It was a total mess of a situation with no 100% morally correct solution. I think she did the closest to the right thing though.
Related…I don’t understand the hate this episode gets. Treck is at its Treckiest when it’s weird future moral dilemmas.
People argue about it instantly decades later. That proves it was effective.
All it proves was that the dilemma itself is effective.
The episode and its resolution are crap, because they don’t justify her decision. They leave it to the viewer. They do a disservice to everyone involved.
People don’t hate the episode, they hate the “debate.”
It’s clear to me that if a sentient crewmate says “please don’t kill me” you should not murder them, no matter how grief stricken you are.
Tuvok and Neelix were dead.
(I do like this episode)
‘Dead’ is a very fluid boundary. More so than usual, in this case.
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They was a voyager episode too.
There is no morality or immorality in it, she is responsible for her crew, tuvix wasn’t crew but the other two were.
You didn’t murder anything, we have several examples of transporter patterns living out their lives in holodeck simulations.
If someone’s heart stopped in a hospital, then an alien possessed their dead body and said “I was just born, this is my body now, your guy was dead” I don’t think anyone would argue that the person’s heart could very much be restarted (assuming otherwise healthy) and the alien has no right to use someone else’s bits.
A better analogy would probably be, if an alien used the body of a cryogenically frozen person that we KNEW could be revived with 100% certainty.
Tuvix wasn’t some alien body snatcher who possessed the bodies of the deceased. He was literally Tuvok and Neelix living on in a new form, which comprised a third entity.
In killing Tuvix, Janeway also murdered both Neelix and Tuvok.
What she did, in essence, was to murder three people to bring back two.
They were not dead in any way, that is like a major issue if the episode.
There being a method of resurrection doesn’t make a person any less dead. They were dead, but Janeway the necromancer knew how to bring them back to life. All it took was a sacrifice.
They never died, ever.
Patterns merged, both wholes remained whole they just mingled together in such a way that created a third party. Tuvix is quite literally a schizophrenic fever dream for both originals…
Janeway made the right call, no one wanted that Tuvix weirdo around, that’s why no one came to his defense.
It’s okay to murder people who are unpopular.
The gigachad viewpoint has arrived.
And you’re next!
Tuvix was 50% Neelix which qualifies him for the death penalty. The real travesty is that Neelix was allowed to exist afterwards. /s
Janeway made the right call, Tuvok and Neelix had their own lives and families and they could be saved. Tuvok was also a majorly important member of the crew and his skills could easily have been instrumental to their salvation.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
Tuvix needs to continue existing.
Tuvok and Neelix need to exist again outweighing Tuvix’s need
The crew needs to be saved from Neelix’s cooking and general incompetence, which have proved to be a more consistent threat than the borg. Thus, Tuvok and Neelix’s needs are outweighed.
Janeway needs Tuvok to be there to talk her out of doing impulsive things like starting wars, causing civilizations to fall, buttfucking the timeline, or murdering crew members. This effects whole worlds, so the needs of the crew are outweighed.
They once showed Neelix taking a bath, and there is a chance (however small) that he might do it again. The audience’s need to not risk seeing that outweighs all the previous needs.
Duplicate Tuvix, divide the duplicate at the moment it is formed and before it achieves self awareness, execute Neelix. What’s the issue?
Janeway gets to “execute” someone and we get both Tuvok & Tuvix, win win win
I was reflexively mad reading the start of this comment but by the end you had me 100% sold on your analysis.
Your mom outweighs the needs of the many
I never understood how transporters are not basically used as quicksave devices. Redshirt died on the planet after beaming down? Just create another copy from the transporter puffer. Tuvix deserves to live. Sure, just recreate tuvok and Neelix from the transporter puffer.
Edit: “Transporter puffer” may come from me watching the German dub
“transporter puffer”
That’s Chief Transporter Puffer to you!
I love the Geordi Grimace in this one.
It’s my head-canon conspiracy theory that the true workings of the transporter are hidden/obfuscated, even from the technicians and engineers, to avoid the existential dread of facing the truth: you die, and then it clones you.
All these systems to make it appear as if it’s a single, consistent matter stream, to leave room for the possibility of a consistent consciousness or even soul. It all falls apart in light of William Riker. You can’t duplicate matter. The only feasible explanation is that they got his scan, and successfully materialized him, but the signal that would have disintegrated the original failed.
