“Phage”
Written by Timothy DeHaas and Skye Dent and Brannon Braga
Directed by Winrich Kolbe
Season 1, Episode 4
Production episode 105
Original air date: February 6, 1995
Stardate: 48532.4
Captain’s log. Voyager is en route to a planetoid that has readings indicating huge deposits of dilithium. They arrive, and Neelix bullies his way onto the away team, as he’s been preparing for it all week. Janeway inexplicably once again gives in to Neelix’s whims and he beams down with Chakotay and Kim.
Their exploration of the planetoid reveals lots of dilithium readings, but no actual dilithium in any of the caverns. Neelix does encounter a life form, who zaps him with a tool, after which Neelix collapses, not breathing.
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Chakotay and Kim beam him directly to sickbay, where the EMH reveals that Neelix’s lungs are missing. He can keep him alive for a bit under an hour—and then he hits on the notion of giving him holographic lungs. It requires Neelix to be completely immobile, but at least it will keep him alive while they try to find a more permanent solution. Unfortunately, Talaxian lungs connect directly to the spine, a far too complex procedure to do with artificial lungs, apparently, and nobody on the ship is biologically compatible with Talaxians for a transplant.
Janeway and Tuvok beam back down with a security contingent. They find a storage room full of biological material, and also find a person, but he gets away in a ship. (Tuvok also determines that the aliens use dilithium as a power source, which explains the reading, but there’s no actual dilithium to mine.)
They beam back and give chase, eventually tracking the ship to another planetoid, this one artificially created. Voyager flies into the planetoid (in which the ship barely fits) only to find reflective surfaces and sensor interference making it impossible to find the other ship. Eventually, they hit on the idea of firing low-powered phasers—it won’t damage anything, but it’ll reflect off the false images, and be absorbed by the real alien ship.
The alien ship legs it as soon as they’re discovered, but this time Janeway tractors the ship and has its occupants beamed aboard.
They identify themselves as Dereth and Mortura of the Vidiian species. The Vidiians have been plagued by a disease known as the Phage for millennia. The only way they can survive is to replace diseased organs and limbs with transplants. They prefer to take from cadavers, but they’re desperate enough to sometimes harvest the living, as they did with Neelix. The Talaxian’s lungs are already in Mortura, and they can’t be removed without killing him, which Janeway won’t do, not even to save Neelix.
Because she has no authority here, and isn’t willing to carry them both in the brig for the foreseeable future, she lets them go, but makes it clear in no uncertain terms that any further attempts to harvest anyone from Voyager will be met with a most violent response.
Grateful, Dereth offers to help Neelix—Kes has already offered to donate a lung, and Dereth can make that work. After performing the transplant, Neelix and Kes both recover in sickbay.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The replicators are supposed to be down, yet the EMH asks Paris to replicate a medical tool, which he does.
The Vidiians have spectacular transplant technology, one which allows ease of cross-species transplants.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway is very obviously frustrated by her inability to properly get justice for Neelix. However, she makes it abundantly clear that she will brook no more interference from them, a threat that the Vidiians, sadly, will not heed.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH hits on the notion of creating holographic lungs for Neelix, since the holoemitters can create solid matter. However, it only works if Neelix never moves a muscle.
He is also getting increasingly cranky over his lack of staff and his need to be on call constantly, particularly if it means constant care for Neelix (though that becomes moot when the transplant option becomes viable). Kes gives him a pep talk.
Also he demonstrates how holograms are solid by slapping Paris. Which was epic.
Half and half. Torres is designing a dilithium refining facility on the ship, using the impulse generator. Janeway is initially appalled, wondering if Torres has an instinct for solutions that violate Starfleet procedure, but Janeway approves it anyhow.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix has taken over the captain’s private dining room and turned it into a galley (and also a fire hazard), so he can make food with the fruits and vegetables Kes has been growing in hydroponics. Janeway is dubious, and also annoyed that he did so without asking her, but after he gets his transplanted lungs, Janeway says she’s looking forward to tasting his meals.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Neelix takes time out from being deathly ill to have a jealous snit about Paris being nice to Kes. This is not the last time this will happen. The snit includes a lot of mean things being said to Kes, as if it’s her fault that Paris is skeevy.
Do it.
“Strange—according to my readings, you are not here.”
“Believe me, I wish I weren’t.”
–Dereth not finding any life-sign readings from the EMH, and the EMH saying, “Bazinga!”
Welcome aboard. Cully Fredrickson and Stephen B. Rappaport play the two Vidiians. Fredrickson will appear again as the Vulcan who makes first contact with Zefram Cochrane at the end of Star Trek: First Contact. Also back is recurring regular Martha Hackett as Seska.
Trivial matters: This episode introduces the second recurring antagonist for the Voyager crew, the Vidiians, who will reappear throughout the first and second seasons, and also show up in the third and sixth. Their next appearance will be in “Faces.”
The storyline is a merging of two notions, a story pitch by Timothy DeHaas (who also wrote the story for TNG’s “Identity Crisis“) about Paris having his heart blown away and being given a holographic one, and a notion in the writers room about an alien species who harvested organs.
Seska is in a gold engineering uniform this time, instead of a blue sciences one, which she’ll maintain for her subsequent appearances as a member of the crew.
Neelix’s galley debuts in this episode. It will continue to serve as a secondary mess hall where people can eat Neelix’s culinary creations.
Set a course for home. “I don’t have the freedom to kill you to save another.” Conceptually, this episode is excellent. The Vidiians are a powerful antagonist because they come, not from malice or desire for conquest or piracy or any of the usual bad-guy motivations, but rather from desperation. They do what they do to survive, the, ah, prime directive (sorry…) of every living species. It adds a tinge of tragedy to their mendacity.
The execution falls down a bit. For starters, there isn’t enough story here for an hour, so we get a tiresome amount of time wandering through dark, rocky corridors and an even more tiresome amount of time flying Voyager very slowly through a big rock.
When we finally do meet the Vidiians, we’re 35 minutes into a 45-minute episode, and that ten minutes has to include revealing everything about the Vidiians, Janeway figuring out how to deal with them, and, oh yeah, curing Neelix. It’s not enough time for the revelations to be as effective as they should be.
While the Vidiians will go on to be an effective antagonist, their introduction is lackluster, because we don’t really get any sense of their desperation. We’re told it, but we’re not really shown it, and it lacks the gravitas the script wants it to have.
However, if you want gravitas, we’ve got Kate Mulgrew, who in that very same scene imbues Janeway with fury, frustration, anger, and resentment. She very much wants to punish the Vidiians, but can’t do so in good conscience, especially since she’s got no actual authority here. So she falls back on compassion, letting them go with a (very stern) warning. And, in true Star Trek fashion, compassion is rewarded: the Vidiians do fix Neelix by performing the transplant that’s beyond Federation medicine.
Which brings us nicely to the biggest problem with this episode, and the entire premise of the Vidiians, unfortunately: what about prosthetics? Why can’t they use artificial organs and limbs? Aside from one brief mention by the EMH about Neelix early in the episode, the notion of artificial replacements never really comes up. Well, except for the holographic lungs, which is actually a very clever use of the existing holotechnology. But still, the lack of prosthetics as an option for the Vidiians is a major flaw, especially when we’re talking about a species that has medical technology way in excess of what the Federation has.
Still, this is a good science fictional premise, with a very Star Trek attitude taken toward the Vidiians. Plus, the EMH slaps Paris.
Warp factor rating: 6
Keith R.A. DeCandido has written three works of Voyager fiction, most of which don’t actually take place in the Delta Quadrant: the Mirror Universe short novel The Mirror-Scaled Serpent (in Obsidian Alliances, in which Kes and Neelix go through the Caretaker’s array and wind up in the Alpha Quadrant), the novella “The Third Artifact” in The Brave and the Bold Book 2 (which tells the story of how and why Tuvok infiltrated the Maquis), and the short story “Letting Go” in the anthology Distant Shores (which focuses on the families of the crew left behind, primarily Janeway’s boyfriend Mark Johnson).
It wasn’t until I saw them written above, that I noticed how obvious the Vidiians’ names are: Dereth = Death; and of course Mortura = mort, Latin for “death.”
This time I agree 100% with the review. I loved how Janeway reacted to the Vidiians, the fury, the helplessness, the compassion, and never a moment of disgust (which I totally had when I watched this for the first time). I loved the conciliatory ending. And yes, the Vidiians are interesting antagonists.
The fact that Kes eventually leaves Neelix for Paris makes Neelix’ jealousy look different in retrospect. That was not a good storytelling choice.
“Janeway is very obviously frustrated by her inability to properly get justice for Neelix. However, she makes it abundantly clear that she will brook no more interference from them, a threat that the Vidiians, sadly, will not heed.”
Why would they? Janeway’s showing herself to be pretty toothless here, and seeing as how she’s unwilling to defend her crew in the face of an unprovoked attack, it’s no wonder they consider Voyager to be easy pickings from now on. I’m actually uncomfortably reminded of the later World of Warcraft expansions, where despite every atrocity the Horde commits (Theramore, Southshore, Teldrassil, et al), as soon as the Alliance gets the upper hand, they restrain themselves to ineffectual finger-wagging.
The idea that Janeway lacks the authority to punish the Vidiians doesn’t make any sense either. Considering how they’re basically pirates, one would assume that hostis humani generis applies here. More to the point, as Captain of Voyager, Janeway has a responsibility to safeguard her crew; that should give her all the authority she needs. I’m pretty sure there’s some Starfleet regulations covering a Captain’s duties towards her subordinates, and I doubt letting them get harvested for their organs by a hostile alien species is permitted.
Does the fact that Neelix has a single lung ever come up again? Or for that matter, the fact that it comes from a species with a much shorter life-span than his own? Seems like it should have worn out after another 7 years or so.
@3 What’s she supposed to do to the Vidiians? Stick them in the brig? Summary execution?
Why is there still no topic for Kes?
