When did the Janeway hatred truly start to coalesce?

It's fine if you feel that I started it; I'm not continuing it. You may surmise at your discretion.

Remember "Year of Hell", though. Her CMO declared her unfit to retain command, and she blew him off. So if she got a hankering for marooning people... well, any bets on who she'd dump first?

 

That's because the Doctor is an idiot.

The CMO is supposed to hand power over to the First Officer, who then "disposes" of the Captain... Which is almost what happened in ENT Hatchery, but the MACOS couldn't be trusted to follow the rules which is ridiculous, since as actual soldiers all they have is the chain of command.

Meanwhile, after what happened in Equinox, his ethical subroutines being deleted, and the Equinoix's Doctor being deleted completely, the EMH would be a fool not to put some serious security on his program.

 

Does she?

 

the idea that torpedos could not be replaced was absurd to begin with: they are basically antimatter bombs on a tiny warp drive and pretty much everybody have them. They should have said that they just found a way to adapt someone else’s technology to replace them or build the parts that can’t be replicated.

 

That's basically how I would have resolved it. A species they encountered used photonic warheads of a configuration similar to the Federation's. Once they had traded for a couple pallets of warheads, they just needed to replicate the other parts.

 

Hasn't it been established that there are elements which may be fabricated with a matter replicator, but only at a significant loss? That is to say, in order to create rare element X from "nothing", X will require considerably more energy poured into its creation than it possesses on its own (in the form of potential energy). In a similar fashion, cranking out ultra-tech warheads via shipboard replicators could require an abundance of power to make the practice, well...practical.

 

Replicating antimatter might also because problem. If it weren't, fuel would never be an issue.

 

There’s always The Neutral Zone.

 

That's like bombs over Baghdad.

 

The moderator there and I have a history.

Agreed. Consider what happened in "Lineage". B'Elanna was not a trained geneticist, and her ill-advised "alterations" could have done Miral significant harm. But the Doc was ready to make them, once B'Elanna started digging around in his program.

In her (non-canon) autobiography, Janeway declares that one thing she helped to do was to mandate hardwired protections on the ethical subroutines of all EMH's, to prevent people from turning their physicians into concentration camp Frankensteins.

 

He did, yes, but he wasn't necessarily proven 'right' in the end. He was portrayed as being so bitter that revenge was still the only thing he could settle for, no longer able to lift his mind out of the 'revenge' groove it had settled in, and he got assimilated himself as a 'reward', while Janeway & Crew escaped. In that sense, Janeway still 'won' that confrontation, regardless of whether you'd agree with Arturis or not.

I still don't see what she could have done differently. As Kes told her, species 8472 was intent on destroying and killing everything. And, as someone said, assimilation beats annihilation. As horrible as the Borg were, species 8472 were worse.

And yes, it was later established that you could reason with some members of them, but that's a later retcon, and there wasn't the slightest indication of that in Scorpion.

Had Janeway turned her tail, refused to get involved, species 8472 would have won the war, and the proceeded to destroy the rest of the galaxy. Arturis' people still wouldn'd have survived. At least, that was the most likely outcome by far according to the information Janeway had in Scorpion.

So no, while it was a gruesome and controversial decision she made, I still think it was the best option available to her, given what she knew at that moment.

 

But it was bad information in good faith.

Probably a translation error.

From what we found out later, 8472 would have gone home after it killed the Borg.

Captain Ransom who is a pussy, would have just ran, despite the perceived danger to the galaxy, and the Borg would have been wiped out and no one else would have been in any danger at all.

Meanwhile Picard would have stuck to the Prime Directive or the Non Interference Directive and kept out of the way of a war between an enemy of the Federation and an unknown quantity who did not want his help.

Sisko would have laid into the Borg.

Kirk would have made out with the Borg Queen.

 

^ So in that case, it still wasn't really Janeway's, but Kes' error. Perhaps Janeway's error being that she trusted that information implicitly.

In reality, I think it was the intention of the scorpion episode that species 8472 was really that malevolent, and that it was simply retconned later, because they wanted another 8472 story, the same way the Borg were repeatedly retconned.

An in-universe explanation could be that not all 8472 think alike, even though they are telepathic, and Kes just had contact with a particularly hateful one.

I agree that Picard might have chosen for non-interference. As to whether or not that would have been better, I can't say.

 

Who would have absorbed the notion of freedom and individuality from the snog session, and promptly dissolved the collective forever...

 

Janeway made two errors.

1. She took it on absolute faith that what Kes said was correct. While Kes was not lying, as mentioned above, there are any number of reasons she could have been wrong, including telepathically linking with a particularly hateful member.

2. Janeway didn't even attempt to communicate with Species 8472.


While the first mistake is perhaps understandable, the second is not.


Regarding Arturis...

Just because someone is more about revenge than justice doesn't mean they weren't right.

 

She tried, at least once, when she found that initial bioship attached to the Borg cube. She got no response. The creature then attacked Harry without provocation, and the bioship attacked Voyager.

I don't think the tried again after that, which you could see as an error on her side.

My point here is not about whether Arturis is right or not (though I've also said something about that in my posts, too). My point is that he has to carry the consequences for his actions, while Janeway gets to shrug off his critique without any further consequences, escaping scot free. Because Janeway Must Win. He could have been 100% right, and still end up the punished party.

 

That's exactly one of the biggest issues with Janeway. It presents Janeway as an unrealistic character, for lack of a better term.

It's like the writers were afraid to give her faults or be presented as wrong on occasion because they were afraid it would weaken her character. I'd argue the exact opposite... such things strengthen a character. Nobody bats 1,000. Janeway was written like she did. Kirk did not always win. Picard did not always win. Archer did not always win. Even Sisko did not always win. But Janeway was written to always win. Even the finale, despite killing Janeway, still had Janeway win.

(By way of future Janeway sacrificing herself to the Borg Queen, present Janeway was literally given a cake, ate it, and still got to have a full cake.)

 

^ So we do, in fact, agree on this (as these were exactly my feelings when I started citing the Arturis incident on page 36, and more in general on page 34 when I tried to describe the issues I had with Janeway.)

I think that's also why I came to the conclusion that I have less problems with early Janeway. At least she still knew she couldn't realistically win each and every confrontation (and the episodes in early voyager also reflected this more).

 

I am SO adding that in.

https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/who-needs-chuck-norris-when-youve-got-kathryn-janeway.307281/

 

Awesome Arturis.