What continuity errors are there on Voyager?

... It looked like him because it was programmed that way by the Doctor. It could have looked like Tom Paris, Leonard McCoy, Spock, Louis Pasteur or B'Elanna Torres, if the Doctor had chosen that. He could have changed the hologram's appearance any moment he wished.

And to B'Elanna, it didn't matter that it looked like Crell Moset specifically - she didn't even know what Moset looked like, or who he was, and she never commented that she disliked that it/he looked like Moset. She hated that the hologram looked Cardassian. (Then later, after a Bajoran crewmember reveals the truth about Moset's experiments, B'Elanna says: "So I was right". Eh, you were right about what exactly, B'Elanna? You never said that Moset was evil, you didn't even care who the hologram looked like... You were right about what? That all Cardassians are evil? - And this is just one of the many serious problems with that episode. But nevermind, I'll leave this for another thread - let's focus on the issue of the inconsistencies of the presentation of holograms on VOY.)

Which could have been fixed easily, anyway: "Computer, change parameters: Apperance: Human"

Which, as I said, didn't make sense, if the hologram was just an ordinary non-sentient hologram, why would he do anything that the Doctor didn't program him to do?

Even if he was sentient (which is very problematic as it means that the Doctor committed a murder), it's still unclear how did he develop that personality and those views? As I've pointed out, the episode ignores all those obvious questions and instead expects us to accept the hologram as a representation of Moset himself. None of it makes sense.

If they wanted to have Moset in the episode, they should have found a way to involve the real Moset....flashback, time travel, I don't care, but something that makes some sense... or maybe they just shouldn't have involved him at all.

If they only had acknowledged that fact in the episode itself, it would have made all the difference.

Imagine a dialogue roughly to this effect:

A: If we use the results of Moset's research, we will be justifying his methods. We must make it clear that it is not acceptable to torture and kill people in the name of science. We owe it to his victims.
B: But we cannot do anything for his victims now. However, this cure could help many people. Maybe the victims would be happier to know that something good has come out of their suffering.
A: But where does it end? What if future physicians and scientists decide that their medical research is important enough to sacrifice a few 'unimportant' people?
B: You have a point, but we are, in fact, already using results obtained through inhumane means: just look at the older history of Earth medicine; today we would consider those experiments deeply unethical and inhumane.
A: That was in the past. We have to draw the line somewhere. We must send the message that this is not acceptable anymore.
C: But...what about the Borg technology? Maybe we shouldn't be using it? Are we justifying what the Borg did?
(C exchanges a glance with Seven)

etc.

There, the episode itself would have acknowledged all the issues and different viewpoints, asked some difficult questions, call the characters on their hypocrisy, and all in all, it would have been a better, more interesting and more honest episode.

 

Wow, that's a really good point that I don't recall being brought up here before. With all the lives that were ruined by the borg no one has any qualms about using any of their technology - technology gained thru the suffering of others.

Impressive.

 

Was it? I mean did the Borg develop that tech through actually torturing and killing people or was it just tech they developed on their own, or through methods that didn't involve killing anyone? The assimilation procedures could easily have been from beneficial medical tech that the Borg simply perverted for their own ends, which would mean that VOY's use of Borg tech would be just using it for the beneficial ways they were originally designed before the Borg twisted them.

 

We do it now.
Many of the medical procedures & cures we used to today were taken from the inhumane experiments the Nazi' used back in WWII.

However, as I said it's taking something from evil and using it for a greater good. Voyager isn't using that technology to ruin more lives, they've used to to create new technology and even new cures. Bringing the info of the tech back to the Federation could help improve the lives of billions upon billions of people. It's giving back for all those lives taken.

The debate over the Crell Mosset hologram is irrelevant.
The debate in the ep. is about what we're talking about here.
"Is it ethical to thrive off the pain and suffering of others?"

 

I think you're mixing up your "if; then" statements a little, there.

 

Explain?

 

1) I think a replicator can convert energy to matter but can we assume that it can work the other way around? Do people 'recycle' their coffee cups back into the system?