This was a decent idea, and the Vidiians were a very disturbing and interesting concept for antagonists. But I’ve always had one major credibility problem with it, and that’s the lung transplant from Kes (EDIT: And I see from comment #4 that I’m not the only one). Ocampa only live 8-9 years, so presumably their organs wouldn’t be adapted to last much longer than that; and even with Vidiian tech to make it compatible, Kes’s lung would be pretty small compared to Neelix’s, plus it’s doing the work of two, so you’d think the extra strain would make it give out even sooner. It always bothered me that this never became an issue down the road. My “headcanon,” though, is that (spoiler alert) when Seven used Borg nanoprobes to bring Neelix back from the dead in “Mortal Coil,” that regenerated his lungs too and solved the problem. (Though that didn’t happen in my alternate-timeline VGR novel Places of Exile, so I was able to make the lung failure a plot point there as I always felt it should’ve been.)
@2/Jana: Whaaa? Kes didn’t leave Neelix “for Paris,” she left him for herself, because she realized she needed more independence to discover who she was as she continued to mature. It was only in the alternate “Before and After” timeline (okay, arguably the original timeline before she reset it) that she and Tom ended up together.
Anyone notice that they used the exact same asteroid in which the Pegasus had stuck in TNG?
@5: Sure, why not? Pulling a Javik and throwing them out the airlock might just convince the rest of the Vidiians that screwing with Voyager and its crew is more trouble than its worth. Considering that the ship is all alone in the Delta Quadrant and without support, bearing their teeth to ward off a genuine threat that has attacked them without provocation just seems sensible.
@6/Christopher: Okay, I didn’t remember that. I still don’t like that they ended up together.
@8/Devin Smith: Because she feels sorry for them, that’s why. And it payed off in this episode, although it didn’t in the long run. If she had thrown them out the airlock, I would have stopped watching the show.
Christopher: Because it’s my rewatch, because not everybody gets a category, and because I don’t want to do a category for Kes, and please don’t phrase the question in such a way that a category for Kes is just a fait accompli.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@8/Devin Smith: If the Vidiians had just been predators or pirates, maybe a harsh response could’ve been justified (though Starfleet regulations require exhausting all nonviolent options before resorting to violence). But the Vidiians are literally suffering from a terminal disease. They’re sick and dying. How would the TV audience have reacted to seeing a lead character execute the equivalent of a terminal cancer patient?
After all Kirk himself didn’t get a category on the TOS rewatch.
I have to admit I started this episode in a bit of a cringe state, because I confused it with “Tuvix”, so it really had nowhere to go but up. It does largely stand on its own, though. The Vidiians do make good antagonists, and the “flashlight” use of the phasers was reasonably clever (especially since they did it without an obvious callback to outdated technologies like radar or sonar).
So they aimed high and fell a little short. That’s not all too uncommon for Trek. And at least it didn’t have Tuvix in it.
The problem is not resolved in a morally satisfactory fashion. The Vidiians mugged Neelix for a vital part of his body and left him to die. Yes, they eventually helped save his life, but at a cost of harming another person (who at least was willing to make that sacrifice). The second act does not make up for the first, and they are left to violate other people in the future.
@11: If said terminal cancer patient was having people kidnapped and forcibly exsanguinated in an attempt to prolong his own existence, then I doubt the audience would be perturbed when he got his just desserts. Even the best Freudian excuse is simply that: an excuse.
@14 I’m pretty sure aggravated assault–even murder–is not punishable by the death under Federation law.
@16 – If Riker and Pulaski can kill their clones in the name of defending their bodily integrity, then should there be any qualms in recovering Neelix’s stolen lungs?
The Vidiians will do this to other people and their need does not justify their actions.
KRAD asked:
Back in the ’90s, during the original airing of VGR, there was fan speculation (on Usenet’s rec.arts.sf.tv.startrek, probably) that the Vidiians and Borg were related: in response to the depredations of the Phage, one branch of the society used organic transplants, and the other used cybernetics.
(The Borg trademark in VGR is “nanoprobes” but, given their modus operandi, they would have started with something more crude and later assimilated nano — possibly between TNG and First Contact, if you prefer to believe the change in looks wasn’t just an upgrade in makeup budget.)
(Of course, VGR, for all its encounters with the Borg, never got around to giving the audience an origin — either via gloating by the Queen, or a lecture by Seven. Assuming the Borg even know — in their relentless quest for “perfection” they don’t seem the type to be sentimental about their origins.)
@14: Don’t you know that actually standing up for yourself is an act of perfidious colonialism? When someone harms those you have a responsibility to protect, the only moral thing to do is wag your finger at the perpetrators and let them walk away. Actually holding them to account for their crimes and stopping them from hurting anyone else is always worse than their actual crimes themselves.
/sarcasm
Though in all seriousness, you’re absolutely correct. Not only is Janeway risking her ship and crew further, who knows how many other innocents these particular Vidiians might harm now that she’s let them go?
@19 So what is she supposed to do? Killing them would be as illegal as their assault on Neelix. She can’t lock them up or send them to the penal colony she found Tom in.
Paris might be skeevy, but at least he’s not an overpossessive Nice Guy like Neelix. Plus, his food is probably edible at least half the time.
@8, @11, the first time you run into the Vidiians, you play nice. The second time they screw you over, you take aggressive counter measures (or should have–I don’t recall so we’ll see what comes next).
I have a problem with the idea that the holodeck could simulate lungs. There is an immense difference between simulating a baseball (it needs to look right, and move right when you hit it with your holographic bat, and feel right when you hold it, but the internal structure is irrelevant) and simulating a lung. To work correctly, the lung needs to have the correct physical structure on a 1-3 micron level, and the structures need to have the correct protein signals sticking out of them so the blood cells react properly when passing through). If you can simulate that precisely with the holodeck, you could just replicate a new lung. And don’t say the replicator were down. (They might have been restricted to emergencies.)
It would have been more believable to say that the doc could keep Neelix’s blood oxygenated with an external pump (already in stores for human cardiovascular emergencies) and then you could add urgency by saying that he is deteriorating faster than expected due to species incompatibility.
@17/Crusader: “If Riker and Pulaski can kill their clones in the name of defending their bodily integrity, then should there be any qualms in recovering Neelix’s stolen lungs?”
Those clones were only partially gestated, the equivalent of aborted embryos or fetuses, not fully matured, sapient beings with lives of their own.
@22/Thomas: It wasn’t the holodeck creating Neelix’s lungs, it was the holoemitters in sickbay, which are designed to generate the EMH and his surgically precise hands. They no doubt operate at a much higher level of fidelity and precision than purely recreational holosystems.
“Organised organ theft to stave off a widespread fatal disease” isn’t an idea I remember from any written SF, let alone TV, so kudos to the writers for that. I suppose Larry Niven’s organleggers and A Gift From Earth comes closest.
@20: As I explained before, it’s a hostis humani generis thing. Long story short, pirates and slavers are considered hostis humani generis, ie “enemies of all mankind”, as their actions threaten all peoples and usually take place in international waters where no single nation has jurisdiction. Much like the classical definition of “outlaw”, they are considered outside the protection of the law for their crimes, and it’s open season on them. And that’s not even counting the fact that self-defense is a thing, and the Voyager crew has the right to protect itself from an unprovoked attack.
And before anyone contests comparing the Vidiians to slavers, it’s actually established in “Faces” that the Vidiians do in fact use other species as slave labour, before harvesting their organs when they’re too weak to work. So yeah, Janeway can light their homeworld on fire and it would be a justified response, as far as I’m concerned.
@25/Devin: It’s not about what might be legally or pragmatically defensible in a real situation, it’s about how you present fictional characters to the audience and make them both sympathetic and representative of the show’s values. Achieving the latter often means compromising on the former.
It was Voyager, after all, that explicitly codified the Starfleet directive I mentioned above, Directive 010: “Before engaging alien species in battle, any and all attempts to make first contact and achieve nonmilitary resolution must be made.” It’s basic to Trek’s ethics that Starfleet stands for peace and understanding even at risk to its personnel’s lives. “Risk is our business,” after all. Starfleet’s existence and missions are not motivated purely by self-preservation. It takes far more courage to make peace with a hostile force than to destroy it.
@23, that doesn’t negate my point. If the emitters could recreate a lung that precisely, they could have replicated one. (If Voyager were airing today, I would say they could 3-D print a new lung, and that would be technology that’s maybe only 10-20 years away in real life, too.)
@27/Thomas: “If the emitters could recreate a lung that precisely, they could have replicated one.”
No, because they weren’t designed to replicate things. It was the Doctor’s own holo-emitters — themselves a cutting-edge experimental technology — that were reconfigured in an emergency to create holographic lungs for Neelix. The replicators that did exist on the ship were a separate system, presumably more standardized and not up to the necessary level of detail. (The Doctor used the transporter matrix to create a scan of high enough resolution. Replicators operate at a lower resolution than transporters.) Finding a way to combine the two systems would’ve taken more time than Neelix had.
#25
That would be an excellent point if Voyager took place in the 18th century.
@24: Aliens raiding us humans to get transplants to keep themselves alive was part of the plot of the late 60s British TV series “UFO” by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. The theory on the part of the humans at the Earth defence agency SHADO responsible for defending against the aliens, based on limited evidence from the few aliens they had been able to examine, was that the aliens were on a dying planet and had become sterile, but had been able to keep their race going thru advanced medicine and transplantation of dying organs. (There was never any real communication with the aliens, so it’s not clear just how close to reality SHADO’s theories were, but they had identified human-origin organs in the alien bodies they examined.)
@26: A few points.
First off, there is a major difference between spending lives and wasting them. Yes, space exploration has risks, and even the best leaders must be willing to sacrifice those under their command to achieve a greater objective, but that still doesn’t absolve them of their responsibility to the welfare of said subordinates. The likes of William Adama, Honor Harrington, Ibram Gaunt and James Cutter (ie actually competent leaders) would move heaven and earth to help their followers if they were caught in such a situation, and I can’t see any of them letting the Vidiians off with a warning like this either.
Second, what makes you think that peace is the preferable option? Babylon 5 put it best: sometimes peace is just another word for surrender, and given the evils the Vidiians perpetrate, one can reasonably argue that the moral response is to stand in defiance of them, violently or otherwise. When Captain Sheridan is kidnapped by the Streib in “All Alone in the Night”, the B5 crew doesn’t let them go on their way with a slight finger-wagging; they bring two squadrons of Starfuries and an Omega-class destroyer and blow the shit out of them.
