Voyager crew incompetence. Has Trek always been like this?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨TedZanzibar@feddit.uk⁩ to ⁨startrek@startrek.website⁩

Tl;Dr - everybody on Voyager lacks the most basic of common security sense, and roams the delta quadrant with the naivety of children. Discuss.

Long version: Let me preface by stating that we’ve watched all of TNG and DS9, and we’re approaching the end of Voyager, so maybe I’m just burned out on Trek’s writing in general, but why do so many of Voyager’s plots require a complete lack of security common sense to work?

Case in point: we’ve just watched “Repression”, wherein Tuvok has been attacking and mind melding with all of the old Marquis crew, who have now all recovered from their mystery comas and been put straight back on duty. Tuvok is in the brig talking with Janeway. Not only did they let him keep his combadge, but when he uses it to relay a bunch of strange words to Chakotay, who replies that he “understood”, Janeway at no point thinks it might be prudent to have Chakotay immediately detained. This leads to a full ship takeover and Janeway almost getting killed.

Then literally the very next episode a random trader is able to straight up steal the doctor out from under everyone’s noses. I know the internet was in its infancy when Voyager was created and we were all pretty naive about data security, but come on!

So many plots rely on critical systems being wide open for anyone to tamper with, or crew members lacking the most basic of common sense and/or being way too trusting of complete strangers.

I appreciate that it would be a pretty boring show if everything was locked down and people did their jobs properly, and that I might as well be complaining about the fallacy of Holodeck safety protocols, but I had to get it off my chest!

If it weren’t for the fact that it’s become a bit of a running joke to point out all of the ways a major plot device could’ve been avoided I think we’d have stopped watching a couple of seasons ago.

Has Trek always been this way, or is the writing on Voyager just particularly lazy/bad?

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zero_spelled_with_an_ecks@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
Trek has always been this way. In TNG, Data takes over the Enterprise singlehandedly to go see his dad. In the Darmok episode, they just beam Picard away. There are Q episodes. There’s the spinning disk metaphor for drugs episode.

Maybe it’s not the most reasonable on every single plot point, but it also spans a wide range of topics, genres, level of seriousness, etc. The point of Measure of a Man isn’t that the full legal system of the Federation is explained in a consistent way. The point of Darmok isn’t to do an audit of the security system.

If you can’t get past the points that are less than perfect to get to the points that are important, it may not be the show for you. Maybe try watching a few with the idea of looking for what’s important instead of trying to find what’s wrong and see how that goes.

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Azzu@leminal.space ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
The problem is that the writers are normal humans.

Imagine this: let’s say the writers themselves do understand the highest level of competence. They write the Voyager crew in a way so that they handle all issues perfectly. How would it be possible for them to come up with any situation where this Voyager crew is challenged? - they can’t. Because they are portraying them as perfectly competent, which is based in the writer’s imagination, the definition of this perfect competency is that the writers could not come up with a way for them to be challenged.

Hence, when making any story like this, it is absolutely essential that the writers leave a flaw that the writers know about. Otherwise they literally would be unable to come up with any challenges. So the characters in Voyager necessarily need to be less competent than the writers.

But since the writers are average humans, the characters necessarily end up being less competent than average.

Maybe you didn’t see it before because TNG and DS9 actually taught you things, but those shows were the same. Most issues in those shows are ridiculously badly handled.

The thing is, it’s not actually that important that the characters are competent in actuality. This is where your suspension of disbelief comes in. You just have to believe for the context of the show that the characters are actually super competent. The story is mostly still valid and focuses on human growth and interpersonal relationships, which would be pretty much the same if the situations portrayed would actually be handled better. Even though the characters are not actually competent, you can act as if they are and then everything works again.

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jrs100000@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
All Trek is like this, but Voyager was a particularly blatant offender. Their writing quality was generally not great, and there were quite a few cases where they would run the same premise multiple times in a season, which just highlighted the implausibility of the crew having to make the same mistakes twice in a row.

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