2) It's not a 1:1 ratio i.e. running the replicators themselves use energy (we can assume this from replicator rationing that we see for much of the series - why bother with rationing if they can just convert materials they find to energy on a 1:1 basis)

3) I would have thought that creating super dense materials like hull components and torpedoes would require a LOT of energy. This is why industrial replicators are needed.

4) Once you replicate the torpedo casing you have to arm the warhead. I don;t think a replicator can replicate energy in this way. Can anybody recall if that El Auran in DS9 was able to produse those probability manipulation devices fully charged? In the early days at least we know that they didn't have any method of charging the torpedoes because they say so. It would have been sensible to show them acquiring or inventing some tech to do this later on.

 

TNG & DS9 have shown people putting uneaten and eaten food & the dishes back in the replicator to be "reabsorbed".

DS9 has industrial replicators because it's a huge space station and the amount of traffic & supply and demand of such an instillation would require replicators to support such heavy demands. The rationing on Voyager is what allows larger items to get made. Not using the replcators for such things as food, saves energy. That's why Neelix cooking & growing his own veggies for the entire crew is very important. The food & drink demand for a crew 0f 150 or so is great. His job cuts daily replicator use down by at least half. However, you also never know when you'll come across the next debris field, so you also wouldn't waste replicator energy on pointless stuff too. Like Chakotay making Janeway a watch.

"Dreadnaugt" & "Warhead" have shown both Be'Lanna, Harry & Tuvok can arm & reprogram a warhead.

 

The debate over the Moset hologram is very relevant, since this is the topic about continuity errors, and I brought up the inconsistencies of the presentation of holograms on the show as an example of poor continuity.

The ethical debate from the episode itself is relevant to the topic if you accept my view that the ethics of the VOY crew have been inconsistent.

You got it backwards. That's like saying: "This man was the property of his slave-owner, therefore this man was not human."

It should be: if the Doctor is sentient, then he SHOULD not be considered the property of Starfleet.

 

Whoa, long thread.

The easiest things first. According to a con appearence by Braga in 2000, the writers/producers "just forgot" about the BORG baby, assuming they had already mentioned his/her relocation to a local race.

The Lady BORG from Survival Instinct was never seen again because she died. She tells Seven at the end of the ep that she's expected to be dead within the month and she was grateful to Janeway for being allowed to end her days on the ship.

There was a scene where we see the crew manufacture a "shuttle". It was early season 5's "Extreme Risk" when the crew designed and built a protoype Delta Flyer in 3 or 4 days. If they can do that so quickly with a new ship, it stands to reason whipping up a tried and true replacement shuttle was child's play by season 5. Regarding the hyprocrisy of using BORG components, I agree with the poster who claimed the BORG compnents weren't BORG, they were Katarian, or Vulcan, or Hirogen like any number of items that the BORG stole from a victimized race. As I think they made clear in "Scorpion"...

TORRES: That's right. The Borg gain knowledge through assimilation. What they can't assimilate, they can't understand.
JANEWAY: But we don't assimilate, we investigate, and in this case, that's given us an edge. We've discovered something they need.


The continuity thing that bugs the heck out of me was the inconsistency in how fast the ship flew. For a ship that would need to travel 70-75 years to cover 75,ooo light years, it was amazing to me when they would go several light years in just a few hours.

Now for the hard one.

Don't view this link if you are faint of heart.

http://www.auschwitz.dk/doctors.htm

The controversy of using the data from these experiments.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/naziexp.html

I'm sure you will quickly recognize that the arguments offered as to whether the fictional crew of Voyager should use the results of the Crell experiments directly mirror the real world arguments for using the results of the nazi experiments. Yes, there are some in the "real world" who believe its disingenious (sp?) to forbid nazi data when others are using data from the Tuskegee experiments on black males in the early 1900's by American doctors studying Syphillis but that doesn't mean the arguments for/against aren't valid, just that they are difficult ethical ones.



Janeway decided she had to have it "both ways".

Utilize the results and save B'Elanna at any cost, even at the possible loss of B'Elanna's respect AND take away the temptation of the Captain ever using that data again by encouraging the EMH to consider deleting the program "quickly".

Its not a sentient question to my way of thinking.bbCrell Mosett wasn't any more sentient than Geordie's holoprogram of the Enterprise's original design engineer (name?), but he was a database of tainted information. Making him "look" human would have been a lie. Janeway didn't lie to B'Elanna, but this episode was the final straw between the two in season 5, and they never buried the hatchet until season 6's "Barge of the Dead."

