unaired subplots from Star Trek Voyager

I'm the same person as @VOYsubplots on Twitter

[voysubplots]

I've loaded my queue with VOY subplots previously seen on my Twitter. Enjoy!

New subplots will be mixed in over time.

[voysubplots]

The universal translators go haywire and stop accounting for linguistic drift. Most people don’t notice, but Tom taught himself a bunch of 20th Century slang as a teenager and never bothered to stop using it. Things get awkward on the bridge when he calls Janeway “daddy-o”

[voysubplots]

After learning that people with traumatic childhoods can have a “rebellious teen” phase later in life, Seven attempts several minor acts of dissent against “the man,” which backfire, making Voyager more efficient. Janeway decides to help her, despite being an authority figure.

[voysubplots]

Seven helps B’Elanna clean her quarters “to reduce the net chaos on the ship.” They find an old friendship bracelet from Seska that Torres is unwilling to dispose of, to Seven’s confusion. At the end, Seven gives her a new bracelet that matches, and Torres gives her the original.

[voysubplots]

B'Elanna uses a subspace anomaly to open a narrow conduit to the Alpha Quadrant. Unfortunately, she finds that the conduit is unsafe for human travel. Before moving on, the crew assembles a capsule of letters home and tosses it in, sending a “message in a bottle” to Starfleet. 

Unsure of if their letters will ever reach their intended destinations, crew reminisce about their friends and families. Tom writes a single letter addressed to everyone in his family besides his father. Neelix writes a letter introducing himself to “anyone who wants to read it.“ 

Seven writes to "any former borg whose whereabouts are known” after significant pressure from Janeway, who does not write a letter at all. B'Elanna sends an encrypted file with designs for possible Maquis defense modifications to Federation runabouts, inspired by the Delta Flyer. 

Harry, too overwhelmed to write, instead sends an audio file of his most recent clarinet performance for his mom, with the title “I’m still practicing.” Kes sends a series of thank-you notes to her favorite living Alpha Quadrant artists, authors, botanists, and musicians. 

Tuvok sends long, individual letters to each of his children, and a very short letter to his wife. When asked why, he says she “already knows anything he could tell her.” Chakotay writes to the Maquis about the importance of perspective and cooperating in the name of peace. 

The Doctor misses the deadline to submit his letter because he took too long selecting which piece of his own art, music, fiction, or poetry to send home. B'Elanna makes fun of his indecision but secretly sends an appeal to the Federation to recognize his personhood.

[voysubplots]

BONUS DS9 SUBPLOT

Someone tells Quark about Pride Month and he immediately rainbow-capitalisms it beyond description. The promenade becomes more chaotic than ever. Odo gruffly, but not seriously, announces that he’d “like to arrest whoever told Quark about this “Pride Month’”

Quark facetiously accuses Odo of being homophobic. Everyone understands this as a joke until they see how vehemently Odo denies the allegation, insisting that Quark “knows that couldn’t be true” but refusing to elaborate.

[voysubplots]

Chakotay writes a book that’s bad on purpose as a joke, and nobody knows how to tell him they don’t like it. This is funny until he realizes that he now has come up with a believable way to tell the crew that it was a prank. The Doctor gives himself holographic chores.

[voysubplots]

The Doctor recommends that Seven should get a pet to explore her “nurturing” side. She won’t admit that she enjoys having a pet, but gets VERY defensive when Janeway questions whether a lizard belongs clinging to her shoulder in astrometrics. 

For those wondering, the lizard’s name is “Two of Two.” Initially, Janeway worries that this indicates the presence of another lizard, but eventually it comes out that Seven named him that because they “are part of the same unimatrix in the Voyager collective" 

[voysubplots]

In an effort to fast-track some of her friendships, Seven starts asking extremely personal questions. Janeway tries to explain that she shouldn’t do that, but confuses her by answering every question anyways. Harry opens up to her emotionally, which is weird for both of them.

[voysubplots]

Seven tells Janeway about her efforts to preserve Borg-assimilated cultures. Neelix overhears and takes it upon himself to convince Seven that the best way to preserve a culture is by celebrating their holidays. Things quickly get out of hand after she finally agrees.

[ralfmaximus]

An argument erupts about the inclusion of Festivus, which Neelix and Seven agree is a valid holiday but sends Tom Paris stomping angrily to the holodeck, recreating episodes of Seinfeld to demonstrate its actual, fictional, origin.

Neelix: so you have documentary evidence

Tom: No! This was a show! An entertainment!

Seven: Documentaries are a form of human entertainment

Tom: Not like that–

Hologram George: OH HAVE I GOT GRIEVANCES WITH YOU GUYS

[voysubplots]

Tom replicates a pair of heelies, but Janeway and the Doctor agree that they’re a uniform violation and a safety hazard. As a joke, B'Elanna asks to add heelies to her own uniform. To her surprise, the request is approved! Soon, almost everyone but Tom has permission for heelies.

B'Elanna’s request is predicated on the idea that she’ll use the heelies to get from one engineering emergency to another more quickly in a tactical situation, but mostly she wears her standard-issue shoes and uses the heelies to make fun of Tom. 

