Those of us who were on the old social media boards of the day recall the outright hostility against a woman as a captain as the principal character of a show.
The number and toxicity of rants about ‘political correctness’ was extreme if less generally known outside fandom.
Personally, I loved the technobabble in Voyager — it conveys the process of engineering and science more authentically than in any other show in the franchise. At a certain level, it’s more important to have a realistic applied science and engineering process in a Star Trek show than to be restricted to what’s currently known in science or that can be extrapolated from limited current knowledge.
Voyager gave us nerds nerding out. What made it exceptional was not only was it two women with STEM expertise, but that they were enthusiastically supporting one another rather than competing.
We saw some of that positivity and STEM process with Geordie and Data in TNG, but Voyager gave us a captain who was an engineer who moved to command track. Janeway’s uncompromising work the problem dammit ethos is all engineer, and it made her the right temperament for the scenario of a ship lost in another quadrant.
The thing is, for Darem, his family and his people, this might be a high stakes situation.
It’s a change in leadership model, with a young new monarch. It should have more weight — especially as we and Jay-Den learn that they have some advanced Ionian-level portal technology. So, they seem the legacy of an advanced species with a highly structured society.
But the feel of the event was more like a resort destination wedding than a constitutional event.
The Khionians clearly a society hiding behind masks, and Darem excels at that.
BUT in the end, Darem’s long time betrothed expresses betrayal that Darem had been wearing a kind of mask with her, never showing his true self.
So, she sees only the ultimatum of an abdication an annulment as a solution.
Being creative and allowing Darem to continue with Starfleet so he could grow and become more comfortable and confident in his own identity, was beyond her ability to imagine.