Third, it’s funny how “Risk is our business” never seem to come up when the Prime Directive is employed, hmm? We’re left with the unfortunate double standard where the Federation is willing to let a primitive species that offers no threat die from a preventable extinction event on the vague chance one of them might become Space Hitler, yet a clearly hostile gang of organ thieves masquerading as a civilization that has already taken aggressive action against them demands Janeway put on the kid gloves. Pandering to the strong while allowing the weak to suffer is a textbook definition of moral cowardice, and pretty much what I’d expect from latter-day Star Trek.
Fourth, Janeway isn’t making peace here (as the numerous other hostile encounters they have with the Vidiians proves). At best, she’s simply kicking the can further down the road. Now, if she tried to work out a non-aggression pact with them in return for trying to help cure the Phage, then yeah, that would be a non-violent solution to the problem. But simply telling them off it’s the same as making peace, as the threat they pose still remains and there’s nothing keeping them from going after Voyager in the future. You can seek peaceful solutions to problems and still be willing to take a hard line if necessary.
@30 Thanks, I haven’t seen that.
@30/rmtodd: It’s interesting how in the late ’60s and early ’70s, after the first heart transplant had been successfully achieved and the practice of organ transplantation was starting to become a viable, regular thing, a lot of science fiction defaulted to painting it as a dehumanizing or predatory thing rather than a beneficial, healing practice. In addition to UFO, the Cybermen in Doctor Who were conceived as a cautionary tale about organ replacement and artificial life support taken to an extreme that cost people their humanity, which seems rather quaint and Luddite in retrospect. Plus you had fiction about people being victimized and having their organs stolen for the black market, like Larry Niven’s organleggers or Robin Cook’s Coma. People always seem to fear the worst about new technologies, even the most benign ones.
31/Devin: “Second, what makes you think that peace is the preferable option?”
Have you met Star Trek?
Janeway missed the perfect opportunity to rid us of Neelix and she failed. For that she is forever on the crap Captain list.
The Vidiians have perhaps the most horrific ethical cultural norm in Star Trek of any species who are not the Borg. They regard a member of any other intelligent species as a bag of spare parts on the hoof, not as a person with rights. If they treat you well, it is only because they don’t have a current use for your body. It is tragic that they chose to see other intelligent life as mere resources under the duress of the Phage, but they still made that choice. They have sympathy for their plight, but they deserve none for how they have chosen to deal with that plight. It is hard to imagine the Vidiian’s values being in any way compatible with the Federation’s values to provide a common ground for peace and understanding without the Federation side turning a blind eye to grave evil.
In the Babylon 5 episode “Deathwalker” the antagonist character created a longevity drug. This character was a war criminal on the order of Dr. Mengele (but competent). It turns out the vital ingredient of the drug can only be obtained from intelligent creatures. For someone to get the longevity treatment, at least one other person must die. The war criminal character created the drug as revenge on her people’s enemies to make them as bad as her culture. There is no moral difference between using the longevity drug and what the Vidiians do harvesting organs. The Vidiians are Nazis with an excuse.
SF Debris’ video review of this episode has a well taken counterpoint on how ineffective and morally bankrupt Janeway’s dealings with these two thieves are
Although the Vidians make for a grisly antagonist, it always annoyed me too that for all their wealth of medical knowledge and matching technology that they couldn’t determine how to design any sort of acceptable prosthetic. It’s conveniently not even brought up as a point of discussion…and we know that this isn’t mentioned because we’re supposed to see the Vidians as formidable ‘grim reaper’ types to be feared.
This episode does have a bit too much padding which has been noted here as well. It takes entirely too long for the face-to-face confrontation to happen. I didn’t mind that the crew took the time to investigate the tunnels, discover the lab and then determine why they were getting dilithium readings which brought them to the rogue planetoid in the first place. It at least gives us some indication of how grisly these aliens seem to be and allows us to see their advanced (and superior) medical technology. But the ensuing chase, the time spent within the asteroid, figuring a way to locate the enemy ship among the reflective surfaces (a clever solution, yes, but really….) comes off as false jeopardy. This episode has the appearance of having been rushed this into production without a thorough editing job. More could have been done with the episode – and should have been.
I always wondered if a potential resolution could have been to have a Voyager security team board the alien ship after capturing them and then determine through ships’ logs or navigational logs where the two Vidians had been to previously to harvest the organs. Wouldn’t it have been a possibility to incarcerate the two and – here’s where it gets dicey – if able to locate the alien species they harvested organs from, turn over the two to them and allow the local laws there to try them for their crimes? (There are incidences of this having occurred on previous ST series – and even occurs in another Voyager episode in a later season). Of course, we wouldn’t have the ending where Neelix ends ups with a life-saving measure performed by them….so the point seems moot. Any way, the Vidians will return soon in a better episode ‘Faces”, but it also has a thorny issue arise at the end as well….
@35/Crusader75: “The Vidiians are Nazis with an excuse.”
I was thinking more along the lines of vampire fiction. A lot of it portrays its vampires as formerly innocent people living under a curse that forces them to become murderers in order to stay alive, and they’re meant to be both monstrous and sympathetic at the same time, because they’re victims too in a way.
Although the Vidiians sort of combine that with elements from zombies and Frankenstein’s Monster as well (maybe even mummies, what with all the organ removal). So they’re horror-movie monsters, and such monsters often evoke our pity and understanding even while being terrifying killers.
Also, Motura said the Vidiians usually try to take organs from the dead, only killing when the need is too urgent. Hardly nice or ethical, but I think it’s an overstatement to compare them to Nazis, whose killing was industrialized as an end in itself.
@29: It’s not as bad a comparison as you might think. Just as the mariners in the Age of Sail, Voyager is far from home, with no means of contacting them, no backup on hand in case things go south, and travelling through regions yet to be fully charted or understood by them. Trek takes more than a little inspiration from Horatio Hornblower anyways, so if the shoe fits…
@35: Well said.
@devin: can add Capt. Jack Aubrey to your list of competent captains with fierce loyalty to their crews.
This one is probably best known for introducing the Vidiians, even though we don’t really meet them until the last ten minutes. Watching this, I think I have to list them as yet another good idea the show squandered. A species who exist in constant pain, whose culture has evolved into the idea of survival at all costs. There’s a distinctly tragic feel about them, pitiable rather than evil, with Janeway unable to bring herself to fully condemn their actions. As she says herself, human/Federation morality doesn’t allow her to commit murder in order to resolve the situation, even though some people on here seem to have a different morality more akin to medieval times (or possibly 21st century concepts of finding a way around human rights laws which seems to be a backwards step towards those times). This tragic element will, sadly, be ignored in later episodes where (aside from Danara Pel) they’re portrayed as creepy space vampires with the idea of them only taking organs from the living in cases of dire emergency being forgotten.
It’s also a great episode for the Doctor who, after three episodes of cameos and comedy turns, finally gets a meaty role. There’s another lovely scene between him and Kes which shows how important she is to his early development, as she convinces him that he’s not that different from any other doctor in terms of learning on the job and coming up with innovative ideas. His “You’re very kind” is one of the most accurate things ever said about her. I’d have hired her on the spot too.
I agree the Doctor slapping Paris to demonstrate how solid holograms can be is a good comedy moment. Neelix doesn’t make the most sympathetic patient, as we get another look at his jealous jerk qualities. And yes, I guess someone forgot about the replicators being offline when Paris used them to make medical equipment, or are the ones in sickbay on a different circuit?
How much time did it take for Neelix to turn Janeway’s private dining room into a kitchen on his own? I’m somewhat confused by it being referred to as a “secondary mess hall” here because I don’t recall us seeing any other mess hall in the next seven years. My reading of this is that it’s still the same mess hall, and Janeway’s private dining room was adjacent to it, and Neelix has turned that space into the kitchen we see here and knocked it through into the mess hall.
Possibly he was talking about how well-hidden it was, but Tuvok calling the Vidiians’ forcefield “very sophisticated” when Janeway’s just taken it down with one phaser shot was unintentionally funny. I thought the dilithium readings were a lure at first but then we get that odd hand wave about sensors picking up the Vidiians’ dilithium reactor. Neelix asking the Doctor if he can sing and his eye-rolling reaction is hilarious in hindsight, knowing where his character goes later on.
@2 and @9: As has been said, Paris and Kes never ended up together except in an alternate future where she and Neelix hadn’t been together for at least a year at the time. This whole subplot is actually resolved pretty well in Season 2 without making Neelix’s behaviour seem entirely justified. He might be an incorrigible flirt, but at heart Paris is basically a gentleman.
The conundrum of what to do with the Vidians once the crew catches them is by far the most interesting part of this episode, and it’s a shame that the script wastes so much time getting there. Either it should have happened at the 20 minute mark or this should have been a two-parter.
On some level, Janeway is at least mildly culpable for every person these two murdered after this. On another level, her selfish decision to let a threat roam wild so long as they don’t threaten her own crew is pretty understandable. She’s not the Delta Quadrant police, nor is one ship in a position to stop the entire Vidian race. On yet another level, she doesn’t even do selfish properly; sure, the Vidians solve their immediate problem, but so long as you have them over a barrel you might as well at least try to extract as much medical knowledge and local data as you can.
So, what to do? I don’t know the right answer and there probably isn’t one. But there’s your story! Half the episode should have been about that. Instead Janeway makes a snap decision with no discussion. What a missed opportunity.
@11/Christopher:” @8/Devin Smith: If the Vidiians had just been predators or pirates, maybe a harsh response could’ve been justified (though Starfleet regulations require exhausting all nonviolent options before resorting to violence). But the Vidiians are literally suffering from a terminal disease. They’re sick and dying. How would the TV audience have reacted to seeing a lead character execute the equivalent of a terminal cancer patient?”
I don’t expect Janeway to chop off their heads or even vaporize them with a phaser. But the brig option is discarded too quickly. “We’ll hold you in the brig and treat you to the best of our medical ability, augmented by what you know. If we can cure you, great. If you die, you die. But we won’t let you murder anybody else to prolong your own lives,” is a perfectly valid response here and perhaps the right one. Then extract as much information as you can from their computer, scuttle their ship for parts, and move on. Sure, this is a riskier option in some ways and invites retaliation from other Vidians. But I’m not sure it’s a worse solution than just setting these two free with carte blanche to murder anybody who isn’t part of Voyager’s crew.
