Are there ethical problems with Janeway's time travel in 'Endgame'?

Quite possible, but (for better or worse) no way to say for sure.

 

And if Hitler is killed when he's young, my family is three times larger. Instead, they were mowed down by Einsatzgruppen outside of Kiev. Of course, the NS had many awful, vile people who could take Hitler's place.

Not to criticize you, but I think that the essential problem with time travel is that it is selfish, even with the best of intentions. It means picking a way that events move forward based on one's knowledge (which is likely limited) and interests. Unfortunately, it also means that those events won't be organically linked to those that came before. At least in previous episodes, there was a sense of correcting changes made to the past rather than engineering a past one wants.

 

Some of us argue that Goebbel's was worse.

 

I'm not feeling criticized. I agree that unless you're correcting changes time travel is quite likely inadvisable, and certainly at least potentially dangerous. You can change the course of events without even realizing you're doing so.

After all, who knows what happened with the man who vaporized himself in City? Do we know that Gillian's departure had no impact? Even if she was going to get hit by a bus the next day, would that not have impact on the person who hit her and ripple outward from there?

It's easy to side with Kirk et al. in TVH, but even that time travel is arguably selfish.

 

I think that we can even extend that to what would be very honorable time travel experiences. In Past Tense, Sisko plays the role of Gabriel Bell, a man who died to protect hostages in the middle of a demonstration against welfare conditions. Sisko claims to have studied the era, and he knows that the residents were able to communicate that they were respectable people with needs to a wider public. Sisko confronts BC about who should represent the residents. He nominates Webb, because Webb has "the face." What does that mean? BC's crazy, but why can't Sisko be the voice of the residents? I think it is implied that he can't because he's black. And while I would argue Webb is a safer bet (especially to get the better temporally appropriate result), Sisko's choice is still based on an historical interpretation, perhaps one that was disputable. Gabriel Bell was still the hero for his determination and sacrifice, but not for his ideas.

 

I think a more basic reason why Sisko didn't nominate himself was because if someone watching them actually knew Gabriel Bell, and he was impersonating him, it could have caused other issues he might not be able to work around.

Plus, he may have known that it was Webb who went on first historically, so trying to keep as much of the timeline intact as he could. He just came up with a reason that seemed to fit for B.C., since he is pretty unstable.

 

Sisko has a micro-historical knowledge of the Gabriel Bell riots, but doesn't recognize Webb, BC or Vinn? Nah.

 

History is an interesting thing--mess with it, and you could be playing with things you don't know. Twilight Zone has dealt with stuff like this, and may do so again now that it's back.

Kirk fought a greek god and won. But that's an entirely different topic. It was established that Apollo was no god--but an alien that would appear godlike because he could do stuff. Apollo wasn't behaving like a god. He was behaving like an enslaver.

We will never know. WWII was almost a second act to WWI, because the Germans were so viciously punished after it. But perhaps a better leader than Hitler could have led Germany to a resurgence in a more peaceful manner. While post-WWII Japan was the beneficiary of the lessons learned from WWI, Japan after surrender became a much better country and an important part of the world today.

As would be the same with other people, who would have met other people, married other people, interacted with other people, and the odds of you being born are far lower.

It should also be noted that the further back you go, the worse it is. The past owes nothing to the future. But the future owes everything to the past. If you travel back in time 30 seconds, the only history you change is 30 seconds. If you travel back 30 years, you affect 30 years.

The only real exception is something the time traveler likely can't know, which is a predestination paradox. The real timeline actually unfolded because the time traveler was there, and if the time travel is prevented, THAT changes history. The only way to know though is after the adventure, nothing changed.

Saving Edith Keeler changed the world. Saving 2 humpback whales was always supposed to happen.

STIV is a perfect predestination paradox. Every issue you have is a proper concern, but we know for a fact that everything was what it should be because the second Kirk came back, everyone was in the exact same spot. Right to the conversation. Gillian was supposed to come to the 23rd century. As for the guy who got vaporized in City on the Edge, they got very lucky.

However, the motivation is far different than Janeway's. Janeway ruined a perfectly good timeline. Kirk saved Earth from imminent destruction, and given that he returned at the exact moment he left, he did not actually alter history.

 

We don't know that TVH was a predestination paradox, we only know that everything seems to be the same with the limited amount of exposure we have.

 

In the same time, Janeway & her crew changed the timeline so many times for their own interests that all in all, it is not once again (by Adm. Janeway, this time) that will change the face of the world. And a future less than enviable was maybe the consequence of all the mess created by past Janeway & Cie's actions...

And a question, why always associate Janeway in time travel? If I remeber well, she wasn't alone to do it ... cf to Chakotay/Kim played with the timeline in Timless, the Doctor in Living Witness/Blink of an Eye, etc..., Braxton in Future's End and later Braxton/Ducane in Relativity, Paris (with Janeway) in Time and Again, ! ).
It is so tempting to play with the timeline and in the same time, it offers a full power to the individual who is able to do it...whatever the result

 

At the beginning of the movie, the ship returned home before it left as evidenced by the breaking window.

Fixed timeline?

 

The Doctor didn't play with time travel in "LIVING WITNESS". He was the backup program and we saw what he was up to hundreds of years after because he was dormant.

"BLINK OF AN EYE" is not really time travel. The planet is just going through centuries extremely fast. When he beamed down, those few minutes were years down there.

In "TIME AND AGAIN", it was Voyager's rescue attempt that caused the disaster, not Janeway. She corrected that one. So at least it isn't her fault there.

 

Fixing an illegal action illegally is an illegal action.

Besides, maybe it's cool if you reverse a mistake on the first attempt, but what if after a thousand attempts to reverse your error, how the ###k are you not Annorax?

 

It's kind of funny if you think about it... throughout the entire run of Voyager, Janeway is shown as someone who doesn't like time travel (and dangers and paradoxes associated with it) at all, yet is sucked in those situations a few times against her will and then has to cope as best she can. Then suddenly in the series' finale, her 26-year-older-self does so voluntarily and accepts all risks and such. Somehow she seriously must have derailed in that future.

And the writers wanted to make sure we'd notice this, since they also made her give up on coffee.

 

Is it real coffee though?

No sugar, and no caffeine.

To get the bad stuff permitted through your replicator would require permission from the CMO. You would think that Captain rank would carry enough seniority to replicate sugar, meth and nicotine, to avoid needing a gilded permission slip to party... But the CMO outranks the CO in medical matters.

I'm just saying that if she was writing reach-arounds to circumnavigate the EMH's best intention in the Delta Quadrant, no Fleshy in the AQ is going to let that ##it fly.

It was easy to give up the nothing burgers they were filling her mug up with in the AQ... Crawling off the walls detoxing, but she had lost access to the good ##it, but that's just one dark week until Kathryn is fit for human contact again.

 

Well doing that some 6 episodes in, a matter of a few weeks (compared to accepting some 70 years stranded) felt like way-excessive selflessness idealism.

It does feel controversial but also reasonable, at least understandable, that Janeway would feel what happens to a few members of her crew matters even more (she certainly, long before that future, had been willing to risk all to save a few); as she says, it was luck that they survived but others didn't and "our family's not complete anymore" but should be. ST and other television usually both focuses and cares much more on the main characters than other crew or guests of the week.

No, the whole crew and even future Janeway do end up rejecting the selfishness of the get there early short cut, they just did get to take the short cut too as a bonus to defeating the Borg. Because yes, the show didn't want to end with not actually getting home or skipping over the next 16 years of adventures before the homecoming happens again (although actually doing the latter would at least be interesting).

 

^Except they didn't actually defeat the Borg at all.

 

CLEARLY. And I speak as someone who overall liked "Endgame."

But the "bad future" wasn't nearly bad enough to justify Janeway changing it--especially when two out of the three bad fates shown (Chak's death and Tuvok losing his mind) seemed to occur in old age, which isn't unusual. At least not in our century. Granted, it's later implied that Tuvok went crazy much earlier, and that Chakotay's life was depressing after losing Seven; but the episode still didn't do a good job at convincing us this future was bad enough to warrant changing history.

That said, I was also always impressed that the episode allowed Janeway to be selfish in this decision, and didn't just deus ex machina a Morally Free Time Travel Card like it did for Picard in TNG's finale.

 

It seemed to me that Tuvok's illness, Seven's death and Chakotay's resented mourning were just a part of Adm. Janeway's painful memoriesloss. Indeed, we must not be forgotten that her crew suffered of numerous casualities during the period which preceded the return to Earth, to the point where her crew/"core" family was drastically reduced. So, I think that it would be greatly unfair to only consider/focus on the loss of her beloved friends as settings in her decision to erase her timeline to come back in the present and MAYBE in this case, her decision would appear to you less selfish... .

That being said, I say again that her decision was wrong but as WarpTenLizard wrote, Adm. Janeway's present seemed to be gloomy so, who could blame her for trying to change it ?!