[O]ne thing defines [Seska] in contrast to the Cardassians we’d been regularly seeing on Star Trek at that moment in time: she’s just kind of an absolute hot mess.
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But it’s kind of what makes Seska work as a character: despite all this, villainy or otherwise, nothing ever quite clicks for her. It’s a great mirror to uphold against Janeway’s decision to have the crew take the long way home in the first place, the idea that, if they did ultimately just go Seska’s route and exploit their advantageous power in an unknown quadrant, it would doom them.
You’re not remembering the season very well. There’s very little water in this region of space and people are always fighting over it.
That’s interesting. I’m no spaceologist, but I wonder if that’s consistent with our observations of the universe. My cursory searches lead me to believe that there’s just a boatload of ice out there. I’ll have to rewatch Voyager at some point, and see what the technobabble explanation is.
I think the idea is that it’s weird and different and has created a politically unstable area of space not unlike arid regions of earth. Probably exactly that when you include the later addition of the Trabe species who are the wealthy colonizers.