@42: That’s actually a pretty good solution. If nothing else, it gives Voyager a chance to find out exactly what the hell they’re dealing with, so they can be better prepared for them in the future.
@38
The shoe doesn’t really fit in this case, though. They follow future enlightened Starfleet rules, which are quite different from those in the Age of Sail. And before anyone says they’re far from the Federation and it doesn’t matter, that’s exactly the point. Ethics still matter when no one is looking. (Skipping ahead, see Equinox.)
@21/Uly: “Plus, his food is probably edible at least half the time.”
I liked the importance they place on good food in this episode, and so far nothing suggests that Neelix is a bad cook. Was he ever a bad cook, or was it just that he had to make do with whatever they could gather on the planets they passed?
@40/cap-mjb: “Paris and Kes never ended up together except in an alternate future where she and Neelix hadn’t been together for at least a year at the time.”
I thought it was more than one episode, which shows how much I’ve forgotten. I also remember that we’re only told about Kes and Neelix’ breakup in retrospect, and that it came out of the left field. Maybe I’m wrong about that, too.
@42/dunsel: “[…] the brig option […] is a perfectly valid response here and perhaps the right one.”
I think there are several valid responses here, and no right one. Every possible response is flawed in some way, and Janeway knows that. That’s what makes this a good episode.
Concerning captains who care about their crew, Janeway does that, she just doesn’t stop there. Like other Starfleet captains before her, she cares about everyone.
@45: “I also remember that we’re only told about Kes and Neelix’ breakup in retrospect, and that it came out of the left field. Maybe I’m wrong about that, too.”
No, that’s a fairly accurate summation. We get a break-up scene which appears not to count (because Kes was possessed at the time), but apparently it did, because eight episodes later she gets a one episode love interest and it’s mentioned they’ve broken up. I understand there was meant to be a scene establishing they’d broken up in one of the intervening episodes but it got cut.
@40/cap-mjb: I think it’s safe to assume that the ship’s food replicators and its equipment replicators are separate mechanisms. At least, it stands to reason that a ship’s sickbay would be designed with fully redundant systems so that it could keep operating regardless of problems elsewhere.
@42/dunsel: I don’t think long-term incarceration in the brig was really an option for a ship that was struggling to bring its power systems back online and even to feed the crew it had. It would also have invited retaliation/rescue attempts from other Vidiians. It just wouldn’t have been feasible for a lone, damaged ship in hostile territory.
@45/Jana: I don’t think Neelix was shown to be a bad cook per se, but his style of cuisine was presented as very much an acquired taste, foreign to Alpha Quadrant palates, and maybe somewhat rough-hewn and survivalist in approach, making do with unconventional ingredients.
Phage is easily the best episode in this opening stretch. It’s also the one that convinced me to stick with the show for the long haul.
The Vidiians are one of the more interesting concepts to come out of the writers’ room at this point. In retrospect, they should have been given more development than the Kazon. The Vidiians in a way embody the core idea that the Delta Quadrant is a more unpredictable region of the galaxy, where you don’t have the comforts of home and therefore must do whatever it takes to survive, making moral concessions along the way. Essentially, the Vidiians represent the Voyager that could have been, had the show not settled for doing TNG retreads.
Of course, the idea of harvesting organs fits well into the horror genre, and Brannon Braga’s concept fits nicely in this Voyager setting.
And having Neelix as the unfortunate victim works to give the character some room to develop. Even though we’re several episodes away from more explicit backstory, we do get some idea of what makes Neelix tick. Granted, his possessiveness of Kes works against the character, but you do get a sense of a lonely person trying to hold on, which would be explained later on with the Talaxian war and how it shaped the rest of his life.
It also works for Kes, since her decision to donate her lung only furthers her already evident selflessness and willingness to help others and contribute to the mission any shape or form (she was definitely the most Trekkian character in the outset).
And of course, Phage is the first time Janeway truly becomes the captain. I said before that the pilot episode didn’t really function as a Janeway vehicle, and subsequent episodes didn’t use her past mentorship roles. This is the first one that really challenges her ethical boundaries and establishes her willingness to shed blood in order to protect her crew, not unlike a mother protecting a hurt child. That scene with the Vidiians would never work the same way had they done this with Picard, Sisko, Kirk or Archer. And that’s why it works beautifully. She’s not the same type of captain. She can and will use deadly force. And Mulgrew nails it out of the park. There are so many emotions contained within that scene, I rewatch it every now and then.
Kolbe directed the hell out of this one. You feel Neelix’s agony early on, and the Janeway/Vidiian confrontation oozes tension. This is also why I feel Braga has a better handle on Janeway as a character (though I do think Taylor had a hand with the confrontation scene, even though Braga is a natural for writing credible characters and dialogue).
This has been a tricky reply to write – I’ve erased & restarted it more than once – but I do genuinely feel that, for USS Voyager, a reputation for Mercy is much easier to sustain in the long run (and generally more economical) than trying to perpetuate & maintain a reputation as the Baddest, Meanest Crew of Roughnecks in the Delta when Voyager is a working lifetime away from rearmament.
It’s difficult to see how the ship can afford to fight her way through the Delta Quadrant under those circumstance and taking a ‘Rough Justice’ approach to most problems is likely to close more doors than it opens, diplomatically speaking – as the history of more than one gunslinger proves, a reputation for spectacular lethality doesn’t necessarily keep off the bushwhackers, it just persuades them to shoot you in the back (it can also persuade those who prefer a quieter sort of life to ostracise or prosecute you rather than do business – how many planets might have preferred to shoot first, rather than risk letting a ship whose captain was willing to rip organs out of the thief who stole them dock in their own port if Captain Janeway had taken that option?).
*For the record, we have no idea how representative such crews are of the species as a whole; are we seeing all these organ thieves because they comprise a large majority of the species or are we seeing them much more often than the grave-robbers because (A) logically the latter are much, much less aggressive and (B) The Vidiians as a whole have got the message that if you don’t trouble USS Voyager she won’t trouble you (and therefore it’s only the Mad, Bad B******* who tend to cross her, in more ways than one).
@49/ED: As the series progresses, IIRC, we’ll find that Voyager actually does get a reputation as a troublemaker ship making enemies wherever it goes, despite the crew’s best efforts to uphold Starfleet’s peaceful and diplomatic values. Imagine how much worse their reputation would be if they actually were aggressive.
On the face of it, Janeway was at one point faced with the decision to have either Neelix die, or his attacker. And she chose to have Neelix die. I wonder if this says something about how she views Neelix?
@51/ad: It wasn’t about Neelix. It was about the Federation value that it’s unacceptable to commit murder, no matter what you might gain from it.
@31 Regarding Honor Harrington, Janeway isn’t that far off from following Manticoran policy for captured pirates. Given that Janeway didn’t have local authorities to turn the Vidiians over to and Honor usually had to deal with corrupt authorities, it’s effectively identical.
Didn’t rewatch this one all the way thru, but were any half measures considered? Kes gives up a half lung. Why not take back half a lung from the Vidiian? You don’t commit murder, while saving Neelix.
@48. Eduardo: “That scene with the Vidiians would never work the same way had they done this with Picard, Sisko, Kirk or Archer. And that’s why it works beautifully. She’s not the same type of captain. She can and will use deadly force.”
This doesn’t quite parse for me. Both Sisko and Kirk are more than willing to use deadly force on warranted occasions. Picard would find a more diplomatic solution akin to Janeway’s. And of course, Janeway chooses not to use force in this case. The Vidiians come at Voyager again because they perceive her as making empty threats.
@52 – That assumes the incidental death of the Vidiian to recover Neelix’s lungs, even to save Neelix’s life is murder. For that to be the case his death would have to be considered unjustified. Given the circumstances:
1. He and his accomplice violently assaulted Neelix
2. They violated Neelix’s body appropriating a vital organ, dealing Neelix a mortal injury and his life is only being sustained by extraordinary medical intervention. They have all but murdered Neelix.
For the Vidian’s death to be considered unjustifiable, that means Neelix has lost the rights to his own body because it is sustaining another person’s life without Neelix’s consent. It also suggests the Federation though Janeway has the authority to cede Neelix’s rights to his body without his permission. It means that the Vidiians have a right to benefit from the horrific crime they committed.
It is hard to see how this is not a case of defending the life and other rights of a person under the Federation’s protection. If it is against the Federation’s values on taking life, then it difficult to see how Starfleet can use deadly force in almost any circumstance without violating that value, which we know that they have and will do, especially since the Dominion War plotline of DS9 will run concurrently with Voyager.
@54/Sunspear: Motura was on the brink of death already, which is why the situation was urgent enough that they were willing to kill someone for their lungs rather than waiting for a chance to harvest them from someone who died naturally. Thus, it stands to reason that Motura wouldn’t have been healthy enough to survive giving up one of those lungs.
Besides, though Janeway didn’t seem to consider it, the lungs might have already been contaminated with the Phage just by being in Motura’s body, so putting them back into Neelix could’ve infected him with the Phage.
@55/Crusader75: I’m just repeating Janeway’s own moral argument. “I don’t have the freedom to kill you to save another. My culture finds that to be a reprehensible and entirely unacceptable act.“
Besides, what you’re describing is more like execution than self-defense, and we know the Federation does not practice capital punishment.
Let’s try an less lethal scenario and say that both Neelix’s legs had been amputated and stolen by the organ/body thieves. If it was me running into them again I’d say, “Damn you, at least give me one leg back so I can hop around.”
@CLB: “Motura was on the brink of death already”
krad said: “The Vidiians have been plagued by a disease known as the Phage for millennia.”
Doctor Who did something analogous in this week’s episode. Aliens who have the engineering and tech to traverse from galaxy to galaxy, but have very poor knowledge of biological sciences.
So how has such a state of desperation existed for millenia (unless krad is exaggerating for effect), without any progress toward a cure? The Vidiians have advanced transplant skills/knowledge, but maybe they have a certain type of government that denies pure scientific research. I don’t have sympathy for their solution. At least the episode introduces the ideas of donors and consent. Don’t know if that amounts to anything later.
@58/Sunspear: “So how has such a state of desperation existed for millenia (unless krad is exaggerating for effect), without any progress toward a cure?”
