Star Trek Fan-Favorite Hero Should Never Have Been Promoted
Star Trek: Nemesis is definitely one of the worst films in the franchise, but it had at least one moment that made fans cheer: Captain Picard talking via subspace to Admiral Janeway. It was a great cameo for Voyager fans, and most of us were so busy cheering that we didn’t stop to think about the ramifications of her promotion. Here’s a truth that will hit you harder than week-old leola root stew: Janeway should never have been promoted after Starfleet read about the Prime Directive violations, war crimes, and outright murder she committed in the Delta Quadrant.
Janeway Should Never Have Made Admiral
A major element of Star Trek: Voyager is that the ship and crew are lost on the other side of the galaxy. As they make their way home, they can’t count on support from any other Starfleet vessels, forcing the captain to make some hard decisions to both help her crew survive and make it home that much quicker. With that being said, though, it’s still difficult to process the appearance of Admiral Janeway because it implies that Starfleet had no major problems with some of the worst transgressions during her seven years in the Delta Quadrant.
Violating The Prime Directive Like It Was Her Job
For one thing, Star Trek: Voyager made it clear that Janeway didn’t have a problem with violating the Prime Directive. She arguably did this in the very first episode by destroying the Array before the Kazon could get it; had she not interfered, they would have gotten it anyway, so she interfered in the natural development of a less developed race. In the very last episode, she worked with a future version of herself who was flagrantly violating the Temporal Prime Directive to change history and get the ship home that much quicker.
The Enemy Of My Enemy Is My….Nope, Still My Enemy
Those violations alone would arguably disqualify a promotion from Captain to Admiral, but Janeway’s record gets worse. She has taken many actions that would arguably be considered war crimes, and these actions range from putting Tom Paris in complete isolation for a month to giving the Borg a biological weapon to help them attempt genocide against Species 8472. Even in the hippie world of Star Trek, it’s weird to think she got a promotion and became Admiral Janeway after casually giving catastrophic weapons to the Borg, who are unambiguously the Federation’s scariest foe.
The Tuvix Incident
If you’re still not convinced, then we’ve got one word guaranteed to get Star Trek fans screaming: Tuvix. At one point, a freak transporter malfunction fuses Neelix and Tuvox into a new lifeform, but when Janeway gets the opportunity to get her original crewmen back by reversing the accident and erasing Tuvix from existence, she doesn’t hesitate to take it. The holographic Doctor refuses to pull the trigger, leaving Janeway to straight-up murder a sentient lifeform actively pleading for his life.
Captain Janeway Is A Supervillain
Again, we get that Star Trek: Voyager got plenty of stellar mileage out of storylines where the captain had to make the hard decisions because nobody else could. But the reality that fans need to face is that many of those actions were downright monstrous, and our beloved captain is a lowkey supervillain by the end of the series. Forget the promotion: “Admiral” Janeway should have ended up on the same penal colony she plucked Tom Paris from rather than cracking jokes with Picard in Nemesis.
Sorry, Voyager fans. It turns out there was more than coffee in that nebula: there was, in fact, an entire shipload of murder and war crimes.