Harry and Seven are the only ones who actually use their heelies to be more productive. Seven pretends not to understand the situation surrounding Tom and his lack of heelies, but taunts him by saying that he couldn’t handle “the immense responsibility of wheeled work-shoes.”

[voysubplots]

@monkeyrevolution asked: what about Tuvok?

Tuvok never asks for permission to add heelies to his uniform but Chakotay adds it to his personnel file anyways. Tuvok confronts him:

“Commander, I see that you have added an authorization form for “heelies” to my Starfleet personnel file. I have requested no such authorization. Why have you done this?”

“Well the crew has practically been breaking down my door with requests lately so I decided to add an authorization to everyone’s file. We can sort out which crew members should actually have them on a case-by-case basis as incidents crop up.”

“I see. I would like to request that my heelie authorization be revoked, as I do not wish to wear them.”

“Relax, Tuvok, it’s permission, not a requirement. You don’t have to wear them if you don’t want to. Unless you want this removed from your file for some other reason? Worried you’ll be embarrassed when we get back to the Alpha Quadrant and Vulcan High Command thinks you’ve learned how to have fun?”

Tuvok replies “I know how to have fun, Commander.” before heelieing away. Nobody believes Chakotay that this happened.

[voysubplots]

Tired of putting in extra shifts in Sick Bay, Tom designs a hologram of himself to act as a nurse. The Doctor soon becomes frustrated with "Tom's" constant presence and demands control over when the program runs, raising some eyebrows among the senior staff.

[voysubplots]

Tom tries out Voyager's new diagnostic device (which allows doctors to experience patients' sensory input) with B'Elanna. Everything seems normal until Tom sees a new color visible only to Klingons. Soon, the whole crew is begging B’Elanna to let them see the "Klingon Color."

Torres resists on the grounds that she's "just not comfortable letting everyone on the ship feel her senses" but eventually relents and lets Harry try it.

The color was green. Tom is colorblind.

[70thousandlightyearsfromhome]

LOL 😂😂😂

Though I think Tom would know he was color blind. In the US military, they test your vision intensively, and people who are color blind are not allowed to be pilots.

Aliens on Trek should have had differing color vision. Even here on Earth, different species have different color vision. We mammals have very poor color vision, due to our evolutionary origins as nocturnal creatures in the days of the dinosaurs. I think it's likely that Klingons can see colors humans can't.

[stenchkow]

That's a fantastic point!

What if it was incorporated into the episode in order to make everything sillier?

Upon finding out, Harry asks Tom how Tom never knew he was colorblind. It turns out that Tom falsified his medical records in order to fast-track himself into Star Fleet's pilot program. He's Tom Paris, destined to be the best pilot in all of Star Fleet, dammit! Why would he spend time on medical tests when he could be spending time at a ship's console?

Everyone finds this very funny except for the Doctor, and who begins lecturing Tom on medical ethics.

[voysubplots]

Love both of these.

My slightly-less-fun explanation:

Accessibility has improved so much by the 24th Century that, although Starfleet knows Tom is colorblind, he was still allowed to become a pilot. After all, if he truly needed to see colors, he’d fail some flight test or similar. Nobody in Starfleet Medical ever told him because they assumed he knew.

When Tom was first tested for colorblindness as a child, his father didn’t tell him the result because he forgot didn’t want him to feel disadvantaged compared to the other children.

Also, as @70thousandlightyearsfromhome suggested, B’Elanna can indeed see colors which humans cannot, but only in low light. Neither Tom nor Harry thought to dim the lights in Sick Bay when seeing Torres’s vision, so Seven of Nine is the only other person on board who knows what these colors look like, having remembered them from previously-assimilated Klingons. When she hears what’s happened, she asks Tom and Harry if their favorite Klingon colors were qlt’ej-wov (night-pink) or se’rop (liar’s blue). Neither of them know what she’s talking about, but B’Elanna is “sick of letting you two plug yourselves into my brain!!” so they don’t get to find out.

[voysubplots]

Tom tries out Voyager's new diagnostic device (which allows doctors to experience patients' sensory input) with B'Elanna. Everything seems normal until Tom sees a new color visible only to Klingons. Soon, the whole crew is begging B’Elanna to let them see the "Klingon Color."

Torres resists on the grounds that she's "just not comfortable letting everyone on the ship feel her senses" but eventually relents and lets Harry try it.

The color was green. Tom is colorblind.

[voysubplots]

In an effort to fast-track some of her friendships, Seven starts asking extremely personal questions. Janeway tries to explain that she shouldn’t do that, but confuses her by answering every question anyways. Harry opens up to her emotionally, which is weird for both of them.

[voysubplots]

The Doctor suggests that Seven should do something nice for the crew around the holidays to foster community. She organizes a Secret Santa and pairs people “based on common knowledge of their mutual romantic interest.” As it turns out, some of that knowledge was not so common.

[voysubplots]

Tom buys a mood ring at an alien market while on shore leave, but it doesn’t change color. He says it’s consistent with ancient-Earth culture to wear a non-functional mood ring. Soon, the crew notices that his emotions change according to his temperature. Chakotay buys a vest from the same vendor, with no ill-effects.

[angrywarrior69]

Crying sobbing throwing up over these tags