Dust in the Attic
I used to watch "Star Trek: Voyager" pretty regularly. Call me what you will, I tended to like the actors and actresses on the show (with the exception of Kate "Captain Janeway" Mulgrew who left no scenery unchewed). But every now and then something just stuck in my craw. I'm not one of those "physics of Star Trek" types or an obsessive fan boy (though I admire the casting of both Jennifer "Kes" Lien and the delectable Jeri Ryan who has already made a cameo appearance on PoW a while back). I'm just troubled by the bunnies of dust that a few stupid details have left in the old cerebral attic.
First instance: There is no way I could recall in which episode this happened since only 96.58742% of the episodes dealt with Voyager being under attack by either superior alien technology, superior alien species or aliens in superior number. So here's Voyager (the coolest ship in the entire franchise, BTW) getting pounded by somealiens at somealien planet and Janeway backs away from the planet saying "We need to regroup!" Regroup?! Is there something about the fact that Voyager is a lone Federation ship beyond the known galaxy that she forgot? Regroup?! With whom???
Secondly: This was a specific episode which I'm not going to bother to look up because it's against my religion (I'm devoutly lazy). Which also means I'm not going to remember how it all came about so let me set up the end of the show - Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres are in spacesuits, floating in space and running out of air. They are put there to be in a position where they finally declare their love for each other, which is nice. And, of course, Voyager arrives in the nick'o'time as they are just about to run out of oxygen. So what does Janeway say to these two people, adrift in space, gasping for life? "Prepare to beam aboard." What the...? "Prepare" to beam aboard? What are they going to do to prepare? Evacuate the waste containers? Shake off the cosmic dust? Jebus! Just beam them aboard, save their lives and shut up about it.
I see from my rant that my complaints about the show are entirely directed to stupid things the writers put in the mouth of Captain Janeway. Not worth the waste of a neuron gap-jumping electron, really. Perhaps by blogging this I will have swept that particular dust out of the cranium.