I think the worst Worf character assassination is "Let He who..." by far, he gets ridiculed ten ways till Sunday, allies himself with a bunch of dorks, and ruins the vacations of an entire planet!!! For apparently the sole reason that he was feeling grouchy.
Though the thing is with some of these DS9 especially, story choices, I thought they were trying to be edgy and they did not want to be like other Treks.
I don't recall ever feeling that DS9 was trying to be edgy for the sake of being edgy, but I'd be happy to consider specific instances. Disclaimer: My threshold for what constitues "edgy" may be higher than others'.
Deep Space 9 was ahead of its time. All of the things that are relatively normal today (dark tone, loss of utopian world, conflict, and serialization) were things it featured first. It is the perfect classic Trek for the modern binge watcher.
I did not like what they did with Odo in Things Past. Before that point, the idea that Odo always carried a dark secret with him he told no one about changes all his past characterization, especially some of his dialogs with Kira, lambasting the latter for doing the same.
I don't really think Odo "lambasted" Kira in the past? Though, if that's how you feel about "Things Past", how do you feel about "Children of Time", in which Odo 'kills' thousands of people who perhaps never should have existed in the first place, all for the love of a woman?
That episode made me sick to my stomach. One watching of it was about three times too many. Whether it was character assassination or not, it was certainly one of my least favorite. I'd rather watch a Sub Rosa/Threshold/Shades of Gray triple feature than that one.
Can you mass murder people who arguably never should have existed in the first place? I suppose it is a bit similar to "Tuvix" though with greater stakes. Either the situation is an accident that's 'corrected' in the end, or the situation was 'meant to happen' and should have been left as it was.
I suppose not, because this was "200 years older" Odo. Considering that the Odo we know was about 35 as of "Children of Time", he was much older when he "killed" the colonists. The Odo we know had nothing to do with it.
Whichever way you put it, he willfully and with premeditation caused 8000 people to cease to exist. To me, that qualifies as mass murder and in most systems of justice, the penalty is either death or life imprisonment with no possibility of parole with a "no way in hell" clause attached to it. The surviving Odo may not be directly guilty but to think that he has that potential in him.... no comment.
Yeah...even though the Odo who did what he did is an Odo who will now presumably never exist, it is hard to shake the sense that we now know what he's capable of. Janeway doesn't get let off the hook that easily, of course, because it's the Janeway in the here and now who opts to restore Neelix and Tuvok at the expense of Tuvix.
Besides who are we to say that someone "should never have existed"!!! Whether you were born by accident or because a loving couple decided to have a child you have the EXACT SAME RIGHT TO EXIST DAMN IT!!!!
Here's a question, though. If Sisko and the rest of the Defiant crew had decided on their own to avert the accident that sent them through time, erase the colony from existence... would that be murder? Or simply exercising the right to make their own fate? If a woman chooses not to have children, and deleted three children, eight grandchildren, 19 great grandchildren, and 235,789 other assorted descendants born over the next few hundred years... is she a mass murderer?
Yes. How can someone know if someone is a accident or destined by fate to exist? The only way to make such a determination and decide whether the existance of someone is accidential or not is to follow science. And all the evidence of science indicates that either: 1) everyone and everything is completly random and accidential 2) everything and everyone is predetermined 3) everyone and everything is a mixture of predetermined and random, accidental factors. And in al lthree case there is no possibility of separating accidential and random people from predetermined people, so everyone has to be considered to have equal rights. I have an idea for a fictional character who is immortal and whose mission to save everyone, giving eternal life to every intelligent being ever born in the entire universe, including countless sets of peopel born in alternnate universes which are inconsistent . The people in alternate universe A will not be born if the people in alternate univers B are born, and so on. Andhis mission isto save them all. To use a lot of understatement, this chaacter has great job security. She is certainly a mass murderer from the point of view of those descendants if they can learn about her decision to delete them from distance. I note that there are only three classes of humans sorted by reproductive results. 1) Those who have no children. 2) Those who have children but their descendants die out within a few generations. 3) Those whose descendants continue until the end of their species. And after enough generations, each such ancestor will have so many descendants that every member of their species will be descended from them. Suppose that a time traveller visits a group of hunter-gatherers living several times farther in the past than the period for someone's descendants to become the entire human population. Suppose that he somehow wipes out the entire group. Unless they would have all died without descendants anyway, some of them should have become the ancestors of everyone living in his era, including himself. So the time travellor will never have been born. Suppose that a time traveller visits a group of hunter-gatherers living several times farther in the past than the period for someone's descendants to become the entire human population. Suppose that the entire little tribe is at the shore when the ocean suddenly recedes and they walk out on the seabed to gather stranded fish, but he warns them to run for high ground.and they do, and so survive the tsunamies which would have otherwise killed them all. So some of them will become the ancestors of all people living in the time traveler's era. And to do that they will have to marry and have children with people who would have otherwise married and had children with different people. So after thousnds of years their descendnts will completely replace the total population of humans. And thus the time traveller will never have been born. Think about mcrosopic life forms and how short their generations are and how many generations they have in one human generation. And which lifeforms have the greatest impact on how long humans live? Microscopic bacteria and viruses. So suppose that a time traveller travels thousands of years in the past and breathes once before returning to his own time. He will bring specimens of long extinct bacteria and viruses back to his own time. And he will take specimens of the bacteria and viruses of his own time into the past and relese them when he breathes. That will change the evolution of bacteria and virus species in the past. And that will change the evolution of new deadly diseases from previously harmless germs. Thus a number of diferent peole will live or die than would have. And so by the time the time travller came from, there will be a completely different set of living humans. And thus the time traveller will never have been born.
That is the Butterfly Effect for you. It's why even though First Contact did happen, the reality of "Star Trek First Contact" is that the Borg might well have prevented the Federation by the people they killed. Wouldn't Zephram Cochrane's crew have been important, too?
In Necessary Evil there was a similar conversation when Odo finds out Kira has been hiding a similar secret, and Odo takes the moral high ground. It is of no consequence. — Odo never claimed that he would not kill by necessity and he did not bother to erase any evidence. What changed Odo's character is that he was given sanctimoniousness as a character trade. — before that point he owed up to all of his own personality and had no secrets. If he defied anyone, he did so openly without attempting to hide it.
The 8000 people actually existed, they were not prospective people... You can't be held responsible for something that MIGHT happen in the future, that's just delusional and a little bit insane. If the crew had decided, given what they knew and given that they had 8000 living breathing people around them, and given that Kira was willing to make the sacrifice (in fact IMO she was the only one who could morally object to the thing) then they would have been no better than mass murderers even if no tribunal would have ever prosecuted them for that but Sisko has had already dropped bombs on children at that point so...Because on one hand they would not have died themselves, just lived a life different from the one that thought they would have and on the other hand the lives of 8000 people were at stake... There's no comparison between these things!!! I think the morals of this episode are all wrong. Sure they made the right decision in the end but that was only AFTER they made the bad one and that's reprehensible. If they were truly the people they pretend to be they would have made the right decision right away, as soon as Kira had decided to sacrifice herself, which was her choice to make.