10 Star Trek Questions That Always Confused You
Which of these Star Trek questions has bugged you enough to read an article about them?
How did the Enterprise travel to the centre of the galaxy? Why didn't Voyager just set a course for home in a straight line? Why would the Borg confine themselves to the Delta Quadrant?
Star Trek is full of various plot points that raise a few eyebrows, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're plot holes. In the almost sixty years that Star Trek has existed, it has offered the audience dozens of head-scratching moments, yet it's also offered answers to them as well. Are those answers straightforward? Well, no, not always. Still, that's why we're here - doing the work so you don't have to.
Why does everyone in Star Trek look the same, more or less? Does every single human being speak English? How did James T. Kirk make captain in a fraction of the time it should have taken him to advance? This article may not be able to solve every single riddle that Star Trek has ever posed (just who were those clicking aliens in Schisms?) but in the spirit of exploration, let's journey on together and do what we can to seek out new....resolutions!
10. Why Didn't Voyager Fly Home In A Straight Line?
One of the most common questions that are posed about Star Trek: Voyager, and the crew's journey home, is why didn't the ship simply fly home in a straight line? Losing all of the detours along the way, couldn't the ship have saved itself a lot of time and effort?
In the Star Trek canon, the centre of the Galaxy is a bit of an oddity. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier shows the Enterprise-A simply nipping over there and back, no problem. Despite this, the film still takes the time to say that all ships that attempt to traverse the great barrier end up destroyed.
The Enterprise promptly flies through it without so much as a bump.
However, by the time Voyager began airing, this element of Trek history had been quietly swept under the rug. The galactic centre became a far larger and far more distant destination, which scratches that from Voyager's path. Could the ship not have then set course for the Gamma Quadrant and used the Bajoran Wormhole to get home?
Now that question has yet to receive a satisfying answer, but there is most probably a case of not wanting to cross the streams going on there!