That was explained in the episode. Motura: “Our immuno-technology cannot keep up. The Phage adapts. It resists all attempts to destroy it.” Think about how much trouble we’re having today with diseases developing resistance to antibiotics. Also, this was a clear analogy to HIV, which at the time of this episode’s writing was seen as incurable, because of its frequent mutations that made it hard for any treatments to keep up.
“we know the Federation does not practice capital punishment.”
Except for General Order 7 (or, post Turnabout Intruder, GO 4) and General Order 24.
@CLB: “this was a clear analogy to HIV”
Maybe the writers were infused with the paranoia of the times and the social and political scares. But humans have at least contained that virus within a few decades. What trips me up on a meta level is positing a situation where thousands of years pass in what’s essentially an unsustainable situation. A supermegavirus like that wouldn’t be stopped by a low-level response such as harvesting transplant organs. For that strategy to work, the Vidiianns would have to set up an industrial scale of organ/body part harvesting. They would need to be space vampires, mummies, zombies, walking dead, and possibly necromancers on a power level equivalent to the Borg.
Yeah, I know… applying too much logic or extrapolation ruins the drama.
@60: Whilst the franchise is frustratingly vague about in what circumstances General Order 24 can be enacted, it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with capital punishment. (In fact, it seems to be completely at odds with other uses of the term General Order in TOS, being an order given by a captain, rather than a standing order that Starfleet officers are supposed to abide by at all times, as with General Order 7.)
@61/Sunspear: The Vidiians only said the Phage first attacked them 2000 years ago, not that they’d been dealing with it in this exact way for 2000 years. I would imagine that the Vidiians attempted many methods to try to deal with the Phage before things got so bad that they degenerated to the level of organ-snatching to survive. Like they said, the Phage kept adapting to everything they tried to cure it. So there were probably times when it seemed they’d brought it to bay for a generation or two, but then it mutated again and a new epidemic broke out. And so the war of attrition against it carried on for century after century, an arms race where the Phage got progressively stronger as the most resistant strains survived, and the best and brightest medical and scientific minds in Vidiian society grew scarcer and scarcer as the population dwindled, until eventually they were left at the extreme we see here.
@CLB: So maybe a better analogue would be Space Black Death which never abated. But still, I wish we’d get more restrained uses of time spans in these shows. Decades or centuries won’t suffice. It must be millenia. I like Picard a whole lot more than this season of Voyager, but even it falls into the trope of thousands: the secret conspiracy within a secret organization for thousands of years.
Well, at least this episode isn’t “Spock’s Brain,” which usually lands near the top of worst Trek lists:
star-trek-worst-episodes-of-all-time
@64/Sunspear: ““Spock’s Brain,” which usually lands near the top of worst Trek lists”
Undeservedly so. It’s a silly episode, but it’s enjoyably silly and well-made. There are much worse Trek episodes, tedious slogs or incoherent messes, e.g. “The Alternative Factor” or “And the Children Shall Lead.” The reason “Spock’s Brain” gets so much attention for its badness is not because it’s the worst episode, but because it’s the most entertainingly bad episode. Also probably because its title sounds particularly silly to modern ears (although viewers at the time would more likely have recognized it for what it was, an homage to Donovan’s Brain).
@54/Sunspear: Which diplomatic solution might Picard have found? As for Kirk, while he was willing to use deadly force, he was always very forgiving towards defeated enemies. I can see them both do the same thing Janeway did here, angry threat included, if they were in an equally helpless position. I guess that means I agree with you – comment #48 doesn’t sound quite right.
@65/Christopher: And it can be summed up in one silly sentence.
Personally, I prefer the tedious, incoherent episodes to the politically or morally dubious ones like “Wolf in the Fold”, “The Omega Glory”, or “The Apple”.
@Jana: Hmm, good question. I guess I was thinking more generally about his temperament and being a de facto ambassador on the flagship. As to specifics, he may have made explicit references about instituting a donor policy and stressed consent as a moral requirement. He had a way of inserting himself in alien societies and environments, like when he represented Worf during the Klingon Council wars (based on the Chicago Council wars), or (unwillingly) becoming a Borg.
Don’t remember if later episodes address the social status of Vidiians. How much are they treated as pariahs, as criminals even? Have they tried asking other societies for help before assaulting other species (leaving aside entirely the likelihood that alien organs would be compatible)?
Of course, Janeway and Voyager had no home base or lines of support, so she couldn’t build on any program for change she may have tried to start.
@67/Sunspear: That’s what I was thinking, that the lack of a home base changed everything. Normally Kirk would have offered Federation help. But he was never all alone like this, and neither was Picard.
62. cap-mjb -General Order 24 appears to simply be Captain’s discretion. After all, from Kirk’s perspective, all the Eminians are guilty of is holding Federation hostages (Himself, Spock & Fox). Of course, to the Eminians, they were simply enforcing the law.
Since we have seen numerous other cases where they’re held captive, it appears that the circumstances are totally up to the captain. We’ve even told in The Omega Glory
“A starship captain’s most solemn oath is that he will give his life, even his entire crew, rather than violate the Prime Directive.”
– James T. Kirk
Seeing as Fox ordered Kirk to violate the PD, it’s hard to see what Kirk’s motivation is, other than frustration. But, since he remains in command, it appears that his invoking GO 24 didn’t raise much of a red flag with the brass.
@69/kkozoriz: Kirk told Mea 3 what his motivation is: save her life and everybody else’s.
@69: For Andraste’s sake, have we truly gotten to the point where we’re condemning Kirk for not ordering his crew to literally march to the deaths?
@71/Devin Smith: Not me, I like Kirk in that episode. He cares about everyone and tries to save everyone.
Who is Andraste?
@69/kkozoriz: Leaving aside the fact that the Eminians did a lot more than that (including, from Kirk’s perspective, attempted mass murder of Federation personnel), you’re missing the important detail that Kirk cancelled General Order 24. If he hadn’t…well, he’d have died with everyone else on the planet and wouldn’t be around to answer difficult questions. He was using it as a bargaining tool and last resort, not as “punishment”, capital or otherwise.
For a real-life analogue to the Phage, I feel like you can’t get that much closer than (and people will probably laugh at this, but hear me out) the flu virus.
Think about it. How long has the flu existed on this planet? Hundreds, possibly thousands of years? And people still die from it every year. Sure, we have a vaccine for the common flu now, but you have to get a new vaccine every year because the virus keeps mutating and adapting to our methods. And that’s only the common flu. One of the things that makes it so dangerous is that there are so many different varieties of flu virus, and one vaccine cannot possibly protect from every single variety of flu out there.
It was only a century ago that a flu pandemic wiped out 50 million people worldwide. A third of the world’s population was infected, and that’s without modern methods of travel (which work even more quickly now to spread infection). Even considering how much our medical science has advanced in the last hundred years, scientists are still predicting that another flu pandemic could be on the horizon, even worse than the last one.
I mean, if you think about it, the Phage could have started like the flu, with an outbreak every hundred years or so every time a new strain developed, eventually contained, outbreak, contained again, and eventually their medical science just wasn’t able to keep up with its rate of mutation.
@56 – I question whether such an extreme position is an actual value of the Federation, given numerous examples of Starfleet personnel in all iterations of Star Trek using deadly force to save themselves or someone under their protection. Including the very beginning of the franchise in “Where No Man Has Gone Before”.
I also question whether a government that takes such an extreme position is in any way useful in defending the civil rights of its citizens and residents which is a primary purpose for a government to exist. Is such an extreme value something worth having?
And then there is the ironic fact that this allows the Vidiians to continue to kill random people to save themselves.
@75/Crusader75: I can’t believe it’s necessary to point out that there’s a massive ethical difference between being forced to kill in immediate self-defense and choosing to kill with premeditation. That’s one of the most basic principles of law and ethics. Even self-defense is only a legally valid justification for killing if you can prove that you had no other option such as running away. If you capture someone, have them at your mercy, and then decide to execute them, there is no way that can be legally or morally rationalized as self-defense.
@66/JanaJansen: I associated Janeway’s angry response to the Vidiians to the notion of how a mother would react when one of her children were hurt in any way. Neelix is a new kid on her nest, but she already protects him the same way she would protect Tuvok from outside threats.
This is a reaction you wouldn’t really see with the other captains. You might get the anger, but you wouldn’t see the character literally holding itself back from doing something far more serious the way Janeway did. The tone of her voice is that of someone about to pull a phaser and wipe the Vidiians out. Even Sisko in his bouts of anger wouldn’t be this eager for blood.
In a way, I find this foreshadows Janeway’s eventual take no prisoners attitude in later seasons, when she makes some bold choices such as pulling the risky Borg heist in Dark Frontier or even the blatant timeline tampering in the series finale.
@18: The origin of the Borg was almost certainly Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
I can only assume that Kes’ lung was a stopgap measure until a lung could be grown.
“@42/dunsel: I don’t think long-term incarceration in the brig was really an option for a ship that was struggling to bring its power systems back online and even to feed the crew it had. It would also have invited retaliation/rescue attempts from other Vidiians. It just wouldn’t have been feasible for a lone, damaged ship in hostile territory.”
You raise valid points. It certainly was the easy and expedient thing to just set a couple of serial killers loose and write it off as “someone else’s problem.” But it’s a rather rapid and completely undiscussed transition from Federation values to being completely and selfishly cynical. And, again, even if we’re going to take the easy way out and just let these two go, at least negotiate a better deal! The Vidians medical knowledge might not help them with the phage, but it would be a great resource to have. Similarly, whatever star charts they have are going to be more useful than what Neelix knows off the top of his head. At least try to get *something* in exchange for their freedom.
@78: In Star Trek First Contact, the fact that the Borg do exist in the Delta Quadrant during the 21st century is a major plot point. It’s the reason there is the whole deflector dish subplot to begin with.
@78/melendwyr: “The origin of the Borg was almost certainly Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”
I’ll never get why people think that. If you mean that literally, that somehow the merger of V’Ger and Decker created the Borg, that doesn’t work because the Borg are obviously far, far more than a century old. And the idea that the Borg spawned from the same Machine Planet that turned Voyager 6 into V’Ger doesn’t work either. The AIs of the Machine Planet didn’t even recognize organic beings as life forms, seeing them merely as useless infestations, whereas the Borg are all about the symbiosis between technology and biology. There’s also the fact that V’Ger was vastly more advanced than the Borg. V’Ger was literally as advanced as it was possible for an entity to become while still remaining corporeal and on this plane of existence. The Borg aren’t even remotely close to that.
