VOY - Collective

[Thebestoftherest]

I really don't see the big deal about fridging.

In and of itself really nothing, it the fact that female characters keep getting screw over for male characters arc with no plans for what happen to them is.

[GreyICE]

They invented an infinity speed space drive in Voyager that, at the very least, had literally zero effect on the equipment or machinery. Yet they never used it to send supplies back and forth with starfleet, or do anything else an automated shuttle with an infinity speed drive could do.

They never figured out how to control where it comes out of transwarp. Speed isn't that helpful when you can't control where you're going.

Paris and Janeway ended up a few days from where Voyager was. Now at infinity speed, you're literally everywhere in the universe. The volume of the universe is, give or take, is a volume of space encompassing 93,000,000,000 lightyears. For reference, the Milky Way is 52,000 lightyears. Warp 8 is about 1,000 times the speed of light (give or take - seriously see the Memory Alpha page) so Tom Paris landing within 4 days of Voyager is landing inside a bubble 12 lightyears in diameter, out of the 93,000,000,000 lightyear bubble that he could have landed in.

If he couldn't aim it, then that's basically like buying the winning lottery ticket a few days in a row.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I really don't see the big deal about fridging.

In and of itself really nothing, it the fact that female characters keep getting screw over for male characters arc with no plans for what happen to them is.

I just feel like its use as well as mary sue as innate pejoratives is stretching.

[GreyICE]

I really don't see the big deal about fridging.

In and of itself really nothing, it the fact that female characters keep getting screw over for male characters arc with no plans for what happen to them is.

I just feel like its use as well as mary sue as innate pejoratives is stretching.

Fridging was extremely common in comic books for quite a while. I don't need to tell you that many comics are sexist and horribly derivative (you have eyeballs, so that's old news) but fridging was an extremely lazy thing they were doing. It was a combination of two things: comic book writers copy shamelessly, and comic book writers are frequently utterly incapable of writing women.

In this case, they copied the Death of Gwen Stacy. A pivotal moment in Peter's life, it was an enormous change for the comic. Gwen Stacy was an extremely well-developed character who was Peter's canonical love interest the way Lois Lane was to Superman. She was frequently getting kidnapped, and it made logical sense that her, being kidnapped by dangerous supervillains, might die. It also refreshed Peter's motivation. Uncle Ben had been slipping in relevance - he had died decades ago, the readers didn't have a strong connection to him (it was "hi Ben, bye Ben"), he had just gotten his powers. Gwen Stacy was a fresh death, and wracked Peter with guilt - if he had been faster, could he have saved the love of his life? It was an impactful and gut wrenching storyline.

However, in the hands of idiots, lets just say that that that was... less good. The term came from an stupid example where a Green Lantern (IIRC) was criticized as having "no character" so the comic writer introduced a girlfriend, only for her to be chopped up four issues later and stuck in the fridge (which gave him "character"). This was far from the only incident, but in that case it immediately struck a nerve because of the internet. Readers had predicted her death since she was introduced, and being proven so boringly, predictably right, there was a lot of online throwing of rotten fruit at the writer.

If there were two women on a team (certainly if there were three) you knew who would die to give the team angst and emotion. Girlfriends existed to get shot. Women in costumes existed to die for men. It was truly a piece of shit case of horrid writing.

Not every case of a woman dying is fridging, far, far from it. The trope refers to introducing a girlfriend/love interest/etc. who exists simply to die at some point in the second act to give the male character motivation. Think "John Wick's dog" but with women. Exists far outside comics by the way, witness Quantum of Solace (truly one of the worst Bond movies in many ways).

[Robovski]

They invented an infinity speed space drive in Voyager that, at the very least, had literally zero effect on the equipment or machinery. Yet they never used it to send supplies back and forth with starfleet, or do anything else an automated shuttle with an infinity speed drive could do.

They never figured out how to control where it comes out of transwarp. Speed isn't that helpful when you can't control where you're going.

Paris and Janeway ended up a few days from where Voyager was. Now at infinity speed, you're literally everywhere in the universe. The volume of the universe is, give or take, is a volume of space encompassing 93,000,000,000 lightyears. For reference, the Milky Way is 52,000 lightyears. Warp 8 is about 1,000 times the speed of light (give or take - seriously see the Memory Alpha page) so Tom Paris landing within 4 days of Voyager is landing inside a bubble 12 lightyears in diameter, out of the 93,000,000,000 lightyear bubble that he could have landed in.

If he couldn't aim it, then that's basically like buying the winning lottery ticket a few days in a row.

Really, the fact that it would have taken a large magnitude miracle to even recover Paris and Janeway was one of several things run past us in this episode we are just expected to accept in the course of our suspension of disbelief. When you spend more than a moment thinking about it (like here) then it becomes like you found a fortune in your sock drawer composed of entirely of the Hope Diamond. It's not impossible, but it's not going to happen.

