Here's a good one to add in Voyager's arsenal of brilliance. The holodeck. Anyone recall the TNG episode "Booby Trap"? The Enterprise is caught in a very old energy field with hopes of escape dwindling at every minute. Geordi thinks he can figure a way out, but he needs the holodeck to do it. Picard in the meantime is trying to conserve as much power as possible.
PICARD: Mister La Forge, have we shut down all non-essential energy usage?
LAFORGE: Yes, sir. In fact, I need to get some back. I'm running a programme on holodeck three.
PICARD: For what purpose?
LAFORGE: Well, I've gone back to the beginning to the earliest construction entries of the Enterprise. I've created a propulsion design model to assist me. I believe we're making progress.
PICARD: Computer, reinstate holodeck three programme.
COMPUTER: Holodeck three programme is reinstated.
PICARD: Mister La Forge, your best suggestion in an hour.
That episode, and many more afterwards would establish that the Holodeck requires a great deal of power. Since Voyager is out in the deep end of space without help, power is going to be a big issue. From Voyager's
SECOND EPISODE "Parallax"...
PARIS: Engine efficiency's down another fourteen percent. If we don't get more power to the warp drive, we're all going to have to get out and push.
JANEWAY: What about alternative energy sources? Ensign Kim, have you had any luck getting power from the holodeck reactors?
KIM: Not yet. We tried hooking them to the power grid and we ended up blowing out half the relays. The holodeck's energy matrix, it just isn't compatible with the other power systems.
That's right. The holodeck, an component of the ship that can be used to recreate World War II France with all the realism of gunfire and arial bombings is completely incompatible with the ship. Remember how during the Apollo program that the CO2 filters for both the command module and the LEM were incompatible with one another? In zero gravity, with tools and components not designed to be used in such a way, the crew of Apollo 13 managed to make a compatible filter when the ones on the LEM wore out. And yet here, in Star Trej where humanity's grasp on technology is so awesome that it can recreate anything in a dark room, they can't make one part of the ship work with another part of the ship during a crises.
I've seen technobabble be used to get writers out of tough spots, but I've never seen them use it to prevent them from getting into tough spots, because that's what this is. Despite the show setting out to be something different, the writers just don't want to abandon the material that they're comfortable with. Instead of having our crew trying to deal with the inhospitable space with a ship that can barely sustain itself, we're instead assured that every other episode will feature the crew in the holodeck wasting away like they're on college break. You cannot convince me that the Voyager crew is in an inconvenient situation when the Captain of the stranded ship is playing around in a holo novel complete with victorian clothing. Compare that to Kirk's life long fantasy when the first thing he wants when put into the Nexus is take a double headed axe and chop things with it. Even in an carefree fantasy reality, he's doing something productive.
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And people bitch about the 'space magic' at the end of mass effect!
Hey, now. Even Voyager can say they ended their show a lot better than Mass Effect 3. Enterprise's "These are the Voyages" is the episode that will have both fan bases split.