The only reason people want to equate V’Ger and the Borg is because they both involve cybernetics in some way, but that’s so flimsy that you might as well say Noonien Soong or Richard Daystrom or Bill Gates created the Borg. Just because two things vaguely resemble each other does not require them to be related.
@79/dunsel: “It certainly was the easy and expedient thing to just set a couple of serial killers loose and write it off as “someone else’s problem.” But it’s a rather rapid and completely undiscussed transition from Federation values to being completely and selfishly cynical.”
What a ridiculous way to twist the situation. This isn’t the Federation. They don’t have the power of a Starfleet vessel back home to enforce the law. They’re alone and damaged; there’s not much they can do. You see the same thing later in Enterprise — sometimes Archer and his crew have no choice but to leave a bad situation unresolved because they don’t have any power or authority to resolve it. It’s not that their “values” are different, it’s that their circumstances are different. They don’t have the kind of power and authority that Kirk, Picard, or Sisko had. There’s a difference between wanting to do something and being able to do it.
@76 – Recovering Neelix’s lungs would not be an execution. The point is not to kill the Vidiian. That is an incidental result. The point would be to save Neelix’s life and literally make him whole again. I am not sure how it can be argued that the ethical outcome is to potentially let Neelix die rather than let the person who would have then murdered him die.
Some years ago there was a case of conjoined twins. Their condition was such that they would both die if they were not separated. However, they shared organs in such a way that one of them would not be able to survive the separation. It was a hard and terrible situation to decide on. I would not suggest that the doctors who performed the operation were murderers, nor would I describe their parents as having ordered the one twin’s execution.
@82/Crusader75: I think you missed the part where I said they probably couldn’t have put Neelix’s lungs back in anyway, because they’d been inside someone infected by the Phage and thus might be contaminated already. One of the standards for organ transplant viability is that the donor have no active infections or incurable conditions like HIV.
“I am not sure how it can be argued that the ethical outcome is to potentially let Neelix die rather than let the person who would have then murdered him die.”
Because ethically and legally speaking, killing to save a life is only defensible if all other options have been exhausted. That is not the case here. Janeway’s choice did save Neelix by appealing to the mercy of the Vidiians; therefore there was a nonlethal option, and therefore lethal force was not ethically justified.
I see a scary thing happening to society today. People are too absolutist about morality, too unwilling to forgive the slightest transgression. Anyone who does a bad thing is condemned as irredeemably evil with no possibility of redemption. That’s too draconian, too medieval. People can reform, can atone for their mistakes. Janeway’s rejection of a violent response to the Vidiians prompted them to act with compassion and atone for what they’d done to Neelix. That didn’t stop other Vidiians from being predatory later in the series, but maybe it stopped these two. Maybe it gave them an incentive to try to find another way, to spare people they might otherwise have killed. By assuming they were irredeemably evil villains, you ignore that possibility. Denying wrongdoers even the potential to redeem themselves is not morality, just egotistical self-righteousness at others’ expense.
@78: Given that the Andorians had previously been Earth’s first contact, it seems the movie’s writers weren’t interested in maintaining previous canon. They likely didn’t even know about it.
@81: Of course the machines recognized organic beings as life forms! They simply didn’t consider them notable, or in any way like themselves. Much the same way we’d respond to microbes. Which is why the Borg arising from the merging of organic and machine life at the end of ST:TMP makes so much sense – becoming convinced that it would gain by merging with its biological creators, V’Ger would quite likely take the lesson to heart and attempt to assimilate all the unique biologies it could, to gain as much as it could.
Considering that the Borg were originally nigh-unstoppable god-monsters, their arising from remnants of the technology of a machine civilization doesn’t seem so implausible. It’s only with their recurrence in the series, and the resulting Villain Decay, that they’ve ceased being so powerful as to inspire awe and terror.
@84/melendwyr: “Given that the Andorians had previously been Earth’s first contact, it seems the movie’s writers weren’t interested in maintaining previous canon. They likely didn’t even know about it.”
That was never canon. That was exclusively from Diane Duane’s novel Spock’s World — and she was taking the backstory from the 1980 Spaceflight Chronology book and using the Andorians in place of its posited native Alpha Centaurians (based on a misunderstanding of the “Zefram Cochrane of Alpha Centauri” line from “Metamorphosis”).
“Of course the machines recognized organic beings as life forms!”
No, they explicitly did not.
http://www.chakoteya.net/movies/movie1.html
KIRK: The carbon-units are not an infestation. They are …a natural function of the Creator’s planet. They are living things.
ILIA PROBE: They are not true lifeforms Only the Creator and other similar lifeforms are true.
” They simply didn’t consider them notable”
Exactly the point. The Borg do consider organic life essential to their makeup. The whole point of them — literally right there in their name — is that they’re a hybrid of cybernetic and organic. V’Ger was pure cybernetic with no use for organics.
“Which is why the Borg arising from the merging of organic and machine life at the end of ST:TMP makes so much sense”
Until you glance at a calendar
“Considering that the Borg were originally nigh-unstoppable god-monsters, their arising from remnants of the technology of a machine civilization doesn’t seem so implausible.”
This is exactly the problem — the lazy tendency to assume that all beings more advanced than us are equally more advanced. But there’s a whole hiearchy of levels of advancement. V’Ger is as far beyond the Borg as the Borg are beyond, oh, Leonardo da Vinci.
An episode ago, Federation Morals required that an entire intelligent species be allowed to be wiped out by an industrial accident, because they hadn’t invented warp drive. In this one it requires that a member of the crew die so that the Vidiian who mortally wounded him can live to attack other people in the future.
In future episodes, it seems, the Vidiians return to attack Voyager again several times. Apparently they felt neither grateful nor deterred. And according to @50 “we’ll find that Voyager actually does get a reputation as a troublemaker ship making enemies wherever it goes”.
I’m beginning to wonder what the show thinks about the ethics of the Federations moral values, or the consequences of putting them into practice.
@86/ad: As to your first paragraph, the common ground is “Don’t play God.” Don’t assume you have the right to decide the fate of a society or an individual. And you’re forgetting that Janeway decided it was right to intervene and save the natives. Which is how the Prime Directive was supposed to work before TNG took it to a legalistic extreme.
As to your second, I already acknowledged that other Vidiians were not deterred. My point is that these two might have been. Changing a whole culture has to start with individuals — and you can never recognize that as long as you think of an entire race as a monolithic entity.
70. JanaJansen – Based on the Prime Directive, that’s not his decision to make.
If that were the case, Picard would have refused to let Dr. Timicin beam back down to his planet and would have done everything he could to put an end to “The Resolution”.
Non-interference means keeping your hands off cultures that have practices we may find abhorrent but work for them and that they freely chose for themselves.
Now, if the people of Kaelon II tried to force other cultures to adopt their practices, then the Federation would have the right to step in.
It’s not about forcing our values onto others.
76. ChristopherLBennett – “Even self-defense is only a legally valid justification for killing if you can prove that you had no other option such as running away.”
The states with “Stand Your Ground” laws would like to have a word with you. You don’t even have to show that you were in danger, just that you THOUGHT you Could be in danger.
In Stand Your Ground states, that a legally valid justification and has been held up by the courts.
@76. Challenge accepted.
If Neelix orders the operation, he will have his lungs removed from his attackers body, and returned to him. He will have decided decided to kill his attacker to save his life. That would seem to be the whole point of self defence.
And if Janeway gives the order, she will have decided to kill her crewmembers attacker in order to save his life. Which would be killing in defence of someone else.
If you like, they could even give the attacker the holographic lungs Neelix is using.
@90/ad: You seem to have a poor grasp of how self-defense is legally defined. You don’t get to twist logic and vocabulary to redefine murder as self-defense because it suits you. You’d never get away with such a thing in a court of law or a court-martial.
“The Federation doesn’t have capital punishment”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but in the “The Menagerie” (TOS) isn’t Spock threatened with the death penalty for taking Pike to Talos IV? Not even for mutiny, IIRC, but just for GOING to Talos IV?
So, how many viewers were praying for Neelix to die? I’ve got nothing against comic relief and a native guide of some kind would seem a necessity but as far as I can recall Neelix failed at all of the above.
@92
““The Federation doesn’t have capital punishment”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but in the “The Menagerie” (TOS) isn’t Spock threatened with the death penalty for taking Pike to Talos IV? Not even for mutiny, IIRC, but just for GOING to Talos IV? “
Yep:
“KIRK: (reading) For eyes of Starfleet Command only.
MENDEZ: Oh, I’m certifying I ordered you to read it. Know anything at all about this planet?
KIRK: What every ship Captain knows. General Order 7, no vessel under any condition, emergency or otherwise, is to visit Talos Four.
MENDEZ: And to do so is the only death penalty left on our books. Only Fleet Command knows why. Not even this file explains that. (unlocks the magnetic strip) But it does name the only Earth ship that ever visited the planet.”
@87 The Federations Prime Directive, as the show presented it, required them not to prevent the extinction of an entire intelligent species, and would also have required them not to prevent the death of a single member of that species. If Janeway did not do so, it was in defiance what we are told is the Federations most important law. The Federation also required, according to this episode, that Neelix be sacrificed, rather than the person who stole his lungs while he was breathing with them. And apparently future episodes show that Voyager, after some years of behaving mostly as the Federation requires, gets a reputation for making enemies where ever it goes.
If the show is trying to sell me on how great the Federation is, it does not seem, four episodes in, to be doing a very good job. And if it wants everyone to believe in how great the Federations moral standards are, this comment thread seems to suggest that a lot of people are unconvinced.
@91 If I have made an error of logic or fact, you are at perfect liberty to point out what it is. What is it?
BTW – Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights
Article 2 – Right to life
1. Everyone’s right to life shall be protected by law. No one shall be deprived of his life intentionally save in the execution of a sentence of a court following his conviction of a crime for which this penalty is provided by law.
