The headline for this review comes, not from Star Trek, but from an episode of The West Wing called “War Crimes.” One of the many storylines in that third-season episode of the show that starred Martin Sheen as the President of the United States involved Chief of Staff Leo McGarry (the late great John Spencer) and General Alan Adamle (Gerald McRaney) discussing whether or not to convene a War Crimes Tribunal. Adamle winds up telling McGarry about a mission the latter flew in Vietnam that, unbeknownst to McGarry, targeted civilians. When angrily asking why the general told McGarry that, Adamle says quietly, “All wars are crimes.”
The latest SNW episode embodies that quote very nastily.
In “The Broken Circle,” M’Benga and Chapel injected themselves with some green goo that made them incredibly strong. They spoke of it as if it was something familiar, and it felt like an untold story.
And sure enough, it was—that bit, as well as M’Benga’s mention of the moon of J’gal in the season premiere were foreshadowing for this episode. The Klingon to whom M’Benga mentioned J’gal in “The Broken Circle” said it was impossible for him to have survived that. And he was close to correct. The world was the site of some vicious fighting during the recent Klingon-Federation war, as we see in flashbacks. Chapel and M’Benga first met there, Chapel a newly assigned nurse, M’Benga a combat medic.
These flashbacks often feel like a twenty-third-century version of M*A*S*H: “meatball surgery,” with improvised techniques due to supply limitations, and the computer intoning “incoming transport” in place of the PA guy saying, “Attention, all personnel: incoming wounded!” (or Radar saying, “Choppers!”). In particular, we see M’Benga using the technique of temporarily saving someone in the transporter buffer until they can be treated, a method we know he will use later to keep his daughter’s illness from progressing.
Plus, of course, the cliché of the young kid with whom the doctor bonds over the horrors of war, and then the kid goes back out to fight and gets killed.
There are two notable guest stars in this one, and they both elevate the already-strong material. In the flashbacks, the field hospital administrator that M’Benga and Chapel work for is played by Clint Howard. The less famous brother of director/actor Ron, this is Howard’s fifth role on Trek. He is the only actor to have appeared in all three “eras” of Trek: he played the physical form of Balok as a seven-year old in the original series’ “The Corbomite Maneuver,” and as a grown-up he appeared as a twenty-first-century homeless guy in DS9’s “Past Tense, Part II,” a Ferengi in Enterprise’s “Acquisition,” and an Orion in Discovery’s “Will You Take My Hand?”
The main guest, however, is Robert Wisdom as Dak’Rah, son of Rah’Ul. He’s the latest alumnus from The Wire to appear on Star Trek, following Idris Elba in Star Trek Beyond and Sonja Sohn in five episodes of Discovery. (The late Lance Reddick was apparently a huge Trek fan—he visited the set of the 2009 film—and I’m grumpy that they never got him on a show or movie before he died.)
Dak’Rah insists on being just called “Rah,” and he has gone from the general in charge of the forces on J’gal (earning him the title of “the butcher of J’gal”) to a defector to the Federation, serving as an ambassador who is trying now to broker peace between the two nations. Wisdom brings his usual gravitas and charisma to the role.
One thing I’ve appreciated about SNW is that it’s been both a prequel to the original series, but also a spinoff of Discovery. In SNW season one, that was mostly seen in the fallout from Discovery season two, from Pike dealing with his learning his future in Discovery’s “Through the Valley of Shadows” to the unintended consequences of the battle against Control in Discovery’s “Such Sweet Sorrow” two-parter.
This year, they’ve been mining the fact that a war with the Klingons was only three years ago for story fodder. (The “previously on” segment even includes a scene from Discovery’s first season with Klingons doing a war chant.)
And one truism about war is that there is very little truth in it. As much as violence and tactics, an intrinsic part of war is lying and deception. This episode magnificently embodies this fact in multiple ways. Some are very simple: for example, Chapel at one point says encouragingly to M’Benga, “You got this,” and M’Benga flashes back to Chapel saying the same thing to him on J’gal while they were in the operating room.
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It isn’t until later that we realize that M’Benga wasn’t remembering Chapel encouraging him in the past, it was the other way around: M’Benga was the one getting Chapel to say “You got this” as a mantra to get her over her fears that they would lose their patient.
The theme of deception runs through the entire episode, starting with the title, with the double meaning of “cloak,” both to evoke the cloaking device that has been part of Klingon tactics since The Search for Spock and to indicate things that are hidden or obfuscated.
Some deceptions are small but painful—M’Benga and Chapel pretending to be okay with attending dinner in the captain’s mess in honor of Rah. Enterprise is transporting Rah, and he’s an honored guest, so the entire senior staff is expected to attend dinner, including the chief medical officer and the head nurse.
Some deceptions are imagined—Ortegas, another veteran of the Klingon war, is absolutely convinced that Rah is faking his defection, and he’s playing a long game to gain intelligence on the Federation for the Klingons to use. (Ortegas has the same reluctance to join the dinner as the two medical staff, but she overcomes it mainly because Pike is serving jambalaya, and she can’t resist that.) Ortegas’ attitude plays into the biggest deception of war, propaganda: the other side is pure evil and our side is pure good.
Throughout the episode, we’re wondering if Ortegas is right. Rah is very much a politician, and that makes everything he says suspect, as it’s all designed to elicit a favorable response. (Wisdom plays the role superbly.) In general, Enterprise was probably a sensible choice to play ferry to Rah because—as established in Discovery’s “Brother”—the vessel was deliberately kept out of the war. Pike, Number One, and Spock didn’t serve in the conflict. So they’re more readily able to be friendly to Rah, as can Uhura, who was still at the Academy when the war happened. And longtime Trek viewers are similarly not sure because the Klingons have been both enemy and ally throughout the fifty-plus years of the franchise.
But M’Benga and Chapel in particular have bad history there. The Klingons on J’gal massacred all the inhabits of the world, civilian and Starfleet alike. All of Rah’s officers were then killed, and Rah deemed “the butcher of J’gal,” not by the Federation (as everyone probably assumed from the start of the episode), but by the Klingon Empire by way of condemning him—yet another deception. Rah, however, says that he was so outraged by his officers’ behavior that he killed them all in revenge for their horrid act. And it’s what led him to defect.
Over the course of the flashbacks, we discover that M’Benga used to be part of a sort-of special forces team, under whose auspices he developed the green go-juice from “The Broken Circle.” In the flashback, M’Benga insists to the Andorian CO of the team—who is trying to recruit M’Benga—that that’s not who he is anymore, he’s a physician now. This is a fascinating revelation, as we know from “Among the Lotus Eaters,” that M’Benga doesn’t like being thought of as someone who is capable of violence, despite his martial arts training, and we know from the original series’ “A Private Little War,” where the character was introduced, that he interned on Vulcan. He may well have chosen to intern there specifically to move away from his violent past.
But that past comes back to haunt him on J’gal, as the entire team is killed.
Eventually, the truth comes out. The order to kill everyone on J’gal, even civilians, did indeed come from Rah. And the slaughter of all the officers was at the hands, not of Rah, but of a go-juice-enhanced M’Benga, who used a Klingon d’k tahg on each of the Klingons he encountered in revenge for his erstwhile comrades and patients being killed. But Rah escaped, and later he was tarred with the brush of the massacre—and used it to further a political career as a Federation diplomat, since his status as a Klingon general irrevocably destroyed.
The episode ends with a confrontation between M’Benga and Rah in sickbay, the second such in the episode—the first came in the gym, as the two sparred while each is wearing a purple marital arts gi. Rah wants M’Benga by his side as he argues for peace, as a symbol of unity between the two formerly warring factions. M’Benga wants nothing to do with that.
But M’Benga is the true butcher of J’gal, and he still has the d’k tahg he used that fateful day. And he uses it again on Rah. The story he tells La’an and Pike is that Rah attacked him, and M’Benga was able to turn his d’k tahg on him. And he can easily “prove” that it’s Rah’s d’k tahg, because it still has the blood of the Klingons who died at the hands of the butcher of J’gal on it. And since everyone knows that Rah is the butcher of J’gal…
M’Benga is turning into a fascinating—and not very pleasant—character. First he hid his daughter in the transporter buffer without telling anyone, and now he’s proven to have major PTSD to the point of murder. This is not a stable individual, and I hope that this is eventually dealt with, as M’Benga needs to find his way back to sanity and to redemption.
The acting in this is stellar, from the great guest acting by Howard as an eccentric administrator, to Ethan Peck’s Spock trying so very hard to empathize with and provide comfort to Chapel and finding it impossible, to Rebecca Romijn’s Number One doing the first officer thing and insisting that Pike make a course correction that will end the mission sooner, because Rah’s presence on board is torpedoing morale.
But the rock stars here are Wisdom, Babs Olusanmokun, and Jess Bush. Wisdom gives a tour de force, striking a balance between a warrior’s blustery attitude and a politician’s changeable façade. (Robert O’Reilly also did that Klingon two-step superbly as Gowron on TNG and DS9.) And the pain is etched on every pore of Olusanmokun’s and Bush’s faces throughout.
In the end, everyone loses. M’Benga loses more of his soul, Rah loses his life, and the Federation loses an important diplomatic ally. Which is what happens in a war.
Because all wars are crimes.
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be in Booth 243 of the exhibit hall at GalaxyCon Raleigh this weekend in North Carolina, where he’ll be selling and signing his books and comics, as well as some hand-made stuffies created by his wife Wrenn Simms. Come by and say hi!
This was just an excellent commentary on war; it reminds me of some of the best episodes of Deep Space Nine, and it was neat to finally get a ground-level view of the Klingon War from Disco season 1. I just think that it could have benefited from a little more time with Dak’rah, as it was difficult for me to parse what were his actual motivations from politicking (was he actually even remotely repentant, or was he a pure opportunist?)
I think the most interesting answer would have to be “Both.”
What a powerful episode. This may be up there with “Family” from TNG and “It’s only a Paper Moon” from DS9 on pure dramatic power. The writers and visual and audio FX team do an amazing job of creating the horror that was this Battle. The constant intoning of “Transport Incoming” interspersed with the surgery scenes show how grating it is on the character until Dr M’Benga who thinks he has left his dark past besides him must let it out again.
I’d actually think that this episode borrows more from Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness as unlike MASH this is played absolutely straight. The veterans feeling that the civilized veneer over Rah is false is similar to Marlow returning to Europe. It’s also very nicely juxtaposed with Pikes hope for change and progress which is played out wonderfully between him and Number One.
That this episode fits between a screwball comedy involving the Lower Decks crew and what appears to be “Once More with Feeling” in space shows how amazingly versatile the cast and writing team is.
I don’t know when I’ve cried more during a Star Trek episode. It hurt to watch it. We need lighter episodes on either side of this so thank god we’re getting them. I don’t think I could take another like this directly after.
Do we know who directed this?
@00 / KRAD:
M’Benga is turning into a fascinating—and not very pleasant—character. First he hid his daughter in the transporter buffer without telling anyone, and now he’s proven to have major PTSD to the point of murder. This is not a stable individual, and I hope that this is eventually dealt with, as M’Benga needs to find his way back to sanity and to redemption.
Well, we know that by the time that Kirk takes command of the Enterprise, M’Benga steps down as CMO and McCoy takes the post (though he remains aboard for a time as part of McCoy’s staff).
So obviously, something is going to happen that brings M’Benga to that point of ending his tenure aboard the 1701. Between this and his daughter last Season, it definitely feels like it’s building to that catalyst.
This was really heavy and I can see how some people would hate the ending. It is shocking and sad. The episode reminded me a lot of DS9’s “Siege at AR-558.
M’Benga went through hell in this one. It seemed like everything was against him–Pike’s request to have him attend the dinner (which I know Pike did say he’d understand if the answer was no. But who wants to disappoint Pike?), and then Rah’s endless efforts to get close to M’Benga. Rah was annoying enough but then he finds out what M’Benga had done and he’s still preaching about healing. With the amount of pain M’Benga was holding in, no wonder he snapped!
I loved how the music on the show ramped up the tension that he was feeling.
I have to agree with Una, it wasn’t fair to expect veterans of war, especially the ones at J’gal to just accept that Rah’s a peacekeeper now. Like she said, Pike’s idealism is good in the abstract, but I don’t know how realistic it is for everyone to believe it.
I was lost on the ending though. Chapel enters sickbay and she sees the d’k tahg in the box while M’Benga and Rah are struggling behind the partition, correct? So, how was Rah stabbed with the same weapon?
There were TWO knives?
This one was painful to watch. I’m not sure anyone’s list for what to expect this season included a story where M’Benga straight-up murders a guy and Chapel acts as an accessory after the fact. How it plays out is a lot more complicated than that, of course, but that’s still a shocking direction to take those two characters. However, it is played beautifully throughout, especially in the scene leading up to the killing. When M’Benga is basically pleading for Rah to leave him alone, you can see on his face that he is ready to snap. I will admit to being among those who were not pleased by the season opener’s casting of M’Benga as some sort of super-soldier, but I can’t argue that they didn’t end up doing something interesting with it, so kudos to the writers and the actors in this one.
Now I can’t wait for the musical episode to cleanse my brain.
This was pretty effective, and I respect that the show can turn from doing goofy comedy one week to something this dark and intense the next, the kind of variety you rarely get in a serialized show. It was an interesting situation, a Klingon defector becoming a Federation ambassador and dredging up the complex postwar feelings — which fortunately arise from him specifically being a former general with an infamous reputation, rather than just being the result of generic anti-Klingon racism.
Still, I’m not comfortable with how it ended. I think it was left deliberately ambiguous whether M’Benga killing Rah was murder or self-defense, but even the implication that it was murder is farther than I wish the show had gone, and I don’t like seeing such a pessimistic ending in a Trek episode. Trek is supposed to be about how people can overcome their differences and work together, not how they can’t.
Still, I think this episode might help explain why M’Benga goes from CMO of the E in this show to McCoy’s subordinate in TOS (presuming it’s the same character and not his son or cousin or something). Maybe he can’t live with himself and decides to step down from the burdens of the CMO post, or maybe something comes out and he has to accept demotion.
The transporter buffer thing still bugs me, since in the TNG era, the rule was that nobody could survive being held in the buffer for more than 8 minutes. Scotty was only able to survive for decades because he was a miracle worker, and he still lost the other guy in the buffer with him, so it was only 50% successful. So why would older transporters be able to hold patterns in the buffer for days at a time while more advanced ones can’t?
