Voyager has quite a few episodes where the decisions taken by the captain and her officers go beyond the melodramatic, bordering on idiotic. Logical fallacies and plot gaps are common, but the last episode I watched exceeds all boundaries and got me cursing at the morons who wrote this junk.
For those who know nothing of Voyager, it is a ship that is stranded on the other side of the galaxy, trying to make it home. "Future's end" is a two-episode saga summarized as follows: Voyager encounters a small vessel with one human, who travelled back in time from the 29th century to destroy them, in order to avoid a catastrophy in his time. A battle ensues and both ships travel back in time. The time ship goes back to 1967 Earth and Voyager to 1997 Earth. The crew find the captain and learn that someone else had found his time ship and exploited its technology to start the computer age in Earth. This clever dude tries to use it to travel to the 29th century to steal more technology, but he doesn't know how to use it, so Voyager has to stop him to avoid the 29th-century catastrophe. They do stop him and are stranded in 1997, but immediately, the unthinkable happens.
The same time-traveller emerges from a time rift and tells them that 29th-century humans monitor time and discovered that Voyager was in an age where it shouldn't be. He has never met them, since he "never experienced that time line". He instructs them to return back to their time, but he refuses to help them get home faster. What he says, is unbelievable: "We can't intervene. Time travelling prime directive".
Ok, now let me get it straight.
- The same people who do not hesitate to send someone back to destroy a ship, have a prime directive that does not allow them to move the ship to another sector.
- Time causality paradoxes are supposedly understood as loops (A leads to B, leads to C, leads to A). BUT, it is possible to change C, and then another "time-line" emerges. Well, in that other time-line, the original meeting should have never occured and the crew should have found themselves back in their original time and space, remembering nothing of the meeting.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. In scifi, the reader/audience expects you to present your own assumptions. The more far-fetched, the better, because we want the journey to a different reality. But YOU CAN NOT ignore your own assumptions. Either go with the alternate universe assumption (changing the past splits the universe in two), or stick with the fatalistic causality loop assumption. You can not depend on the audience forgetting everything you have told them.
Critical thinking is becoming a rare asset. TV depends on its eradication in order to increase profits. The example I just described is blatant, but we are constantly being conditioned to accept more and more melodramas, unsupported claims, propaganda. The trend should have every thinker out there worried. The least we can do is speak out against these idiots, whenever they insult our intelligence.