2. Deprivation of life shall not be regarded as inflicted in contravention of this article when it results from the use of force which is no more than absolutely necessary:
a. in defence of any person from unlawful violence;
b. in order to effect a lawful arrest or to prevent the escape of a person lawfully detained;
c. in action lawfully taken for the purpose of quelling a riot or insurrection.
It would seem to be lawful, according to the ECHR, to deprive Mortura of his life to prevent him from murdering Neelix. And if Neelix dies as a consequence of an attack on him in which Mortura participated, he will have murdered Neelix.
So if, as Janeway was told, it was necessary to kill Mortura to save Neelix, it was her right, and perhaps duty, to do so.
Later in the episode, after a way had been found to save them both, this right would expire.
Further Adventures in STO:
Ended up in an alternate timeline in a work camp run by Tholians who are capturing ships from different eras coming thru a temporal rift. Met a few random characters, like Garak, in the camp (unfortunately not voiced by Andrew Robinson; the actor even gave a different name for the character, even though the text said “Elim Garak”).
Met Tasha Yar (voiced by Denise Crosby) and some of her crew there and found out the Enterprise-C had been captured. Helped her and a few others free the ship, then got to captain it in a battle. It handled very well and I actually said, “I want one of these!” Then the game gave me one as a reward; actually an Ambassador-class ship which I named the USS Aurora. I have various other ships called Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars. So there’s a Kim Stanley Robinson theme running.
The game considers the Enterprise-C/Ambassador ships to be support cruisers, which means 2 engineering bridge stations. My ship is not as kitted out as the E-C. Have a ways to go getting the gear to make her battle ready. Recently also acquired an assault cruiser, which has 2 tactical bridge stations. Playing the game seems to be equal parts collecting ships and following stories. Supposedly there are hundreds of ships available, though some (most?) players stick to their endgame highest level advanced ships. The game is clunky in how it delivers story, however. It’s kind of chopped up among various contacts that give you missions.
Two Discovery era characters are running around in the 35th century. Michael Burnham was recreated by the Excalbians and is now working on… something with Abraham Lincoln. Stamets is back. Ran one mission where he was an EMH style hologram who helped out in the mycelial network. The jahSepp used whatever was imprinted on the network by Stamets’ prior interactions with it to infuse the hologram with his original personality. Stamets is now a running contact for missions involving spores and such. He’s voiced throughout by Anthony Rapp.
Other contacts are a bit disappointing. Geordi La Forge isn’t voiced, just text interaction. Harry Kim is a Captain (I think), but haven’t met him as a contact yet. Interacted with Q (in his Farpoint getup), who is part of the 10th anniversary celebrations, sadly not voiced by John de Lancie. Q explained how players can acquire the new Khitomer Alliance dreadnought by Feb 27. Not sure why Q gives a crap about that. He also gave me some very grindy things to do, which unfortunately is the bane of MMOs.
@CLB: “@90/ad: You seem to have a poor grasp of how self-defense is legally defined. You don’t get to twist logic and vocabulary to redefine murder as self-defense because it suits you. You’d never get away with such a thing in a court of law or a court-martial.”
George Zimmerman would like a word with you. He’s obviously a scumbag, but yes, he got away with it.
@96/ad: That’s…the exact opposite of the law you just quoted.
“Everyone’s right to life shall be protected by law. No one shall be deprived of his life intentionally save in the execution of a sentence of a court following his conviction of a crime for which this penalty is provided by law.” In other words, Mortura’s life is protected by law. Neither Janeway nor anyone else has the right to take his life from him. There was no court, there was no sentence, he was on board a Federation starship and had not committed any crime that was punishable by death under Federation law, even assuming that there was anyone on board qualified to try and sentence him, which Janeway implies there wasn’t.
As to the exceptions to this right to life: “in defence of any person from unlawful violence”. Well, Mortura was not committing an act of violence at the time. He may have done in the past (although I believe it was actually Dereth who attacked Neelix, meaning he’d have been guilty of murder if Neelix died, not Mortura) and may do in the future, but if you take that point then you could just go around killing anyone with the capacity for violence, which clearly isn’t the intention. “in order to effect a lawful arrest or to prevent the escape of a person lawfully detained”: The Vidiians made no attempt to resist or escape once they were apprehended, so that doesn’t apply. “in action lawfully taken for the purpose of quelling a riot or insurrection”: Also doesn’t apply.
So, yes, as Janeway said, there was no legal justification for her murdering Mortura in the name of saving Neelix.
@83 “I see a scary thing happening to society today. People are too absolutist about morality, too unwilling to forgive the slightest transgression. Anyone who does a bad thing is condemned as irredeemably evil with no possibility of redemption.”
Yeah, isn’t it awful that organ thieves are condemned by society like that? Just because they treat other sentient beings like walking sacks of spare parts to be exploited at will with no regard for their inherent rights is no reason is call them out on their actions, or worst still, looking out for those they try to violate (le gasp! Quelle horreur!). You’re right, the only moral thing to do is simply lie there and let them take whatever they want from you. Treating other people like resources to be consumed without hesitation is far more moral compared to the unforgivable sin of actually defending yourself.
In fact, that’s a lesson that other SF franchises should apply as well. What gives Commander Shepard the right to stop the Reapers from harvesting all sentient life in the galaxy or turning them into techno-organic crimes against nature? They’ve been doing it for a billion years, so it’s clearly a long-standing cultural tradition that she has no business interfering with. And actually fighting back against them? Doesn’t she realize how unenlightened such displays of violence are? Likewise, XCOM has no right to resist the ADVENT occupation of Earth; the Elders are suffering from a degenerative condition that requires they melt people down into goo. They have a right to survive too, one that totally lets them forcibly conquer the Earth and abduct millions of people for their deranged science experiments. And where does the Imperium of Man get condemning the Dark Elder as hideous alien monsters, just because they drag trillions of people screaming into the non-Euclidean depths of the Webway to wring every last drop of suffering out of them like a man juicing an orange all in a vain effort to momentarily appease She Who Thirsts? That’s settler logic right there!
@95: Yeah, “moral” isn’t something I’d really define the Federation as at this juncture.
@96: Well spoken!
@100: Now you’re just being silly and taking it to extremes while acting as though the “good guys” murdering people is heroic and to be celebrated and the “bad guys” murdering people shows them to be inhuman monsters who have no right to live. If that really is your point of view, then you need to check what “Space Nazi” really means. No-one is suggesting letting organ thieves take what they want and Janeway has stated that she’ll defend her ship against any further attacks (which she does). But there’s nothing moral about ripping organs out of the person they’ve been transplanted into and calling it self-defence and everything moral about a solution which means everyone gets to live.
I wonder if assimilation counts as murder? Or just assault? Is it morally right to blow up a Borg cue to prevent a situation where the drones are still alive but assimilated into the the collective?
It’s not murder. We’ve see that people can be removed from the collective and go on to lead, long, productive lives. 7 of 9 and Picard, for example. So, is it moral to kill hundreds or thousands of Borg to prevent assimilation?
Picard had no problem destroying a cube in First Contact.
@102
Assimilation might be closer to slavery, since said slaves can be rescued from servitude.
About killing drones, I hope it’s a conundrum Picard will eventually explore. I mean, if you have to bring back the Borg, it would be nice to go at them at a different angle. Hopefully they’re more than scary space zombies.
@103: That’s an interesting take on things, and you’re right: hopefully Picard will explore the topic as the series continues. At the same point, I can see the practical limitations of trying to free drones en-masse; the Borg are powerful and dangerous enough even without pulling your punches trying to stop them.
@102 – so, is it legally permitted to kill someone abducting someone for the purposes of slavery?
Is lethal force permitted when the death of someone is not guaranteed or even likely?
The problem is that this episode says that, given a choice between letting a murderer die or saving the murderer’s victim, it is wrong to let the murderer die.
I think, instead, Janeway should have tracked down the people who stole Neelix’ lungs and found out they had already transferred them to an innocent party who didn’t know they’d been stolen from a still living being. We could have the majority of Vidians thinking they get their organ parts in fair, ethical arrangements with other worlds. Stolen organs could have been illegal or it could be standard operating procedure with the powers that be lying to the people.
In a case like that, it could even be that the Vidians, when they get caught with their hand in the cookie jar, would act all horrified and return Neelix’ lungs. The recipient would die, but the government would turn a blind eye to the thief. If Janeway still decided to make a deal with the organ thief to put Kes’ lung into Neelix instead, she’d be paying off someone she knew was a monster to save the monster’s victim. Just because it might be the best option doesn’t mean they’re going to be happy about it.
@106 – Ellynne
From what we see of the Vidians, I seriously doubt their government – if such a thing existed – would care that someone’s body parts were stolen in order to save a Vidian’s life. We will see that in addition to impressive medical technology the Vidians also possess significant weapons technology. They are desperate enough to take what they need and dare anyone to challenge them. If Janeway had been foolish enough to take Voyager into Vidian-controlled space, the locals would have looked upon this as nothing more than a delivery of fresh meat.
@104, 105
All good questions and I haven’t a clue how to answer them, ha.
@102 et al: If someone invades your country, and fires at the soldiers defending the border, then they don’t actually have to want to kill everyone there for you to be allowed to fire back. We’re not just talking a few abductions: The Borg wouldn’t go after a major planet like Earth if we’re not talking occupation and wholesale transformation. (We see this when the Enterprise crew get a glimpse of a fully-assimilated Earth if the Borg succeed in the past.)
That said, the fact that the Borg all seem to be brainwashed victims who can be retrieved does render a lot of moral problems as to where exactly you draw the line between viewing them as enemy soldiers trying to kill you and viewing them as people who can be liberated. Picard does seem to be suffering from PTSD for a lot of the film, so his ruthlessness towards the Borg can be partially explained, but it does go into disturbing areas at times, notably when he kills a partially assimilated crewmember in what he probably regarded as a mercy killing.
@107: Agreed. One of the great points that SFDebris brought up in his review of this episode is that, like the Borg, the Vidiians conceive of anyone who’s not them as something be consumed, a resource to be exploited for their own gain, and like with the Borg, a de-facto state of war exists with them as a consequence.
Over 100 comments again. Looks like Voyager still has its fans, or at least it’s still worth talking about. Glad you went ahead with this rewatch, Krad.
