# Star trek Voyager inconsistency? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [March 14, 2013, 5:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-voyager-inconsistency/652898 "2013-03-14T05:40:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/the_other_waldo_pepper/32/12370_2.png) [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Other_Waldo_Pepper)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 12:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-voyager-inconsistency/652898/21 "2013-03-14T12:48:27Z")
> [@DrFidelius](#): > > That was like the third episode. 15th episode of the 2nd season; they’d long since made contact with the Alpha Quadrant through a wormhole, sought out a second Caretaker, met Amelia Earhart, contacted the aliens who’d visited Chakotay’s tribe in antiquity, negotiated a swap of our culture’s literature for an interstellar teleportation device… ---
**Author:** ![DrFidelius](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/drfidelius/32/3447_2.png) [@DrFidelius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrFidelius)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 12:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-voyager-inconsistency/652898/22 "2013-03-14T12:56:00Z")
Seriously? My aging memory had “Threshold” as much earlier in the series. (Oh, gods, Amelia Earhart. I blanked that one from my mind.) ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 1:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-voyager-inconsistency/652898/23 "2013-03-14T13:04:20Z")
> [@DrFidelius](#): > > That was like the third episode. To many Gilligan incidents in that series fo rmy taste. “Surely, you don’t think Gilligan’s Island is a…” “Those poor people!” Stranger ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 1:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-voyager-inconsistency/652898/24 "2013-03-14T13:34:52Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > “Those poor people!” 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 1:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-voyager-inconsistency/652898/25 "2013-03-14T13:49:34Z")
For reference: [[http://sfdebris.com](http://sfdebris.com)](SF Debris) Chuck Sonnenberg has got enough Star Trek reviews to choke a camel, and his Voyager reviews are probably the best, with a combination of head-shaking and over-the-topness. _Enterprise_ was possibly the worst series, but that was largely just going through the motions. In _Voyager_, they seemed to actually thought they didn’t completely suck. ---
**Author:** ![ReticulatingSplines](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e274bd/32.png) [@ReticulatingSplines](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ReticulatingSplines)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 2:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-voyager-inconsistency/652898/26 "2013-03-14T14:33:02Z")
If this is a general VOY bitchfest now, can I complain for a second about Tuvix’s outfit? I mean, even if we accept that their DNA can be merged, how does it make any sense at all that the designs of their clothes also combined? ---
**Author:** ![Aquadementia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aquadementia/32/555_2.png) [@Aquadementia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aquadementia)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 4:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-voyager-inconsistency/652898/27 "2013-03-14T16:08:35Z")
> [@ReticulatingSplines](#): > > If this is a general VOY bitchfest now, can I complain for a second about Tuvix’s outfit? I mean, even if we accept that their DNA can be merged, how does it make any sense at all that the designs of their clothes also combined? As I remember, it’s all done with flowers. That explains it. > [@CyclopticXander](#): > > I can usually fanwank my way out of things to make myself feel better, and none of the specific issues mentioned here are any problem for me. What does drive me crazy though is how they keep running into the same species long after they’ve put significant amounts of distance behind them, often after they’ve made gigantic jumps by irregular means. That and how certain characters can so easily find them even after said erratic jumps (like Kes or the formerly dead now turned alien crew member), which means these master trackers must have found similarly gigantic shortcuts as well. It isn’t so much meeting the same species that bothers me, which may make sense if they migrated over the centuries, but that they keep running across the same individuals. Those horrible, horrible Kazons for instance. A technologically inferior species keeps getting ahead of the Federation’s newest hot-rod headed full tilt away from them. And to make it worse, they were those fricking boring Kazons. Never mind the obvious, that in “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier” Kirk went to center of the galaxy and was back two years later to take on the Klingons. I guess Voyager was taking the long way around. But that’s the difference between Kirk and Janeway for you. ---
