Tl;Dr - everybody on Voyager lacks the most basic of common security sense, and roams the delta quadrant with the naivety of children. Discuss.
Long version: Let me preface by stating that we’ve watched all of TNG and DS9, and we’re approaching the end of Voyager, so maybe I’m just burned out on Trek’s writing in general, but why do so many of Voyager’s plots require a complete lack of security common sense to work?
Case in point: we’ve just watched “Repression”, wherein Tuvok has been attacking and mind melding with all of the old Marquis crew, who have now all recovered from their mystery comas and been put straight back on duty. Tuvok is in the brig talking with Janeway. Not only did they let him keep his combadge, but when he uses it to relay a bunch of strange words to Chakotay, who replies that he “understood”, Janeway at no point thinks it might be prudent to have Chakotay immediately detained. This leads to a full ship takeover and Janeway almost getting killed.
Then literally the very next episode a random trader is able to straight up steal the doctor out from under everyone’s noses. I know the internet was in its infancy when Voyager was created and we were all pretty naive about data security, but come on!
So many plots rely on critical systems being wide open for anyone to tamper with, or crew members lacking the most basic of common sense and/or being way too trusting of complete strangers.
I appreciate that it would be a pretty boring show if everything was locked down and people did their jobs properly, and that I might as well be complaining about the fallacy of Holodeck safety protocols, but I had to get it off my chest!
If it weren’t for the fact that it’s become a bit of a running joke to point out all of the ways a major plot device could’ve been avoided I think we’d have stopped watching a couple of seasons ago.
Has Trek always been this way, or is the writing on Voyager just particularly lazy/bad?
Half of all Trek episodes go up in smoke if the given ship had security cameras. Trek sometimes ages poorly when modern technology unexpectedly leaps ahead of the show, but in this case they were already behind the times. i guess you could argue that the federation embraces radical privacy or something? but it’s a stretch, and doubly so on a ship with a large contingent of crewmembers who are defectors or never joined up to begin with. maybe they’re just too tired from immaculately refitting the ship every week
That’s my head canon for why they don’t have cameras everywhere, and other invasive technology like implants for communication and tracking