Thinking about Sacred Ground as an episode. And aside from “hehe the captain’s naked” and the idea of faith versus religion and Janeway’s fascinating sadness at being told there was a perfectly scientific explanation for saving Kes, I think this episode really does something interesting for Janeway specifically.
Janeway is arguing at the end of the episode that she’s got to take Kes through a field that everybody knows Should kill her and Kes. She says she just knows, which is alarming, and her officers question her mental capacity and decision-making skills. The alien right next to her says, “but they don’t have the answers, Kathryn. YOU do.”
Janeway proceeds through the field and, against all explicable odds at the time, she lives and Kes wakes. The point of the episode was a pretty clear “faith is not always to be mocked by science, and science is not the opposite of faith but rather a kind of it” parable. But, for Janeway it comes back to:
“They don’t have the answers, Kathryn. YOU do.”
And she did. For both Janeway and the crew who witnessed this ‘miracle’ (most particularly Chakotay, whose role as first officer means he SHOULD challenge her decisions when appropriate), this adds to a body of evidence showing that Kathryn Janeway Really Does Know Better.
By the time we reach Equinox, the nature of a high-stakes adventure where the isolated ship is the only mechanic and doesn’t have other people to help means that Kathryn Janeway continues to Know Better. Otherwise, they would have died, and the show would have ended. The structure of the narrative is built around Kathryn Janeway having answers that other captains and crew simply don’t. Again and again, the story tells us that Janeway has a ridiculous streak of luck, recklessness, and instinct that makes her a stellar captain. But to her, does it really count as luck? Does it, to her crew? Even Tuvok accounts for her luck in his calculations.
“They don’t have the answers, Kathryn. YOU do.”
Voyager’s episodic nature means this line probably wasn’t in any of the writers’ minds during Counterpoint, Equinox, Haunting of Deck Twelve or any of the other late season episodes where Janeway operates alone from the rest of her crew and believes herself 100 percent in the right. But I like to think the Sacred Ground episode was the first time Janeway was given the idea that she is simply Built Different. The first time her belief in her own instincts was codified as just as valuable as her scientific beliefs.
And I think it is fascinating that a woman who is Largely Good, effectively the highest form of authority wherever she goes according to her society, and who is often actively depressed by the isolation of a such a living deity-adjacent role, ALSO has enough pride in that existence to go along with it as well. Believing your own hype or the hype of your underlings - especially by a woman - is typically a bad thing.
Fascinated that Janeway’s pride and genuine enjoyment of her authority and skill is baked into, and rewarded by, the narrative. And is truly only challenged by Equinox and Bliss, two episodes designed to show the roles of Chakotay and Seven as the sole challengers of her worldview.
“They don’t have the answers, Kathryn. YOU do,” followed by several seasons of exactly that statement being proven? Of being cursed by her enemies, treated like a god by the time-accelerated planet and the society that wrote fanfiction about Voyager, of being wielded by several crew-members as if “I’m telling my captain on you” is the best threat they can come up with because she genuinely DOES come through for them?
Anyway, I am fascinated by the living deification of Janeway and every time I watch Sacred Ground I am reminded of it.
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