Tuvix died because people couldn’t accept how many times they had technically killed their colleagues, or commited suicide.
Sure, but different writers treat it differently. What about the one episode with Broccoli, where we get a first person view of being in the transporter, and he clearly has a continuous consciousness throughout the experience.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realm_of_Fear
Based on this episode, you aren’t killed and recreated.
IIRC, it is explained (kinda) that the personal viewpoint of being solid within the matter stream isn’t entirely real. Wishywashy, but how do you show that on a screen, really?
To the bigger issue above, the function of the transporter is that the pattern buffer isn’t “storage” such that you cannot query against the buffer as if it’s data in memory where individual particles can be pinpointed. (Obv this is not necessarily canon and some episodes poke holes in the idea).
I’ve always imagined it more like a mound of dirt dumped onto a conveyor in FIFO order, sending it up the beam, then rolling in order into the pattern buffer. The buffer is just holding all the matter in a continuous conveyor in the original order so it can be reassembled on the pad. Outright saving a pattern to memory where every particle location, energy state, etc. would take basically all the memory everywhere (TNG: Lonely Among Us). Weapon and bacteria/virus patterns could be simple enough to detect within the buffer to knock those bits out as the “dirt” rolls around continuously.
And of course the longer you roll a bunch of dirt down a conveyor, the positions of particles shift out of their original position until eventually there’s not enough of the original pattern to reassemble properly.
My headcanon for Scotty locking the buffer into a diagnostic loop means additional scrutiny in the system’s pattern scanning which then keeps “knocking” bits back into place they were in the prior ‘pass’ down the conveyor in order to continue calibrating scanners.
Don’t look at me like I’m crazy, it totally makes sense!!!¡!!!¡!!! *cough
So, you’re saying Tuvix died for our sins?
Pardon my blasphemy.
No pardon, only meme
When you’re advanced enough to let go of concepts like having a soul, the idea of having your being destroyed and remade elsewhere becomes a lot let problematic. What’s the difference between being anesthetized and revived VS transported?
Shit, for all we know the universe just started five minutes ago and all of history is just a collective delusion. Just go with the flow and stop worrying about existential problems. One day you’ll die forever and that’s OK.
Oh, for sure. I’m fine with that. But it seems clear that the writers aren’t, and neither are many Trekkies.
Spock had a soul and that is canon. His soul (or whatever it was that made Spock more than the sum of his sexy, sexy green parts) was so important to his friends they quit their jobs, stole their own ship, crashed her, stole another one then got Spock’s soul out of valet parking just in time by THISMUCHSECONDS before it (or he) got lost forever.
TLDR: souls are a thing for Vulcans, why not everybody else? Vulcans haven’t advanced beyond the concept at all.
The transporter is just a people replicator. Same technology. Why reinvent the wheel?
The cannon answer is that it doesn’t work that way, it coverts you to energy and that energy is turned back into you so “nothing changes”. In cannon it doesn’t kill you and assemble a new copy, and you can’t duplicate a person because you only have one copy of their energy.
Accidents like Thomas Riker are not supposed to be possible and only happen when they encounter strange energies which cause reactions that aren’t understood, so they can’t just make duplicates on demand.
The transporter doesn’t work this way
Sometimes it does but that doesn’t count because it’s not supposed to work this way
Just ignore it
Your soul is already lost to the warp.
I didn’t write the cannon, I just went to warp in it.
A photonic cannon?
I’m pretty sure even in Voyager there was an incident where someone got stuck in the transporter puffer/cache/whatever it’s called in the og
Off hand I actually can’t think of any, aside from as close as Tuvix got.
There was the episode where the population of Neelix’s home planet were revealed to be in some kind of particle limbo from a Star Trekium powered super weapon and a scientist was trying, unsuccessfully to restore them.
I think there was also an episode where Voyager smuggled some people through hostile space by hiding them in the pattern buffer.
You’re right, ‘Counterpoint’ from season 5.
That was a badass ep, thanks for having a keener memory than me.
In the new one, the doctor is literally keeping his daughter in stasis in it…
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Transporters become horrifying when you think of them as something obliterating all your molecules then recreating them somewhere else. The thing that comes out the other side has all your memories and personality and looks the same… but you 100% died when you got vaporized in the teleport.
I would never do it.
