Did the Voyager crew make the wrong call in Memorial? "

Discussion in 'Star Trek: Voyager' started by The Overlord, Sep 22, 2012.

  1. The Overlord

    The Overlord Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Did the Voyager crew make the wrong call in Memorial? It seems like allowing the Memorial to mind rape any beings who enter that system is pretty immoral. What if a ship full of pacifists enter that system, wouldn't exposing them to the thought transmissions from the Memorial screw them up. Setting up a warning at the planet doesn't change the fact that the Memorial can affect people who enter the system. Also doesn't fixing the Memorial break the Prime Directive?
     
  2. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Breaking the memorial breaks the Prime Directive.

    Leaving a Buoy breaks the Prime Directive.

    You know how when some thug steals a street sign in your nighbourhood?

    You know what that road is.

    You've lived there for years.

    Replacing it doesn't seem a priority.

    Leaving the Buoy was redundant for the most part.

    And imagine really, if well armed Russian paratroopers dropped into your nieghbourhood and fixed all your missing road signage, then filled in all your nasty potholes and trimmed your hedges?

    Shit you were planning to get around to?

    That's cause for war.
     
    Last edited: Sep 22, 2012
  3. Deks

    Deks Vice Admiral Admiral

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    The question of the Prime Directive here is rather... dubious.
    Did the crew have it within their right to repair the monument?
    Maybe that was considered interference.
    On the other hand... deploying buoys to warn other ships on what to expect probably could have been done in the first place by the species who placed the memorial.

    Perhaps the Voyager crew was traumatized so much because the memorial was damaged (due to being neglected - and I think it might have even been implied) - perhaps if it was functioning properly, it wouldn't cause the crew to be considered 'violated'.
     
  4. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    The memorial was working fine.

    Not broken.

    It's just that the warning signs/buoys that should have been there weren't at the boundaries of the effect any more.

    this is exactly why Voyager had to stay in the Delta Quadrant, they couldn't trust automation to get 'er done.

    She also charged the batteries?

    If the memorial was designed with a finite life expectancy, rather than a regenerative power-supply, like solar or geothermal, it's possible that the designers decided that this wasn't going to be an open ended project and it was in the process of being decommissioned when Voyager...

    Now I'm thinking about that ^%$# Goldilocks rifling through the three bears house like she was some sort of entitled (*&^ princess.
     
  5. T'Girl

    T'Girl Vice Admiral Admiral

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    The PD is to prevent damage to a culture? The culture is gone, no damage.

    Up ahead and around the corner there is a rapist. You can "turn him off' by removing him or destroying him. Or you can erect a sign warning others of his presence and intentions.

    Now the rapist (like the people who built the monument) may think that his actions are just fine. If you do nothing, you agree with him.

    Not all rape is physical.

    :)
     
  6. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    And not all rape is soggy.

    The monument is a hazard to navigation which stymies the local space-lanes. if a species is flummoxed by it, and run home with tales of being used as soldiers in some war fought by dickheads, and they all decide to stay planet bound for another hundred years, then they're wussies who wouldn't function in the presence of a real threat and it's a good thing that they know how to hide.

    Your analogy about the rapist is fine.

    but is this internal or external matter?

    Should you deal with it?

    Should Your police deal with it?

    Or should some random foreign vagrant just be handing out their foreign justice indiscriminately?
     
  7. teacake

    teacake Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    I think they should have turned it into a holo-theme park, Genocide Land. The buoys acted as flyers advertising the experience to any passers by, but you had to beam down to actually go on the rides.
     
  8. R. Star

    R. Star Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    These aliens were jerks of the first order to kill those people, then only demonstrated they hadn't learned ANYTHING resembling morality from it by forcing those memories on everyone who passes by.

    Janeway proves she's pretty much a tyrant by supporting the mind rape of random passer bys, not only supporting it but aiding and abetting it by fixing the damn thing to make it violate people even better! And Neelix... well by supporting randomly mindraping people as if that's some great lession, this is yet another reason he's a jerk. The rest of the crew told Janeway how stupid this was, she just said screw you and couldn't pass up on the oppurtunity to make people suffer in the name of righteousness.

