It certainly didn’t live up to Federation ideals.
But then again Sisko should be a war criminal for using Biogenic weapons.
If you want to see someone do the ethically correct thing 10/10, even in the face of Starfleet failing to, Jean Luc is your captain.
I’ll bet Janeway and Sisko’s music playlists are a lot more fun though.
The whole theme of the show is the battle of the ideals which work great in the alpha quadrant vs the reality of their situation
That actually makes Sisko sound so much worse.
Yeah, he was largely operating in safe space and still made some unethical decisions.
Janeway was willing to make the hard calls that would best serve her ship and it’s future, having your cook and your third in command get fused isn’t exactly going to result in a functioning chain of command.
Plus since the operation could be reversed, you could argue that Tuvok and Neelix aren’t actually dead, merely suspended animation like storing people in a transporter buffer. You’re still killing Tuvix, but sacrificing one to save two is “the needs of the many” in it’s most simplistic form even without the added weight of hundreds of lives depending on Tuvok’s leadership and tactical skills.
I never once considered Janeway to be out of line given her circumstances. The crew always comes first even at the cost of her own humanity and ethics. She’s a good captain, willing to make the call that ends lives and live with it so that others may not have to endure those decisions and consequences. She didn’t ask anyone else to do that for her.
I mean, DS9 was almost as much in the boonies as Voyager. Assistance was limited, and there were limitations on what he could do, as he was only running the station at the behest of the Bajoran government, not as a true representative of the Federation.
It also introduced facets of war, even before it became a full blown thing in the later seasons. He wasn’t always on the side of the angels… because there are no angels in war. War only ever makes demons.
It doesn’t excuse his actions, but it doesn’t make them truly inexcusable either. They both operated in much more of a grey area than either of the two previous series.
Bajoran space was far away but not impossibly so from Federation resources, I’m not trying to say he’s a bad Captain, merely that the comparison to Janeway is a complete farce. If we are being fair they both fail to uphold the federation’s ideals.
If we are being reasonable, they both did what they had to do in order to save lives and get the job done.
My issue is the constant Trekky tendency to pretend Janeway is a shit bag and Sisko is somehow better, it’s just bias.
Yeah fuck Tuvix, and the Philosophy 101 bullshit. Two people were the victim of an orchid-related technology malfunction. Plus, I don’t hear people making the same argument about Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.
Exactly, had they not reversed the malfunction Janeway could be considered to have killed two of her crew. That somehow never gets brought up in the philosophy discussions surrounding the episode. Refusal to act when a solution exists makes her complicit in dual homicide.
Plus! After that one episode in TNG where they de-age replacement Crusher, we have no reason to believe transporters can’t solve literally all of these issues including death. For those not in the know, since the transporter has the last time someone energized stored in their memory banks it can simply reconstruct them as they were. A literal backup snapshot of the person.
Once that episode airs, all bets are completely off. I mean seriously, you could fix someone getting their head blown off by just transporting them but altering the image to correct for their last time leaving the ship. Death? Fixed. Wounds? Fixed. You can literally pull their backups and reconstruct at any time you want.
It’s foolish to think this is even a conundrum given that slip up, just duplicate and separate, keep all three. If transporters are really making matter out of energy it shouldn’t matter if there’s three people’s worth of matter, just use more energy.
There are a lot of instances where the Enterprise crew wanted to do the ethical thing, and Picard stops it or tries to. For example, when Dr. Crusher wanted to help when that planet population was addicted to drugs, and Picard wouldn’t let her do that or communicate anything to them.
Also, Data once found humans frozen in space, and when he helped them, Picard was annoyed; it wasn’t even a Prime Directive issue!
The biogenic stuff is so funny for some reason… The absolute absurdity of Sisko bio nuking a planet to get one terrorist
Even Picard broke the PD multiple times. If we are basing ethics on that then he’s no better.
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Needs of the many (2 people live) over needs of the few/one (cya tuvix)
JANEWAY DID NOTHING WRONG
Sucks to be Tuvix, nobody should be judged on the circumstances of one’s creation.
But Tuvok and Neelix deserved to live, too.
If you have the ability to help them, you have the responsibility to help them.
Exactly! The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one. Tuvok and Neelix are the many, Tuvix was the one. Simple math
Yeah, it separated the wheat from the chaff. Janeway did nothing wrong.
Pretty harsh to call Tuvok “chaff” - the man’s chief of security!
Transporters just kill everyone all the time anyways. The original Tuvok and Neelix were already long dead. What happens to their Nth copy hardly matters.
He had died a thousand deaths, he feared not one more.
Exactly what I was thinking of
same brainwave connection five 👋
That’s why you never use the transporters. Also, they could have had all three alive by doing a clone and split via the transporters.
I’m in camp Janeway did nothing wrong, but some things like the doctor in SNW keeping his daughter in the buffer raise questions about just exactly what is being stored and rematerialized. Maybe there was a way to use transporter magic to solve the trolley problem, but the needs of the many and two crew members were already MIA
It’s been shown multiple times before that there’s no technological reason you can’t put someone in the buffer and take two out. Thomas and William are proof of this.
The Voyager crew likely had access to the records of the Thomas case, having happened a decade earlier. Though I admit I don’t know if the information would have been classified or withheld for some reason.