I saw a comment on Twitter today that Clint Howard’s Trek career is “like a slow-burn Jeffrey Combs.” It was nice to see him again, though I didn’t think much of his character, whose only personality trait was getting sayings wrong. Let’s see, this makes 57 years between Howard’s first and latest appearances in the same franchise. That’s certainly a record for Trek, and the only other actor I can think of who surpasses it is William Russell, who first appeared in Doctor Who in November 1963 and had a cameo in the most recent Doctor Who special airing in October 2022, a 59-year span. (With a 57-year gap since Russell’s previous appearance in 1965, a Guinness world record for the longest gap between an actor’s consecutive screen appearances as the same character.)
It’s perfectly possible that TOS transporters do not work any better than the later versions, but that Doc M’Benga is just THAT desperate (and, by trial and error on the battlefront, managed to work out techniques that could make the most of what technology would allow him to get away with – thoigh the results would probably not satisfy any review of his peers, hence those techniques not being adopted across the Fleet).
The problem there is that M’Benga’s technique actually works, consistently and reliably. How could that not satisfy peer review? If it’s a desperate gamble more than a century beyond the state of the art, then logically it should fail more often than it succeeds, yet M’Benga took his daughter out and put her back in numerous times and she always survived.
@7 / CLB:
Still, I think this episode might help explain why M’Benga goes from CMO of the E in this show to McCoy’s subordinate in TOS (presuming it’s the same character and not his son or cousin or something). Maybe he can’t live with himself and decides to step down from the burdens of the CMO post, or maybe something comes out and he has to accept demotion.
Or a combination of the two.
Like I was saying, that’s a mini-mystery that SNW set up last Season. We know what’s coming with M’Benga, but we don’t know the circumstances yet.
@5/Mary: “I was lost on the ending though. Chapel enters sickbay and she sees the d’k tahg in the box while M’Benga and Rah are struggling behind the partition, correct? So, how was Rah stabbed with the same weapon?”
No, the box with the d’k tahg was on the table in front of M’Benga and Rah. Chapel didn’t see it.
Incidentally, whose idea was it to name a cheerful Klingon “Rah?”
Also, are his ambassadorial aides the Staff of Rah?
@9 / CLB:
Also, are his ambassadorial aides the Staff of Rah?
Mr. Bennett, thank you.
There’s now coffee all over my work desk from snorting and laughing too hard.
Bart Simpson had it right — the only “good” wars were the American Revolution, World War II, and the Star Wars Trilogy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTLKyWi9hns
@9 said: Also, are his ambassadorial aides the Staff of Rah?
If that’s the case, I’d say they got a Rah deal with that posting.
@12 / twels:
If that’s the case, I’d say they got a Rah deal with that posting.
Gah, oy…
@11: Aaaand, maybe not so fast on the American Revolution, there, Bart!
Don’t let the United States hear you, were only just moving past that little affray in 1812-1815, we can’t afford to rehash the War of the Tricorns too!
Wow, wow, wow, this was deep. This episode reminded me of TNG’s “The Wounded”: Captain Maxwell and Chief O’Brien’s PTSD from war and being changed men from the war; the former man not believing the war is over and not getting over his prejudice of the Cardassians. And I was also reminded of “…Nor the Battle to the Strong” and “The Seige of AR-558”: seeing our heroes tested and crack in the stresses of frontline combat and just a reminder that war is hell. Here, we see the obvious division in response to the ambassador from those officers who have been in a recent war with the ambassador’s people, and those that had the good fortune not to have been in the war.
Ortegas is still suspicious and bigoted when it comes to Klingons, Chapel is haunted, and M’Benga is a disturbed and somber man. Excellent twist at the end with the truth of Rah’s actions having become clear to the audience. Rah is an interesting character as well and one can detest him for his actions but also choose to believe in him in that he really does want to atone for his prior actions during the war. I truly felt that M’Benga did murder him once Rah did not back down and just leave sickbay. I guess it was shot and edited to be ambiguous but I believe the implication was that M’Benga killed him and Chapel knew this and backed the doctor up.
I don’t think I really knew who M’Benga was until this point but now I find him fascinating. And Babs Olusanmokun was sensational. In a just world this performance alone would get him an acting nomination but because the Emmy’s are a joke that won’t happen.
I’ve really been impressed with SNW of late and I’m now liking this season as much as the first one. We go from a light-hearted crossover event episode to this dark character study to a romantic musical event next week. Truly exciting times for this series. I wonder what the season finale will be about. I’m sure Spock and Chapel’s relationship will play a big part. Will Korby come into play? Will Sybok, hinted at last season, finally get a proper story to be featured in?
This is true only if voice acting is discarded. George Takei played Sulu in most of TOS and TAS, and also in VOY “Flashback”, and voiced him in LD “Crisis Point 2: Paradoxus”.
@7 It’s possible the writers intended for there to be some ambiguity, but in the eyes of this prosecutor there was none: it was a murder. M’Benga having the knife at the top of his box, ready to go before Rah started touching him showed to me that he was already contemplating killing him even before the “fight” started. The earlier sparring scene was there I think in part to show us that Rah is obviously not in great physical shape for a Klingon, as a human normally might struggle against a general. Rah’s cane served a similar purpose. I don’t think anybody could argue that M’Benga was in fear of his life enough to justify killing Rah.
And I’m really struggling with that ending. We’ve seen plenty of Trek characters commit or contemplate cold-blooded murder before, but not from the ship’s doctor. It’s incredibly dark, and I really hope that we’ll get a follow up on it at some point. I agree that this would be a good catalyst to M’Benga taking a back seat to McCoy, though I can’t imagine Kirk ever learning of it because he probably wouldn’t have kept him aboard at all.
Placing this episode where they did in the season schedule is a good example of why this show needs more episodes per season. Can you imagine if DS9 had done “Trials and Tribble-ations,” “In the Pale Moonlight,” and something like “Take Me Out to the Holosuite” in consecutive weeks?
I’m imagining that the Gorn threat from earlier I. The season will be paid off with some sort of attack. I imagine we will end with a cliffhanger threatening the life of La’an, Ortegas or one of the other non-legacy characters
While I’m a Star Trek fan, I take note that, “Yes, it’s murder, but it’s murder of the Klingon version of Eichmann.”
One of my complaints about Deep Space Nine is the fact that Gul Dukat is meant to be a Nazi officer and the show waffled between the idea that he was redeemable or not. I feel like they made the right call by settling on the fact, “Dukat is incapable of reform and will always be a monster because the kind of man who did the thing he did is incapable of seeing what he did as wrong.”
Weirdly, my biggest comment about this episode is, “How stupid is the Federation?” Going with the above Eichmann example, General Dak’Rah is a guy SO SCUMMY and SO DISHONORABLE that the Klingons call what he did mass murder and this is a guy the Federation appoints as an ambassador. It’s akin to appointing Ted Bundy or Jim Jones to be the ambassador to the United States. Yes, Ted and Jim would know United States culture but it’s an insult and I can’t imagine did the Federation any favors. It really goes a long way to suggest the Federation does not understand the Klingons on ANY conceptual level.
I also hoped we might have example Klingon handling of Medical Workers vs. Federation more with chapel. Like the Mandalorians in Star Wars, Klingons seem to consider medical staff to be valid military infrastructure and presumably their medics are armed combatants as well.
Strictly speaking the Klingon general in question struck me as less Eichmann (In the sense of cold-bloodedly setting up a production line of mass murder away from the battlefront) and more “We had to burn the village down to save it” (In the sense of declaring an active battlefront a free fire zone and therefore being culpable for the atrocities stemming from that blanket permission).
If nothing else, this makes it slightly harder for audiences to dismiss Klingon Benedict Arnold as “Just another Nazi.”
Oh yeah, I had already forgotten about the Gorn and this show really wants to make the Gorn happen. But I’ve been ambivalent about them because they’re so different from what we saw in TOS and even in Enterprise. I’d rather hear from the Tholians or some other one-off alien race that we were introduced to on TNG like the Sheliak.
@19 I don’t think DS9 ever actually waffled on Dukat’s character. He was always shown to be an irredeemable bastard, but he was also played by Marc Alaimo so he was charming enough to blind people to it. The producers are on record talking about all the times they had to make Dukat do horrible things so that people would remember he’s the bad guy.
@20 / garreth:
I’d rather hear from the Tholians or some other one-off alien race that we were introduced to on TNG like the Sheliak.
Yeah, the Tholians made more sense to bring into SNW than the Gorn. They’re not bound by canon like with the Hegmony and “Arena”.
That said, I live in hope that CBS will see it in their infinite wisdom to adapt David Mack’s Vanguard if SNW decides to do its own spinoff show towards the end of its run.
Then we’d really have some fun with the Tholians.
@21 I’m glad DS9 didn’t bow to fan pressure there.
Dukat is the quintessential “superficially charming” psychopath.
the episode was definitely up there with AR-588, Family, and others that were already mentioned. Maybe not something to watch after reading about Hiroshima yesterday though.
Maybe I’m the only one, but it helped explain members of Starfleet’s attitude towards peace with the Klingons in Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country.
@24 / Loungeshep:
Maybe I’m the only one, but it helped explain members of Starfleet’s attitude towards peace with the Klingons in Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country.
Yeah, it definitely adds additional context.
It makes sense. The late-TOS Movie era top brass of Starfleet are the generation that came of age during the conflict and went through the worst of it.
The idea of making peace with — what was to their perspective — the monsters who put them through hell and killed their friends and loved ones killed must’ve seemed insane and a betrayal of their memories.
@21/Chase: And yet the writers in a way wanted to “redeem” Dukat by having Kira fall in love with him which would be such a gross insult to her character and fortunately Nana Visitor was adamantly opposed to that idea as well.
I feel like they introduced a layer of ambiguity precisely so that it would be debated and parsed out for some time to come. I would agree that it doesn’t quite fit with the usual Trek philosophical perspective for its main characters. My first thought was that it was a plot point more suitable for a show like Babylon 5. But perhaps that is a good thing for future exploration of the character; I’m certainly intrigued where they take him from here.
In terms of the Gorn, it’s interesting that they are clearly dealing with another emerging conflict, one that even Enterprise is a part of this time, but so much of it is happening off-screen. It does set up some kind of expectation that the hints and threads will come to a head in the season finale. Otherwise, why bother giving out subtle indications that is it going to be a thing?
I think this is basically a DS9 “Anti-Trek” story. Which is the fact that we have a scenario about a man who committed war crimes and we assume it’ll end with his story being that he’s sincere in his redemption and M’Benga reluctantly forgiving him.
But no, Rah ****ed up and he knew he didn’t have a place back home in the Klingon Empire so he decided to join the Federation and throw his men under the buss.
And it’s probably better M’Benga killed him.
I find that an interpretation entirely too generous to Doctor M’Benga and entirely too dismissive of the possibility that even the worst can admit their crimes, then work to make amends: the Ambassador is hard to love and deeply self-serving, but his desire to do better strikes me as a genuine effort by a deeply-flawed person (One who also seems to have been suffering the fundamental loneliness of every defector).
@27 – Aside from the mention of a possible war with the Gorn in The Broken Circle, it’s been announced that the season finale is titled Hegemony.
Regarding the current episode, an episode excellent job all around. I do have to question Pike’s judgement in having a dinner and making sure that three members of his crew that he knows are still dealing with issues from the war are in attendance. Especially after walking onto the bridge in time to hear how Ortegas feels about their guest.
M’Benga has been a longtime favourite character. It’s disheartening to find out he’s a cold blooded murderer. As said above, the box was there. The lid was open. There’s no doubt in my mind that M’Benga knew exactly what he was doing.
I wonder if M’Benga would also be in favour of “justice” if he knew about Ambassador Sarek and his plan for planetary genocide against the Klingons. That was only stopped at the last minute and because of dumb luck.
One quibble. The Klingon headpiece had a decidedly plastic look to it and from the side looked more like a hat. Not the best job by the makeup department.
Attention. Tonight’s TV has been Strange New Worlds. Starring Anson Mount, Rebecca Romijn, Ethan Peck, Babs Olusanmokun, Jess Bush, Melissa Navia, Christina Chong, Celia Rose Gooding, and Bobby Troup.
“Goddamn Starfleet.”
That is all.
I find it interesting that M’Benga’s black ops past wasn’t even (to my recollection) hinted at in the first season. I wonder whether it was part of the writers’ conception of him in the first place, or whether it was retconned in after the arc with Ruukiya exhausted itself.
It strikes me that Ortegas’s mistrust of the Klingons here contextualizes “A Quality of Mercy” and helps account for why her alternate-future self takes on Lt. Stiles’s “Balance of Terror” role as the anti-Romulan xenophobe. I guess she was projecting her Klingon War traumas onto the Romulans. It’s still contrived to plug her into Stiles’s role, but at least now we see it’s not out of the blue for her to act that way.
@19/C.T. Phipps: “General Dak’Rah is a guy SO SCUMMY and SO DISHONORABLE that the Klingons call what he did mass murder and this is a guy the Federation appoints as an ambassador.”
IIRC, while it’s true that Dak’Rah ordered the killing of civilians, the thing the Klingons despised was his alleged murder of his own officers in his escape, which was actually something M’Benga did on berserker juice and that Rah took credit for to sell his narrative of turning on his own people.
I’m surprised to see everyone assuming M’Benga murdered Rah outright. It looked to me like there was an even chance that it was self-defense, though one could argue that M’Benga left the dagger in Rah’s view to provoke an attack that he would then defend himself against, which I guess would still make it technically murder.
Still, I hate the idea of a protagonist we’re supposed to like committing murder, especially when he’s a doctor. So I’d prefer to seize onto whatever shred of ambiguity there is.
I don’t see much ambiguity because he used the dagger (that M’Benga owned) to frame him. So M’Benga was armed and Rah absolutely wasn’t.
@32 @33 After thinking about it some more, there is a scenario where M’Benga could more plausibly claim self defense, though I still personally wouldn’t totally buy it. If M’Benga were to claim that he felt physically threatened by Rah’s aggressiveness towards him and grabbed the knife to defend himself before stabbing him after Rah tried to take the knife from him, that might justify it enough. That’s why Pike’s only real question was whether M’Benga started the fight; if M’Benga was the initial aggressor he doesn’t get the benefit of a self defense claim.
To P.A. in comment #30: well played.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, who always loves a MASH reference….
This episode reminded me just how much of The War we skipped in Discovery. The first six months fly by because Burnham is in prison and the last nine months are skipped by some time travel shenanigans.
This almost made me wish we’d had a season of Star Trek At War with 2010s TV budget and ability to go harder on some of the themes.
Then I realised that would be bleak AF, and what I actually want out of my Trek these days is some optimism.
So maybe not. But as a one off episode, in between Then Crossover and The Musical, it was just what I needed.
Looking forward to what they’re planning for M’Benga…
M’Benga is a legacy character that can’t die (unless he actually does and is replaced by a clone) but apparently some kind of demotion is in store for him. I wonder if at at some point in this series Dr. Piper takes over (the doc from “Where No Man Has Gone Before” pre-McCoy) from M’Benga.
