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elephant-in-the-pride-parade · 2 years

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Janeway ain’t Reckless. She’s Smart AF.

I’ve seen some variation of this joke going around Tumblr a lot since i’ve been on the site more regularly. It’s usually played off as a cute joke. Something to the tune of “Janeway is so reckless she needs her male subordinates to manage her.” And I’ve got to say, it pisses me the fuck off. Buckle up, because we’re going on an essay about Janeway’s decision making and how the recklessness trope is sexist, and totally inconsiderate of the decision making reality Janeway exists within.

Let’s look at Janeway compared to her male counterparts. If Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Pike made the high risk, high reward decisions she makes (and they do make many similar ones), they get called bold. ballsy. cocky. strategic. etc. What does my Captain Janeway get saddled with?

And this is fake news about Janeway, my dudes. Absolutely sexist fake news.

Janeway is the opposite of reckless. She thrives in her command environment, with the training and smarts required to calculate all the risks and rewards available to her and determine her course of action. She keeps a lone ship of people alive in hostile territory for 7 years, and comes home with the majority of those people alive. Frequently our Captain is found trapped in unknown and potentially hostile space, with only her crew and her wits available to her to get her out of trouble. She has no back up, no safe haven to retreat to. And every day is another one where she gets the honor of picking between the best of her shitty options. Because there are rarely truly good options when you’re 70,000 light years from security. She’s calculating and thoughtful and yes - she takes risks. News flash. Every decision maker accepts risks. You weigh them against the likely rewards and against your capability to mitigate those risks and then you decide if the action is worth pursuing. Do those risks sometimes eventuate themselves? Yes, obviously, but that does not make the decision itself reckless or bad. (And anyways, Janeways high risk decisions do tend to work out in her favor.) Her norm throughout the show is demonstrated to be smart, well thought through decision making. There’s perhaps three cases where one could argue she made or considered reckless decisions. In all three cases these are also plainly shown to be outside her normal behavior.

Decisions that are billed as reckless that are absolutely the opposite.

4x07 - Scientific Method: Janeway decides to fly Voyager through a set of binary pulsar stars to force a hostile technologically superior force to retreat.

I swear to god this one annoys me the most. Thanks Tuvok for mentioning that this manuever had a 20%ish chance of success. This one gets a bad rep for that.

Janeway’s options were:

(Option A) Do nothing. Wait and find a better opportunity or path to negotiation with their captors, risking increasing crew fatalities and potentially her own life.

(Option B) Fly the ship through the pulsars and guarantee that even if the aliens stuck around, at least their ships attached to the hull would be burnt to a crisp.

Option A is not an option. At least one crew member had already died from the Scrivani experiments. The Scrivani had demonstrated a clear disregard for the Voyager crew’s lives. The first officer was in sickbay in what could potentially be a life threatening condition. And Janeway herself was a target as soon as the Scrivani were discovered. So you’re facing one option with a 0% chance that your entire living crew makes it out. And an option B with a 20% chance that all of them live. I like that 20% better than 0%.

2x26 - Basics Part 1: Janeway decides to take the ship through contested Kazon space in order to remove Seska from the Kazon and save the woman’s child (at that point presumed to be a Federation and Cardassian citizen) from death or enslavement.

Did this end badly. Yes. Did that make the decision necessarily a bad one. No.

We’re gonna need to walk through a little decision making what if scenario here.

If Seska is telling the truth (Unlikely until they discover the injured Kazon in the abandoned shuttlecraft):

Option A - Ignore her call for help, condemning she and her kid to death.

Option B - Accept her call for help and most likely liberate her with intel provided by her Kazon buddy

If Seska is lying (Likely until the discovery of the Kazon in the damaged shuttlecraft):

Option A - Ignore her call for help, leaving her to continue contaminating the Kazon culture and influencing delta quadrant power dynamics (a prime directive no no)

Option B - Pursue her call for help, doing their best to appear more threatening and hope that the Nistrim have overestimated their own chance of success (which they do have a history of doing).