As for what the writers did RIGHT regarding their continuity, I think this Janeway/B'Elanna arc is one of the best over the 7 years of Voyager. The two finally reconciled in "BOTD" and this reconciliation was made manifest not just in the hug at the end of that ep, but rather was driven home when B'Elanna forced her way onto Janeway's away mission to the BORG cube in season 6's finale, "Unimatrix Zero, Part I".

"Torres: Tactical Directive thirty-six A."

 

It is very frustrating that I have to repeat this over and over: if the hologram was not sentient, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever for him to do or say things that the Doctor didn't program him to do. It is illogical. It is stupid. It's like the episode was written by children or for children, so the idea was to make everything as simple as possible, even at the expense of sacrificing logic: if we make a hologram based on a database about Moset's medical data, then it has to look like Moset, too, and if it looks like Moset, then it has to act like Moset. Anything else might be too complicated for the viewers to understand, let's just keep it simple.

The Starfleet database was partial and flawed in that it didn't contain any data about Moset's crimes, about the way he got his research, and it also had no data about his real personality. There is no way that any of that information could have become a part of the hologram on its own, if it wasn't in the data that the Doctor used or if the Doctor didn't add it on his own, which is obviously not the case. For a sentient hologram to start acting like real Moset for no discernible reason is really far-fetched and inexplicable; for a non-sentient hologram to start acting like - presumably - Moset would, rather than what the Doctor would want his assistant to act, is impossible.

Unless a wizard did it.

 

ROFLMAO

 

The torpedoes were specificly described, in dialogue from Tuvok, as irreplaceable.

I have tackled this task more than once.

Short answer is that they might have done better than people thought. At the very least, the number seems consistent from Season Three on (Janeway gives the crew as 148 in two consecutive episodes in Season Three).

 

They even failed to mention him again in that episode.

 

Indeed. It was this very moral dilemma that the episode was trying to address.
A lot of valuable medical knowledge came from one particular doctor in the 20th century, who had access to a group of study subjects he did not regard as human, so he felt free to do horrible things to them. And ever since, doctors have wrestled with the implications thereof: this information could save lives, but using it could encourage others to think that they were acting "for the greater good" when doing terrible things.
Just as an example: a lot of what we know about hypothermia, including the fastest/safest way to warm up someone suffering from it, was learned by intentionally afflicting people with it, usually to the point of their death. Do we let people suffering from hypothermia die, or treat it with methods we know will work, even though they were discovered by a monster?

 

Borg queen was paraphrasing your statement as "If the Doctor is property of Starfleet, then he is not sentient."
And was suggesting that the correct order would be "If the Doctor is not sentient, then he is property of Starfleet."
That is to say, if the Doctor has achieved sentience, then he can no longer be the property of Starfleet.

 

Replicators use energy to reshape matter. And yes, we see people returning their dishes to the replicator. (And the TNG Tech Manual makes it clear that that's where the toilets go, too.)

 

In Voyager these are all pretty minor issues but the are breaks in the continuity of Voyager itself and not the discontinuity that Enterprise shows in the Greater Canon Debate.

These problems I noticed in Voyager but never bugged me. I just knew that it was difficult to keep track of that for the show and it would have been extra expenses they couldn't justify so I got over it but a lot of fans trip on it.

The only real problem I have is IF you say you have only so many torpedoes and you can't replace them then don't fire more than 38 torpedoes. That's a writer issue writing the show into discontinuity...that's controllable.

 

When did they say they could NEVER make more torpedoes?

 

There was an ep where Tuvok said that they have "no way to replace them once they are gone".

Which is just stupid. Replicators can produce the parts, and they can get antimatter from the engines.

I'd say that the best way around that is to say that at the time he said it, it was true - Voyager didn't have the capability to replace the torpedos. But any good and competant captain would make sure that getting the ability to re-arm themselves was the first thing to be done. So I can see the "Can't replace them" problem being fixed pretty damned soon. Certainly the fact that we see Voyager fire many more than 38 torpedos is proof of that!