The knife was in the box on M’Bengas desk. He was standing next to the desk with his back to it. Rah was on the other side of M’Benga.
When Chapel walked in, they were in the same positions. The most likely scenario is that M’Benga grabbed the knife and stabbed Rah. He’s an experienced fighter. I can’t see a situation where Rah got the knife first or that he took it from M’Benga and M’Benga took it back.
Besides, M’Benga was closest to the door. If he felt threatened he could have gotten outbof his office and called security.
‘Purple marital arts gi’ Oops.
This was beyond DS9/B5 dark. I saw the murder as unambiguous, though I know some disagree. It was brave to go that far.
Nits about script: Spock using ‘breached’ for broached and Nurse Chapel saying something about ‘being there’ which made no sense. I’d have to replay to check but it reminded me of Delenn’s ‘we are running out of time, and time is all we have’.
I suppose it was ambiguous but I took it as given that M’Benga murdered Rah. I don’t know what would prompt Rah to try and kill M’Benga first, unless he feared the truth about his fabricated backstory coming out. But if Rah attacked first, the plot is a bit limp – M’Benga really wants to kill Rah, and Rah conveniently gives him a watertight legal and moral justification to do so. The episode’s ending only really works if M’Benga murdered Rah outright.
I see why people are loving this one but I suppose I’ll be a sort of dissenting voice. The episode was entertaining and well-written but I didn’t really like the tone it was going for. Olusanmokun is a superb actor but I’m not a fan of what the writers are doing with M’Benga on the whole. I also think Pike looked characteristically weak here, as he often does. M’Benga all but says “yes I killed Rah and I’m glad I did” and Pike just sort of winces and walks out. Things go so badly wrong under Pike’s watch every single week that it’s amazing he’s still in command of the ship. There was a very decent debate to be had between “peace should be our goal no matter what” and “we shouldn’t work with brutal war criminals”, but Pike’s attempt to argue the former position was pretty weak.
The other thing that annoyed me, which is a very subjective personal thing that most people probably won’t agree with, was the very DS9-ish depiction of war in the future. DS9’s depiction of war always struck me as extremely unimaginative, never making use of the technology that is available to the Federation, and this seemed to follow a similar template. Why are we sat in trenches dodging artillery shots? We have ships that can wide-beam stun from orbit (see: A Piece of the Action), there’s literally no reason for us to ever get involved in ground combat. And if we do, it ideally shouldn’t play out like a crap Vietnam movie where gruff men talk about “leading platoons” and “keeping their heads down”.
Surely a single starship could show up, stun all the Klingon ground troops, beam their generals to the brig, beam civilians to safety (or just beam the Klingons somewhere else), and that’s the end of it. You could even just keep stunning the entire Klingon army from orbit until they’re forced to surrender, if you couldn’t be arsed dealing with them. The only combat that needs to occur is ship-to-ship, but whoever wins that has essentially won the entire ground battle by default. The only time I can imagine the Federation ever needing to fight a 20th-century-style war is if covert agents are infiltrating an occupied planet (eg Errand of Mercy) or a garrison has been attacked unexpectedly and has to defend somewhere until a starship can arrive.
Something I liked in TNG’s “The Wounded” was O’Brien’s horror at having accidentally killed one person in the entire Cardassian War, the implication seemingly being that, even in the event of war, Federation troops typically don’t end up actually killing anyone. Why would they, with all the technological solutions available? I always wondered if this was one of the reasons the cold war with the Romulans in TNG never went hot – war would just be too much of a stupid waste of time for both sides, as transporters, ultra-wide-range phasers and whatnot would render every battle a total farce. There’s the terrifying mutually-assured-destruction of planet-killing starships, but really when you’re dealing with the Federation, it’s more mutually-assured-annoyance because they can just keep doing stupid shit like spamming stun at you or teleporting you away every time you try to do anything.
Given that almost every other episode of STAR TREK shows Federation technology being adversely affected (Whether by circumstances or by deliberate action) it hardly seems out of tbe question that in all out war the most nifty technological techniques available to all parties can be cancelled out to the point where the timeless Meat Grinder opens for business yet again.
@36/TheMongoose: I agree with the conclusion you reached. The last thing I ever want to see is another Trek season devoted to a war story. There have been too many of those already. War is a lazy well to keep going back to over and over. If you want wars in the stars, there’s already a franchise for that. I’m here for the treks.
@37/garreth: “I wonder if at at some point in this series Dr. Piper takes over”
Gods, I hope not. Piper wasn’t even a character, just a placeholder until Roddenberry could work things out with DeForest Kelley’s schedule. He had only eight distinct lines, all exposition. An unmemorable role played by an unmemorable actor.
Of course, you can always take a nothing character and add substance to them. I find it ironic that the one trait M’Benga had in TOS, that he was an expert in Vulcan medicine, has been virtually ignored in SNW, because they’ve done so much else with him instead. So yeah, they could introduce a character named Mark Piper and flesh him out into someone interesting. But I’d rather they stick with M’Benga. I don’t like what they’ve done with the character this season, but Olusanmokun is very good.
Another good episode from Strange New Worlds. It had strong performances and just enough twists to keep it from being yet another PTSD episode. There are some similarities to the Deep Space Nine episode “Hard Time” in which Chief O’Brien has PTSD and the big reveal is that he has the memory of killing his cellmate.
If I must offer a criticism, it’s that whatever real-life Brazilian jiu-jitsu skills Babs Olusanmokun has, they are obscured by the same disorienting use of editing and camerawork that we might expect from an assembly-line from Liam Neeson’s career since Taken.
@11
I know that it’s a joke, but even WW2 has its share of moral ambiguity. The British and the Americans were on the right side of things, but they committed more than their fair share of atrocities. For example, just study the massive bombing campaigns by the Brits and the Americans against civilian targets: Dresden (22,000+ killed), Hamburg (35,000+ killed), Tokyo (100,000 + killed), etc. And one could add to that the fact that they allied themselves with Joseph Stalin…..
There’s a reason why quote marks are appropriate when people call it “the good war.”
I very much got Sisko / “In the Pale Moonlight” vibes from M’Benga at the end.
“I’m not saying I started the fight, but I’m glad he’s dead.”
*sigh* Beautifully acted, but so not Trekkian. Whatever happened to “We won’t kill … today.”
I think it’s a very interesting interrogation of the fact a lot of Trek just allows war criminals to walk away in the name of peace. The Xindi arc has the leaders of the Xindi Council commit mass murder of six million people for no reason whatsoever than some other aliens told humanity MIGHT be a threat in the future. None of whom presumably faced any consequence for this horrific act.
Archer just gave them a good scolding.
No consequences beyond what appears to be a military coup and the consequences thereof …
The problem with it for me is that M’Benga claims that stabbing Rah was “justice”, and Pike doesn’t really successfully argue against that point. But of course, the obvious counterargument is that this isn’t justice in any meaningful way, and there can never be any justice – Rah’s victims are still dead, the horrors still occurred, only now Rah is also dead (and, if we’re going “an eye for an eye”, he died much more quickly and with less pain and fear than most of his victims likely did). The only “justice” offered is that M’Benga found it cathartic to put a knife in Rah’s chest.
Star Trek generally seems to go with the idea that the only worthwhile form of “justice” is restorative – hence Lenore Karidian going to hospital rather than being executed at the end of “Conscience of the King”, and Kirk (and Riley) ultimately deciding not to carry out a vigilante attack on Kodos in the same episode. Lenore is recognised as mentally ill and therefore receives treatment; this is considered justice. Kodos meanwhile is recognised as being morally culpable for his actions; Kirk therefore attempts an arrest. The ethos, I suppose, is that the motive not to just kill Kodos isn’t necessarily for Kodos’ benefit, but rather for Kirk and Riley’s. Kodos may be a murderer, but Kirk and Riley can console themselves with the fact that they’re better than that, and don’t have to resort to eye-for-an-eye tactics.
Now, of course, it’s fine for the show to do plots like this and have characters like M’Benga who on occasion aren’t able to accept the Starfleet way of doing things and end up taking drastic measures, but I feel like the script was almost entirely sympathetic to him and not too interested in the counterpoint, which was represented mostly by Pike. The message – which I may be intepreting uncharitably – seemed to be “M’Benga’s been traumatised, Rah’s crimes can never be forgiven, violence is the answer here because otherwise Rah would walk free”. That’s one perspective, but we get comparatively little of the Pike/Starfleet side of things, which could have offered a lot to think about for M’Benga (like when McCoy and Spock asked Kirk what the point of assassinating Kodos would be), but Pike’s generally portrayed as a bit of a naive dork in this episode who ends up getting slapped down by M’Benga’s speech about how he’s privileged to have not been on Vietnam Moon and can therefore never understand the value of stabbing people in the chest.
Watching this episode helped me to understand why Starfleet eventually started putting counselors aboard starships as senior staff members. Throughout the episode I was really wishing that one of them would call their therapist, just to model that people who are dealing with deep traumas can (and should) seek professional therapeutic help, even years after the traumatic event
47. I don’t interpret it as Pike being naive. I don’t think he bought what M’Benga was selling (about it being self defense and him not starting the fight) Pike just couldn’t prove it especially wit Chapel backing M’Benga’s story. Since M’Benga didn’t admit to starting the fight Pike had to let it go.
I was really blown away by this episode. I definitely believe that the moment Rah walked into the sickbay was the moment M’Benga decided that he would end him. He gives him a chance to leave but the dialogue in the fight equates to “look what you made me do.” In fact, he asks Rah why he couldn’t just “leave me alone.”
Is the world a better place without Rah in it? Is he the Klingon equivalent of Eichmann? Or is he Wernher von Braun, whose later works go at least some ways toward balancing the scales? I’m glad the show chose ambiguity. Sometimes it’s good not to have the answers spoon fed to you.
I liked the fact that Pike’s idealism was a hindrance in that moment but that it was something that M’Benga also clearly admired – or at least was pleased that Pike had been allowed to keep it by being left out of the war.
The performances were all incredible. This truly is a cast that doesn’t seem to have any weak links.
Though I sometimes wish for longer seasons, I have to admit that having ten good-to-great episodes all in a row as opposed to a 26-episode one where the majority are average-to good is an experience I quite enjoy. I’m trying to think of a Trek season that had more than 10 episodes of the quality we’re getting in SNW – and other than MAYBE the first season of TOS and the third or fourth of TNG, I’m not sure we have
@47
My take on the subject is that Pike’s own argument defeated itself. M’Benga, to me, was flat out confessing to Pike without precisely saying the words and Pike knew it. However, Pike’s argument is that a murderer going free if he does good things is superior to a murderer being punished.
So, what the hell is his argument for arresting M’Benga then?
M’Benga as a doctor who has saved countless lives and will save countless more. Arresting him would only stop him from doing so.
So Pike had no choice but to leave in order not to be a monstrous hypocrite.
(People are also complicated and Pike has his own feelings about “murderers who go free who do great good” with the “Ones who Walk away from Omelas” episode that I’m blanking on the name right now. The “what if I told you he murdered children” was where Pike decided to let it go even if he didn’t want to investigate anyway)
@50
I agree about the number of episodes. In the past, there might have been 26 episodes, but that was just a function how television series were produced. There was never any intent to make 26 good episodes. They just needed to fill the timeslot with something, even if there wasn’t a budget. So whether we get 10 good episodes out of 10 or 10 out of 26, it’s just very difficult to write 26 consecutive good episodes and have a budget for them.
*****
For everyone complaining that M’Benga might have murdered someone, off the top of my head, I can think of about a dozen homicides that either should have been prosecuted, or at a minimum, derailed someone’s career:
* Data in “The Most Toys”, and he lies about it,
* Janeway in “Tuvix”,
* Worf in “Reunion” and maybe even Gowron,
* Picard killing a crewmember before he can become a Borg in First Contact,
* Riker in “Up the Long Ladder”,
* Sisko commits felony murder in “In the Pale Moonlight” and essentially admits it,
* Agnes should at least be placed on leave and investigated for killing Maddox,
* the Admiral that drove Data’s daughter insane by threatening to kidnap her should lose his commission,
* and even M’Benga erasing someone’s pattern in this episode would be investigated.
And we can throw in war crimes:
* Harry Kim fakes his surrender in “Nightingale”, and
* Garak’s attempted genocide in “Broken Link” is knocked down to a misdemeanor!
So I’m not saying you are wrong to be bothered by M’Benga at the end of this episode. I’m just saying it seems to be a recurring problem, and we might be showing some selective outrage about it now.
.
My take on Dak’Rah as a Klingon is that he was probably born to a Great House (almost certainly has to as this is before the Great Council), got his Generalship through nepotism, and proceeded to utterly fail (from his perspective) in this battle.
Losing all of his officers and running from a battle, he realized he’d only get a dishonorable death so he concocted his BS story about killing his men for being dishonorable. He thus adopts a “defector of conscience” story and adopts as much in the way of human mannerisms as possible and that he left the Klingon Empire because of their nasty warmongering.
The Federation buy it and ignore the Klingons calling him the “Butcher of J’Gal” as typical Klingon espionage and lies when they’re actually telling the truth. They want to buy that he’s a Klingon who saw the light and the guy is very good at social manipulation. Basically, they think he’s Worf. However, he’s not even Gowron (who was many things but not a coward). He’s Duras.
The real question, though is what M’Benga said about wearing a mask so long that it becomes the real you. Dak’Rah committed countless war crimes but came to the Federation and acclimated to life there. He’s not willing to own to his crimes (and justifies them through various ways) but may have simply adopted the culture of the Federation and come to believe his own lies. As a man who was never a true believer in the Klingon way, maybe he’s now a “weekened warrior” of the Federation and a harmless peacenik.
But does that mean he is reformed? Does that mean that punishment for his crimes should not happen? Is all retribution revenge?
@7/CLB: “Let’s see, this makes 57 years between Howard’s first and latest appearances in the same franchise. That’s certainly a record for Trek, and the only other actor I can think of who surpasses it is William Russell, who first appeared in Doctor Who in November 1963 and had a cameo in the most recent Doctor Who special airing in October 2022, a 59-year span. (With a 57-year gap since Russell’s previous appearance in 1965, a Guinness world record for the longest gap between an actor’s consecutive screen appearances as the same character.)”
Well, William Roache has been in Coronation Street more-or-less continuously for nearly 63 years (that’s in the Guinness Book of Records as well), with Barbara Knox only just behind him at nearly 59 years since her first appearance (with a 7 year gap between her first and second) and Eileen Derbyshire on 58 after her cameo in 2019 having previously appeared from 1961 to 2016.
