Ransom and the Equinox
- Thread starter Immolatus
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So we're in agreement, if Branson was in charge of the Equinox it would have run better than it did nationalised under Ransom?
brilliant! it's funny to think that Starfleet's problem could be public sector complacency, and not having enough competition for services! We could almost return to piracy - if only Sir Francis Drake * was in charge of the Equinox, how things might have been!
* or Andrew Lansley, or Lord Adonis!
Whoa, whoa, whoa...there's a biiiiig difference between personal convenience and dying in space.
Personal convenience would be if, in some situation that I cannot possibly comprehend how you and I found ourselves there, we were stuck on a deserted and barren island and saw a rescue boat come our way, and I decided to snack upon one of your felines instead of a Jimmy John's #4 Slim that I had in my backpack, saving said sandwich for later. That's personal convenience. To attempt to reduce the enormity of the terminal situation confronting the Equinox crew to mere motherfrakkin' personal convenience is to completely take their motivations out of context.
If Ransom and his crew were dedicated to getting back to Earth (which they were, can you blame them?) and they needed a continual and stable source of energy for their propulsion (which they found in the liquid-Schwartz guys), then it is what they had to do to make it home, or at least having a shot at it.
I'm of the opinion that it is less of an immoral act than it was a necessity to do so in order to get home. It was, for the Equinox crew, the lesser of two evils (i.e. dying in space versus shoveling aliens into the warp core). Clearly, they agreed.
I don't think that I ever alleged that "Premeditated mass murder in the name of personal convenience is actually a moral act". I think I've shown that it was a necessary one if they wanted to make it home, given the Nova-class limitations and the situation that the crew found themselves in within the parameters that the episode gave us...and don't blame me, I didn't write the episode. They (the writers, that is) didn't appear to give Ransom, et al much of an out if they wanted to make the episode work.
For what it's worth, I would rather have seen the crew come clean to Janeway, some manner of peace and/or restitution made to the liquid-Schwartz aliens, and some integration made by the Equinox crew into the Voyager crew...something to spice up the rest of the season.
If I were the aliens, and some asshole had just killed several dozen of my species because he was homesick, a restitution would be out of the goddamn question.
SicOne - are you saying you would happily murder dozens of innocent civilians to return home if the alternative was living in Africa for the rest of your life?
SicOne - are you saying you would happily murder dozens of innocent civilians to return home if the alternative was living in Africa for the rest of your life?
You're right, there is. Fortunately, the Delta Quadrant was full of friendly worlds with whom Ransom could have allied or on which the Equinox crew could have settled.
And meanwhile: Dying in space is a possibility from the moment you sign up for Starfleet. That still doesn't excuse murdering innocent people. A Starfleet officer's duty is not to endanger innocent people and to protect innocent people, even unto death.
Where as the actual aliens seemed to be willing to take Ransom's head on a stick as restitution.
Thank goodness. What if they had decided to declare war on the entire Federation, thinking the UFP as a whole to be aggressors?
^^Good point. I always wondered, if Ransom had succeeded and made it to Earth (he only had a little over 60 jumps left) would they have begun slaughtering humans on Earth? After all, they and the Ankari considered Voyager guility by association simply because they too were Starfleet, if Ransom led them to Earth the aliens would likely considered humanity as a whole responisble and not have been too picky about who they killed. So really, Ransom's desperate act to get his crew home, could have doomed all of humanity.
Thanks! I don't know if it would have doomed all of humanity, or even just all of the Federation. But it sure as hell could have gotten a lot of innocent Federates killed, too.
Might make for a decent Myriad Universes story as well...
Buried deep within the pile of looting and stealing. I woulda used the recent Japan Disaster as a better example. Not one instance of violence.
Well, Thrawn, I don't know as I would utilize the word "happily"...
But I shan't digress.It's not about what I would do. It's about what the Equinox crew was prepared to do to survive. Remember, I didn't write the episode, I just supported Ransom's initial decision use the liquid-Schwartz aliens as warp drive fuel at least until they encountered Voyager, at which point they should have come clean.