**Author:** ![levdrakon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/49beb7/32.png) [@levdrakon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/levdrakon)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 4:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-voyager-inconsistency/652898/28 "2013-03-14T16:46:32Z")
> [@Tsunamigirl](#): > > @bryan hah! I know what you mean, mostly I ignore it but this time it was too big a mess up. Although they always find a way to cover it up, or not at all. Example: season 4 living witness, where supposedly the doctor is left behind after a major battle with 2 feuding aliens and apparently voyager goes on without him. The doc apparently stays on the planet contributing to the feuding aliens peace and eventually leaves for earth 800 YEARS after voyager left him. BUT the doc is always on the ship. Never left. Never left behind. Answer me that? What bugs me about this is the presumption that the Federation never managed to retrace Voyager’s route and establish relations with these people, even after 800 years. ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 4:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-voyager-inconsistency/652898/29 "2013-03-14T16:55:39Z")
> [@grude](#): > > I thought it would be neat to have Voyager damaged and repaired so much, or having taken on so much unknown strange crew Janeway would find a hostile reception back on Earth. You know, this would be a pretty interesting story concept. Like, starship goes out looking like Voyager, comes back looking like LEXX … ---
**Author:** ![pancakes3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ba9def/32.png) [@pancakes3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pancakes3)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-voyager-inconsistency/652898/30 "2013-03-14T17:24:05Z")
Which begs the old philosophical question, if you slowly piece-by-piece replace every panel, circuit, and bio-neural gel pack on Voyager, is it still Voyager? ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 5:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-voyager-inconsistency/652898/31 "2013-03-14T17:30:02Z")
Well, as I recall, V-Ger still had the original gold laser disc, so there was that. ---
**Author:** ![mlees](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba8739/32.png) [@mlees](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mlees)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 5:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-voyager-inconsistency/652898/32 "2013-03-14T17:33:11Z")
> [@Aquadementia](#): > > Never mind the obvious, that in “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier” Kirk went to center of the galaxy and was back two years later to take on the Klingons. I guess Voyager was taking the long way around. But that’s the difference between Kirk and Janeway for you. Nothing about the “warp speed factor”, time & distances mentioned in Star Trek make sense. Trips that should have taken months seem to take minutes. (In the latest Star Trek movie, the NewEnterprise goes from Earth to Vulcan (40 Eridani, a little over 16 light years) in less than ten minutes. That’s (if my math is right) 841,536 times the speed of light. Warp = speed of plot. ---
**Author:** ![Great\_Antibob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e47c2d/32.png) [@Great\_Antibob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Great_Antibob)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-voyager-inconsistency/652898/33 "2013-03-14T17:34:21Z")
Replication/energy conservation was the biggest inconsistency for me. At the beginning of the series, the lack of sufficient power was used to explain why they couldn’t simply replicate all their food or weapons or more CPUs or whatever and why holodeck time was limited. By the time I stopped watching, the writers simply didn’t care. The holodeck was used just about as often as TNG and all those carefully hoarded photon torpedos were being used in every other episodes like spitballs. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 5:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-voyager-inconsistency/652898/34 "2013-03-14T17:45:30Z")
> [@DrFidelius](#): > > That was like the third episode. To many Gilligan incidents in that series fo rmy taste. The whole show is a Gilligan’s incident - Lost in Space with more boring characters. When TOS first came on I cheered, because for once here was an sf series (as opposed to an anthology series) where the characters were in control of things. Sad that they went back to that hoariest of series ideas, the neverending (until the show ends) quest. I quit after a season and a half. I’ll eventually get to it in my watch all of ST project. As for warp speed, in 1966 it was a great advance to have a show which realized you couldn’t go faster than light by pressing on the accelerator harder. Too bad they never got beyond that simple concept. ---
**Author:** ![alphaboi867](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alphaboi867/32/3898_2.png) [@alphaboi867](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alphaboi867)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 6:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-voyager-inconsistency/652898/35 "2013-03-14T18:49:46Z")
> [@grude](#): > > …1.The Doctor takes up a lot of disk space and takes up a lot of CPU power when running, a couple of times they needed to do backups or had low power and characters bitched about how many resources he needed. > > 2.The Doctor’s portable emitter com badge thing was an artifact from the future, literally. It came from the 29th century in a early season two parter, they could not make more or analyze it properly so even if you created new instances of The Doctor they would be confined to either the holodeck or sickbay… The biggest problem was that they treated the Doctor’s “program” exactly like a soul and not a piece of software. Let’s assume that, for whatever reason, Voyager’s computer can only run one Doctor at a time. Then the mobile emitter enters the picture. So