Mortal Coil

[Sandoval]

Meh... I suppose I can buy that the magical 'nanoprobe death cure' shown in Mortal Coil is only viable in very specific circumstances.

Neelix happened to get lucky - I use the term loosely - and was able to be brought back, but in the vast majority of cases this nanoprobe trick is useless.

 

[JB2005]

Neelix, revived by that most wonderful of items, the contract

 

[exodus]

I've heard this argument made a LOT, but can you actually point to a subsequent episode in the series where a crewmember had just died and he was in a position to be resuscitated? Remember, Neelix died of a specific cause, and was revived within a specific time period. Just because we didn't get the specifics of why this was doesn't mean that Seven had unlimited resurrection power- she did state that it was a risky procedure that was not guaranteed to work. Maybe she HAS resuscitated crewmembers, we just didn't see it because it was not germane to the stories we saw.

So before we proceed with the argument, can you find a time when the procedure could have been used (Latent Image springs to mind), but wasn't?

Friendship 1... Joe Carey

Joe Carey had been shot point blank range.
He had a hole in his chest.
Nanopropes can't fix that. We've seen plenty of Borg shot by phasers and they stay dead.Neelix' body was still whole, the electrocution just disrupted his synaptic pathways. We've seen an example of this in "Dark Frontier" w/ "Needle Fingers". A Drone hit by a electrical discharge and the nano's kept him alive. They deactivated him because they showed Seven's words to also be true. Nano's didn't work completely in his case, so he couldn't full function anymore.

 

[JanewayRulz!]

Well, maybe its not point blank... but it looked pretty devastating. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgcQLmV_7kc

I suspect those nanoprobes can do some reconstructing as they "reanimate", just like I suspect that everyone on this crew knew what Neelix went through and decided for themselves to OPT out of any Borg surgery in the future. Not because they would doubt their own spiritual philosophies, but that in the long run they couldn't handle the idea of Borg nanoprobes running amok in their bodies.

Oh, and I forgot... letting Seven ressurect the dead would make for long term story telling boredom.

Just like after season 1 Bev Crusher didn't keep ressurecting alien Queens killed by Picard's crew.

Oh, speaking of forgetting, we did see Seven use her nanoprobes once more on an alien to cure him... Repentence.









[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgcQLmV_7kc[/yt]

 

[exodus]

The Borg tried to enslave your entire species, if they turned around and told you the same technology they used to enslave people could also cure cancer, would you still want that cure? What's controlling those nano's from going from cure to enslave?

 

[stj]

The whole time that Neelix was dead, information in his brain, which one would think essential to reviving the full Neelix, was being irrretrievably lost. And while you can say "nanoprobe" and pretend they are supposed to have infinite properties, they can't. The nanoprobes could only work if they could somehow probe back into time, before key information was lost to damage to Neelix' brain. I suppose that you could grabl some Trek terminology and say these were Seven's only nanoprobes with a chroniton charge that enable them to do this and now that she was out of them there couldn't be any more such revivals.

Actually, the amazing properties of the nanoprobes stagger belief, save for the FX. In particular, the instant creation of all sort of metal parts as part of assimilation must be happening, as we see it on the TV screen right before our eyes. That refutes any silly questions like, where does the metal come from?

The episode works despite the crappy science because it addresses a deeply heartfelt wish pretty much everyone raised in a religious society has felt.

Naomi's dream of the Great Forest was a deeply moving and thematically fitting coda/commentary. People like to talk about the great writing on DS9 and rant about the lousy writing on Voyager, but I don't know of anything on DS9 that can compare with this.

 

[You_Will_Fail]

Naomi's dream of the Great Forest was a deeply moving and thematically fitting coda/commentary. People like to talk about the great writing on DS9 and rant about the lousy writing on Voyager, but I don't know of anything on DS9 that can compare with this.

All a matter of opinion of course but I felt that while the message and issue explored in "Mortal Coil" was excellent, the writing was only merely good.

 

[Lange]

I got shocked by this episode while I knew they wouldn't kill of Neelix it reminded me somewhat of the "redshirt" lore of Star Trek when people who had way less severe injures in other Star Trek series were easily discounted or ignored right away when they died

 

[Destructor]

Seven wasn't on the ship in Latent Image.

Exactly.

Joe Carey had been shot point blank range.
He had a hole in his chest.
Nanopropes can't fix that.

Agreed- it's not shown to be a miracle cure, it cures a very specific problem. It's not like the medical science on Trek isn't already a bit magical, the Borg just have a higher level of technology, so it seems more magical.

So again I must ask: Does this ever come up? For all it's reputation as the ship of death, not many people actually die on Voyager, so I'm just not sure it's an issue.

I also agree with stj: If you get bogged down on specifics like this you lose sight of the point of the episode- Seven's treatment was a Macguffin to enable Neelix to contemplate death in a very bleak, very powerful episode. Next you'll be saying that all of Trek is unbelievable because you can't go faster than light. Well, yeah.