I know, baby...

but the janeway/janeway selfcest of it all really has me rotating deadlock in my mind like a rotisserie chicken, nonstop. what if that situation happened 3 or 4 more times?

several different things to crunch on with multiple deadlock instances.

1. free angst. so goes the captain, so goes the ship. how does the janeway who survives through all these - janeway prime if you will - handle her survivor’s guilt when all the other janeways had a successful Kathryn Janeway Special (martyred themselves for another).

2. ethical dilemmas when not every situation is as neatly solved and there’s no clear pick of which voyager to sacrifice. who gets to live? how does the captain decide? what to do when the same person on both crews is begging to be the choice to live. how to explain to naomi??

3. janeway/janeway is bound to get real damn weird the 4th, 10th, 20th time this situation rolls around. kate mulgrew’s impossible chemistry with herself? real guilt/desire/loneliness that only She understands happening there, need them to have a quickie on the upper floor of engineering at least once.

Seven: I beg your pardon?

Tom: I mean, can you still smell the captain?

Seven: Would Tuvok not be the more appropriate one in this metaphor?

Tom: Of course, the ears! Tuvok is an elf.

May your Paths be safe, your Floors unbroken and may the House fill your eyes with Beauty.

I read Piranesi again...

I had to compress the hell out of this gif to upload. If you want to see a nicer, bigger version you can do so here on my AO3.

There's a sort of running gag with the Star Trek engineers. Something will need to get done, the captain asks how long it will take, and the engineer gives an estimate. The captain will then say they need it done twice as fast, or more. They then usually pull it off somehow. This is the done thing. TVtropes calls it "Scotty Time", after the engineer from the first series.

We get this same interaction over and over across multiple series, from multiple different pairs of captains and engineers. By the later seasons of Next Generation they're already riffing on it. One scene establishes that the initial estimate is usually actually already longer than they'll actually need, because captains love to pressure their crews and the engineers know this, so getting it done in less time than initially proposed makes them look good. This ritual has by this point been established as Starfleet standard, seen in the original series, Next Generation, and prominently in Deep Space Nine.

So then we get to Star Trek Voyager, and we have our captain Janeway and our chief engineer B'elanna Torres, and we know how this is gonna go. In a season one episode, sure enough, Janeway asks that whatever needs to be done gets done in half the estimated time, and... Torres stops her. No, she says, it takes as long as it takes, it can't be done faster. And her face is dead serious. Janeway is momentarily surprised but doesn't protest. And it's some great characterization for both of them. It establishes Torres as an honest and hard working officer, a straight shooter who doesn't take shortcuts. She'll look her commanding officer in the face and just say the truth. And it establishes Janeway as someone experienced but not incapable of adapting to her crew. She knows how this interaction is supposed to work, but takes Torres at her word, and doesn't repeat this trope for the rest of the series. I like it a lot. Idk end of post