Yes, kids; they could have settled down in a nice quiet area of the Delta Quadrant, integrated themselves into the society of whatever planet they found themselves on when their warp drive ran out of steam, worked out an accommodation with whatever political entity they ended up in, set the ship for a course into the local star if they didn't want to risk having someone get hold of Federation technology; there's all manners of ways to speculate on how they could have avoided having to make that choice to use the aliens...but all we know of the Equinox backstory was that half his crew was killed in the first week in the DQ and his ship was shot to shit pretty much right from the get-go. It's something of a miracle that they made it as far as they did before they encountered the hospitality aliens. We don't know exactly what tribulations they went through between the situation with the Krotonan Guard and when they encountered the Ankari, what other kinds of nasty decisions and choices between lesser and greater evils they had to make.
Were they perfectly good and by-the-book Starfleet officers and crewmen before they started converting the liquid-Schwartz aliens some two weeks before they met Voyager? Or were they already well on the path to, as Christopher would no doubt put it, sheer and unadulterated evil over that whole five or six years between the time they Caretaker pulled them out of the Alpha Quadrant and the time Janeway put the hammer down on them? We don't know. There might have been a whole chain of gradually intensifying bad choices to have to make by the time they encountered the Ankari, by which time the decision to use the Schwartz wasn't much of an issue with the crew, morally-speaking. It might have been a decision along the lines of, "Oh well, it sucks, but we've come this far and this is what we'll have to do if we want to go the rest of the way."
Bear in mind, folks, that Voyager was significantly more...well, I can't necessarily say prepared, but I can say equipped, yes, to handle a stranding 70,000 LY from home. Whether you were on Voyager or Equinox, the situation was fucked but considerably less fucked on the former, which routinely handled deep-space exploration, had a larger crew, more supplies, was much faster, etc than a smaller ship, smaller crew (of which half got blown away the first week in), not meant for deep-space exploration (at least not in the manner in which an Intrepid-class would be), and all of the other little and no-so-little details between Novas and Intrepids. Maybe the key difference was not having a Talaxian cook. Food for thought, no pun intended.
There's a whole universe of difference in thought between slogging homewards but eating regularly and knowing that it's largely a matter of time, and knowing you were gonna die if you didn't figure out something. Comparing the situations between both ships is comparing apples to oranges.Above all, folks, don't think that I'm a horrible, terrible person for siding with Ransom on this one. I'm glad I'm not in the position to have to make a choice like that one, or a choice like Thrawn gave me. That's a whole 'nother conversation that I don't think is going to make anyone happy.
I wonder if Equinox was making for the Bajoran Wormhole rather than for Earth - that would account for them stumbling across different species to Voyager and that either the Wormhole put them into Voyager's path, or when they engaged the Enhanced Warp Drive they decided to make a clean run for Earth?
Well, that's Japan. They're a very disciplined and orderly culture (some would say repressed), so I wouldn't have expected violence. But that's not the point. I'm not just talking about the absence of bad behavior, I'm talking about the presence of great kindness and generosity and heroism even in a situation where there is a lot of bad behavior going on. The question is, in a very regimented culture where people are conditioned from youth to obey authority, would you really see a lot of acts of individual heroism, or would the same impulses that kept them from looting and stealing also incline them to sit still and wait for the authorities to do the rescuing rather than taking the initiative to do heroic things themselves? (Not saying that did happen; I don't know. Maybe there was a lot of heroism there, but you didn't mention it, so you're not actually addressing the same thing I am. I'm just saying that there's a profound difference between the positive acts that I'm talking about and the mere absence of negative acts that you're talking about. The latter does not prove the former.)
Was it only two weeks? Wow, I didn't realise it was so short, and that it has taken around (or over) five years for the crew to essentially get to that point of moral collapse - as the story told us. Only after that much hell.
