In my view, having rewatched Voyager again decades after first run, the show not only took successful risks in several episodes like the Demon duology or The Thaw, it has some ‘best ever’ episodes for employing some classic Star Trek tropes.
At the time, I suspect some fans focused on the ‘not new idea’ more than ‘did it better than’ but at this point it’s fairly clear.
For fans who came to Voyager first (including our kids), the original TOS and TNG episodes that Voyager built upon just seem weak by comparison.
More, when SNW does something similar, people are viewing these kind of episodes from the perspective of how well done within a type rather than criticizing them for reworking a trope.
So, I have a story about Star Trek the Animated Series.
My friends and I used to watch it in college, but it was a drinking game. We watched it in Spanish, with no subtitles (and none of us speak Spanish). And there were certain things they said every episode, and everybody drinks when they say it.
Oh man I this is such a great post to realize that Lemmy/Kbin allows you to see the exact number of both upvotes and downvotes on a post and not just a fuzzy aggregate score. I missed that.
First off, I think we should dispense with the notion that the biofilters are exclusively jizz. If Janeway’s in the middle of one of her period dramas after her third cup of coffee that morning, and she needs to drop a massive deuce, does she pause the program, or hike up her skirts over a chamber pot in the corner like a proper Regency era governess?
And you want them to use the transporters to beam waste material around the ship? The system that created Tuvix?
In “Day of the Dove” Spock claims that intra-ship beaming is dangerous, “Pinpoint accuracy is required. If the transportee should materialise inside a solid object, a deck or wall,” and in “Twisted” B’Elanna has to specifically configure a transporter for site-to-site beaming.
(please ignore season one of Disco, where characters just tell the computer to beam them somewhere on the ship, and it does so instantly without issue)
Not to mention that page 108 of the “Technical Manual” cites that site-to-site beaming requires double the amount of power expenditure, because it is essentially two transporter functions combined into one.
When you get right down to it, having the lower decks change out the biofilters just makes good sense. And what else are they doing while bridge crew actually handle all the important jobs? I’m pretty sure ensign Jones will survive if he misses this week’s life drawing class or poetry recital.
Ah, but that very Technical Manual (ch. 12.5) clearly states that solid waste is transported through linear induction utlity conduits - no mention of dematerialization, except in the case of those materials that cannot be recycled by mechanical or chemical means!
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