When did the Janeway hatred truly start to coalesce?

ME: Injecting a substantial dose of fallibility into the character of Kathryn Janeway? Definitely crossing the line. Thank goodness sanity prevailed.

 

Or the Borg might have really, really wanted to assimilate Picard again.

Archer would have got beaten up a lot but would also somehow have got the two sides to agree to a ceasefire.

"Equinox" really needed to have a third part. I would love to have seen Chakotay lead a mutiny in "Equinox II" because it's really interesting that Chakotay and Burke are very different XOs and I wanted to see more of that.

 

We see in both "Year of Hell" and "Equinox" that Kathryn Janeway can go seriously Ahab when she wants to.

 

Was Janeway's sentencing of Tom to solitary confinement viewed positively, negatively or...merely neutrally?

 

Personally, I thought it was going overboard.

Snatching his rank and 30 days in the brig was excessive. A week, okay. But a month?

 

Pre-covid, neutrally. Post-covid, 30 days of solitary confinement sounds horrific.

I think Tom may have still technically been on parole at this point. Perhaps Janeway was hoping that by giving him a demotion and 30 days solitary confinement, the parole review board would consider the matter closed and wouldn't feel the need to extend his sentence.

 

A month doesn't seem like an especially long time as long as he's not entirely deprived of entertainment options. People were allowed to visit him, so calling it solitary confinement is overstating matters.

I think if it feels like a long time, it's because we're so used to seeing Our Heroes get slapped on the wrist rather than facing any real consequences. Carey, Seska, Torres and Tuvok practically blew up the ship while going against orders, and IIRC Janeway was deeply disappointed with Tuvok in particular. Truly a fate worse than any amount of brig time.

Suder murdered someone and he got confined to quarters with zero brig time.

Then again, Janeway arguably tortured and/or threatened to kill an Equinox crewman and she got...er...what did she get, again? Do we think she would have given that same treatment to anyone under her command?

 

Well, Neelix tells him he is to have no non-essential conversation with the prisoner; the EMH also leaves immediately after treating his injury, so these visits were functional only.

Kim is allowed to visit him once, but only for a few minutes for which 'the captain finally gave him permission'. Doesn't exactly sound like Kim got to visit him easily, or that Paris got loads of diversion that way. I'm sure that those few minutes he got were precious to him.

 

IIRC he did have a PADD, so he could read and watch movies and play Fruit Ninja? By my understanding of contemporary solitary confinement conditions, that's not so bad.

 

He has a PADD, yes, but we know that these PADDS can apparently contain a few files only, otherwise they wouldn't be carrying around heaps of them in some episodes as we see them do

 

Depends on who you ask. Me, I regard a rank reduction and 30 days normal confinement as reasonable. However, solitary confinement is considered to be inhumane, and was abolished as a punishment years ago.

 

Then, this is either a case of a definition "evolving" (along with the rest of humanity?) or the show's creators not wanting to accurately depict the mind-rending effects of genuine solitary confinement.

 

I've always viewed that as a security issue, not a storage issue.

Also, standard PADDs were connected to the main computer, as we saw in Fistful of Datas when one of Beverly's plays got replaced with Data's poetry.

 

They can probably be isolated, though. I doubt Tom was allowed access to the full ship's library during his confinement. Though I hope he was allowed something. Maybe some approved Federation literature and self-help material, their secular equivalent of the Bible.

 

He could have gotten an 'empty' PADD, just for writing that letter to his dad, and nothing else, or it could have contained full access to whatever he desired. We don't know, but I'm guessing it would have been closer to the former than the latter.

Still wondering why 7 literally got a _box_ full of PADDS with her parents' research. Can't have been because of security issues, since they were all meant for the same person.

 

Given the amount of information the Hansons had... years of observations and data... I am not surprised there were a bunch of padds for Seven.

 

Even in modern prisons, inmates are allowed books of their choice to read; I'd be flabbergasted if that tablet Tom had contained word processing software and nothing else.

 

I like to think that there are certain rules regarding how prisoners can and cannot be treated.

 

More in general, I'm wondering how much leeway Janeway has in determining his punishment. To mention the extremes, could she have decided to not punish him at all, after formally logging his transgression? Or could she have locked him up for years, without Starfleet coming back on that later, even if Paris himself never filed a complaint?

True, but I would usually imagine the choice of material to be limited in both amount (say, max. 2 books per term) and selection options (only what the prison library has to offer, for example).

 

I like to think there was an approved prison library, which could fit in a PADD. It would likely include assorted literature from humanity, Vulcan, and other Federation members. The kind of thing that would allow a prisoner to improve himself, which is reportedly the goal for all Federation citizens. And a prisoner would need it more than most...