Good analogy. It helps underline your point about the flaw of the episode:
In the real world, parents generally *aren’t* evil. Or–even if you wish to portray a given parent as evil, there isn’t any way you can separate the child from the “evil” parent without causing massive psychological damage to the child. To believe otherwise, or to believe that the child is guaranteed to eventually come to see that you made the right decision is deeply naive. And dangerous. Go check and see how many foster family kids grow up to have lives that don’t completely suck. It’s small numbers.

Janeway’s lucky Seven didn’t turn sociopath or something.

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Furry cows moo and decompress.

While I understand your point I fear you are making a mistake. A major point in the discussion is that people should be be told what to “think”.

Also that is generally a bold statement as I think you need to prove that Borg equates to metal disease.

Sisko was a very conflicted captain. He had his duty to the Federation on one had with an ever growing, and conflicting, interest in Bajor as emissary. This constantly makes him choose between two shades of gray in a moral mire. Once the Dominion war breaks out things become even worse as the sterling reputation of the Federation gets tarnished.

I think the best example is “In the Pale Moonlight” where Sisco being faced with the choice to watch comrades die in combat or commit an escalating series of crimes. Neither choose is right and he clearly struggles with the outcome.

Anyway, how about the episode where Voyager encounters a race possessing the technology to send them home or at least half way, but who won’t share the technology with them. In order to solve the moral and logical conundrum of having the captain either failing her entire crew or failing her entire belief system, Tuvok chooses to buy the technology from a third party and then face the consequences as an individual, a volunteering spacegoat (err… scapegoat), so to speak.

I personally would have loved more “evil Janeway” episodes. The same “logical solution” could have been applied from a moment on all the time, either by scapegoating a member of the crew or by the captain assuming the entire blame for everything, which is far more likely in the context.

Janeway completely ignores it. She listens to the crew’s opinions but in the end disregards B’Elanna’s request and tells the Doctor to use Moset’s cure.

Patterns of behavior…

I think you also gloss over the fact that we don’t really know how her newly severed mind was working at that point. Maybe she wasn’t yet making a “choice” to stay or leave.

I think you can view Voyager in one of two ways. Either we’re seeing the events from inside Janeway’s twisted, desperately rationalising mind, where she’s somehow always right even when she’s obviously wrong. Or the crew is composed entirely of people with Stockholm syndrome, in thrall to a bully…who’s also probably mad.

Janeway is either the hero of her own mind, or the villain of the delta quadrant.

Also, I don’t think it is entirely a 1997 vs 2011 issue, either. I believe this to be more a Roseman circa 1997 vs Roseman of 2011 (pardon my Borg pun here). We don’t really value our right to personally choose when we are young and we need the experience of life to understand choice is personal, not a statistical function of our group.

Anyway, I’ve always wondered how Star Trek could be rebooted for the present and I can tell with certainty that J.J.Abrams is not it. As Star Trek has always drawn inspiration for current political reality, a new Star Trek show would have to deal with terrorists and shadow governments and economic dependency and warfare. Maybe Voyager and DS-9 should be rebooted instead, with more focus on the Maquis.

I do agree that Chakotay should have at least questioned Janeway’s decision and we would have received some exposition explaining Janeway’s actions. At that point, she could have said that she was taking a gamble and trusting her gut. She could have said that Seven needs to mature in order to make a decision on whether to return to the Collective or not.

I don’t even want to talk about how they flushed Kes down the proverbial obscure toilet of Star Trek.

In regard to Kes; it doesn’t strike me as that unusual that a being with a nine-year life expectancy might experience periods of rapid development. That is to say, not that unusual in the context of a universe that allows humans to travel faster than light.

If she was making a choice to be gay it would have been wrong to force change.

If the episode was written today more would have been done with the discussion on why this was a forced change.

No doubt i’m overstating the case– but if you engage with Voyager at this deeper level, i think you will often come to similar conclusions.

Kirk, by contrast, was basically an irresponsible jerk. He screwed up a lot, made a lot of enemies. He was a hero, so it usually worked out in the end, but the universe around him never tried to make him anything other than an irresponsible womanizer with an insufficient sense of the importance of the rules to hold the position he held. Picard, on the other hand, was a stickler to the rules, to the point that he got his people killed and regularly made his life harder than he had to.

I don’t know much about Sisko – I didn’t watch all of DS9 – but I seemed to recall that he screwed up a lot.

Janeway never made mistakes. If she irrationally mistrusted someone, they turned out to be a bad guy. If she followed the rules and sacrificed innocent lives, it was ok. When she broke the rules, it was ok, too. She was not judged as strictly as I wanted her to be, and it always rankled.

Sometimes a hot borg in spandex is just a hot borg in spandex..