A lot of people think Klingon honor actually permits the massacre of noncombatants due to the actions of people like Duras in ENT and the behavior of Kor. However, I should note this is not actually true. “House of Quark” makes it clear that cutting down a Ferengi helpless before you was dishonorable and worthy of dis-commendation. The lawyer, Kolas, in “Judgement”, makes it clear that he’s utterly disgusted by the massacre of refugees and believes Duras will LIE (and did in fact) about them being terrorists to gain unearned glory. Klingon honor says anything to achieve victory is justifiable but pointless massacres are still high on the monster scale.
Which is to say honor is a matter of interpretation, probably like most religions, but there’s plenty of people who’d probably view Dak’Rah as scum for the same reasons humans would.
@46/C.T. Phipps: “I think it’s a very interesting interrogation of the fact a lot of Trek just allows war criminals to walk away in the name of peace.”
And yet this episode is willing to let M’Benga walk away with (probable) murder. The more I think about that, the more I hate it. I don’t like the tendency of TV series to let their protagonists commit murder and go unpunished for it as long as they pledge not to do it again. The ethical thing to do in that case is to confess, plead guilty, and pay your debt to society, not to cover it up and escape consequences. If this was murder rather than self-defense, then I don’t want M’Benga to get away with it. It’s not something he should get away with. Hopefully at some point he’ll turn himself in, do his time in a humane Federation rehab facility, then get out in a few years and take a job as McCoy’s subordinate. Maybe Spock and Kirk are willing to give him a chance when others won’t, because they knew him before.
I mean, the hypocrisy here is that part of what made M’Benga so furious at Rah was that Rah was in denial about his true crimes, hiding under a facade of redemption while failing to own up to what he really did. If M’Benga just hides behind the pretense that his killing was self-defense, he’s doing the same thing. Redemption requires owning what you did.
@52/SteveM: “Data in “The Most Toys”, and he lies about it,”
Uhh, Data didn’t kill Fajo. He was beamed away before he could fire, so it was left deliberately ambiguous whether he would have killed Fajo or not. Fajo was taken into custody and had a final verbal exchange with Data in the Enterprise brig.
And despite the writers’ intent, I still believe Data wasn’t lying. After all, the conceit was that he could see no way to stop Fajo without killing him, but I could see an obvious way the writers missed — graze the force-field box with the disruptor pistol so that Data could touch Fajo and detain him nonlethally. (Or maybe that was more of a costuming/directorial error, putting the box on Fajo’s hip where Data had a clear shot at it, rather than putting it more centrally on Fajo’s body.) If I could see that solution, surely Data could. So the episode failed to sell its pretense that there was no other option.
“* Janeway in “Tuvix”,”
A captain has the right to make decisions that send members of their crew to their deaths in order to save others. She effectively saved two lives by sacrificing one. What captain hasn’t given orders like that? “Tuvix” was a Trolley Problem — the only options were to kill one person or to kill more than one person. There was no right decision, just an agonizing choice between two wrong ones. It’s the same moral dilemma the Doctor faced in “Latent Image,” yet for some reason people are far harsher to Janeway.
“* Riker in “Up the Long Ladder”,”
It was both Riker and Pulaski, and they were “aborting” half-formed clones of themselves which weren’t yet viable. So you’re getting into very muddy waters here.
“* and even M’Benga erasing someone’s pattern in this episode would be investigated.”
Battlefield triage. Again, sacrificing one life to save others is a decision that doctors and commanders often have to make.
describing M’Benga’s actions as murder is problematic. During the scuffle, he is clearly her to tell Rah to get his hands off of him and Rah addresses him as a stubborn “human,” indicating that in meeting a Terran who won’t bow to his will, Rah shows his true colors. And considering they were so eager to prosecute Una, it seems unfathomable that the federation wouldn’t put Rah on trial. He murdered hundreds of thousands of people and got away with it with the Federation’s blessing. He should not have aggressively put his hands on M’Benga twice. I do see the doctor’s actions as self-defense, not murder. That said, I hope M’Benga, who is at his core, deeply good-hearted, can heal.
@9 / CLB: Don’t forget his colleagues, Sis, Boom, and Bah.
@57/Jamie: I want to believe it was self-defense, but the way M’Benga premeditatedly left the knife in the open, as if hoping to provoke Dak’Rah into attacking him with it so he could fight back, makes self-defense harder to justify.
@41 – Christopher, that’s very hard to Paul Fix, who had quite the career and certainly wasn’t unmemorable!
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Paul_Fix
@60 – Thank you, yes, Paul Fix was a good actor. But then I’m a bit biased. My parents named me after one of his characters. No kidding, they really did.
As for recasting Dr. Piper, it’s a pipe dream on my part, but I think Bob Odenkirk would be a good choice to play him. Can’t say why exactly, other than I like Odenkirk.
There’s also the amusement of casting a man named OdenKIRK on a STAR TREK show where he could conceivably meet James T. Kirk.
@56 said: If this was murder rather than self-defense, then I don’t want M’Benga to get away with it. It’s not something he should get away with.
I think you’re missing the point of the end of the episode. M’Benga may not face legal consequences, but he has gotten away with nothing. He’s in a worse “prison” than any tribunal could send him to. He sees himself as broken beyond fixing. It wouldn’t take much to assume that his daughter’s illness was maybe the only reason he hadn’t hunted Rah down and killed him before now. Like the broken bio-bed, he may work well from time to time but he believes he will ultimately always fail to do the things he’s meant to. We see throughout the episode those little moments that make us want to believe that he’s wrong and that he is a “good” person (“Let’s pretend the war doesn’t bother us” being a particularly touching one). But hat isn’t ultimately what he believes of himself. He believes that person was destroyed by the war and he’s just pretending to be the good one trying to make it true
”I find it ironic that the one trait M’Benga had in TOS, that he was an expert in Vulcan medicine, has been virtually ignored in SNW”
I don’t think there’s any irony at all. I don’t believe he is an expert in Vulcan medicine yet. I think this episode is intended to provide an explanation/catalyst for M’Benga taking time to study on Vulcan — sure, for pure science/academics to learn more about Vulcan physiology, but also in the hope of learning some Vulcan techniques that can help him deal with his PTSD.
@60/Jarvisimo: I’ve seen at least one thing where I thought Paul Fix did a reasonably good job — I think it was Land of the Giants — but in “Where No Man,” he was a non-entity. He certainly wasn’t given anything to work with there.
@62/twels: “I think you’re missing the point of the end of the episode.”
No, I get what it was going for, I just don’t agree with its approach. Not unless it’s a setup for something more down the road.
“He’s in a worse “prison” than any tribunal could send him to. He sees himself as broken beyond fixing.”
You’re just reinforcing my view that he shouldn’t cover up what he did. The Federation has an enlightened penal system focused on rehabilitation (at least, assuming the pre-bad-guy Tristan Adams’s reforms have gone through by this point). If he confessed, he’d get psychological help in coping with his trauma. Admitting what you’ve done wrong, taking responsibility for it rather than hiding it, is the first step in recovery.
Maybe this was just my impression, but the thing that struck me about the final dialogue between Pike and M’Benga was that it seemed like Anson Mount was mouthing the lines (the “who are we to judge” stuff) as if Pike himself didn’t fully believe them, like he’s parroting the Starfleet line while he himself isn’t entirely sure of where he falls.
It’s the kind of dialogue that Patrick Stewart would have done (and did do, on multiple occasions) with a full measure of gravitas and righteousness —and we know that Mount is capable of that same tone, so it seems like a conscious choice on the part of Mount and/or the director.
@64: Admitting what you’ve done wrong, taking responsibility for it rather than hiding it, is the first step in recovery.
That may be true – but M’Benga doesn’t see what he’s done as wrong. He says it was justice that Rah received. It’s a horrible justice – and an incredibly debatable one. “I didn’t start the fight but I’m glad he’s dead” is as close to a “confession” as we are likely to get. Let’s not forget, M’Benga gave Rah two chances to walk out of that room alive – and Rah responded by refusing to leave and then invading his space, grabbing his shoulder. Granted, Rah was panicked by the fact that his secret could get out. The true question – which is unanswerable – is whether Rah’s conversion was genuine or just the avoidance of damnation. It’s clear what side of that argument M’Benga believed
I just re-watched the final fight scene, and it’s definitely more complex than I initially believed. The first thing I noticed was that the dying Andorian gave M’Benga the names of the four Klingons responsible for the massacre and told him to take care of them. M’Benga than tells Rah “I looked for you, now here you are.” I took that to mean that Joseph hunted Rah for a time, but stopped for some reason. Second, M’Benga is looking in the box where the knife is held before Rah comes in, almost like he’s thinking about what to do with it. He goes back and opens it in the middle of the conversation, immediately after saying “You never paid for what you did.”
However, the fight itself is a little less clear. You never actually see who picked up the knife first, and this is the exchange immediately before the stabbing:
M’Benga: Get your hands off!
Rah: So selfish a human!
M’Benga: Don’t!
::stab::
Notably, after Chapel comes in and sees Rah actually die, we see Rah’s hand fall from the hilt of the knife, which makes it look like he actually stabbed himself. It could also be that he tried to pull it out, but didn’t have the strength. I was wrong when I said I didn’t think it was ambiguous. There are a lot of possible explanations for what happened. For now, I’m going to choose to believe that Rah knew the jig was up and his cowardice was going to be exposed. So he took the coward’s way out. I also believe M’Benga planned to kill him, and felt guilty enough about that that he didn’t tell the full truth to Pike.
@41/CLB: I have full faith in the writers of SNW to take a nothing burger character like Dr. Piper as portrayed in “The Cage” and do something substantial with it. He doesn’t even have to be played again by a white guy as this show’s casting has already changed the ethnicity of Robert Apri and even changed the species of Yeoman Colt as shown on season 2 of Discovery.
@66 – “Let’s not forget, M’Benga gave Rah two chances to walk out of that room alive – and Rah responded by refusing to leave and then invading his space, grabbing his shoulder.”
Deciding to murder someone because of that sounds suspiciously close to the stand your ground laws that are in place in a number of states.
M’Benga was closer to the door and was able to walk away. Rah was unarmed. M’Benga had the knife, easily accessible.
All M’Benga had to do was walk away and call security.
@59:
I read the sequence of events as M’Benga considering murdering Rah (hence getting out the knife), while trying to convince himself that he shouldn’t, and asking Rah to go away. Then we don’t see what happens next, but it seems to me that Rah grabbed hold of M’Benga — probably trying to “shake some sense into him” or something? — and M’Benga fights back. When Rah won’t let go, M’Benga likely then used the knife.
Not exactly clear self-defense, but also not precisely pre-meditated murder either. M’Benga was in a state of heightened anxiety, being confronted by the person responsible for his trauma, and it’s possible he perceived Rah to be a threat to his life, even if that perception was falsely informed by his mental state at the time. Messy, messy, messy all around.
As for whether Rah was genuine or not…? I don’t think he was, but I also think he didn’t have any other play to make than to try and convince himself, the Federation, and the Klingon Empire that he was. Brokering a proper peace deal between the Federation and the Klingon Empire was probably the only path he had to possibly recovering some of his lost status. He was very insistent on getting M’Benga’s assistance, so it seems it was that important to him.
The story of him being the “Butcher of J’Gal” is actually in the Klingon Empire’s best interest, since it implies the highest-ranked official around was so horrified by the dishonorable actions of his subordinate that he murdered them all. Even if that had been the true story, he would still have had to flee the Empire. It’s also in the best interests of the Federation, since he’s an important diplomat. But does that make it justified to let him escape judgement? I don’t know.
If Rah knew it was someone else that killed his subordinates why would he ever think the truth wouldn’t get out? Am I missing something?
@71 I think his plan was always to do what he tried with M’Benga if he ever encountered the person who actually killed them (which he probably thought was unlikely): convince that person to join with him in his “quest for peace.” It was only when M’Benga refused that offer that things got ugly.
@1 Jaimebabb
I came away from this with the firm belief that Rah was a coward, using the attack on his officers by M’Benga to make his escape, and then using his conversion to peace and diplomacy as a way to escape the consequences for his war crimes. Whether his change was genuine becomes immaterial when considering this his true motivation.
He obviously was, would have continued being, an effective diplomat. But there was no sign of contrition or regret for his actions. M’Benga served the only justice available for the General’s victims.
@66/twels: “That may be true – but M’Benga doesn’t see what he’s done as wrong.”
Then why the hell would he lie about it?? If you commit a crime that you believe is just, you don’t hide it; you admit it openly and face whatever legal consequences come with it, because that in itself is part of behaving justly and ethically. Lying about it implies consciousness of guilt. It’s exactly what you don’t do if you believe you were justified in breaking the law.
Of course, that’s if he actually murdered Rah to begin with. The director told CinemaBlend that the scene (or at least the version they went with) was deliberately filmed to be ambiguous, so it’s unclear whether it was murder, self-defense, or suicide: https://www.cinemablend.com/interviews/star-trek-strange-new-worlds-under-the-cloak-of-war-director-purpose-ending-alternate-takes-filmed
@68/garreth: “I have full faith in the writers of SNW to take a nothing burger character like Dr. Piper as portrayed in “The Cage” and do something substantial with it.”
Sure, hypothetically, if they chose to. I’ve already said that (and I’ve spent much of the past 20 years of my own career fleshing out bit Trek players and background extras into fully developed characters or alien cultures). I just don’t consider it important for them to make the attempt. It’s just checking off a continuity box, and the Trek creators are already way too preoccupied with doing that.
I mean, sure, a lot of continuity-based stories can add something meaningful, like the way SNW has fleshed out Spock & Chapel’s history. But Piper is a complete non-character in the second pilot, nothing but a plot convenience with no identity. There’s no hook to make it worth the effort of checking off that box.
@74 The director’s comments are very interesting, because he makes it clear that there wasn’t any ambiguity for them. It doesn’t sound like they filmed one version where M’Benga does in self defense, one where it’s suicide, etc. There is a correct answer out there somewhere, which makes me think there will definitely be a follow up on it sometime in the future. At that point, I think they’ll use the alternate take he mentioned as a flashback.
I watched it earlier today, and I’m not really sure how I feel about it.
This episode definitely had a great deal of moral ambiguity to it. It reminded me of some of the later episodes of DS9 and of the third season of Enterprise. It raises a lot of questions, and doesn’t offer any easy answers. I guess that’s a good thing, that it actually gets you thinking.
Thinking about it some more, I guess one of the really unsettling aspects of it is that, in that final scene, Pike and M’Benga were both right. Pike is correct to work to make higher ideals a reality, and M’Benga is right that people who have been through literal hell are understandably going to have an extremely difficult time believing in those sort of higher ideals.
