Spoilers Captain Archer's Response in Cogenitor
- Thread starter KlingonCereal
- Start date
I appreciate your point, but it also sounds like what you're saying is that you don't actually have a solution in mind.
Which gives credence to the possibility that at some point Cogenitors really did hold the proverbial gun to the rest of their civilization's head, and so rightly or wrongly the current culture evolved out of a perceived need to ensure that never happened again.
Which gives credence to the possibility that at some point Cogenitors really did hold the proverbial gun to the rest of their civilization's head, and so rightly or wrongly the current culture evolved out of a perceived need to ensure that never happened again.
If our women chose en masse to stop producing offspring, our options would be limited. Because we can't bring a fetus from conception to birth without a female human womb, our options would be extinction or perpetual large-scale female enslavement. So yes, it's conceivable that the Vissians' treatment of cogenitors is effectively choosing the latter. But that's pure speculation, since no mention of it was ever made.
Well, the lack of knowledge we have about their civilization has been the primary thrust of my argument as to why we should endeavor to avoid making bad-faith assumptions about the Vissians for awhile now.
Fair enough. But let's not get so busy trying to justify it that we overlook what happened. A person asked for asylum. It was refused. She found death preferable to the life she was returning to.
I seem to recall Phlox didn't have any issues or compunctions with creating a sentient clone of Tucker that was then murdered so he could harvest its brain tissue. They could have easily shared that technique with the Vissians and that might have solved their reproduction issues.
But if Tucker hadn't made her aware of things that she subsequently felt she'd be deprived of if her asylum request wasn't granted then she likely wouldn't have killed herself...or requested asylum, for that matter.
I don't recall how much of the asylum proceeding we get to see; does Charles even get to plead her case? Does she indicate that she'd rather die than return to Vissian society? The Vissian captain seemed reasonable enough that he might have been willing to let her go (and probably claim she died in an accident or such) if he fully understood that it wasn't so much an asylum hearing as a capital punishment hearing.
No.
We give them money.
Then we give them even more money and they pretend that they are having a good time.
I'm describing marriage as much as prostitution.
Judging by the intensity of the debate all these years later, I'd say the writers achieved their purpose and more with this episode.
No, that's prostitution. Marriage is we give them money, then they divorce us and take more of our money. And we get to see our kids every other Saturday.
More often than cogenitors do, though.
Maybe what I was getting at was addressing the Vissian's scarcity issue surrounding cogenitors. Since if there is a surplus of cogenitors due to cloning, there should not be a big deal if some of them decide that they want to do more with their lives and reject being baby factories for others. If there is still resistance to Charles or a different cogenitor wanting asylum, it would beg the questions as to why any of the Vissians would still show resistance. Since like they had stated, they don’t own the specific cogenitor, they are assigned a cogenitor. And in the face of a surplus of congenitors, the simplest answer would be to get another one and let the cogenitor that is seeking asylum go free.
Now maybe their government are a bunch of religious fundamentalists and reject cloning cogenitors as much as giving cogenitors civil rights, and they are going against what the majority of what the population believes. But at least then there is a better understanding as to how their society works and why its such a touchy subject to them. Archer didn't have a lot to work with when he decided to reject asylym for Charles. He just saw a ship much more powerful than his, was given a limited understanding of Vissian society and technological capabilities, and wanted to salvage whatever goodwill that came about from this first contact. And had the backing of T'Pol to boot to follow through.
This seems like the chicken or egg. Did the incident with the Vissians inspire Phlox to look up the technique to create Sim, or is it only after Phlox creates Sim they only realize later on that they could have given this technique to the Vissians?
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Unfortunate numbers of Indians and the Chinese kill their girl fetuses because there is less value in Girls than boys.
Vissian parents given the choice of more congenitors (for society!) or more Men, given that a man will pay for their nursing home in their later years and a congenitor is a sex slave that gets taken away at birth, the choice is clear, unless the government is paying people to make cogenitors, at which point its just farming.
