When did the Janeway hatred truly start to coalesce?

We need to get Mirror Janeway and this guy in the same room.

 

Although I'm fine with the women of SNW, I agree that Kathryn Janeway was a truly special character, one no one could have replaced.

Great picture, too.

 

Kira Nerys for me, but different strokes for different folks.

 

Many strokes.

 

In general, hatred for any character (unless we're dealing with bigots) really flows from an action of theirs, which is more likely to repose in writers/producers decisions.

One of my most hated Janeway scenes lies in "Nightingale", when a certain character finally reminds her that his Starfleet career has been adversely affected by their circumstances. Rather than sympathize or try to make things right, Janeway gets downright accusatory, forcing him to tell her what she wants to hear. I'm fairly certain that at the end of Season 6, when Tom got re-promoted, there were a lot of angry letters to the effect of why him and not Harry? The writers, insistent on holding to this nasty inside joke like an toddler clinging fiercely to someone else's toy, produced this scene to justify their actions. The fact that it made Janeway look tyrannical and unsympathetic was just collateral.

 

Getting cooch or getting command; he was screwed either way.

 

Make no mistake, I like both him and Janeway, but both had their character assassination moments. Janeway had the scene I described, plus Tuvix, plus her resorting to torture in "Equinox". But look at Harry in "Resolutions". He was acting like a spoiled nine-year-old instead of a trained Starfleet officer and department head.

Regarding Tuvix, i remember one person saying that they just couldn't like Janeway after what she did there. While I don't think the "Janeway hatred" (what there was of it) has just one point of origin, it certainly gathered steam there.

 

Operations is a department that needs one person at a time and there are three shifts a day, and no one handles operations during the night shift. The night shift on the bridge is two people, and I'm not even certain that Swing Shift is a thing on Voyager.

So the Operations Staff is probably 3 or four people, including Kim, and as department head Kim has to allocate which day of the week each of these people have to work.

Any Starfleet graduate, can do every job on a Star Ship, one day out of the Academy.

 

In this topic, justification is irrelevant (though I may bring that one up in the proper topic at some point ). While certainly Janeway gets the stamp of disapproval from some people for assorted reasons (including something as minor as not liking her voice), I think that a lot of so-called "hate" is more just "acknowledging that Janeway stepped in it from time to time" (God knows I do, and Janeway is one of my favorite captains). And when you google Janeway's worst decisions, Harry's rank is often on the list (Trekculture even put it at #1).

 

It must be of some import, given that most of the 14 department heads don't attend senior staff meetings... but Operations does.

What's also odd was that Pete Durst was an operations officer... why wasn't he in charge of the department, at least while he was alive?

 

^Presumably because rank doesn't override senior staff determinations by the captain, just as if Kim is manning the conn then everyone should be deferring to him.

Now why Kim was senior staff to begin, especially once the ship is in the DQ, is something of a mystery.

 

It's possible that Durst was replacing someone of a lower rank who died?

He may have already been a section head, and just worked in Operations whenever Harry was a man down?

 

Best qualified in terms of skill. I noticed that Janeway tend to appoint those who are the best skilled as part of her senior staff.

 

And then ruin their Starfleet career by not promoting them...

 

Given what we saw of Kim, I question whether he was really "best skilled" within his department.

 

Disagreed. Despite Harry's young age and inexperience (and occasional cluelessness), I saw only competence in how he did his job. And, he was the go-to guy when someone needed something built from the ground up.

 

B'Elanna was promoted above Carey.

Dekker was demoted below Kirk, who himself was demoted to do the job.

Department Heading is about HR, not being the chosen one.

 

Kirk wasn't demoted in TMP. He was given command of the Enterprise to deal with V'Ger. It wasn't until the end of TVH that he was demoted.

 

Being senior staff isn't just about how well you can do the operational aspects of your job, it's also about how well you can handle being the leader of a team, and I never got the sense that Kim was particularly good at that, especially in circumstances where he was placed in command.

 

Consider that Captain J. should have thrown B'Elanna in the brig, but instead she made her chief engineer because of her superior skill level. That is not a universally popular decision by any means (I can just imagine how the rest of the Starfleet engineering staff felt about it, seeing their colleague get booted in favor of someone they likely saw as a borderline psycho), but it indicates Janeway's overall mindset. If any of her senior staff had been deficient, it's safe to assume that she would have found someone who wasn't.