And M’Benga’s line at the end “Some things break in a way that can never be repaired. Only managed.” That was heartbreaking :(
@19 / C.T. Phipps
Weirdly, my biggest comment about this episode is, “How stupid is the Federation?” Going with the above Eichmann example, General Dak’Rah is a guy SO SCUMMY and SO DISHONORABLE that the Klingons call what he did mass murder and this is a guy the Federation appoints as an ambassador.
Consider this to be the Federation’s version Operation Paperclip, with Dak’Rah as their Wernher von Braun. The Federation has often been shown to be an organization in which its publicly-stated ideals & principles are in conflict with realpolitik, and I have no trouble believing that someone in Starfleet or the Federation Council decided the strategic and public relations benefits of giving shelter to a war criminal turned defector far outweighed the negatives.
@77
Weirdly, a thing that occurred to me in this episode is this is possibly the ONE time I would ever think using Section 31 would be justified since DS9. I would have loved to have it reveal that Dak’Rah was manufactured by a Operation: Paperclip, as you say, except the idea wasn’t science but DIPLOMACY.
“Starfleet Intelligence grabbed me, lied about my involvement in the massacre, gave me a fake honor and had me going around various planets where I told about how corrupt as well as awful the Klingon Empire was. It’s been incredibly effective and we’ve caused many races to join the Federation or settle the feuds the Klingons have been promoting for their own interests.”
I would 1000% prefer THAT Section 31 to the one that does horrific war crimes like experimenting on Changelings.
@74 said: Then why the hell would he lie about it?? If you commit a crime that you believe is just, you don’t hide it; you admit it openly and face whatever legal consequences come with it, because that in itself is part of behaving justly and ethically. Lying about it implies consciousness of guilt. It’s exactly what you don’t do if you believe you were justified in breaking the law
He would lie for the reason he gave Captain Pike. He pointed out that Pike can live in a world where he doesn’t have to compromise his principles and humanity but M’Benga no longer has that choice. He’s compromised because of his actions – and those of the Klingons – in the war. What is right and what the law allows are two different things for him.
What is gained from the truth? Pike has to arrest his friend. The knowledge Rah was a fraud threatens to undo all the treaties he’s negotiate. Something tells me that the man with “the most hand-to-hand kills” is willing to make moral compromises. One death to avenge the many innocents Rah set his soldiers loose on and one lie to avoid more people being hurt may not seem like such a bad bargain to someone with that sort of experience balancing life and death
If I may say so, a brilliant and passionate analysis. I am honored to read it.
I knew I recognized the actor from somewhere beneath the Klingon prosthetics! I recently rewatched The Wire. Wisdom has such a distinct face and voice. He really brings a level of expression to Rah that you don’t see in the average Klingon. The way he plays diplomat, salesman and politician really make him stand out.
Rah is definitely NOT the honor-seeking Klingon from the Berman era that Moore spent a lot of time developing, nor is he the fanatical version that Kurtzman, Goldsman and Bryan Fuller birthed in the early days of Discovery. This version is a lot closer to the more fluid Klingon characterization from TOS, seeking to reinvent himself whenever circumstances require to do so, for his own purposes. A character like Worf would gladly dismember this guy if he knew the truth about J’gal as M’Benga did.
It’s not the first Trek episode to resemble M.A.S.H. though. DS9 had emulated that setting more than once (“Nor the Battle to the Strong” and “Siege of ARR-558” both come to mind). This one felt particularly similar to that Jake/Bashir episode. But in a very good way. The scene where civilian casualties start coming in – including dismembered children – was rather horrifying by Trek standards. But so is the scene where M’Benga brutally takes down those Klingons (who definitely do NOT spill TUC pink blood). I can’t think of a recent episode of Trek that exemplifies the brutality and stupidity of war better than this one. “All wars are crimes” indeed.
And having seen what he’s done here to Rah, I’m confident we’re being given the reason as to why he plays third tier banana to McCoy by the time we get to TOS and “Private Little War”. If the truth ever comes out, this is going to have severe consequences for the character. And even if it doesn’t, I wouldn’t be surprised if Pike stopped trusting him as a senior officer in the long run. And if Piper does indeed replace him as head CMO – as pointed above, it would be an opportunity to reinvent and improve the one-time character from the second pilot episode.
Overall, a gutsy, challenging episode that’s not afraid to go dark when it’s needed. Yet another winner for SNW.
@79/twels: “What is right and what the law allows are two different things for him.”
That’s called thinking like a criminal. That’s called hiding from responsibility instead of taking it. That’s called being a self-serving coward or a narcissist putting yourself above society’s rules, rather than an ethical person. None of that is what I want M’Benga to be.
“What is gained from the truth?”
I told you. A humane, enlightened penal system that focuses on rehabilitating people and helping them recover, as opposed to America’s current obscenely abusive, brutal prison system that just makes people worse. If M’Benga’s suffering as much as you say, he shouldn’t suffer in silence, he should get the help he needs.
“The knowledge Rah was a fraud threatens to undo all the treaties he’s negotiate.”
The details could be classified. And you’re just making excuses for M’Benga evading responsibility for his actions.
“One death to avenge the many innocents Rah set his soldiers loose on and one lie to avoid more people being hurt may not seem like such a bad bargain to someone with that sort of experience balancing life and death”
A Federation doctor should not think in terms of wanting revenge. Meeting death with more death is not “balance,” it just adds more red to the ledger.
@81/Eduardo: “And if Piper does indeed replace him as head CMO – as pointed above, it would be an opportunity to reinvent and improve the one-time character from the second pilot episode.”
Or, they could introduce a new character to be CMO. They didn’t bring in Scotty when Hemmer died, they created Pelia. Not everything has to be continuity porn.
I adore this episode. Yes, M’Benga and Chapel fall way short of the idealized persons of the Star Trek Universe, but that makes them in my book throughly *human*. I do not buy that people are perfectible but that it is a goal we strive for and fail but in failing we must strive even more.
I don’t think there is any ambiguity in who killed who. M’benga took the knife and killed. Having it out doesn’t prove remediation and Rah refusing to leave is far from justification for lethal force. I believe the doc, broken by PTSD and anger lashed out and killed in passion not in cold judgment. It is not right, and he should suffer justice for it, but it utterly understandable. The same for Chapel. (I also Adore Jess Bush and this version of Chapel.) She understands what she has done in backing M’benga, but like him, and like Frodo, the war has changed her and there are wounds that never heal.
I think Pike understood exactly what happened. I don’t think he bought the cover story for a moment, but facing his own emotions and the lack of real physical evidence he decided to say nothing, his own failing, and something very human.
Sometimes something can’t be fixed but only managed. That’s the entire truth and theme in a sentence as perfectly encapsulated as ‘I killed him for the money and a woman. I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman.”
While I am an old man and Trek to me always mean TOS, and I haven’t taken to Discovery, or Lower Decks, I love SNW because it both gives me that original Trek feeling but with more moral ambiguity that suits this lover of noir.
I think it’s pretty clear that M’Benga opened the box knowing or hoping that Dak’Rah wouldn’t leave him be; that he would lay hands on him and so give him at least some way to plausibly claim that it was self-defence. Buy I think that it was very clearly an act of murder.
If they do get rid of M’Benga, sending him off on psych leave or whatever, I’d be much happier if he were replaced by an alien doctor than if they brought in another legacy character like Piper or McCoy. The senior staff has been entirely too human since Hemmer died, especially with Spock acting all chummy emotional this season.
@81/Eduardo – Robert Wisdom actually reminded me of Christopher Plummer more than any other actor who’s played a Klingon. I appreciate the sophistication he brings to the role, especially after Discovery mostly portrayed the Klingons as snarling goons.
@52/ I think that they establish in “The Star Gazer” that Agnes was tried for murdering Maddox between seasons and found not guilty by reason of Romulan brainwashing. Still it’s not like she got away scott-free; it seems to have basically ruined her life. Incidentally, I think that Seven killing B’Jayzl in the same episode also absolutely counts as murder.
@73/ Yeah I rewatched this episode last night because I liked it so much and on the second viewing, my impression is that Dak’Rah might be a good diplomat and he might even genuinely prefer the Federation to the life of a Klingon Warrior, but he’s not really contrite. He seems like he’s essentially a psychopath, especially in how he continues to inflict his presence on M’Benga, despite his clear trauma, as a means of advancing his career.
@56/ChristopherLBennett:
Regarding “The Most Toys”, I should have said “attempted homicide” and not “homicide”. The episode establishes that the weapon Data fires is “a most lethal weapon” (I believe is Data’s wording), so the episode taken at face value lends itself to the conclusion that Data firing the weapon is a clear intent to kill. Data’s attempted killing of Fajo is not justified under current laws, so it almost certainly wouldn’t be in the future, either. We cannot kill merely because we anticipate someone will continue being a criminal in the future.
I completely disagree about “Tuvix.” There are military situations where a commanding officer can order a subordinate to perform a duty that will likely lead to his or death, but this was a medical situation. This is more comparable to killing someone, giving his organs to multiple dying patients, and saying that sacrificing one person saved many more. It’s not the same as the Doctor’s choice in “Latent Image” because the Doctor didn’t actively harm the patient who died. He could only save one patient, so he chose the one he knew better. His decision might be reviewed to see if he followed proper triage procedures, but Janeway would be likely be charged with homicide in “Tuvix.”
In “Up the Long Ladder”, I do not recall anything in the episode saying the clone was not yet viable. It’s absolutely not murky. Even if someone has stolen something from you, you cannot trespass on their property, discharge a weapon, and destroy something valuable. Even if Riker avoids a homicide charge (which he probably wouldn’t since he would likely be under Mariposa law in this case), this is a career-ending offense. And in every jurisdiction I can think of, if we are to use the analogy of a fetus before viability, then destroying said fetus that doesn’t belong to you without permission is a serious felony.
It’s also not correct to call clearing Alvarado from the pattern buffer to be mere triage. If all the patients arrived at similar times and M’Benga decided to save the others and not Alvarado, so be it. If, when Alvarado arrived, M’Benga said he couldn’t place Alvarado in the pattern buffer because it was reserved for medical evacuation procedures, that would also be acceptable. But once the step of placing Alvarado in the pattern buffer was taken, then Alvarado’s care became the responsibility of the physician.
I really enjoy reading the analyses you provide in the comments, but I do believe here these are really misplaced thoughts on both law and ethics. And there are some darker arguments that might be derived from the ones you’ve made. For example, if a captain can kill a person to save two people, then can a captain torture someone to save two people? Could a captain forcibly remove someone’s organs (without killing him/her) to save someone else? Can police officers shoot unarmed criminals simply because the officers believe the criminals will continue to commit crimes in the future? I don’t know how we get from phrases like “all wars are crimes,” “to seek out new life”, and “first, do no harm” to openly justifying all kinds of homicide.
@86/Steve M: “Regarding “The Most Toys”, I should have said “attempted homicide” and not “homicide”. The episode establishes that the weapon Data fires is “a most lethal weapon” (I believe is Data’s wording), so the episode taken at face value lends itself to the conclusion that Data firing the weapon is a clear intent to kill.”
As I already said, I know perfectly well that’s what the episode intended to convey, that Data had absolutely no choice but to kill — but it failed to do so due to the costuming decision to put the anti-Data forcefield box on Fajo’s hip where Data could’ve easily disabled it with a grazing shot that wouldn’t have struck Fajo’s body, thereby allowing him to take Fajo into custody non-lethally. So of course I know what the episode was trying to convince me of, but I don’t buy it, because it failed in the execution. If that was what they wanted me to believe, they should’ve done a better job making it convincing. I hate it when storytellers try to create a situation that has only one possible solution, but overlook an obvious alternative.
“I completely disagree about “Tuvix.””
Not really, because I’m not saying sacrificing Tuvix was right; I’m saying both choices were equally wrong. It’s profoundly missing the point of the entire episode to think there could possibly be a right answer. The whole thing that makes it powerful is that both options are equally bad, but Janeway still had to choose one. Like I said, it’s the Trolley Problem. The whole point is that there is no good outcome.
Plus, it seems a little unfair to condemn Janeway for bringing back Tuvok and Neelix, because it was always obvious that the show wasn’t going to fire two series regulars in favor of a one-shot guest star. Janeway’s “choices” as a fictional character were constrained by the realities the writers were working under. The reset button was always going to be pressed; it was just a question of how the episode rationalized it.
“In “Up the Long Ladder”, I do not recall anything in the episode saying the clone was not yet viable.”
Since it was a metaphor for abortion rights and bodily autonomy, I think it’s obvious we’re meant to side with Riker and Pulaski, which means that we’re meant to presume they only destroyed nonviable embryo/fetus equivalents. As with the Fajo example, it was a flaw in the production that the clones were depicted as adult-sized forms.
Also, why do you keep mentioning Riker and ignoring Pulaski’s equal part in the incident?
“It’s also not correct to call clearing Alvarado from the pattern buffer to be mere triage.”
Did I say “mere?” War forces people to make horrible choices all the time. We’re not supposed to think they’re right. We’re supposed to understand the principle that Keith named this column after. War compels people to do evil things because they have no other choice. If every death inflicted in war were prosecuted as murder, every combat veteran would be in prison.
@@@@@Steve M: I love “Tuvix” and I’d actually offer it as a counterpoint to this episode in some ways.
A lot of people rag on it, but for me the genius of “Tuvix” is that the writers don’t actually take a side. The episode works whether you agree with Janeway or not (and, crucially, Janeway herself is pretty clearly horrified by what she’s decided to do).
The unjoining of Tuvix is presented as utterly harrowing. Tuvix begs for his life, several of the bridge crew barely stop themselves from intervening, and the EMH refuses to follow Janeway’s order on ethical grounds. The viewer is invited to take part in the same dilemma as the characters, and no matter which conclusion you reach (if you’re even able to reach a conclusion, given what a no-win nightmare situation it is), some of the main cast agree with you and voice their stance in a reasonable and clear way.
The only real opposing voice we get in this episode is Pike, at the very end. From a writing standpoint, Pike’s presence in that final conversation didn’t feel like it was to offer the view that M’Benga’s actions were unacceptable, but rather the inverse, to act as a naive strawman who’s there to allow M’Benga justify himself by giving Pike the “you are privileged” smackdown, to which the script doesn’t even let Pike respond.
I understand of course that the episode doesn’t invite the viewer to celebrate Rah’s murder or anything, and the message we’re meant to take away is that “war is horrific, M’Benga will never escape the mental hell he’s in, and war continues to claim lives even after it’s officially over”.
But the ending, nonetheless, felt to me like it wanted to absolve M’Benga, even if just through the dual lenses of “give him a break, he’s got PTSD” and “Rah was a bastard, you know?”. “Tuvix” offers no such absolution for Janeway (nor “In The Pale Moonlight” for Sisko) – she’s just left with the reality of having chosen between two unjustifiable positions, and having to live with it.