@110: Is that definitely true of all Vidiians though? They’re people, and opinions differ. They’re not a group mind like the Borg and, even among the ones who agree with harvesting organs for their own gain, there are degrees. The ones here, who stop and treat Neelix once they’ve got what they want, are fairly mild compared to the organised organ harvesters we see in later episodes, and they’re not even the nicest Vidiians we meet. If the race can throw up a caring and compassionate individual like Danara Pel, is it really fair to dub the entire race as monsters to be eradicated without compunction?
109. cap-mjb – But the Borg don’t shoot first. They show up and say that they’re there to assimilate, as is their function. When shots are fired, it’s from those that are going to be assimilated. First use of lethal force is not the Borg way. Killing people is a waste of potential drones.
being assimilated is more like having a disease. Once you cure them (i.e. – remove them from the collective), they recover fairly quickly. For Picard, it took an couple of glasses of wine, a fight with his brother and rolling around in the mud. You don’t put someone with PTSD in charge of a starship capable of depopulating a planet.
@107, Sorry, what I meant was that I would have found a story where Vidian culture was written differently, where a minority were involved in organ stealing (while the government either turns a blind eye or secretly supports it) but the majority of Vidians have no idea or they know it happens but it’s the way we all know crime happens.
That’s not the way Vidians were written, but I think it would have been a much more interesting scenario. There’s no prime directive broken if Janeway takes the lungs back. There’s no bad rep with other cultures they may encounter. There’s just an innocent life lost while the real criminal carries on, business as usual. If Janeway takes an option where nobody dies, she has to make a deal with a murderer. That’s much more morally complex than the scenario she faced and it doesn’t have a clear answer.
@113: Whichever way you try and parse it, the Borg were still invading Federation space with hostile intent. And just because the immediate effects of PTSD are controlled, doesn’t mean there can’t be recurrences years later. Starfleet specifically ordered Picard away from the battle because they were worried about the effect encountering the Borg again would have on him. Even though they needed him to save their asses, their fears weren’t exactly unfounded.
@76: >Even self-defense is only a legally valid justification for killing if you can prove that you had no other option such as running away.
That’s not true across the board. There are states in the US that have permitted and continue to permit killing even if other options are possible. Your understanding of US law is incomplete.
Regarding your arguments about the Borg and V’Ger… let’s just say that I find your “look at a calendar” argument to be unconvincing at best. Especially since the writers of Star Trek have chosen to play quick and dirty with the series’ canon. It’s best to look at what the Borg were when they were initially introduced, not what they’ve been made into in the meantime. In any case, it’s far from obvious that their technology is less advanced than V’Ger was.
To return to the main topic:
The Vidians left Neelix to die. If they had stolen his (more conventional) property and mortally wounded him, they’d be thieves and pirates. And given that there was no authority Voyager could deliver them to, there’s no point to taking them prisoner to be judged and possibly sentenced by recognized law. In such a case, would it have been just to let them go?
Seeing as V’Ger learned as it made it’s journey and that it has the ability to act as a giant replicator as shown by the creation of the bridge to the central core, it’s not hard to believe that it upgraded itself on it’s trip. It wouldn’t have the ability to make intuitive leaps but when it digitized something that used an improved technology, it could easily incorporate it into itself.
The same goes for the Borg.
@83 really stuck with me reading through this. There’s this Death Wish mentality that really shows up in today’s culture. The bad guys always have to be punished, and punishing means death, and that’s that. That kind of mentality. And so it is in this comments section, with some pretty generous interpretations of Castle Doctrine and Stand Your Ground. (Suffice to say, even in Florida those conditions don’t ALWAYS apply.)
The problem is that this is not Star Trek’s way. Star Trek is supposed to be about the better parts of the human condition, not the Captain going all Charles Bronson on the bad guys, no matter what impression Insurrection and Into Darkness gives. Hell, it’s said right in the last movie to date: “Better to die saving lives than live with taking them. That’s what I was born into.” Pretty sure Krad quoted that and it IS Trek in a nutshell. Even in Search for Spock, Kirk only kicks Kruge off the ledge when he has no other reasonable choice — and the dude just murdered his son. That says a lot.
@119/wizardofwoz77: “Even in Search for Spock, Kirk only kicks Kruge off the ledge when he has no other reasonable choice […].”
And his first impulse is to save him. He only kicks him in self-defense, when Kruge attempts to kill them both.
@120/Jana: Still, I hate the hypocrisy of writers who make a token gesture to their heroes’ compassion yet still choose to structure the story in a way that ends up with the bad guy dying, as if that death were necessary to satisfy the audience’s bloodlust and the rest is just lip service. Stop trying to have it both ways, writers — if you want to say it’s moral to save the bad guys, then let the heroes save the bad guys! Stop painting death as a victory or a necessity!
@121/Christopher: Oh, absolutely. I would have vastly preferred if they hadn’t killed Kruge. But at least it’s only the writers who look bad, not the characters.
@122/Jana: Well, I always thought “I… have had… enough of you!” looked pretty bad on Kirk, like he was giving in to revenge after all.
@123/Christopher: Again, I agree. If only he had just kicked him without saying that…
I tend to forgive the writers (and Kirk) because there’s so much about that film I like. It’s my favourite TOS film. But like all the others, it could have been so much better.
@123, 124 It reminds me of when His Grace Commander Sir Samuel Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch killed the big bad of The Fifth Elephant — very pointedly after ticking all the boxes for lethal force, of course — and the narrative said “There were a lot of things he could say. “Son of a bitch!” would have been a good one. Or he could say, “Welcome to civilization!” He could have said, “Laugh this one off!” He might have said, “Fetch!” But he didn’t, because if he had said any of those things then he’d have known that what he had just done was murder. “The Hell with it.””
I’ll also forgive Kirk in the circumstances, but “I, have had ENOUGH, of YOU!” isn’t him at his best, to say the least.
@125/wizardofwoz77: Great quote. Why didn’t they ask Terry Pratchett to rewrite the script?
If I could be the contrarian- Kirk is human. And he’s a passionate human. Starfleet ideals aside, we’re talking about the Klingon directly responsible for the death of his son and the destruction of his beloved Enterprise, the two things he loves most in this world– and I would venture to say I’m not sure the former would be number one on the list.
Kruge is going to fall to his death and Kirk instinctively reacts to save him, yet Kruge uses even that gesture as another means to try to take something from Kirk– this time, his own life.
Against that backdrop, I have no problem with Kirk reacting as a human would rather than a dispassionate Starfleet officer. He killed the man who took everything from him and wanted more, and in the moment, he took some pleasure in it. And vicariously, so did I.
@127/fullyfunctional: And that’s exactly what I hate about the mentality of American action movies, this default assumption that audiences should celebrate the villain’s death. “Against that backdrop” is no excuse, because the filmmakers actively choose to create a backdrop that will evoke that emotional reaction in the audience.
@127-128: I think I might have liked if Kirk had done exactly what he did, and then been distressed by his own action afterwards. That would have been quite in character, and a criticism of American action films at the same time.
@127: Agreed. Kirk gave Kruge numerous chances and he burned through them all, not to mention that he was the one who’d launched an unprovoked attack on the Genesis team in the first place. Kirk’s response was more than reasonable, and that he doesn’t shed any tears for a murderer and a terrorist seeking to turn Genesis into his personal, planet-killing superweapon is something I can wholly accept.
@130/Devin: Again, using the events of the story to justify the character’s actions is beside the point, because the character and the events don’t actually exist. They’re invented by the writer to convey a desired effect. What I’m saying is that I don’t like it when writers choose to create situations that “justify” a hero killing people. I’d rather see more writers choose to end their stories with the heroes succeeding at saving people, even bad guys who don’t want to be saved. Because the best victory over a bad guy is to be better than they are, to prove that their way is wrong, not to let them drag you down to their level.
Kirk in the 2009 reboot first offered to save Nero but Spock talked him out of it. Sure, Nero refused but he was hardly in a position to do anything to stop Kirk but Spock is the one who decided that Nero shouldn’t be saved. And Kirk grinned when Spock said that. That also gave Kirk the opportunity to say “Fire everything” even though Nero and his ship were being consumed by a black hole forming inside their ship. Totally different than having your ship fly though a black hole. And the crown in the theatre I was in cheered his actions. At that moment I realized that my version of Star Trek had changed and not for the better.
When the people laying out the money to see a movie are cheering something so far removed from how the character was developed, you know that they are actually the ones in charge of the direction of the franchise. The studios see what’s popular and go with that. That’s one reason that I think Star Trek works better on TV than in the movies. It doesn’t require laying down money for each episode and doesn’t require you to try to top yourself each and every outing. But CBS/Paramount wants it’s own version of Star Wars or the MCU so they’re willing to to use Star Trek as an experiment in order to do that.
Imagine how different Balance of Terror would be remembered today and how different the character of Kirk would be if, when the Romulan commander had said “Just one more duty to perform” Kirk had responded with “Fire everything”.
@132/kkozoriz: You’re right, these two scenes are structurally very similar! Oh my God. This film gets worse the more I look at it. It definitely feels like they consciously rejected everything Star Trek stood for.
“That’s one reason that I think Star Trek works better on TV than in the movies. It […] doesn’t require you to try to top yourself each and every outing.”
I’m not sure if that’s still true for today’s serialised season arcs.
@121 et al: I suppose the counterpoint to Kruge’s death is that they do then show Kirk refusing to kill the last member of his crew and taking him prisoner instead. He threatens him with death, then a moment later it’s clear it was a bluff. (“You said you’d kill me!”/“I lied.”)
I remember hearing about stem cells around 20 years ago, and since I am a total layman when it comes to that kind of technical medicine, I imagine the possibilities were being discussed in the medical community long before VGR premiered. Since the Phage affected Vidiian DNA, I know stem cells couldn’t have helped them, but Nelix’s DNA was perfectly fine. At the rate current research is going, I imagine that it will be possible to create replacement organs via stem cells within 20 years or less, certainly centuries before humans encounter the Vidiians.
@Krad/There’s coffee in that nebula!:
Why sadly? There were some pretty good episodes to come from the Viideans not heeding Janeway’s warning. Unless you mean ‘sadly’ because it was a powerful moment for Janeway that wasn’t taken seriously.
Thierafhal: yes I meant sad that the Vidiians ignored the threat and, also, that Janeway didn’t really follow through.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido