As I said we can blame him for unethical science (If we are to believe Saavik). For wasting time and resources that would have been better spent on other projects. But he can't be blamed for Khan being a psychopathic killer, or for Kruge's weapon man being an idiot who doesn't know the difference between "disable" and "destroy", can we?
Or for those Starfleet Beavises building an unarmed and unshielded science vessel, in a galaxy full of races that hate the Federation's guts.
ETA - Sorry, I thought this had been posted further up the thread. Yeah, I don't think anyone would expect David to be formally charged with murder or such...his intentions seem to have been benign enough...but there's a direct line from his actions to what later ensued. I don't know what happens with scientists in the current day who engage in unethical practices, much less how such a situation would be handled in the 23rd century.
well, unethical is often MD's creating false research with fake patients to get grant money. These people are thieves, and indirectly murderers because of the people crippled by bad medication falsely supported by research.... But they'll never be charged with murder only with thievery.
I'd say he was a secondary casualty in Dear Doctor. Or maybe it was the Columbia's first mission, in case there were hard feelings. No more Section 31 type dirty tricks, please. I'd really like Trek to not go full dystopia.
Who said anything about S31? I'm just saying that it seems incredibly short-sighted for the Federation to fund a project with obvious WMD implications and then not do more to protect it. Were they really that idealistic? Were there concerns that doing more to protect it would explicitly call more attention to it from hostile powers? Oh, but to backtrack to Archer and character assassination, I clearly repressed ANIS (what a fitting acronym) entirely from my memory, because that was just a terrible thing to do to any captain.
1. Remove "i" 2. Insert "u" 3. Any questions? Also, given that S31 retroactively existed in the 23rd century, it's a safe bet they got the specs on the Genesis device at some point. But maybe instead of building one in the Dominion war, they went with the "changeling virus" plot instead.
I don't think we ever found out exactly where the Changelings relocated to after the Romulan-Cardassian attack? Odo may have known, but I don't think he would have shared that kind of information even if he did.
Problem is, they probably couldn't find the Changelings' new home. So, they found a way to eliminate them from a distance: discover one Changeling infiltrator, quietly infect them, and let them take the poison back to the nest. Kind of how exterminators get rid of certain types of ants.
Speaking of ants there's an interesting phenomenon called a zombie ant parasite, it's a fungus that infects the ant and takes over its brain functions. It sounds like sci. fi. but for once it's the reality. Imagine if there was such fungus for PEOPLE!! Scary, isn't it?
I hope Dukat hasn't already been brought up because the man was already evil and a tyrant. He was not ruined by writers trying to assassinate his character.
But that's an argument separate and apart from "he was a good man at heart who'd done horrible things and the writers ruined him by turning him into a supervillain." THAT can't be argued because from the beginning of DS9 he's portrayed as a manipulative ex-tyrant who presided over a brutal military occupation.
Dukat was shades of gray, but far closer to black than to white. Sisko was his opposite number in that regard.
Dukat had moments of decency and glimmers of hope but never enough to erase the corrupted and violent man he'd been since at least the start of his tenure as Prefect of Bajor. He had some grey to him and was never 100% evil but then nobody is pure, unfiltered evil and all it takes is a cunning and intelligent person doing more bad things than good to make them a villain.