Something else that wound me up a bit in this episode was Number One telling Pike that it’s not fair to ask the crew to put aside their feelings about the Klingon War.
…yes, it is. We’re a Starfleet vessel, the crew are on duty. They’re meant to be the representatives of the people of Earth. Unless they’re ordered to do something they think is genuinely unconscionable, their personal feelings on the mission literally don’t matter.
Una was of course right to raise the issue with Pike and point out that crew morale was taking a hit from the presence of Rah, and of course as the Captain and XO they need to be aware of any potential issues that could flare from people who’ve served in the Klingon War, but… come on, we’re adults, we’re government representatives, and we’re the closest thing Earth has to military officers. You can’t ask the crew to like or forgive Rah, but Pike was asking them to do neither. He only needed his crew to be able to act calmly and civilly and mask their feelings for a couple of days in the name of basic diplomacy, and apparently that was considered too much to ask. Ortegas at the dinner was pretty dire – it makes total sense that she’d feel the way she does, but it doesn’t make much sense to me that, as a trained Starfleet officer with plenty of experience, she’d be so bad at controlling herself that she’d just try to wreck an entire diplomatic event like that.
I often thought as a kid that TOS was a bit too militaristic/navy-ish at times, and preferred the more chilled out and communal style of starships in TNG/VOY, but the SNW crew could really use TOS Kirk coming along and getting them into line a bit. The SNW crew take the piss at times, and it’s not helped by Pike being so lax that he makes Sisko look downright proactive.
The simple fact is that Pike’s argument, by definition, also says that he should forgive M’Benga.
@90: That’s kind of what I’m getting at. Pike’s purpose in that scene, from a writing standpoint, seemed to be to let M’Benga justify himself. Pike wasn’t there to give an actual counterpoint to or condemnation of M’Benga’s actions, but rather to offer some easily-defeated soundbites, make his own position look shallow, and allow M’Benga to accuse him of being naive and privileged.
I don’t think the writers intended Pike to be a serious force of opposition in that scene, they just intended him to act as a launchpad for M’Benga’s assertion that justice has been achieved through violence.
@87/ChristoperLBennett:
“If every death inflicted in war were prosecuted as murder, every combat veteran would be in prison.”
I should start by saying that I agree with this. That’s why some killings are justifiable. Depending on the legal system or the system of ethics, killing in war, capital punishment, killing in self-defense, and abortion (recognizing that many people might dispute the use of the word “killing” here) can be justified. Some killings cannot be justified.
Janeway, who has no license to practice medicine, commits homicide among other crimes with her acts in “Tuvix”. There is a correct solution in this episode, and it is not to kill Tuvix. I realize that the episode can only end for practical reasons with the return of Tuvok and Neelix, but that doesn’t make Janeway’s actions within her fictional universe ethical. Again, the most relevant analogy, is that one person cannot be unwillingly killed and harvested for organs to save other people. This “Trolley Problem” is actually contemplated within medical literature and resolved in this scenario on the side of not killing the patient.
I can’t give “Up the Long Ladder” a pass for being a metaphor for abortion. It actually becomes even more repugnant then. We would be saying, Riker, who in such a metaphor would be the father, has a right to destroy the fetus without the consent of the mother, and that he can trespass and discharge a weapon in the process. This seems to be the opposite of the ethical argument for abortion.
(My recollection of the episode is that Riker destroys both clones, which is why I haven’t included Pulaski. I would have to rewatch the episode and watch her actions and listen to what she says to think if she has committed any chargeable offenses beyond trespassing.)
As for M’Benga, it’s just not good enough to say war forces people to make horrible choices. Even within war, there are rules. There are laws. Service members are trained to follow these rules. Sometimes these rules seem extremely unfair, but they must be followed. In these examples I’ve named, the rules were not followed.
In the best episodes, like “In the Pale Moonlight”, Sisko knows that he made the legally wrong choice and grapples with it and decides he made the choice that he can live with, regardless of the law. Another example is “Empok Nor.” O’Brien is justified in trying to kill Garak because Garak is actively trying to kill Starfleet personnel. Likewise, Garak is remorseful for his conduct but still has to face an investigation. Another good example includes Picard in Insurrection basically telling the admiral that the immorality of displacing a population to save lives can’t be overcome by an appeal to the numbers. These decisions are tough, but service members go through thousands of hours of training so that when the time comes, they have the ability to make the right decision. Those decisions don’t involve killing fellow service members, except perhaps when a fellow service member is violently threatening members of their own side.
To remain on topic, I will say that I believe Strange New Worlds is a good show. Because I believe it is good, I think we have not seen the end of this storyline with M’Benga. Maybe we will find out more details about his encounter with the ambassador. Maybe he has committed immoral actions that will eventually catch up with him, but I don’t think the series will let this issue drop. And maybe the series will force us to confront an uncomfortable reality — that the same people who are capable of amazing acts of kindness are also capable of some of the most depraved acts of cruelty.
@92/Steve M: “Again, the most relevant analogy, is that one person cannot be unwillingly killed and harvested for organs to save other people.”
I hate it when people try to reduce “Tuvix” to pat analogies to real-life scenarios. The whole thing that makes it such a terrific science fiction story is that it’s a situation that could not possibly exist without its conjectural scientific element. No real-life analogy actually works, because it’s a unique situation. Tuvix is not a separate person from Tuvok and Neelix; he’s a fusion between them, like the way a joined Trill is a fusion of symbiont and host. Trying to dumb it down to a simplified analogy to a real situation is as bad as trying to argue there’s a “right” answer — both are deliberately refusing to engage with the unique complexity that makes the story so fascinating.
I am so sick of people taking sides on “Tuvix,” insisting that there’s an unambiguously correct reading of the episode. We aren’t supposed to be able to pick a clear answer. That’s the whole point. Too few people are willing to relish the ambiguity, and that’s just sad.
“We would be saying, Riker, who in such a metaphor would be the father, has a right to destroy the fetus without the consent of the mother, and that he can trespass and discharge a weapon in the process.”
What a bizarre misreading. Riker is the mother in the analogy — as is Pulaski, whom you still bizarrely insist on erasing. (It doesn’t matter who fired the phaser; they were both clearly in agreement on the course of action and the underlying ethics.) They’re the ones who were forcibly assaulted, whose bodily autonomy was violated to produce offspring they didn’t consent to have, and who assert the right to decide for themselves what to do with their genetic material, rather than have a government take that choice away from them.
@88/Descent:
I agree with you about M’Benga and about “In the Pale Moonlight”. I can only meet you halfway on “Tuvix”. The episode may intend to take no sides. It does show Tuvix pleading and the Doctor refusing to cooperate. But ultimately, Janeway is never investigated or criticized for it again. And yeah, I realize that Voyager is the type of show where follow-through is difficult.
I don’t see any more ethical quandary with Tuvix than M’Benga clearing the buffer to save more lives in this episode. Neelix and Tuvok are imprisoned in Tuvix’s body and the latter has to die to save both.
@94/Steve M: In fairness, there’s not really anything that can be done to Janeway. The crew, while some of them were revolted by her decision, all seemed to understand that it was an impossible choice, so there’s no real chance of a mutiny or anything. The best she can do is write a full account in her log (which I’m sure she would do) and have it reviewed by Starfleet on their eventual return to Earth, along with the rest of her decisions during the voyage. I was happy enough with the way the episode itself made clear that it was a haunting decision that would weigh on everyone involved – like how we know the Edith Keeler situation would have haunted Kirk without necessarily needing to see it brought up again.
@95/ C.T. Phipps: Not sure about that. As CLB says, the genius of “Tuvix” is that it’s got no real-world allegory, it’s a hypothetical issue resulting from hypothetical technology with no real life equivalent. It’s one viewpoint that Tuvok and Neelix are trapped and that Tuvix is simply a fusion of them that acts irrationally, but it’s an equally valid view that Tuvix is a new, independent lifeform with as much right to life as Tuvok and Neelix both had. If you view Tuvix as an independent lifeform – which there’s plenty of reason to do – Janeway can’t kill him to save her friends, for the same reason she couldn’t kill the Vidiian who stole Neelix’s lungs.
I always viewed Janeway’s decision as her accepting the brutal reality of command – she needs her tactical officer back if Voyager is to survive its journey, and the emotional appeal from Kes spurred her into action. But even Janeway isn’t under the illusion that she’s doing anything other than committing murder, hence her obvious revulsion at her own decision, and the fact it takes her so long to steel herself and carry it out. Most of the crew seem to view it the same way, especially when Tuvix is begging for his life on the bridge near the end – Tom looks like he’s about to intervene, but stops himself, realising that there’s no right answer and they’re going to be doing the unthinkable no matter what choice Janeway makes.
A deliciously complex episode, and I’m loving the discussion here. That said, from my perspective I don’t think there’s any ambiguity about M’Benga’s actions whatsoever. This was premeditated murder with a premeditated intent to get away with it. What I’m not seeing in the debate about this is something Krad emphasized in his review and it’s as clear as day. M’Benga could have killed Rah countless different ways, but he intentionally chose the one piece of evidence that exists in the universe that would clear himself from suspicion and condemn Rah himself as the instigator. M’Benga planned to kill him, he killed him, and then he refused to own up to it. He’s a cold-blooded killer. Not purist Trek, but as others have noted, this is really heavy DS9 kind of stuff and this episode adds layer upon layer of complexity to several of the characters. M’Benga is deplorable, but I love him as a character in this show and I hope we see a lot more of him. :)
The resolution with Pike just sort of meekly walking away and allowing this all to have happened with no retribution for anyone doesn’t really fly with me. At the beginning of the episode we were led to believe if Rah was going to be the subject of even a side-eye glance of disrespect, there would be hell to pay. He literally gets a knife in his chest, and I guess Starfleet is like oh well…
Forgive the slight tangent, but I thought the most obvious solution to “The Most Toys” was Data simply running out of the room at android super speed, locking Daphne Moon’s boyfriend in the shuttle bay, then calling for help. No shooting required.
Yeah, I think that this episode could benefit from some Picardian speech at the end about how, even if Rah wasn’t really repentant, his death isn’t justice because the dead are still dead, and now a lot of people in the Prospero system where he was supposed to mediate a conflict are probably going to die too. But Pike’s never really been presented as that kind of a captain, so it would seem out of left field.
Portions of this episode feel directly inspired by a portion of Bujold’s Vorkosigan setting (which was itself originally inspired by Star Trek; such is the cylcle of inspiration): Admiral Aral Vorkosigan is often referred to as “The Butcher of Komarr”, due to an incident where the ruling council of the planet Komarr surrendered to him and were then massacred. Vorkosigan says that the order to kill them was given by one of his officers, whom he then killed for the said crime. Later on, family members of the victims repeatedly try to kill him in vengeance.
Rah’s crime is scaled up somewhat, but the scenario is basically the same. In Bujold’s iteration, Vorkosigan is on the same side as the protagonists (love interest, parent or uncle, depending on the book), and we are led to understand that his version of events is the true one, and the people trying to kill him (for that) are definitely in the wrong, because (aside from the fact that he was leading an invasion force) he didn’t commit any war crimes at all in that war. It’s the stuff he did in the next war that torments him all the rest of his life. Which is the one that occupies the first book, so there’d be a lot of spoilers and it’d be a slight digression.
@43
From the book I mentioned, a very relevant quotation (thinking here especially of the decisions to drop the nukes, but there’s a lot of other ones)
About why M’Benga doesn’t turn himself in; He probably will not do that until he can get his daughter out of the transporter matrix. There’s no guarantee that the next Captain will not erase her, and he has to periodically materialize and talk to her. Maybe if he can get her out of the transporter, or if she is erased, M’Benga will turn himself in.
@100
Rah lied, though. He did make the order to murder everyone on the planet.
@101
M’Benga already got his daughter out of it and she went to live with some Cloud Lady.
@93/ChristopherLBennett:
Regarding Pulaski, that’s not entirely how conspiracy works. There is a fine line, but agreeing to be a part of a conspiracy is legally different than agreeing with the objectives of the conspiracy. For example, one sample jury instruction says, it “is not sufficient to prove that (name) was a member of the conspiracy even if (name) approved of what was happening or did not object to it.” She may be guilty of some lesser crimes, but getting beyond reasonable doubt on conspiracy is unlikely.
And you’ve butchered how law is applied to facts. Yes, Riker is assaulted, but that does not make him the mother. His remedy is to have Starfleet arrest and try his attackers for assaulting him. His remedy is not to enter their property without permission, discharge a weapon, and destroy their property. When a woman aborts, she is not infringing on someone else’s land and firing weapons. It just shows how messed up the logic is in this episode. The episode is more closely (even if unintentionally) arguing that Riker is the father, and if a woman assaults him to become pregnant, he can enter her property and terminate the pregnancy. Star Trek is a great show, and it likes to tackle ethical issues, but sometimes it gets it wrong.
@94/Descent:
Yes, it’s true not much can be done to her, and Voyager rarely followed up on things (maybe the demon planet is an exception). Sometimes, Tuvok can get to Janeway emotionally. Maybe if Tuvok walked into Janeway’s office at the end and told her she made the wrong choice and that he wouldn’t have don’t the same for her, I would accept it. Or maybe if he mind-melded with her and shared how Tuvix felt, there could have been some real emotion there. But people would probably just say, “Man, they really made Tuvok a prick at the end. And what happened to the many over the few?”
Still, I don’t let this episode get away with saying it has no parallel to the real world and therefore is just meant to be ambiguous. However, I do think “Twisted” is an episode like that. I’m not saying it’s a good or bad episode. I’m just saying the science fiction doesn’t really have a real-life parallel, and the morality of Tuvok’s decision to do nothing can hardly be criticized. I would say “The Survivors” is like that as well. Uxbridge committed genocide, but the Federation doesn’t have a way of punishing a god-like being. Maybe Picard lets him off a bit too easy, but presumably, it’s completely up to Uxbridge whether he wants to spend his life in prison or not.
But I think “Tuvix” invites us to choose sides. We see crew members take sides. They argue passionately about it. I don’t think the episode asks us to give it as pass on its ethics. And in general, Star Trek makes the case as a franchise that it is in the business of having us think about ethics.
@95/C.T. Phipps:
When someone takes another person’s life, a homicide has been committed. Both Janeway and M’Benga committed homicide. However, not everyone who commits homicide is guilty of murder or manslaughter. Some homicides have justifications or defenses. Clearing the pattern buffer and forcing someone to undergo a medical procedure, as far as I know, fall under no legal defenses to homicide. Could they in the future? Possibly, but neither episode makes that case. A prosecutor may decide it is not in the interest of justice to prosecute Janeway or M’Benga, but these are unjustifiable homicides they’ve committed.