Oh.
I could see antiabortion legislation for just cogenitors.
"We do not care about incest or rape or if the mother will die during child birth, we need sex slaves or there will be no real babies with souls either."
Also war.
You can destroy a civilization with one small bomb if all their cogenitors are ever in the one same place for long enough.
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If cloning creates a new ratio of boy/girl:Congenitor of 1:10 rather than 1:50, but there is no increase in genetic diversity, that will lead to inbreeding quite quickly within a few generations.
A planet of deformed sister humping morons.
The only thing cloning can safely do for the congenitors is cut their work down, but they as a template should not be making more babies than they would as an individual or, see above.
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And that's tragic. But if there was a process that facilitated male conception, that would cause the same long-term problems (a shortage of women in the future), but at least reduce the abortion rate.
Depends on if the cogenitor actually provides genetic material to the child, or if they just provide a necessary enzyme that facilitates conception. If the latter, then it wouldn't matter if every cogenitor had the same genetic code.
There was a US sitcom set in India called outsourced a decade ago, where the white boss of the Indian workers in a call centre, was asked is he wanted to go night clubbing...
When the white boss gets to the Indian night club, he asks the all consuming question "Where are the chicks?“
(There were none. Between the lower birthrate and modesty laws, men got to have fun thrashing about to Music without being judged like meat. So much fun.)
I have no problem with the episode, and I like Archer. Bakula's one of my favorite captains.
The problem is this - in a lot of episodes they screw up, which means the captain - Archer - takes full responsibility. In that episode, he couldn't. Nothing that happened was his fault - he did what he had to do in a bad situation. Pikard would have done the same - you can't insult a species you just met... that's bad for business. Especially when the Federation doesn't even exist yet - you'll get a bad reputation when word gets around. he had to throw Trip under the bus so Starfleet didn't look like they did anything wrong, which they didn't.
What Archer was just learning is that what one species think of as 'right & wrong' isn't necessarily what another will think is. Most species have no rules about contacting underdeveloped races - humans only borrowed that rule from Vulcans. I can think of dozens of examples right here on earth where a larger, stronger culture imposed its personal values on another, and changed it completely. Right or wrong doesn't apply in space even more so than here on Earth, because we have not "walked a mile in their shoes". That species grew up with completely different values based on alien philosophies and alien religions. Their moral compass could be all over the place. What Tucker did was try and interfere with a natural process on another world, and it does not matte rit was 'wrong' from a human perspective. It would be nice if some future episode of some ST show addressed this, and said how that species changed after joining the Federation - then we would have gotten our closure, and maybe that Cogenitor could have gotten a big statue on her homeworld, in a 'Rosa Parks' kind of way.
The problem is this - in a lot of episodes they screw up, which means the captain - Archer - takes full responsibility. In that episode, he couldn't. Nothing that happened was his fault - he did what he had to do in a bad situation. Pikard would have done the same - you can't insult a species you just met... that's bad for business. Especially when the Federation doesn't even exist yet - you'll get a bad reputation when word gets around. he had to throw Trip under the bus so Starfleet didn't look like they did anything wrong, which they didn't.
What Archer was just learning is that what one species think of as 'right & wrong' isn't necessarily what another will think is. Most species have no rules about contacting underdeveloped races - humans only borrowed that rule from Vulcans. I can think of dozens of examples right here on earth where a larger, stronger culture imposed its personal values on another, and changed it completely. Right or wrong doesn't apply in space even more so than here on Earth, because we have not "walked a mile in their shoes". That species grew up with completely different values based on alien philosophies and alien religions. Their moral compass could be all over the place. What Tucker did was try and interfere with a natural process on another world, and it does not matte rit was 'wrong' from a human perspective. It would be nice if some future episode of some ST show addressed this, and said how that species changed after joining the Federation - then we would have gotten our closure, and maybe that Cogenitor could have gotten a big statue on her homeworld, in a 'Rosa Parks' kind of way.
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