The information Janeway had when the decision to pursue Seska was made, made this risky but manageably so. The discovery of the Kazon in the damaged shuttle added credibility to the Seska is telling the truth options, making Option A even more unpalatable and B more likely to succeed. It was the Doctor who failed to recognize that the Kazon defector was a trojan horse and the Ops and Engineering divisions that failed to connect the damage to the nacelle with a danger to the secondary command processors. Unanticipated risks caused this decision to fail. That didn’t make it a reckless decision.

Now let’s turn to decisions that arguably could be reckless...

“Reckless” decisions that are shown in canon to be outside Janeway’s norm

5x01 - Night: Janeway decides to stay behind in the void and ensure Voyager gets to go home.

First of all, let’s recognize that this episode is not our typical Janeway. Night is all about her coping with depression and crippling guilt. - Not her normal state of mind. And she does weigh the pros and cons here, ultimately deciding her crew’s well being is more important than hers.

Option A: Destroy the wormhole to stop the malon and stay in the void.

Option B: Janeway stays behind to destroy the wormhole and lets the crew escape with the ship.

Option C (considered subsequently): The crew pulls some creative solution out of a had that lets them destroy the wormhole and escape at the same time.

Option B here is obviously better than option A even if the cost of it is most likely Janeway’s life. It still is a net positive for everyone else. It’s Janeway’s mental illness that prevents her from seeing Option C, which is presented to her later by her crew. Note: Option C has a higher risk of failure than Option B. they could easily have failed to get through the wormhole and got stuck in the void or damaged the ship. So the crew’s option is not inherently the less risky one just because it doesn’t involve someone’s sacrifice. Again, a high risk, high reward situation. Janeway (and her crew) ultimately prioritize keeping the whole crew together.

7x25 - Endgame: An older jaded version of Janeway comes back in time and tries to convince the ship to use the transwarp hub rather than destroy it. Captain Janeway of the present time comes up with a better option.

I do actually agree that the Admiral’s original plan - to use the transwarp hub and leave it intact - is terribly reckless. But here’s the thing So does the present time’s Captain Janeway. She’d rather destroy the damn thing. And upon learning the risks to her crew of remaining in the Delta Quadrant (which certainly affected the admiral’s decision making) The Captain is able to figure out a middle path that has a high reward for Voyager and mitigates the risks of the admiral’s original plan. Kudos to the Captain.

5x26 and 6x01 - Equinox: Janeway decides to threaten Lessing’s life in order to get him to betray Captain Ransom.

Again. Like Night. this is portrayed as very outside of Janeway’s norm. It’s an exception. She’s driven to this point after encountering a Starfleet officer turned war criminal who has murdered innocent beings in the name of the organization they both serve. No shit she loses her cool this one time. She regretted it and learned from it.

You know who Is the demonstratively reckless captain in this episode? Rudy fucking Ransom, whom we learn wound up in the delta quadrant with fewer crew and far fewer defensive weapons. Who took some major losses early, and yet, still, after that, rather than act like a leader and help his remaining crew settle down in the delta quadrant or make allies to help take them further on, he stubbornly and singlemindedly pursues the alpha quadrant, having no care for the beings he murders to get there or the lives of his crew put in danger when those aliens start attacking them. Janeway made one reckless decision in this single episode. Ransom made 6 years worth of them.

Janeway is a fabulous decision maker. Over the course of 7 years she makes maybe one truly reckless call and is shown to regret it. At the few other times she considers options recklessly, it is plain in canon that these are not her standard practice. In all other cases where she faces risks, she is careful to consider the consequences for herself and her crew. She figures out whether the risks are manageable and she makes some damn good calls.

There’s nothing reckless about Janeway. And the people who say so wouldn’t last a day in her shoes.

#kathryn janeway #reckless my ass #die mad about it

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