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?
Sorry but this assumption doesn’t hold up. You can still face difficult odds while doing everything competently. It’s one of Picard’s best quotes: “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.”. You can be absolutely perfect, but good luck beating a Q when it doesn’t want to humour you.
True, and there are plenty of episodes like that. But can you write each and every episode like that? Wouldn’t it get boring fast if every episode was like some super powerful force that was just a challenge because it has such higher capabilities than your own?
I’ve been generalizing obviously in a short social media comment, not wanting to write a dissertation about it or anything. I’m aware there are some limited ways around the problem I described, but in the end, they’re very few and get old fast.
yes, it would be boring 💯
I think the other major challenge of writing sci-fi that is sometimes overlooked or misunderstood by fans is that the best (IMO, obvs.) sci-fi has always been less about “exciting things happening in space” and more about
1) examining current society and the human condition using a canvas that removes many of the constraints of (say) historical fiction and allowing for more subtle use of allegory^ to get people to think about things in new ways because they’re not being channeled into routine patterns by the stories conforming to existing or historical reality or prejudices – the most obvious example is perhaps “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, which delivers an anti-racism message inside the Trojan horse of starships & aliens & spandex (oh my!) 🙃, and
2) presenting possible better futures for consideration – sometimes futures radically different from our current reality – without having to carry all the sociopolitical baggage of the usual non-sci-fi discourse of the day
^ OK, often not terribly subtle 🤪