[GreyICE]

When you spend more than a moment thinking about it (like here) then it becomes like you found a fortune in your sock drawer composed of entirely of the Hope Diamond.

This is genuinely funny. I'm sitting here just imagining Neelix opening up his sock drawer and taking out the Hope Diamond, and rubbing it on his shirt, and it's killing me.

[Link8909]

In fairness, this is hardly unique to Discovery. They invented an infinity speed space drive in Voyager that, at the very least, had literally zero effect on the equipment or machinery. Yet they never used it to send supplies back and forth with starfleet, or do anything else an automated shuttle with an infinity speed drive could do. Seeing as how infinity fast is very fast, you could do all sorts of things with that - automated mapping of the galaxy, automated mapping of other galaxies, etc. Every single episode about bringing medicine or supplies to someone, just send an automated infinity speed spaceship there, etc. etc.

At least the spore drive requires you to specially breed spores, which were probably all lost, and controlling it requires splicing alien DNA onto your DNA when they lost both the source of the alien DNA and the procedure. And it possibly puts you in an alternate universe and was potentially destroying the entire multiverse. The infinity speed threshold drive just requires you to have an automated ship.

Actually there's a whole bunch of procedures they do that they can't figure out how to do later. In TNG they had perfect deborgification, in Voyager they couldn't manage it. They can reconstruct people out of transporter pattern buffers after they die, or even clone people that way, but they can't ever seem to do it when it matters. And hell at one point DS9 uses the transporter as a time machine, no one ever pulls that trick again. Don't blame Discovery, this is a franchise staple. Just as warp drives move at the speed of plot, technology advances at the speed of plot.

This has also been how I feel about the Spore Drive.

While obviously the science behind the Spore Drive is insane, what I appreciate that it isn't a one and done piece of technology of the week that is quickly forgotten by the next episode, and throughout Discovery we see the applications and repercussions of both the Spore Drive and the Mycelium Network.

And as you said even without the cover up at the end of Season 2, there was plenty of reasons for why this wasn't developed beyond the USS Discovery, even if you could just add the Spore Drive to the starship like the Transwarp Drive or Quantum Slip Stream Drive (two other pieces of technology not followed up on after their failed attempted) and didn't need to build a starship from the ground up, and you could grow Mycelium, the only way for this drive to be affective is with a navigator, which you'll need to find a specific and very rare alien Tardigrade (good luck), and either force the possibly sentient creature to be the navigator and cause harm to it, which we know how Captain Janeway would feel about that from the two parter "Equinox", or break Federation Eugenics Laws and splice alien DNA with someone (most likely Harry Kim) and all the side affects that come with it, and of course all the risks that come from just using the Spore Drive, like accidently hopping into a parallel universe, or getting caught between regular space and sub-space and spinning out so you end up looking like the Thing from John Carpenter's The Thing.

[pilight]

They invented an infinity speed space drive in Voyager that, at the very least, had literally zero effect on the equipment or machinery. Yet they never used it to send supplies back and forth with starfleet, or do anything else an automated shuttle with an infinity speed drive could do.

They never figured out how to control where it comes out of transwarp. Speed isn't that helpful when you can't control where you're going.

Paris and Janeway ended up a few days from where Voyager was. Now at infinity speed, you're literally everywhere in the universe. The volume of the universe is, give or take, is a volume of space encompassing 93,000,000,000 lightyears. For reference, the Milky Way is 52,000 lightyears. Warp 8 is about 1,000 times the speed of light (give or take - seriously see the Memory Alpha page) so Tom Paris landing within 4 days of Voyager is landing inside a bubble 12 lightyears in diameter, out of the 93,000,000,000 lightyear bubble that he could have landed in.

If he couldn't aim it, then that's basically like buying the winning lottery ticket a few days in a row.

My impression has always been that without meaningful navigation, the warp 10 drive always leaves you close to where you started. It's literally a case of going nowhere fast.

[CrypticMirror]

I suppose it all depends on whether your destination is sufficiently improbable.

[Freeverse]

You'd think Spock could get Voyager back pretty easy if he just used the spore drive.

You'd think the specs would be in the computer but they act like they'd never heard of a spore drive.

It almost like the spore drive is a retcon made by people who didn't want to bother with continuity even if they chose a prequel.

I mean, the writers didn't get to make that choice. It was made before they were hired. Also, everything in a prequel is a retcon. Like... that's how prequels work.

No it isn't. It tells you the parts of the story that happened before the story started. If you learn why anakin fell to the dark side that's a prequel if you learn how he saved the republic from falling by killing the emperor during the battle for naboo that's a retcon.

Well, if you're only counting things that directly contradict what's already been established, then the spore drive isn't a retcon. There's nothing in Star Trek that precludes the existence of yet another piece of experimental super-tech that no one talks about anymore despite the amazing things it could theoretically do. There are dozens of things like that rattling around the galaxy.

Unless I missed the episode of Enterprise where Phlox explained how all fungal life had been eradicated by reckless human expansionism.