Does anyone ever think of the Columbia's crew in Destiny? Foyle and his gang went on a similar downward spiral (much sooner than the Ransom et al, and after far less horror), which ended in violence, murder and a take-no-prisoners approach to getting home. As a reader, of course one is frustrated with them (and certainly very frustrated until it is revealed that Foyle and the gang were not responsible for destroying all the other Caelier cities). But equally, I think the reader is meant to understand and empathise with their desire to get home, to screw the consequences, and just try anything. We scream no, but we know the pang of losing loved ones, of losing home, of losing control.
More so, in the second book, as we see one by one the remaining crew go mad or lose the will to life, we experience a situation that would have also faced the Equinox's crew, yes?
That doesn't make any sense, since going by Star Charts, the Bajoran wormhole is roughly 63,000 light-years from the Ocampa system, or about 90% as far as the Federation. There wouldn't have been much point to heading that way.
It's a big galaxy. Even a slightly different route toward the Alpha Quadrant would've still kept the Equinox from coming within comm range of Voyager. Remember, Equinox ran into the Krowtonan Guard in their first week after leaving the Caretaker's array, and that was the root of their problems from then on. But Voyager had Neelix as a guide, so he probably advised Janeway to skirt around Krowtonan territory -- as well as directing her to systems that had useful supplies and resources, so their course would've diverged from a straight-line run. Voyager was also a faster ship, in addition to avoiding the degree of damage Equinox suffered in its first week, so it probably gained a considerable lead on Ransom's ship despite Equinox's headstart.
Although this does underline a problem I've always had with the Voyager premise (and that I tried to address briefly in Places of Exile): Why did Janeway never try to look for any of the other ships the Caretaker had abducted? It would've made sense to track them down and band together in a caravan for mutual protection -- at least for all the ships from the antispinward Alpha and spinward Beta Quadrants, those that would be going in roughly the same direction as Voyager for at least part of the journey. And it would've generated more story possibilities if the crew had had to team up not only with Maquis, but with a variety of other aliens, maybe including Cardassians, say. Although visually it might've been seen as a bit derivative of Battlestar Galactica's ragtag fugitive fleet, and it would've been costlier to produce FX shots of a large group of ships than just a single one. But ultimately, Janeway's decision to go it alone, and apparently not even to try to track down any other refugees, comes off as serious negligence.
That would have been a far more interesting tv show! But then Voyager always failed to handle more than a few characters well. Sadly I think it would have been, in the hands of the creative team it had, just as unimaginative a show as Voyager usually was with its premise and characters. The writers might just have been as successful handling the differences between the socialists and fascists in the fleet as they actually did handle the differences between the Starfleet crew, the terrorists onboard, and the occasional others ('comedic' Neelix, forgotten Kes and overused Seven). Or they might have just become the subject of the kind of weak plotting that Seska & the Kazon were throughout early Voy.
Also, can I ask why you did not like the boxing episode of BSG? I have been wondering that since it came up upthread.
And it is such a shame to think of what Voyager was when it was on, and what actually was happening with television at the time.
Shows like NYPD Blue, Homicide and ER really pushed how realism and characterisation could work on semi- and fully-serialised television. Voyager also does not stand up to the creative competition in the genre front. The 1990s was justly dominated by The X-Files, which for so long was an excellent mix of serial and episodic storytelling. Many people on these threads remember DS9 very fondly, which Voyager compares to very badly, and sometimes even the constantly under-budgeted Babylon 5 seems to stand up better than Voyager for use of their premise, for their formal ambition and the success of their execution. But beyond these long-form shows, there were wonderful short-lived shows like Space: Above and Beyond, Now and Again and Good vs Evil showing how genre television could be stretched and made more interesting, and to borrow phrase from another thread, 'artistic' or 'literary'.