why can’t they have one Doctor being run by the ship’s computer, and one by the mobile emitter? Why does the ship’s computer delete his program as it’s being transfered into the mobile emitter & vice versa? Or all the times his program was transmitted to the Alpha Quadrant? IIRC he even left part of his program back on Voyager in those cases to save on bandwith. Frankley alot of things would’ve made more sense if he was simply an andriod like the Kyrians thought. > [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > …Heck, there was a whole episode about how traumatized the Doctor was when he had to choose (!) between two patients, the loser dying. Geez, I thought triage was a critical part of this program. Part of the problem was that his traige subroutines gave both patients an exactly equal chance of survival if he acted immediatly, and he resolved the conflict by treating his friend (friendship not being part of his original program at all). > [@Johnny\_Bravo](#): > > This is a Star Trek problem in general - how many episodes involve a piece of technology malfunctioning in a spectacular way and then never being mentioned again? Remember the episode of TNG where the crew gets turned into little kids because of a transporter accident? “Hey, gang, we just invented immortality, but whatevs.” Or how only once in the history of Star Trek did it ever occur to anyone that they could stop a boarding party simply by turning up the artificial gravity in that part of the ship. :smack: And that wasn’t even in the main universe, it was in the Mirror Universe. > [@levdrakon](#): > > What bugs me about this is the presumption that the Federation never managed to retrace Voyager’s route and establish relations with these people, even after 800 years. You’re assuming that the Federation still exists 800 yrs later. And don’t say Captain Braxton is proof. He’s from the 29th century; 800 yrs after the 24th century would make that episode set in the 32nd century. ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 6:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-voyager-inconsistency/652898/36 "2013-03-14T18:57:04Z")
What would anyone’s list of bad cookies include? Osama bin Laden, Adolph Hitler, flash drives… ---
**Author:** ![Smeghead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f1d935/32.png) [@Smeghead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smeghead)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-voyager-inconsistency/652898/37 "2013-03-14T18:59:48Z")
> [@alphaboi867](#): > > The biggest problem was that they treated the Doctor’s “program” exactly like a soul and not a piece of software. Yup. I never really watched Voyager, but I vaguely remember watching one episode, where the doctor had to save a patient who, for the sake of simplifying the obvious analogy, I’ll call a Space Jew. The problem was that the person who had discovered how to cure his particular condition was Space Hitler, or at least a member of the Space Nazi Party. Now, some reasonable people might say, oh, well, that sucks, but hey, the information is in the database, here’s your cure, who’s next? But no. In Voyager land, the only way to access the cure was to create a hologram version of Space Hitler, so that Space Hitler and Space Jew could have dramatic face-to-face confrontations and Deep Arguments about Worrying Philosophical and Ethical Issues, and so that the doctor could attempt to _talk_ Space Hitler into explaining the cure, and _talk_ Space Jew into accepting the cure that was discovered by this horrible war criminal, yadda yadda yadda. It was utterly ridiculous. Again, I didn’t really watch the show, and it’s been a decade or two since I saw this episode, and I wasn’t really paying that much attention to begin with, so I probably have some of this wrong. ---
**Author:** ![ReticulatingSplines](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e274bd/32.png) [@ReticulatingSplines](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ReticulatingSplines)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 7:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-voyager-inconsistency/652898/38 "2013-03-14T19:00:21Z")
> [@alphaboi867](#): > > Or how only once in the history of Star Trek did it ever occur to anyone that they could stop a boarding party simply by turning up the artificial gravity in that part of the ship. :smack: And that wasn’t even in the main universe, it was in the Mirror Universe. I never understood why, if a boarding party beamed aboard, they couldn’t just beam them right back off, and into space or something. ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 7:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-voyager-inconsistency/652898/39 "2013-03-14T19:05:01Z")
> [@carnivorousplant](#): > > What would anyone’s list of bad cookies include? > Osama bin Laden, Adolph Hitler, flash drives… Obviously a transporter accident… ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 7:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-voyager-inconsistency/652898/40 "2013-03-14T19:08:00Z")
> [@ReticulatingSplines](#): > > I never understood why, if a boarding party beamed aboard, they couldn’t just beam them right back off, and into space or something. That’s right up there with infantry fighting with phasers. I guess your boarding party would have to take the transporter room first. NCC1701D had several transporter rooms, did it not? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-voyager-inconsistency/652898.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-voyager-inconsistency/652898.md?page=3)