Should have cloned tuvix in the transporter then split the older one.
Or should have sedated tuvix so a unique personality couldn't manifest in the time before the doctor could design a cure.
But it's easy looking back with hindsight, when you're there and it's actually happening you don't have the luxury of time to think of the most perfect solution.
If you cloned him you’ve just doubled the problem since a cloned tuvix is still Neelix and Tuvok. Even if you split one copy the other is still made of people who deserve to live their own lives.
Also, fuck Tuvix.
the other is still made of people who deserve to live their own lives.
But those "people" (i.e., the clones of Tuvok and Neelix) never existed in the first place.
The main issue in this episode is that two sentient beings were effectively destroyed against their will to create a new sentient being. To rectify the issue of two sentient beings being destroyed to create one new sentient being, the one was destroyed against his will.
But a clone of Tuvix would not come into existence at the expense of any sentient beings besides the original Neelix and Tuvok. It doesn't solve the original "we're killing a sentient being to bring back our friends" problem the original Tuvix caused, but it doesn't create new problems either.
We could just transporter-clone and combine Tuvok and Neelix into Tuvix in one shot. The net effect is one new being, Tuvix, at the expense of nobody. Doing it by cloning Tuvix is just an added intermediate step.
Ok, here is what we do. We make an appeal to Q to solve it since he seems to love moral dilemmas.
What problem have you doubled? You flush Tuvix out the airlock it's not like you can never use that airlock again
In a transporter duplication is there an older one?
It's some banach tarsky shit to create the same person twice out of their original matter steam, though mathematically possible.
Tuvix was on Voyager for a long time. Keeping him sedated that whole time would have been a strange choice
I'm not hear to debate anyone, but if you think it is ok to kill a currently living being to resurrect a dead being, then you are fucked in the head. Tuvok and Neelix died painlessly and unaware in an accident. Tuvix was murdered, and was made fully aware of their fate beforehand, to the point where they even begged to be spared.
I think from their perspective Tuvok and Neelix weren't "dead", which was why they were more inclined to "correct" the situation at hand and save their crewmates while they still had the chance to do so.
Regardless, it's a fucked up decision, I don't envy it.
There's a line in the episode around that point:
"At what point did he become an individual, and not a transporter accident?"
But that's the whole point of the episode - it's a moral quandary with no real "right" answer. It's Hugh of Borg all over again.
The episode did its job challenging viewers with the question, because people still argue about this today. But to me there's an actual, unambiguous answer: 4.823 seconds after transport autosequence initiation, when the emitter array completed the materialization cycle.
It's not an equation to be worked out. It simply boils down to respecting the wishes of a currently living and conscious being. Otherwise anyone's life could be forfeit based purely on some arbitrary valuation of what that life is worth. Why don't we just harvest your organs and give them to people we deem more useful, ya know?
If I had come about through the unwilling merger of two people, and my death could restore those people, it's probably ethical to kill me to make it happen.
I don't think it's necessarily reasonable to call the two component people dead either. Death is a not a particularly well defined term, but we don't tend to apply it to people who might get better.
Why don't we just harvest your organs and give them to people we deem more useful, ya know?
The knowledge that you live in a society where you could be legally killed at any point for the greater good, and the resultant fear and uncertainty probably would cause more harm overall than doing so could actually alleviate.
So what if you could save five lives by harvesting the organs on one little old person?
How many people could we save if we harvested you for spare parts? You can't, or at very least shouldn't, make moral decisions on arithmetic alone.
I love this because the Toymaker is basically Q.
Do this one again, this time use Janeway in the second panel.
The whovian in me screeches the toymaker came first, the trekker points out that while Q seems to have some peculiar moral purpose the Toymaker is just an eternal ancient who sets shit on fire for fun.
Also supernovas can harm Q IIRC. The Toymaker, not so much.
One of my co-workers perfectly quoted the Cyberman-Dalek scene never having seen a single episode of Doctor Who. Apparently it was all over her tik tok. I mean, I'll take it, I hope the memeability encourages more viewers. And if that doesn't do it, NPH should.