For more information, watch the documentary “The Prestige”
Oh man, that was a crazy reveal. And he kept them all!
If it has my memories and affects the world the way I would, that’s me.
Look at any photograph or work of art. If you could duplicate exactly the first tiny dot of color, and then the next and the next, you would end with a perfect copy of the whole, indistinguishable from the original in every way, including the so-called “moral value” of the art itself. Nothing can transcend its smallest elements.
CEO Nwabudike Morgan, “The Ethics of Greed”
So… don’t think of them like that. They clearly don’t work that way in Trek.
Transporters were created to save money on the original series and have butt fucking plot holes ever since.
That’s because of the plots they specifically made around the Transporters.
They don’t create matter, they create an energy matter stream that moves the person molecule by molecule. How it happens is scifi magic, but it’s not the same as creating new atoms, which would require every replicator to have the energy to obliterate a planet.
Replicators can make more than enough food to feed the ship.
Why not use some of those atoms to reconstruct victims of unfortunate accidents? If there’s not enough, why not pack enough?
Because the stored patterns have the where, not the how fast. What would come out is a brain dead corpse.
No, they explicitly are written to a buffer of sorts and only when they were read completely are they reintegrated. That means you could easily just create two from the data and it would only use more energy.
The buffer contains the stream(s) before being sent to an emitter. It’s not a hard drive, it’s a container.
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Of course Janeway made the right choice. Anyone who says otherwise is either trolling or sexist. No one would care if it was Picard splitting Guiker or Sisko splitting Quira.
Can you imagine an episode where Picard doesn’t agonize over this decision for 22 minutes and ultimately not do it? The guy spared the Borg.
Picard would have justified his choice. Janeway didn’t even try.
That’s not an indictment of Janeway, but of the lazy writers of that episode.
It’s the No Stametses Club, we’re allowed to have one.
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Tuvix was an atrocity and extinguishing it would have been morally correct even if it had not resulted in numerically more living beings.
That and, specifically, Tuvix probably suggested promoting Ensign Kim.
Manpower is crucial when you’re stranded, definitely the right choice, a two for one deal!
Is this Quark’s account? 100% Ferengi thinking you got there.
Look, there’s no way Tuvok didn’t have “under no circumstances is my body, my mind, my soul, my organs, my DNA, or any products thereof to be integrated into any form, permutation, or byproduct of Nelix” in his last will and testament. Therefore, Tuvix had to go.
She’s just following Spock’s wisdom.
2>1. The needs of the many, yadda yadda…
If only they could recreate the transporter accident that makes a perfect copy of a person. Then all that has to happen is to take the clone and split it before it realizes anything.
That way EVERYONE could exist together.
That’s exactly what I’ve been telling people for ages regarding the Tuvix issue. Simple, yet effective.
Somebody made a full video explaining why that would make stuff twice as bad https://youtu.be/17cbC1AR7FE?si=StNEBon_i88Pt1hm
I didn’t realize that Allison Pregler was still making videos post Channel Awesome fiasco. I always liked her movie and show reviews back in the day. Thanks for the recommend!
I can now see how I could be VERY clearly wrong in every way on the Tuvix topic from another perspective…
Most of the crew dies offscreen, they just keep duplicating them all the time.
I could see Janeway being based and using it that way
It could also solve the need for clones of the Vorta. The Dominion could just pop another one out of the buffer and not have to depend on cloning facilities.
God I didn’t even think of that. Instant army. Altho, for that matter, you could also just use a replicator to fabricate an instant army of killbots.
I wonder if killbots would be better than the Jem’hadar. Certainly a Jem’killbot cyborg would be better than both.
I’m sure the Dominion put that to the test at some point.
Though with the power of the dominion, it wouldn’t shock me if they invented the borg that way and the time shenanigans happened
Bye dear Stamets, it’s been lovely knowing ya! /s
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Lol, so given the basic trolley dilemma, you just gon run over as many as you can. In this case 2.
It’s called multitrack drifting.
I think tuvix was asking for it. Remember that time he swapped out Janeway’s bra for a slightly smaller one. And it irritated her to the point she committed genocide on the breegans. He knew what was coming.
Ha yeah. Classic Tuvix. He got the whole section on double secret probation for that one.
In my mind, Tuvix continues to live on within Tuvok and Neelix, waiting for the day when he can reunite himself once again .
I bet there’s some good slashfic about this.
