Worst Character Assassination Episodes
- Thread starter Oddish
- Start date
It's Starfleet's stupidity that unleashed Kahn, not David Marcus. It's Starfleet's stupidity and incompetence that cause the secret of Genesis to be known by the Klingons. I mean it's really funny because these stooges (as in three stooges) arrest Bones for talking about Genesis when the Klingons and everybody else in the Galaxy with eyes ears already knew everything about Genesis. Talk about a bunch of nimrods!!!
I mean McCoy was trying to go to Genesis, as well as assaulting a Federation Security officer. More damage control for a galactic controversy than a cover up.
As Donlago wrote, the Genesis Project might have been delayed or cancelled if David hadn't somehow managed to use unstable protomatter without anyone noticing. Thus it might not have reached the stage where the Reliant was searching for suitable worlds at the time when the movie started. And if a starship did reach Ceti Alpha sometime to search for a suitable planet, the crew should have known which planet was which - after all the failure of the Reliant crew to do so must have been the result of a perfect storm of errors and chance factors which wouldn't be duplicated by that crew or anyone else at any other time.
Thus Khan's people would have lost their chance to escape from the hellhole they were on - the chance which Khan wasted in his quest for vengeance and so led them all to death - and they would not have killed anyone.
By the way, anyone named Kahn who reads your posts may be annoyed that you keep writing Kahn for Khan.
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It most certainly was as far as bringing Spock back to life.
Again, Kahn killed Spock, not David.
What you're doing is no better than to blame a knife factory because one of their knives was used to murder someone.
David's planet killed no one and saved one life.
Are you misspelling Khan on purpose? That's...really strange.
If the knife factory was knowingly selling faulty knives, then yes they would bear some responsibility. David cheated his way to "success". That cheat set the entire set of circumstances in motion. As many others have already said, if David hadn't acted unethically as a scientist, none of the rest of it would have happened.
David's behavior, which he knew to be wrong in the first place and did it anyway, directly led to many deaths aboard the Enterprise, Captain Terrell's death, etc. etc.
This is really pretty obvious.
History appears to have credited Carol Marcus with the development of Project Genesis and either forgotten her son or relegated him to the sidelines since as late as "The Omega Directive(VOY)" Captain Janeway associates her with the historical development of Genesis and not both Marcuses.
Maybe David's use of protomatter was considered shameful or at least sensitive enough that it was classified and/or expunged from most records?
If Genesis doesn't work without protomatter, but with protomatter you get something that can wipe out an entire planet, then it might make some sense for David's involvement not to be generally publicized.
It kind of begs the question of why the Federation even signed off on this project to begin with. Were things with the Klingons worse than we thought and they were trying to develop a first-strike weapon while passing it off as a terraforming project?
If Genesis doesn't work without protomatter, but with protomatter you get something that can wipe out an entire planet, then it might make some sense for David's involvement not to be generally publicized.
It kind of begs the question of why the Federation even signed off on this project to begin with. Were things with the Klingons worse than we thought and they were trying to develop a first-strike weapon while passing it off as a terraforming project?
That's about right. David's choices were not murderous or evil, but he certainly should have made different ones. However, he cannot exactly be held accountable for the actions of Khan or the Klingons, can he?
No, but his actions were the first dominoes to fall in the sequence. Again, he knew it was wrong and did it anyway.
The Law of Unintended Consequences was sure to follow.
No, maybe I suffer from a mild case of dyslexia, the auto-spellcheck doesn't help. Plus the fact that there are other Kahn(s) in the franchise spelled differently doesn't help either.
The people who died didn't do so because the research was faulty, so your analogy is specious. Anything we do sets events in motion that can result in certain people dying and others not dying, it's called the butterfly effect. Khan (I hope I got it right this time) didn't escape because of David. If the blame is to put on someone, it is on the people who failed to notice a planet exploding, and faulty Starfleet habits of sending high-ranking officers on missions that are suited for low-ranking ones. Seriously, what was a Captain doing on this planet?
Second, Starfleet keeps Genesis a secret, making it a crime to even talk about it in public, but they fail to defend the research itself with enough firepower, this too was not a consequence of the research being faulty. We can accuse David of many things (like seeking undeserved praise) but being responsible f
or people dying is not one of them.
The truth is that Starfleet failed to see what was obvious to the simpleminded Klingon, that (faulty or not) the research could be used as a powerful weapon. Their shortsightedness is not David's fault either.
That's not obvious to me.
It's like if I cheated on my exam (highly hypothetical as I am 61), my teacher saw it and made an appointment with my father. On his way to the appointment, my teacher gets murdered by a mugger.
Are you going to blame me for the teacher's death? Why, because I did some wrong that has nothing to do whatsoever with the teacher's death?
So if the teacher is wrong and I didn't cheat and it's my father who got killed. Should I blame the teacher then?
How many people died because you drank coffee for your breakfast instead of tea?
That is the problem with the Law of Unintended Consequences. Pushed far enough, it can declare that any bad choice (or indeed any choice period) caused something bad to happen. If a butterfly flaps its wings and a hurricane that kills 5,000 people is the ultimate result, do we blame the butterfly?
Did the butterfly know it’s behavior was unethical and dangerous?
Did his mother ever find out? That's what I'm wondering. Or was she complicit with her son's decision just to make sure Genesis was successful and kept her mouth shut from that point on?
I didn't say that David didn't make a poor choice. He did. He should not have made that choice. But we can't judge him based on what Khan or the Klingons did.
Well, by the law of Unintended Consequences, David's Genesis screwup... saved humanity. To save Spock (who was killed as a result of David's actions, and subsequently regenerated by Genesis), the Enterprise crew were made fugitives from justice. So, they were not on Earth when the whale probe came. They were all together, and in a position where they could time warp to 1980's Earth and save the whales.
