Inspired by @unicorn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2026
168 points (97.2% liked)
TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
7524 readers
941 users here now
/c/TenForward: Your home-away-from-home for all things Star Trek!
Re-route power to the shields, emit a tachyon pulse through the deflector, and post all the nonsense you want. Within reason of course.
~ 1. No bigotry. This is a Star Trek community. Remember that diversity and coexistence are Star Trek values. Any post/comments that are racist, anti-LGBT, or generally "othering" of a group will result in removal/ban.
~ 2. Keep it civil. Disagreements will happen both on lore and preferences. That's okay! Just don't let it make you forget that the person you are talking to is also a person.
~ 3. Use spoiler tags.
Use spoiler tags in comments, and NSFW checkbox for posts.
This applies to any episodes that have dropped within 3 months prior of your posting. After that it's free game.
~ 4. Keep it Trek related. This one is kind of a gimme but keep as on topic as possible.
~ 5. Keep posts to a limit. We all love Star Trek stuff but 3-4 posts in an hour is plenty enough.
~ 6. Try to not repost. Mistakes happen, we get it! But try to not repost anything from within the past 1-2 months.
~ 7. No General AI Art. Posts of simple AI art do not 'inspire jamaharon'
~ 8. No Political Upheaval. Political commentary is allowed, but please keep discussions civil. Read here for our community's expectations.
Fun will now commence.
Sister Communities:
Want your community to be added to the sidebar? Just ask one of our mods!
Creator Resources:
Looking for a Star Trek screencap? (TrekCore)
Looking for the right Star Trek typeface/font for your meme? (Thank you @kellyaster for putting this together!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I can’t understand how people think this was the right move. It was obviously murder. Tuvix begged and pleaded for his life.
He was a good crewmate, a comfort to some, and the only bad thing he did was remind people of a tragedy that wasn’t his fault.
There's literally zero difference between Tuvix and having two crew members be eaten alive by a life form, yet can be saved if you cut its gut open. I would do it 102% of the time with a 2% margin of error, losing 0 seconds of sleep afterward. This is the only ethical opinion, you're welcome to disagree but you will be wrong and nothing can be done about it
But there’s a huge difference! Objectively, and morally.
Not an argument
So 2 things with it, first out of universe in the real world, the actors have contracts that need to be upheld, simply because of that the ending of that episode had to happen that way. It would have been fascinating to get to do a longer exploration of this character but the reality of producing a TV show is that contracts have to be honored, amd just like Tuvix, neither choice is really "the right choice" just different ones. Is serving an interesting narrative more important? Is honoring the real lives and work contracts of the actors more important?
The second, is that the episode clearly does heavily weigh on the decision that needed to be made, sacrifice the existence of 2 of the crew for a new one, or sacrifice the existence of this one for the 2 crew mates, the episode never made any comment which was the right choice, only that the choice had to be made one way or the other. Hell even The EMH explicitly states he will not take Tuvix's life by beginning the separation. The episode makes no mistake, what Janeway is choosing to do is essentially murder, and only asks us whether the murder of 1 is worth saving 2.
At the end of the day this this episode testing the conculsion of Measure of a Man in the no win decision of the Kobayashi Maru and the logic of irradiated warp engine room from Wrath of Khan. I think its a brilliant moral philosophy episode because there is no good decision, there is no right answer, there is no star fleet protocol that can handle tbis and there is no "bounce a particle beam off the main deflector dish" treknobabble to magically solve the problem. Just the decision of who's lives to change.
Just to add, but Janeway's conclusion wasn't even about the number of lives. It was that the odds of the entire ship surviving were a lot lower without both of the original 2. (Actually, without Tuvok...)
Copy-paste in the transporter and get all 3, no charge.
Maybe? But transporter cloning accidents are wildly unpredictable, there's a reason the safety measures are supposed to prevent cloning from happening. Kirk got split into his dominant and passive sides, Riker got split into identical clones, but because one was abandoned on Nervala IV and went through a wildly different lifepath he became a wildly different person.
There's also no guarantee how the process has to happen, for example can you get 2 incomplete clones from 1 person and still preserve the original? Or do you have to create a complete clone and then do a split clone? Now were back in the same moral situation, which clone do we essentially murder to bring back Tuvok and Neelix?
As for contracts, can’t the writers write out a character if they choose to do so, and if the actor is still under contract, the actor still gets paid, but doesn’t appear on screen?
In theory, maybe? But contracts for actors partially is to guarantee they'll have work to do and for executive producers to get value out of the actor. Actors tend to want to act and producers want the actors they're paying to actually act and then to replace two of them with another character kn the ensemble is another contract that needs to be drawn up and is another person to pay.
I don't know, I do agree the episode did not sugar coat it, but I still came out of the episode finding it hard to watch and respect any of the crew members who just watched and let it happen. I had to take a break for a while after that.
It being hard to watch is exactly why I love this episode so much, it highlights that with all the hope and optimism and ideals and protocols, sometimes there are situations that there is no right answer. Its the purest essence of the Kobayashi Maru test.
But there seems to be a right answer
I don't see an objectively correct answer, the 2 choices boil down to "uphold starfleet's commitment to protecting sentient life and increase the risk of not surviving the return to the Alpha Quadrant" or "abandon the ideals and increase the odds of crew survival and rescue the two people who were fused together." Both are not ideal choices, both come with tradeoffs. Neither one is the perfectly morally correct choice.
By that logic, two people were "murdered" for Tuvix to exist.
There's no easy answer - which was kind of the point of the episode.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
That was an industrial accident, not murder.
They're not 'dead' dead. They're incapacitated, might be the best term for it.
"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."
By killing Tuvix, she saved two people instead of 1.
Also Tuvix fucking sucked at making coffee. Janeway needed Neelix back.
Janeway did nothing wrong.
Yes it was murder. Sometimes murder is the right thing to do. Who knows what new diseases would develop in a Vulcan-Tallaxian hybrid? He might have died in weeks anyway from incompatable immune systems. He might have become a new Mr Suter and started killing crewmates due to lacking the mental control of Tuvok because he's too Neelix.
Janeway was a hero. Tuvix was a monster with no right to life.
Killing ≠ murder. I don't enjoy killing, but when done righteously, it's just a chore, like any other.
He might even have grown up to be hitler!
Not familiar, is that a Star Trek character?