What makes great Star Trek is when the episode basically says, “Well, that may be what the law is, but this is what it should be.” “The Measure of a Man” is a great example. But with Janeway and M’Benga, the episode doesn’t put in the work to get that conclusion.
Okay, fun discussion. I’ll try to read any further responses and consider your points of view, but I may let everyone have the last word (unless I am absolutely compelled to respond), because I think good manners would dictate that I’ve monopolized more than enough cyberspace this week.
After reading about Tuvix for the umpteenth time on a thread that didn’t start out being about Tuvix, I finally watched the episode for the first time. My opinion is that the alien flower that caused the fusion of Tuvok and Neelix is a parasitic lifeform that took both of them hostage, radically changed their bodies without their consent, made it impossible for them to reproduce, and radically altered their behavior. “We” would not hesitate to separate Tuvok and Neelix if their bodies and minds were joined by some other parasitic plant or creature that made them speak and act as one. We would not hesitate to separate them if the Borg or any other alien race did so by technological means. We hesitate to separate the parasitic flower out of Tuvok and Neelix only because it is so charismatic and the fusion of the two host bodies and minds is so complete. We do not hesitate to separate Borg from the Collective, even though any Borg drone you addressed individually would profess the greatest satisfaction with their condition. The flowers that were merged with the alien orchid in the process of the Doctor’s experiments did not consent to be joined and transformed with this alien lifeform. The process of symbiogenesis is just another form of parasitism. However wonderful Tuvix seemed as an individual, Janeway made the right choice in freeing Tuvok and Neelix from the parasitic flower and in ridding the ship of the parasite before it could infect anyone else, however low the risk of further infection may have seemed.
Alright, now I’ve said my piece about Tuvix! What about M’Benga? He’s a murderer, or that’s what it looks like. He should be confined to the brig pending trial, or the “inquiry” that Pike mentioned. I’ll be very disappointed if there are no consequences for M’Benga in future episodes. But I can understand why Pike didn’t want to throw the book at his friend right away. That’s not his style. He’ll go to his quarters, process his emotions in his own way, put on a cheerful face for his crew, and then let M’Benga’s case work through the courts when it’s good and ready.
@97/fullyfunctional: “M’Benga is deplorable, but I love him as a character in this show and I hope we see a lot more of him.”
I’d be more okay with that if M’Benga weren’t a legacy character who we know will be serving on the Enterprise under Kirk 8 years from now. It means that the worst consequence he may face for his crime (if you’re correct that it was murder) is a demotion from CMO to junior medical officer. It means people years from now will just treat him like none of this happened.
@98/P.A.: I respect the effort to find alternatives, but was it ever established that Data had “android super-speed?” Superstrength, yes, but the only “speedster” trick I can think of him performing is typing so fast his fingers blur. And fingers have much lower mass than an entire android body (which is too dense to float without an added flotation device).
Aside from that, Data couldn’t just run away, because there was still a henchman in the room that Fajo had threatened to kill if Data didn’t cooperate. Even if he had superhuman speed, the time it would take to grab the stationary henchman and pull him out of the room would have slowed him down enough for Fajo to fire.
@103/Steve M: “Regarding Pulaski, that’s not entirely how conspiracy works. There is a fine line, but agreeing to be a part of a conspiracy is legally different than agreeing with the objectives of the conspiracy.”
Who the hell was talking about conspiracy? I’m talking about what the story was intended to be an allegory for. The point is that both Riker and Pulaski were put in a situation that was an allegory for a woman being forcibly impregnated, and they both asserted the point of view that they had the right to choose whether or not they had offspring, rather than having the decision imposed on them by the state. Maybe the specifics of the sci-fi situation muddied that allegory somewhat, but that was the intended symbolism.
“But I think “Tuvix” invites us to choose sides.”
That’s one way of looking at a story posing a situation with no clear answer. The point is to generate debate, and you can argue that the purpose of debate is to pick a side. But I think that’s too binary. I think the real purpose of a story with no clear answer is to encourage us to consider both sides and recognize that they both have merit.
After all, fiction is fundamentally about empathy. It’s about letting us get into the heads of characters different from us and to understand their points of view, their differing beliefs and circumstances that motivate their choices. Ideally, we should be able to empathize with the choices of people on different sides in a story, to understand why they felt they had to make a choice even if we wouldn’t have chosen the same way. Even if we believe their actions are legally or morally wrong.
That’s why this episode is problematic for me. It’s hard for me to empathize with someone who commits deliberate murder, no matter what trauma inspires it. At least, not unless they take responsibility for the act and seek to atone rather than covering it up. Too many fictional protagonists are allowed to get away with murder, and it’s a tendency that disturbs me.
“Clearing the pattern buffer and forcing someone to undergo a medical procedure, as far as I know, fall under no legal defenses to homicide. Could they in the future? Possibly, but neither episode makes that case. A prosecutor may decide it is not in the interest of justice to prosecute Janeway or M’Benga, but these are unjustifiable homicides they’ve committed.”
One aspect of homicide you’re ignoring is that the culpability for the act doesn’t always fall on the person who does the killing, not if that person is forced to it by someone else’s actions. If a police car pursuing a fleeing felon runs over a pedestrian and kills them, the charge of homicide will fall not on the police, but on the felon, because it was their decision to flee from police that led to the death. It’s the same as if you kill someone who was shooting at you. You’re not held culpable for their death, because they brought it on themselves by attacking you. The culpability lies with the person who initiated the sequence of events that led to the death, even if someone else inflicted it.
In this case, M’Benga didn’t make an independent decision to clear the buffer; he was forced to do it by the Klingon attack that produced all those incoming casualties. If not for the Klingons’ hostility, M’Benga would never have sacrificed the patient. So the culpability for the patient’s death is with the Klingons.
@104/iwytor: I think you’re ascribing way too much agency to a plant. The flower was just a catalyst for the fusion. It had no consciousness or will. Tuvix’s personality was an even blending of Tuvok and Neelix, like a Trill joining. He was both of them, yet neither of them, like mixing two colors to produce a new color. That’s what made it such a unique and impossible situation. Neither of them was held hostage; they were both transformed through their merger.
You do have a point, though, that neither Tuvok nor Neelix gave consent for the joining, and thus they had a right not to be deprived of their independent existence when there was the option of restoring it. But Tuvix was a distinct, blameless being that also had the right to exist, and the right to refuse consent to be deprived of existence. That’s what hurts so much — that all three equally deserve to live but there’s no way they all can.
@105 – “that all three equally deserve to live but there’s no way they all can.”
Sure they can. We know the transporter can duplicate people. We’ve seen it in The Naked Time and Second Chances. Figure out how to reproduce those events (taking care not to split them into good and evil) and then duplicate Tuvix. Split one, leave the other and not only do you get your original crew members back, you pick up a spare in the process.
The method from Second Chances is most likely. Use a phased technobabble beam to recreate the conditions that duplicated Riker. Voila.
But that would require Star Trek to actually use what they’ve learn in previous episodes
I think Trek is best when it shows us a future where we are better. The episode does a wonderful, raw, visceral job exploring and depicting the experience of PTSD. But I think it fails at showing us how we might respond to trauma in a better way as a society. Right now, we do a pretty shitty job as a society in general providing even adequate support for those that experience trauma, including combat trauma.
M’benga should have never been placed in that situation – it was dangerous to him and not the right call. How would we expect someone to behave when they have so clearly experienced profound combat trauma?
I am left wondering – in our future, when we (hopefully) are better, how might we deal with and support people who have experienced trauma? How might a quasi-military organization better support combat veterans? How would we find ways to better help people recover after combat, if a war must be fought?
For starters, we wouldn’t ask someone clearly struggling with trauma to go to dinner with a war criminal.
It’s left ambiguous at the end but I wouldn’t blame M’benga for his actions either way – I blame his commanding officer and Starfleet for creating the situation.
But again – I think it would be more interesting to see an aspirational future and explore difficult questions, such as how a better humanity would deal with complex issues like trauma and better support those that return from war.
@106/kkozoriz: “We know the transporter can duplicate people.”
Under freakishly exceptional circumstances that were nearly impossible to replicate, exactly as here. “Oh, let’s fix this one-in-a-billion freak accident by attempting to recreate the opposite one-in-a-billion freak accident, which resulted from rare phenomena found only on the other side of the galaxy. Sure, we’ll have it done in no time.” Yeah, right.
As it happens, I almost suggested returning to the phenomenon that duplicated the ship in “Deadlock” and using that to duplicate Tuvix. I mean, that was only three episodes earlier, so it wouldn’t have been that far. But there were obvious reasons why it would’ve been unfeasible. The phenomenon was too dangerous, too poorly understood, and there was no guarantee it would even have the same effect a second time, or that it existed permanently rather than being a temporary event. And it was in Vidiian territory that would’ve been dangerous to return to.
And of course, the whole point of the story was that there was no way to have their cake and eat it too. Sometimes a premise like that is more convincing than others, e.g. my opinion that “The Most Toys” failed to account for an alternative that was obvious to me. And I’ve sometimes wondered why Kirk didn’t just bring Edith Keeler with him to the future, thereby saving her life and preserving history. But in this case, I think the potential alternatives were sufficiently established as too improbable or dangerous to replicate.
@104 & @107 – good points.
M’Benga certainly appears guilty of murder. He asked Rah to leave several times and then when the Ambassador refused made his decision to kill him. His statement to Pike that the captain has the “privilege” of believing in second chances because he hasn’t lived M’Benga’s life immediately had me thinking “that’s the end of your Starfleet career.” I can’t see how an officer who thinks like that (let alone acts on that thinking), however justifiably, can continue to serve. Serving in Starfleet by definition includes giving up the right to declare yourself judge, jury and executioner.
I love what they’ve done with M’Benga the character, but he’s just completely antithetical to the Star Trek ethos of redemption, forgiveness, and non-violence.
@105 said: I’d be more okay with that if M’Benga weren’t a legacy character who we know will be serving on the Enterprise under Kirk 8 years from now. It means that the worst consequence he may face for his crime (if you’re correct that it was murder) is a demotion from CMO to junior medical officer. It means people years from now will just treat him like none of this happened.
To be fair, they’d be treating him like a guy who was forced to kill another person in a fight the other person started, due to the lie about the origin of the knife. Good thing Starfleet doesn’t inventory people’s belongings when they come on board ..
Quote CLB: ’I’d be more okay with that if M’Benga weren’t a legacy character who we know will be serving on the Enterprise under Kirk 8 years from now. It means that the worst consequence he may face for his crime (if you’re correct that it was murder) is a demotion from CMO to junior medical officer. It means people years from now will just treat him like none of this happened.”
That’s fair. Some of my favorite (meaning compelling and interesting) Trek characters have been the morally compromised ones like Garak and Georgiou, but I agree M’Benga is in a different tier.
@105. No, the henchman had already left the room, right after Fajo threatened to kill him too, perhaps, if Data didn’t comply. So, Data and Fajo were alone when the final decision to shoot had to be made, which really didn’t have to be made. Even without super speed, all Data had to do was pretend he was going to shoot Fajo, back him up against the far wall, then run out and lock the door. Then, what with Fajo casually suggesting he would kill another crew member, I don’t think a mutiny would be difficult to get going.
It’s just another one of those goofy endings where they’re trying to make it look like hard decision but it’s really not. Like that other episode where Riker just had to shoot and kill his assassin girlfriend. Buddy, beam her to the brig. That’s all you gotta do.
@110/twels: “To be fair, they’d be treating him like a guy who was forced to kill another person in a fight the other person started, due to the lie about the origin of the knife. Good thing Starfleet doesn’t inventory people’s belongings when they come on board ..”
And as I’ve been telling you all along, I am not as sanguine as you about M’Benga lying to cover it up. Like they say, it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup. Hiding a crime compounds the crime and perpetuates the state of mind that enabled it. It shows the person cares more about covering their own ass than making amends for the harm they did to others. Redemption requires taking responsibility.
This is why I gave up watching Gotham in disgust when they had Jim Gordon kill someone while running an illegal errand for the mob. That was crossing a line he could never come back from. The only way he could redeem himself for that act was by confessing and serving his time, and then he’d probably never become police commissioner. And if he rose through the ranks while continuing to cover up the felony murder he committed, then he would be just as corrupt as every other cop in Gotham, and could never be the Commissioner Gordon we know. So it ruined Gordon as a character to take him there. It betrayed everything that defined him in the comics since 1939.
And having a Starfleet doctor cover up a murder he committed is comparable to that. Starfleet and the medical community are supposed to be more selfless and ethical than that.
@111/fullyfunctional: “Some of my favorite (meaning compelling and interesting) Trek characters have been the morally compromised ones like Garak and Georgiou”
Emperor Georgiou was a step too far for me. A dictator responsible for the murder and oppression of billions, who ate sentient beings? That’s far worse than Dukat, a character that DS9’s writers recognized should never be redeemed because his crimes went too far for that. I understand the impulse to bring Michelle Yeoh back after her character’s premature demise, but making her the brutal dictator of the Terran Empire was a terrible way of doing it.
@108 – All they need to do is figure out a way to reflect the annular confinement beam. It didn’t seem to be that unusual. Nobody said “Hey, that’s not possible!”. We’ve seen them do a lot more out there things at the drop of a hat. But nobody even suggested alternatives. It was just “either Tuvix lives or he dies and we get Tuvok and Neelix back”.
It was a contrived situation set up so there were only two options on the table. Since Tim Russ and Ethan Phillips are in the opening credits, Janeways decision was made as soon as the situation was introduced. Hands up, who was actually surprised that she sacrificed Tuvix?
I still think y’all are assuming too much about what M’Benga did. The more I think about it, the less convinced I am that M’Benga even stabbed him at all. The balance of the evidence I think favors Rah stabbing himself because he knew his fraud had been discovered and he was fundamentally a coward. M’Benga covered it up because he knew that a lot of people had bought into the fraud and because he really did intend to murder him at some point so he didn’t consider himself innocent.
@115/Chase: I hope you’re right.
@115 and @116
The best argument for M’Benga having stabbed the man is the fact that he just flat out doesn’t say, “No, I didn’t kill him in anything but self-defense.” The only reason he has to equivocate is if he is happy to have done it. Which is totally anti-Trek and an evil action.
But M’Benga isn’t the first of our heroes to be this dark.
Worf killed Duras and Picard forgave him. It was in a duel but this isn’t the 12th century. Worf killed him because he wanted him dead and there’s no moral difference between what M’Benga did to Rah.
Kira? She’s a self-styled terrorist who never went on any extrajudicial killings Post-War–but I have no doubt she wouldn’t have minded.