The picture is even worse when thinking of the end of Voyager's lazy seven-year run. HBO had moved into original drama with Oz and The Sopranos, Buffy had appeared and re-constructed both fantasy-horror and the teenage television model, The West Wing arrived with its incredible style and formal qualities, and television had changed evermore. Older shows had fared to greater or lesser extents, but certainly seem much more interesting than Voyager. I am thinking of ER, NYPD, even the increasingly problematic X-Files and episodic shows like Law & Order. By 2001 Voyager just cannot cope with the quality available in and out of the genre. It had failed to elevate itself to the increasing quality available in an artistic medium less and less confined by artistic expectations.
Shows like NYPD Blue, Homicide and ER really pushed how realism and characterisation could work on semi- and fully-serialised television. Voyager also does not stand up to the creative competition in the genre front. The 1990s was justly dominated by The X-Files, which for so long was an excellent mix of serial and episodic storytelling. Many people on these threads remember DS9 very fondly, which Voyager compares to very badly, and sometimes even the constantly under-budgeted Babylon 5 seems to stand up better than Voyager for use of their premise, for their formal ambition and the success of their execution. But beyond these long-form shows, there were wonderful short-lived shows like Space: Above and Beyond, Now and Again and Good vs Evil showing how genre television could be stretched and made more interesting, and to borrow phrase from another thread, 'artistic' or 'literary'.
The picture is even worse when thinking of the end of Voyager's lazy seven-year run. HBO had moved into original drama with Oz and The Sopranos, Buffy had appeared and re-constructed both fantasy-horror and the teenage television model, The West Wing arrived with its incredible style and formal qualities, and television had changed evermore. Older shows had fared to greater or lesser extents, but certainly seem much more interesting than Voyager. I am thinking of ER, NYPD, even the increasingly problematic X-Files and episodic shows like Law & Order. By 2001 Voyager just cannot cope with the quality available in and out of the genre. It had failed to elevate itself to the increasing quality available in an artistic medium less and less confined by artistic expectations.
I don't blame the creative team. They had some great people on that show -- Michael Piller in the first couple of seasons, Joe Menosky for most of its run, Lisa Klink for seasons 3-4 or so. The problem is that UPN kept imposing limits on them, pushing for a simpler, more episodic approach and discouraging them from telling stories with lasting consequences, like really exploring the Starfleet-Maquis tensions or allowing the ship to become progressively more damaged. Since VGR was the linchpin of Paramount's brand-new network, the network execs were reluctant to take any risks with it and so they insisted on a rather conservative approach, one that wouldn't alienate casual viewers with overly complicated or involved storylines.
Had it been syndicated, it might've been freer to take chances -- although it probably wouldn't have been as daring as DS9. DS9 was able to get away with so much because Rick Berman's attention was mainly on VGR and he trusted Ira Steven Behr to handle DS9. Still, it might've been able to be as good as TNG.
Because it was a boxing episode and I loathe boxing. Anything where people are actually encouraged to inflict incurable, cumulative brain damage on one another at the risk of crippling neurological problems or death is an obscenity. If boxers were required to wear head protection or avoid hitting above the neck, to have the kind of safeguards that are mandatory in most other sports, that would be different; but as it is, I think it's an outrage that it's even legal.
I'm actually okay with "The Fight" on Voyager, because at least it has the Doctor pointing out just how dangerous and harmful a sport boxing is, and the boxing serves as an effective metaphor for Chakotay's character arc (and at least it's likely that Federation medicine is able to prevent the devastating neurological consequences, so it's not quite so criminally irresponsible to permit boxing without head protection). But the BSG episode (by Michael Taylor, who wrote the story for "The Fight") wholeheartedly and unapologetically embraced the violence and brutality of boxing and used it to underline petty character conflicts that I didn't respect and found tedious. It exemplified everything that turned me off about the show. While I watched it, I was sorely tempted to just turn off the TV and walk away from the relentless unpleasantness, and in retrospect I wish I had. And please don't ask me to explain in any further detail. I don't remember many specifics about that episode and I don't want to.
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