This ones a morality nightmare and makes good arguments for both approaches. Unfortunately the sad truth is that we have a chequered history when it comes to treatment of life in the pursuit of knowledge.
Deep!
This is what I expect from Star Trek. There are so many ethical and moral questions at play here. Hypothetical: If Mengele had come up with a cure, for say, cancer - would it be right to use it? I honestly have no answers and I have sympathies for either side depending on the situation.
I was a bit shocked the Doctor justified experiments on animals but I guess it was necessary to make the differantiation for the sake of the story. On one thing though I do agree with Moset: ethics and morals do go out the airlock when we need something.
Janeway making a sound decision? This is definitely a change. I guess we make up for it with the Doctor's poor decision.
Why doesn't this sort of thing happen all the time?
Ah, another alien taking control of a Voyager crew member's body. It's an episode about ethics in medicine. They try to go back to an issue well established in DS9. I don't really like this episode. I just don't buy it that this holo-Cardassian could actually be or could even be mistaken for anything other than a glorified medical database. Don't understand how a hologram suddenly becomes an unethical character or how he even could discuss ethics himself. That's not how databases and/or holograms work. He's merely a representation of a medical database. How could the computer even know that he was a murderer back on Bajor if that was never mentioned in federation databases and is apparently only know by Bajorans who know this fact from oral history or rumors? Remove his personality from the hologram recreation, change his name and face if you don't like the persona the hologram is based on. All ethical problems solved.
Sidenote: that alien looks stupid. Every time they have bugs, reptiles, crabs, dinosaurs or lizards it's incredible silly.
I nominate Janeway for best Star Trek captain ever! Flawless decision making yet again...I'd rather examine this unknown alien here instead of there
The morality part of this episode was great. How they got into this sticky situation (Janeway’s bad decision and not considering the input of her staff) was horrible.
Agg the captain just continues to be horrible.
Review by LeftHandedGuitaristBlockedParent2018-06-18T13:43:08Z
A good moral/ethical debate is part of the heart of Star Trek, and this episode delivers on that quite well even though it lacks any kind of subtlety. There's very little grey area, and it really does come down to a good or bad choice, one of which will save a crew member's life. When the stakes are that high, it's not difficult to guess which is chosen.
Also, ew! Giant bug thing!
I liked quite a bit about this episode, though. I think a big part is the whole Cardassian/Bajoran angle which I always found one of the most fascinating and enjoyable aspects of Deep Space Nine. Bringing that over to this show incorporates a lot of background depth which Voyager is rarely equipped to employ given its episodic nature. I also know the character of Crell Moset from a few of the Trek novels (in fact I had just read one with him in, 'The Battle of Betazed', which chronologically takes place almost right alongside this very episode). So, I knew of his past as soon as we were introduced to him.
It's also one of the areas where the logic of the episode disappears for nothing but dramatic story reasons. Some of the crew are upset at seeing a Cardassian, but he's a hologram - there was no reason that the Doctor couldn't have just changed his appearance to human. Similarly, once Moset's background is revealed, why not just use a different exobiologist from the ship's database?
Janeway's character is kind of destroyed once again as she makes a decision for one of her crew and refuses to hear that she did anything wrong. I swear, nobody on this ship has free will.
There's also the issue that Crell is nothing more than a simulation created by the ship's computer. Any knowledge the hologram presents is therefore already existing within the database's somewhere. But I guess holograms have always been a murky area on Star Trek.