TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

"If I had to do it all over again, I would."

How come Cisco, a man well within reach of federation support and with a fully stocked station gets the benefit of the doubt when he goes genociding an entire planet with what is essentially a chemical weapon, but Janeway is evil, because she does similar things while cut off from federation, surrounded b enemies with a ship and ressouces always at the edge of running out?

For the record, I actually disagreed with him for the destruction of that planet, and I actually thought that the Maquis were morally much more correct than the Federation, when it comes to ethics. A lot of people hated Eddington, but I actually sympathized with the Maquis and thought that Eddington believed in his actions.

When I talked about Sisko, I didn't agree with his ethics in every action, but I saw him as more grounded in his principles. It wasn't that he always came to conclusions that I agreed with or that his decisions were always what I would have supported, but instead that I thought that the character was very well-done and consistent with his struggle with ethical positions.

The thing I didn't like about Janeway was that she seemed all over the place with her ethics. Sometimes she seemed very ethical. Sometimes she seemed very unethical. But it seemed like her ethics and actions were driven more by the authors having the perception of "What would tantalize the viewers in this particular story?" instead of "What might this particular character with their particular backstory do in this type of situation?" I didn't feel that she had the appropriate level of consistency as a character.

And also, I felt that was true about a lot of the other characters and stories in Voyager. It didn't feel so much like character development, but like in a lot of cases the writers would come up with a direction they wanted the show to go and then would insert a random character into whatever role they needed someone to fit into in order to drive the story forward. It WAS storyline development, and it DID drive the story forward, but while (and please don't get me wrong) there was some appropriate character development for certain specific characters, it felt like a lot of the actions of crew members was misplaced.

And as for Seven and the uniform thing, I mean, half of the crew was Maquis. It seems to me that if it was appropriate for them to be wearing Starfleet uniforms then it's equally appropriate for her to be wearing a Starfleet uniform. To me, this is another example of the inconsistencies within Voyager, things like them having a lot more resources than they were purported to have, and things like that took me out of the story when I would watch.

I really WANTED to like Voyager. I honestly did. There were a lot of pieces there for development, but I found myself distracted again and again by the thoughts that "It doesn't seem like this particular character would do that," or "It seems a lot more like this other character would be the one to do that," or "Why did they do this thing that was inconsistent with their behaviors in the other episodes?" or "Why did it seem like the writers did this one particular thing to wow the viewers when it didn't really seem to drive the story forward?"

Again, I'm sorry.