Assuming they had the information, they could have likely attempted a duplication, and unmerge one of the two resulting Tuvix’s.
I found myself so pissed off this wasn’t even considered during the episode. It’s like they just forgot duplication was a possibility, even if it wasn’t a super sure fire solution.
That solution would require transporters to have a consistent set of abilities across series, when somehow the way they work changes even within the same series
Firmware updates fix some bugs and introduce others.
We could have saved Tuvix’ pattern, split him into the family members we all meme over, and then used energy to pop him back
Wait so then why don’t they duplicate people all the time? The galaxy could use another Data.
Because the star trek transporter is pretty much the definition of deus ex machina, with a particularly lazy deus that only works every few episodes
@explodicle @startrek I think it’s best not to ponder the capabilities of the transporter too closely, otherwise it kinda breaks the world.
I wonder if that falls under eugenics, too close to cloning.
They had a pretty broad definition of “eugenics” anyways. Bashir’s parents did nothing wrong.
This was one of those episodes i never really gave another thought until reading about it on the internet.
I skip that episode. It’s just… eh… not my cup of tea.
I think the controversy of Janeway’s choice is largely due to the show’s failure to address the orchid of it all.
As I see it, Tuvix is not “Tuvok + Neelix,” but also isn’t “something new.” I maintain that Tuvix is primarily the orchid, which has subsumed the essence and personalities of two Voyager crew members and is asserting itself on board the ship.
All it would have taken is for Janeway to have maintained (or be convinced by another) that this was the case, and it would be the obvious choice to split them back up.
Of course that would negate the tension of the episode, but it could be left as “not everyone on board agrees that this is who/what Tuvix is, but Janeway believes it so that’s why her decision isn’t immoral.” We could have the same kinds of “was Janeway wrong?” debates, but some of the rough edges would be smoothed out, I think.
New Trolley Problem: Would you cold-bloodedly murder a living being to save two of your buddies from certain death? Jameway say absolutely I do.
She literally murdered him
or did she make a choice to sacrifice 1 to save 2?
trolly problem
I am here to explain this once again. Neelix and Tuvok were dead. They died in a transporter accident. They died painlessly and unaware of their fate. Tuvix was not dead. Begged not to be killed. And was painfully aware of the fate they were forced to suffer.
It does not matter if you have a magic wand that can magic two people back for the cost of one other, she chose to kill someone, who was begging to her face to be spared. It is as simple as that. What other innocent people would you choose to kill in order to bring back others you deem more valuable? The closest parallel I can think of in the real world would be if someone bundled you off the street and explained that they were going to remove your heart to give it to Joe Biden as you are the best blood and tissue match. You won’t survive this procedure but let’s be honest, Joe Biden is way more useful to the establishment than you, whoever you are.
The episode is great and I would never ask for it to be changed, it added a lot of depth to Janeway as a character, but it was also straight up murder.
Exactly, the trolly problem describes a murder too. The question it presents “is murder ever justified” and it’s not meant to have a “correct” answer, it’s meant to study how people react to two seemingly equivalent scenarios.
I think Voyager’s “is it ok to push the fat man if his death resurrects two previously dead people and also increases the chances of getting everyone home” twist on the scenario is really interesting and I love that it always without fail gets people debating.
and people whose heart stop… we revive them, and then they are not dead any more. if someone is able to be revived, it’s irrelevant what you called them before that point: their… let’s say potential state? is not dead
That’s not an equal comparison. If by dying a new person started walking around in your body, and then by the medics doing CPR that person was killed, causing you to come back, that would be an equal comparison.
i’m not comparing the whole thing; just breaking the problem down into parts… i’m asserting that your definition of “dead” is wrong. they are not permanently dead, because they can be revived
we have 3 potential people. either you remain at the end with 1 person, or 2 people… the choice is between action (killing tuvix to save neelix and tuvok) or inaction (allowing tuvix to live, and accepting the death of neelix and tuvok)
it’s perfectly valid to say that inaction is the ethical choice because you should never personally cause harm… but it’s also perfectly valid to say action (in this case, murder, as we see in the episode) is the ethical choice because it has the greatest good for the most people
and in fact, the latter is repeated often in star trek: the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few
and indeed, in this episode they further throw a spanner in the works: the many includes voyagers crew, and their chief security officer
Best solution:
1: Sedate Tuvix. He must not be conscious for the next steps.
2: Make a transporter clone of him (like Riker/Boimler)
3: Separate one of the Tuvixes into Tuvok/Neelix, leave the other as Tuvix
Everyone wins!
Why sedate him? He willingly walked onto his execution pad.
I would have been on Tuvix’s side if they were cuter but I still see their face in my nightmares.
“he deserves death because he’s ugly”
The question to me isn’t whether Janeway murder Tuvix, but was the murder of Tuvix justifiable. In Star Trek 2 Spock famously states “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” in TNG Thine Own Self Troy learns that sometimes an officer must order a crew member into a situation where they know that person isn’t coming back.
Does the situation Voyager was in and the creation of Tuvix represent the same level of danger “to the many” that say an imminent warp core breach does?
Dude I wish I could be split into two people. I reeally want the Neelix part of me gone.
