Some years ago, when I heard this I thought about all those rebates I’ve done. I’ve done quite a few, and my experience has been mixed. I’m not exactly sure how the decide which people they’re going to attempt to deny (even with legitimate rebates). I’m fairly certain that they are not simply careless because the rate at which I’ve been denied at least the first time has been about 50%. That’s way too high to be coincidental considering that it’s never happened even once through all the other mailings I’ve done like paying bills where I’m actually sending them money.

So yes, I would say that they are following the first Rule of Acquisition:

Once you have their money, never give it back.

I ended up watching Voyager after I had exhausted TNG and DS9. I didn’t think Voyager was as good as either of those, but the holographic doctor was good and the episodes were interesting, up until a certain point. That’s right, I could look past the character flaws in Janeway and Chakotay; I could look past the blatant DS9 rip-off of the old “two best buddies” relationship between Kim and Paris; I could even (though just barely) look past the way they ruined some of the foundational concepts of the Q continuum and Q’s personality (saved by John de Lancie‘s acting, not the writing). Ok, I admit it, I can’t look past that one episode where Q is in a civil war (huh? forget about the metaphysics of two omniscient things actually having a conflict) and the crew is able to defeat half of Q with rifles. (No matter how logical you think your explanation of that is, I defy anyone to come up with an explanation for how humans know how to use “Q weapons.”)

I think the real turning point was when Voyager encountered the Borg and picked up 7-of-9. I don’t know where to begin: the fact that the borg are portrayed more as individual creatures instead of that scary massive machine that it was in TNG, or the fact that even after they learn 7-of-9′s real name (Annika) the crew still “comfortably” calls her 7-of-9 even though they only first met anyway. But despite the fact that the writers decided to change the panache and concept of the borg collective, there is just one thing that remains unacceptable: the existence of the Borg Queen who was destroyed in Star Trek – First Contact.

I know, because they did it in Voyager now it’s up to us to make sense of it since it must be canon. Personally, I’m more comfortable with just striking Voyager from the Star Trek record completely. The whole multiple-queens theory is simply unacceptable. I’ve read the explanations and theories put for this on Wikipedia and Memory Alpha, but none are acceptable.

First, there is absolutely no precedence for there being multiple queens before the Voyager episodes. The idea that the queen was on the cube that capture Picard has no basis as the queen is obviously one with the borg: there is no reason to assume that she was on a lone cube going to Earth at that time.

There is also no reason to think that choosing different actors to play the queen implies at all that the queen has replicants. In fact, it seems they went through great lengths to make sure that the queen looked almost exactly the same considering how little they cared about making sure Picard’s younger self looked the same in TNG and Nemesis. (See these pictures from Rascals, Tapestry, Violations, and Nemesis.) And don’t forget that in Voyager, the queen herself gives a little bit of her history about being species number 125 and how she came to be. She implied that she was unique.

So instead, can we just admit that Voyager screwed things up? Why do we have to bend over backwards to make the stuff that happened in Voyager canon when it’s so obviously erroneous? I’d like to call it Star Trek Apocrypha.

By the way, I won’t be watching Enterprise. Anything Star Trek that is so bad that it gets discontinued after Voyager was able to have a healthy life isn’t worth watching. Besides, I’ve not even seen it and I’ve already read or heard some things about it that I can’t stand. Let’s just strike Enterprise from the record too while we’re at it.