Also when they made Sim they didn’t know the procedure would kill him. They seemed to think they would take some brain tissue, heal Trip, then Sim would go on to live his full (one month?) life. Archer didn’t really hesitate though, he condemned Sim immediately and never wavered. Savage.
Wait, Tuvix was around for a month? That’s really fucked up.
I’ve been playing the Voyager - Across the Unknown game and I kill Tuvix. Everytime.
As far as I’m concerned, he was never actually a real person.
Lets say that a human gets a tumor in their head and changes their personality. A treatment can’t be done at the moment but might be able to in the future. The tumor-dude says “Sure, lets get rid of the tumor” but after a month he ‘likes’ his new personality and doesn’t “want to die”. In this case, he’s not in his right mind. He’s been compromised and doesn’t get a say in his own treatment. You could argue until you are blue in the face that this is a new person. Even if the tumor is totally benign, then you suddenly are presented with the exact same argument as Tuvix was. Do you “kill” this new personality? Or do you excise the tumor to get the old person back?
No one in their right mind would ever argue that you leave the tumor in and let the “new person” get a say. However, the second that two people are involved, evidently it’s an entirely different argument. It isn’t. It’s the exact same argument, just Trek flavored like everything else. Two people went down to the planet and came back up. A genetic aberration, caused by a flower, causes their personality to morph. The fact that it is two people and that their biology ends up merging is irrelevant. It’s still the same argument being made but suddenly a different outcome is needed.
Janeway’s argument that she gave to Tuvok later (as from her autobiography) was that she did not owe anything to Tuvix. He had no family, had no one. He was just a guy who was there that was covered in the blood of two other people. One of those people, Tuvok, she had spoken to the wife of and promised that she would get him home safe. She asked how she could look her in the eye knowing that she didn’t do whatever she could to save Tuvok’s life. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or, indeed, the one.”
Tuvix was around for a month but he wasn’t alive for a month. He was a brain tumor that was waiting to be removed.
how did you determine that he was around for a month?
By watching the episode? There’s a scene where Janeway says that it’s been 2 weeks, then there’s a short time period jump and she says the past “few weeks”. If I remember correctly, the showrunners or something established it was also about a month that he was alive. Memory Alpha also suggests “nearly a month”.
nice work. i never caught that when i watch the episode; i last saw it on it’s initial airing in the 90’s and stayed away from this episode because i didn’t like what they did to tuvix
That’s fair.
I’d kill him every time and I wouldn’t have an ounce of regret. The only mistake Janeway made was feeling bad about herself.
We all know they only killed Tuvix at the end of the episode because of the actors’ contracts.
The actor who played Tuvix himself said that there was no tension in the entire episode and there shouldn’t have been. He always was going to be ‘killed’, regardless of contracts.