    Thank you, I don't need to have the memory of killing someone to know that it's wrong. What sort of stupid premise is this? I'm going to violate someone to teach them morality! Yeah... stupid.
     
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  9. teacake

    teacake Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    I think Janeway was still under the influence of the Memorial, a stockholm syndrome deal, when she made that decision.

    At least, that's what I tell myself since I'm always a bit shocked to find myself siding with Chakotay in this one. Chak probably had some built up resistance to fantasy realness because of his spirit guide guff.
     
  10. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Is it possible the rape machine made Janeway like it?

    Forced her to fix the bugger?

    Part of it's program is to make random wanderers by fix it up if something is wrong?

    And while they were in there, what else did they do to her brain?
     
  11. Finn

    Finn Bad Batch of TrekBBS Admiral

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    Wasn't it said that due to the malfunction, they didn't experience it the way the builders intended. Perhaps it would have been less traumatic.
     
  12. R. Star

    R. Star Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    It was and by all accounts it was apparently supposed to be more effective/worse. It didn't effect the whole of the crew at once for example, the poor thing was getting old.

    It's a good thing Janeway fixed it, an innocent ship might have passed by without getting violated if they left it alone.
     
  13. teacake

    teacake Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Well at the end of The Eternal Tide..
     
  14. Anwar

    Anwar Admiral Admiral

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    It's the only remnant of a genocide-inflicted culture. Destroying it would be destroying all that remained of them. It's a dubious issue, really.
     
  15. BillJ

    BillJ The King of Kings Premium Member

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    No she wasn't wrong.

    What right does she have to remove/destroy something on someone's world? Even if they're gone.
     
  16. Mr. Laser Beam

    Mr. Laser Beam Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Janeway was entirely within her rights to do what she did. She took the best possible way out of the situation.

    While it was certainly a worthwhile goal to erect the memorial in the first place, the fact remains: the integrity of the mind is an ABSOLUTE right. The makers of the memorial had no right to force their memories into others without consent. I don't care what the memorial was for - mind rape is not the way to go about it. That is in itself an attack upon Voyager's crew, and Janeway had the right to defend them from it.

    Now that the memorial is fully repaired, and there is a warning of its existence, other crews will not be assaulted in the same fashion, and the memorial will still fulfill its purpose.
     
  17. R. Star

    R. Star Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Yes, what right does a victim have to fight their rapist? Clearly they should submit to the act. Not only that they should help the rapist find more victims.

    Seriously, calling that mind rape machine a memorial is almost like making a video game where you're an SS guard who has to run a concentration camp, gassing as many Jews as you can, and throwing their bodies into the incenerator/mass graves then calling it a tribute to the memory of the Jewish people. And even then at least the video game doesn't MAKE you play it.
     
  18. teacake

    teacake Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Just turn the thing off, set up a few diagrams, and point new people to the on switch. With a crapload of warnings. The VOY crew survived it, you might get species tuned very differently who don't survive it, who go insane. Then you have a whole new genocide, or rather massacre.
     
  19. Mr. Laser Beam

    Mr. Laser Beam Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    ^ Exactly. Does this thing make any allowances for different species and how they might react to having thoughts forced into their minds? I doubt the makers of the memorial even thought of that. Who's to say that some of those who had fallen 'victim' to the memorial didn't commit suicide over it, because they thought those memories were theirs?

    That being said: I thought it would have been interesting if it had been Saavedra (the troop commander from the massacre) who had pushed for the construction of the memorial...
     
  20. R. Star

    R. Star Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    That "warning" Janeway put in was a probe in orbit of the planet. That thing broadcasts it's mind rape to the entire system, so before you could even get to that probe. That's about as dumb as putting a large statue of uranium in a very public area, then putting a sign next to it with a warning about radiactivity.

    If this was the aliens idea of morality, they're clearly lacking it in any form. Instead of killing innocent people, we'll just violate them and make them completely miserable because of our sins... yeah. Let's have the Neo-Nazi's commemorate their sins by putting people through Holocaust simulators... it's really a tribute... a memorial... what a load of crock.