

 

[Anwar]

Even if one were to grant that her decision to destroy the array got them stranded there, there were plenty of subsequent opportunities to get her crew home.

I would contend that, more than one poor decision, it was her refusal to accept other offers that resulted in them being stuck in the Delta Quadrant for as long as they did.

If she just gave Q that damn baby he wanted, or returned that suicidal Q to the continuum for punishment, he could have snapped them all back home.

She could have, at the very least, asked if there was some kind of arrangement they could have made. It's just plain negligent on her part not to at least ask.

All their attempts to get home faster had to fail, that's the "Gilligan Syndrome" the show suffered from.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Might equals righteousness?

Is that better?

Was Queen Victoria the Empress of India an asshole or a liar?

As your current theory stands, the Native Americans could ask all non Native Americans to leave North America, so that they could have their home back, and good manners would force all non Native Americans to eject themselves off the continent.

That would be pleasant and hilarious, but it's not going to happen without some massive cultural shift on par with a literal apocalypse.

A dictator.

Your analogy is ridiculous. No government has the right to take away the individual freedoms of any person, regardless of ethnicity or whether your ancestors 500 years ago were born there or not.

Supreme executive powah derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical military entitlement. If you need to threaten a populace with violence and imprisonment to stay in power, you do not deserve that power. If you treat one group of people as automatically inferior to another group of people based solely on birth, you are a dictator.

 

[Guy Gardener]

It's like you haven't been paying attention to history.

Every leader there has ever been has been a dictator in someone's eyes and Utopia, which is what you're talking about, does not exist. What a government shouldn't do has nothing to do with what a government has to do.

Considering your idealism, it seems impossible for you not to raise arms against your own government immediately if you are a truly moral person, no matter where in the world you are living, if theses bodies do not rise to your impossible standards.