Well, it would have taken Voyager around 70 years at max warp to make it back to Alpha Quadrant assuming nothing fantastic happened along the way (which is impossible in the ST universe).
Even at the normal outward speed of exploration, you’d think the Federation would be in the DQ within a couple hundred years. When Q first encountered Voyager in the DQ, he commented that humans weren’t supposed to be there for another 100 years. Plus, Voyager shared all its intel on the DQ with the Federation. I don’t see how they couldn’t have stumbled onto this planet within several hundred years unless something was physically preventing them.
I agree. Even so, you can cut all the TCW and Xindi episodes, and “Dear Doctor,” and several other bad/lame episodes, and still have more good Trek than Voyager.
This is the only time I have ever seen Reed positioned as a favorite from that crew.
I’ve not watched Enterprise for a good while, but folksy speech patterns notwithstanding, I’m not sure I’d call Tucker a redneck stereotype. Wasn’t he at least usually portrayed as a competent engineer?
Captain Archer, who’s that? My memory might be shaky, but wasn’t the Enterprise captained by a Scott Bakula thrown into the 22nd century? That must be it. My mind can’t come to terms with the possibility that anyone could could cast Bakula except as the script-reciting Ken doll that he is.
I don’t think the c should be in the exponent, otherwise you get different answers depending on whether c is measured in m/s or furlongs/fortnight. I think it should be w[sup]10/3[/sup]c
The worst and most ridiculous episode of Voyager was when they showed future humans after eons of future evolution. It was such a fundamentally misguided understanding of a major scientific tenet that I stopped regarding the programme as science fiction. Ridiculous.
Are there anyVoyager episodes, even good ones, that stand up to scrutiny as science fiction, as opposed to space opera or whatever?
I happen to like “Distant Origin” and “Blink of an Eye,” but the ‘science’ is pretty much laughable. The former even features a ridiculous computer ‘projection’ of what a hadrosaur ‘would have’ evolved into.
Perhaps i was confusing the hadrosaur episode in my mind with something else as that must be the episode I was thinking of. Sorry!
Star Trek, with the universe that’s Ben built up around it, could be so much better with decent science fiction writers but perhaps it wouldn’t have mass appeal.
I always thought it would be cool if the next series had featured a patchwork Voyager finally reaching Federation space, and still stalwartly clinging to Federation values, only to find that in the intervening seventy years, the Federation has entered a political decline and no longer represents the values the crew of the Voyager profess, leading the Voyager to be treated as outlaws by the society to which they’d tried to hard to return.
The holodeck explanation was when I knew the show would not live it to its initial promise, which I thought was considerable. Basically, the writers/producers were unwilling to give up the story crutch which the holodeck represented. They were unwilling to tell essentially different stories than had been told on TNG. Every other consistency problem – the endless supply of shuttlecraft, the lack of an eventual manpower crunch, the fact that the ship, crew, & uniforms were as pretty at the end of the series as at the beginning – stems from that attitude.
Also they insisted no giving Torres clothes in every episode. HUGE mistake.
Personally, I think that the Holodeck is a lot more tolerable if you strip away the thin veneer of science fiction. It’s a portal to the spirit world. The spirits will entertain humans, for a price. And some of the spirits are mischievous, and occasionally one of them manages to break out of the pentagram.
