Re: Why does Janeway seem so often intent on suicidal courses of actio
Okay, I'm a bit new. I just started watching ST this year while excercising on Netflix and seen them all except TOS (I don't care for b/w). I'm now rewatching bits and pieces of eps I liked since I usually don't watch things twice over if I don't have to. I liked them all in their own right (even Enterprise) except Voyager I liked the least. Many things bother me.
One of the biggest is that Janeway seems intent on very impractical or downright suicidal courses of action and justifies it on Starfleet principles.
Two examples from Season 5:
In "Drone", where 7's tech plus Doc's mobile emitter accidentally create a 29th century drone. Janeway refuses to pull the plug, loses the Doctor (mobile emitter) on this experiment and she relies fully on the new drone's loyalty (they have earned in what? A few days?) to not fall in borg hands. Of course, the outcome validated the methods (TV logic, not my own), but such a drone in the hands of the borg would have been devasting not just humanity but the whole galaxy. Basically if this child chose otherwise, we'd be seeing the Borg Milky Way. I don't understand how individual rights go into it, it was just batpoop insane.
Janeway is not alone in making batpoop insane decisions regarding the borg (I would add at least 'Scorpion 1, 2' to 'Drone' on her list):
Picard, in 'I, borg' had a weapon he&crew were confident will destroy the hive mind, but choose not to use it, in full knowledge of the fact that that the borg were killing and assimilating billions upon billions even as they spoke; that the federation will soon be next.
And this, because using an individual - Hugh - as carrier for the weapon is not right. Apparently, for Picard, letting all those billions of individuals die or be assimilated, when one has a chance to stop it, is right.
In "Course Oblivion" which I thought was one of the best Voyager episodes, we see Duplicate Janeway stubbornly keep going towards the Alpha Quandrant when it's obvious to everyone else that it's the wrong course of action. Granted, there was no good course of action, but Chakotay finally gets an episode where he really gets a backbone with her and fully disagrees. I think if he sensed they had more time to do something, it would have turned into a fullblown mutiny. But it took his death for her to see reason. The only positive thing they did that episode was seek a Y class planet from which they were ultimately turned away. They never tried but the very end to locate the original Voyager even though logic would dicate that at the very least they'd try to map the same/similiar course.
I'm not saying they need to go the way of the Equinox, but sometime it seemed they went the opposite extreme and had 0 self-preservation instinct and somehow survived in spite of it...
In 'Course oblivion', Janeway's insanity was not above her normal 'insane' level; a lot of other episodes feature a Janeway similarly opposed to reason, obsessed with a goal.
I can think of a counterpoint, like the Tuvix episode, where she did the right thing (despite people dissing her for it), because it was utterly practicaly. I think she only got flak for it, not just the decision itself, but the inconsistency of her practicality.
Here I disagree.
The best comparison for Tuvix is a healthy person. Yes, you can chop him/her up for spare organs, and, with them, save 2 persons from deep coma, but it's utterly immoral to do so. As such, killing Tuvix was utterly immoral.
And Tuvix was established as doing everything Tuvok could do - better than Tuvok, even. As such, you can not say killing Tuvix was practical.
