Latent Image Quandry

[AuntKate]

The beauty, and the flaw, of Star Trek is that the writers can think up a miracle cure or not, depending on what kind of conflict and tension that they want to create in the episode. You can challenge their decisions or simply relax and enjoy. In this case, using the stasis chamber would have meant "no story," and no chance to explore the moral dilemma the doctor faced or to showcase the growth of his character.

 

[The Borg Queen]

Personally I'd have chosen Ensign Jetal because she could have had children, and if Voyager would have needed to become a generational ship, it would have helped.

Unless the Federation has conception/maturation technology, then there'd be no need for the mother to carry a baby as it gestates, so there'd be no need to prioritise a potential mother over a potential father, and I'd have flipped a coin.

Of course that's on the assumption that Harry's ethnic heritage wouldn't have given Voyager's gene pool more variety over Ensign Jetal's.

 

[Jamee999]

Pegaritaville said:

od0_ital said:

Timo said:
The only things we have ever seen put in medical stasis are dead cadavers and (in "Invasive Procedures") Odo...

Chakotay, Tuvok & Torres were all put in stasis in the penultimate episode of the series.

:thumbsup:

And don't forget the episode "One", where everybody except Seven was put into stasis while crossing the Mutara nebula. Granted, some of them had bad reactions (Tom Paris, for one), but that was for weeks, not a few hours.

If the stasis chamber could be used to protect the crew from that, I'd think it could used to delay the treatment of a critically injured crewmwmber for a short time.

Wasn't the Mutara Nebula where the final battle in TWOK took place?

 

[Timo]

Apparently, Starfleet calls certain types of nebula "Mutara type", no doubt after the first one of that type encountered. And apparently this namesake nebula is the one from TWOK, but the galaxy is full of other nebulae of that type.

BTW, the use of stasis to protect the crew within that nebula suggests that this particular type of stasis slows down life processes considerably, probably to a near-standstill not practically discernible from death. This would be a valid mechanism for keeping radiation damage in check: mutated cells would not divide and multiply... Yet this is also the shallowest type of stasis ever shown on screen.

Good point that medical stasis was used in "Genesis". So there isn't a total technological or ethical ban on that procedure. There may still be two kinds of obstacles, though:

-Practical aspects: perhaps a single EMH isn't capable of handling a stasis operation - perhaps a whole stasis team, comparable to today's surgery teams, is needed for that?

-Medical aspects: certain types of injury might be incompatible with stasis.

With medical matters, it's always possible to write in an incurable disease, no matter how many other diseases are curable. It's also simple to write in a fatal internal injury when other types of internal injury are nonfatal. Things become dramatically iffy only when one episode clearly shows that a limb cut off or some other external, easily visible injury is no problem, but another claims that another limb lost or another exterior spot injured is a problem. This unfortunately happens in Trek as well: sometimes stab wounds are trivial, even when going through the heart (Picard, "Tapestry"), while at other times they are untreatable (Armin Maaritza, "Duet"). And sometimes phaser burns to the torso are shrugged off, but at other times they automatically end the life of the expendable/guest character (DS9 went back and forth on this a lot).

Anyway, in the case of Kim and Jetal, we could certainly argue that there were internal injuries we can't argue about, so to speak. The chance of something stasis-counterindicating is definitely there - and the fact that it is not specifically mentioned does not lead into a plot hole or contradiction at all. The EMH should know what he's capable of doing and what he is not, without bothering us with the details.

Timo Saloniemi