@117/C.T. Phipps: The difference is, Worf isn’t a doctor sworn to do no harm. He’s a self-declared warrior, and his actions were consistent with his culture’s values.
The other, critical difference is that Worf didn’t cover up his actions. He owned up to them and took the consequences, even if that only amounted to a reprimand. If Picard or Starfleet had insisted on more severe consequences, Worf would surely have accepted them, rather than attempting to hide from justice.
@ChristopherLBennett: I think you’re too easily dismissing M’Benga’s trauma. I think his actions were in what he perceived to be self-defense, at the hands of the man that had caused his PTSD, even if in actuality, Rah was never a threat to his life.
He’s covering it up because he doesn’t think of his actions as being wrong. He doesn’t feel as if he needs rehabilitation — if he did, he’d turn himself in, I’m sure. I believe that he feels that not only was it not a crime, it was long overdue justice. But that doesn’t mean that Star Fleet would recognize that. All he has to do to “cover it up” is not incriminate himself. That’s hardly an effort at all.
@119/dholm: “He’s covering it up because he doesn’t think of his actions as being wrong.”
I still say that’s the opposite of how it works. Concealing a crime shows cognizance of guilt.
“He doesn’t feel as if he needs rehabilitation”
If that’s true, it makes him even less of a character I can empathize with. What you’re describing is an unrepentant narcissist, someone who feels entitled to do harm to others and escape consequences to himself. That is not the character I want M’Benga to be.
One more wrinkle here: I just saw a comment on The Letter Formerly Known as Twitter that it’s problematical to turn M’Benga into a violent black man. I hadn’t even thought of that, but they have a point. Even if it wasn’t intended that way, it plays into a stereotype.
“I still say that’s the opposite of how it works. Concealing a crime shows cognizance of guilt.”
Incorrect. Concealing it shows cognizance that the government considers it to be a crime. It by no means shows any cognizance that you think you did anything morally or ethically wrong or that you think what you did should be a crime. “What I did was proper and I’d do it again, but the Federation would stupidly lock me up if they knew so of course I’m going to conceal it. Duh.”
This episode really made me yearn for DS9 Season 8 (right after events of S7). It’s a shame we never got on screen stories that really dealt with the immediate fallout from the Dominion War.
In my effort to balance flooding the comments with arguments or just taking my ball and going home, I will limit myself to one comment today.
First, regarding the general conversation about Worf and Duras, I think “Reunion” handles it well. Worf commits a homicide but on a Klingon vessel. Klingon culture is honor-based, and Worf performed an honor killing, so the Klingons choose not to prosecute. Picard, however, is furious, and officially reprimands Worf. Even if the killing happened on a Klingon vessel, Picard still has the right to discipline Worf for leaving the vessel with a bladed weapon without authorization.
Secondly, regarding M’Benga, I think I agree with the general sentiment that we can hopefully trust the writers of Strange New Worlds to eventually untangle what we’ve witnessed (or think we’ve witnessed) with Rah’s death. We’ve seen the writers play the long game a couple times in this series, so maybe they will pull it off again.
@105\ChristopherLBennett:
Regarding Pulaski, you’ve asked me, “Who the hell was talking about conspiracy?” In my original post on the topic, I said, “I can think of about a dozen homicides…” from Star Trek history. From the very beginning, I clearly stated “homicides” and didn’t include Pulaski. You asked me why I didn’t include Pulaski. She neither committed homicide nor conspired to commit homicide. That’s why I didn’t include her, and it’s perfectly consistent with my original post on the matter. Anything beyond that, whether right or wrong, would represent something of a mission creep from my original statement.
Your comments on homicide here are generally not correct. When you said, “One aspect of homicide you’re ignoring is that the culpability for the act doesn’t always fall on the person who does the killing, not if that person is forced to it by someone else’s actions,” that’s just not an accurate recap of what I’ve said.
The way the system works, as I said, is the person who kills another person has committed a homicide. Next, we ask if there is a justification, excuse, or defense for the homicide. As an example of a correctly written application of this, in “Empok Nor”, Garak commits a homicide. O’Brien tells him he will be investigated for it. But we also know Garak will be cleared because he has a defense: he was unwillingly drugged, which caused him to commit a homicide.
I would have to take up too much space to respond to your comment about the police officer chasing a felon. I can’t even call that example right or wrong. It’s just so incomplete and oversimplified that we’d need to go way off topic to fix it.
I think what some in this discussion fail to see is that, although accepted and lawful, a situation involving self-defense is not one in which killing the assailant is right – it is the less wrong thing to do. We just accept as the moral consequence of an ethical dilemma that it goes without punishment to kill in self-defense. Nowhere does it say that it is a good thing to nor that you may boast of it.
And saying that such acts as described in Star Trek are without relevance to the real world disregards that we encounter similar situations all the time, just look at the ethical conflicts we still need to solve when self-driving cars avoid collisions (the trolley problem revisited in a new guise) or cause accidents.
@117 Again, I think the reason why M’Benga didn’t say he killed Rah in self defense is because he didn’t. Rah either killed himself (as I believe, and as I think the evidence shows), or M’Benga murdered him. In either scenario, there are plenty of reasons why M’Benga wouldn’t want to give the full story.
@121/quantummechanic: “Incorrect. Concealing it shows cognizance that the government considers it to be a crime. It by no means shows any cognizance that you think you did anything morally or ethically wrong or that you think what you did should be a crime. “What I did was proper and I’d do it again, but the Federation would stupidly lock me up if they knew so of course I’m going to conceal it. Duh.””
You’re saying that a doctor, a man who swore an oath to do no harm, thinks that an act of premeditated murder (accepting that premise for the sake of argument) was proper and worth repeating. Are you hearing how utterly vile and hypocritical that makes him sound? Do you really imagine for a moment that what you’re saying is a defense of the man rather than a condemnation? As I keep saying, if that’s who M’Benga is now, it ruins him for me as a character.
@123/Steve M: “I would have to take up too much space to respond to your comment about the police officer chasing a felon. I can’t even call that example right or wrong. It’s just so incomplete and oversimplified that we’d need to go way off topic to fix it.”
It’s not a hypothetical; it actually happened a few years ago. However, researching it further, I find that the decision to charge the fleeing suspect for the death caused by a pursuing police car was controversial and it’s been questioned whether it was a legitimate use of the felony murder rule. https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/05/30/d-angelo-burgess-fled-from-police-does-that-make-him-a-killer
Still, it doesn’t make sense to me to call M’Benga’s triage decision homicidal. What the hell else was he supposed to do in that situation? Let a dozen people die for the sake of one person whose odds of survival were poor to begin with? To echo what Chaironea said in #124, the issue is not whether what he did was right or wrong, it’s whether it was the lesser of two evils. He did everything he reasonably could to save the guy, but circumstances forced him to abandon the effort. Doctors often have to choose to let one person die to save another, e.g. when deciding who gets an organ transplant. It’s not a good thing, no, but sometimes the only options life gives you are bad ones.
Damn, that was DARK. M’Benga straight up murders a guy and he and Chapel cover it up. At least I hope they don’t cop out on it and later decide that it was self defense. It also makes Pike’s boy scout routine look very naive and weak.
Like Data in “The Most Toys” clearly attempted to kill the guy but was stopped when he got beamed out. Here they let M’Benga do the deed.
I agree with some previous posters that 20th century war tactics make no sense when there are starships, lasers, transporters, etc. but I assume the point was to make an analogy to war that the audience knows. The episode wouldn’t have worked if they invented a new type of interstellar warfare.
Just some more thoughts about Tuvix (sorry for continuing with the Tuvix threadjack):
It’s not discussed that way in the episode, because the episode is intended to be all about the Trolley Problem of bringing back two lives by destroying one, but in my opinion the parasitic symbiogenetic flower was a clear and present danger to the crew. I’m using language that ascribes agency to it, but of course that’s a figure of speech. The flower was extraordinarily fecund at its mode of “reproduction”. It merged with the other flowers and with the humanoids with equal ease. This is a strange and bizarre alien plant, and Janeway and the Doctor really have no idea what it’s capable of. Will it continue to merge or mix with other crew members if Tuvix ever beams somewhere with another person? The whole crew could end up with a bizarre and unexpected mixture of personalities that would be impossible to untangle, even if no further bodily merging occurred. If this seemingly foolproof technique for merging two lifeforms or two intelligent beings were to be introduced into society in the Alpha Quadrant (with the parasitic orchid now becoming an invasive species), the consequences for society would be mind-boggling, for good and ill. Tuvix was a wonderful individual in every way, but the alien flower that made him, and possibly continued to reside within him ready to “reproduce” again, was a clear and present danger to the crew. As soon as there was a viable method of separating Tuvok and Neelix from the parasitic flower that had involuntarily joined them, Janeway had the obligation to do that and remove from the ship this potentially civilization-upending parasite.
The episode never showed that particular body-horror perspective of the whole thing, so I acknowledge this is just one more silly internet rant in the long, long tradition of silly internet rants about Tuvix and Janeway :)
Just adding, I think M’Benga might have had his knife handy for a few reasons.
Like, to try to meditate on the nature of war, while also kind of torturing himself, like one does with a memento from a relationship that went bad.
Or, keeping it handy to calm himself, reassure himself that he can defend himself because he’s having nightmares/flashbacks and feels PTSD unsafe.
Or to remind himself that his memories really happened, and strengthen his resolve.
Or, to me it’s not impossible that he had the knife out because he was considering turning himself in, if it will shut up Rah, unmask him as a coward, and make him responsible for his crimes. He might have wanted to have the knife handy so he could show Rah and wipe that smugness off his face. He may have been feeling haunted and now with his daughter gone, maybe he would finally serve his time, as long as Rah goes down harder, having based his whole deal on a lie. This would undermine the peacemaking process that M’Benga may have thought to be dangerous/BS anyway.
I appreciate the ambiguousness and all as is, but I would have really appreciated having a scene earlier in the episode with M’Benga looking at the knife that would have made it clear he had been thinking about what to do with it. It still would have looked like he was contemplating murder, but we would also, I think, suspect that he was also thinking of doing something else with it.
@126 said: You’re saying that a doctor, a man who swore an oath to do no harm, thinks that an act of premeditated murder (accepting that premise for the sake of argument) was proper and worth repeating. Are you hearing how utterly vile and hypocritical that makes him sound? Do you really imagine for a moment that what you’re saying is a defense of the man rather than a condemnation? As I keep saying, if that’s who M’Benga is now, it ruins him for me as a character.
Let‘s not forget that M’Benga is established as a man of contradictions from the get-go. He is a close personal friend of Pike who seemingly never told him he had hidden a child on board the ship in the transporter buffer. This season, he’s established as someone with “the most hand-to-hand kills” in Starfleet and as someone who invented a super-soldier serum to more effectively kill others, which implies medical training prior to his special forces work. He is assigned to the Rigel VII mission not as a doctor but as someone Pike thinks will be good in the inevitable fight. He is doctor, fighter and lawbreaker from the start. It’s just that it was hard to see when the supposed beneficiary of his lawbreaking was a cute little girl
@130/twels: “He is a close personal friend of Pike who seemingly never told him he had hidden a child on board the ship in the transporter buffer.”
I can empathize with someone breaking the rules out of love and the desire to save a life. It’s totally different when someone breaks the rules to cover up a murder he committed out of hate. It’s grotesque to use one as an analogy for the other. When it comes to our ability to like and respect a character, their intentions matter.
@131 said: I can empathize with someone breaking the rules out of love and the desire to save a life. It’s totally different when someone breaks the rules to cover up a murder he committed out of hate. It’s grotesque to use one as an analogy for the other. When it comes to our ability to like and respect a character, their intentions matter.
M’Benga’s analysis of the event was that he had rid the galaxy of a lying mass-murderer. Nonetheless, my point is that once you decide it’s ok to break one rule, it’s much easier to break more and impose one’s own “morality” upon a situation
I should also point out that I am not defending the behavior. I’ve watched plenty of shows in which protagonists ranging from Eddard Stark to Tony Soprano and Walter White commit horrific acts in the belief that some “greater good” is being accomplished. I don’t have to like a character or believe that their motivations are pure to enjoy watching them make their way through the world. Good people sometimes do bad things and bad people sometimes do good. Punishment is sometimes never meted out and when it is, it is often unfairly. That’s the nature of the world we live in. It’s not wrong to say that we should strive for better – and certainly we see M’Benga do that through the show. But progress is not linear. It is often a fallacy to say we are at our best when things are the worst. In this case, a horrible situation brought out the worst in someone
@132/twels: “I don’t have to like a character or believe that their motivations are pure to enjoy watching them make their way through the world.”
I hate it when people respond to a specific point of mine with a blanket generalization. I already said that I can deal with some characters being this dark, but I don’t want a doctor to be this dark, especially one that I know will still be a member of the Enterprise crew 8-9 years after this. If it were La’an or Ortegas, it would be one thing, but I don’t like them giving this story arc to M’Benga specifically.
I really hope the truth eventually comes out about what happened and, if it turns out that M’Benga did murder Rah, he faces consequences for his actions, because this does affect how much I can enjoy his character going forward, especially since this show has a mix of serious and lighthearted episodes. Next week’s musical episode is a prime example. Do I really want to watch M’Benga’s big dance number, knowing that he did something awful? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how the show handles it. I hope it’s not a case of just never referencing it again.
@133 said: I hate it when people respond to a specific point of mine with a blanket generalization. I already said that I can deal with some characters being this dark, but I don’t want a doctor to be this dark, especially one that I know will still be a member of the Enterprise crew 8-9 years after this. If it were La’an or Ortegas, it would be one thing, but I don’t like them giving this story arc to M’Benga specifically.
I guess that’s where we differ. No offense to Booker Bradshaw, but the character as it existed in TOS is just as much a blank slate as La’an or Ortegas in most regards. The fact that he is both killer and healer (even if Rah’s killing is ruled self-defense) makes him unique among Star Trek doctors. It actually occurred to me during this discussion that this episode had plenty that reminded me of MASH – but no episode more so than the episode in which Trapper has to be talked down from killing the North Korean soldier who caused the death of one of his patients.
I like giving a doctor this story because it sets a unique balance to the scales of “justice.” What will M’Benga do the next time he meets a Klingon? What if he has to treat one? Will he let him or her die? H
A really good episode that kind of falls apart at the end. I found myself comparing this to The Undiscovered Country, where the Klingon Chancellor notes that it will be difficult for their generation to accept a peace between them and the Federation due to their history of fighting each other. And unlike Pike, Kirk by that point has both fought the Klingons and suffered losses as a result. But he still manages to overcome his prejudice and come down on the side of accepting peace with his former enemies by the end.
And much like “Ad Astra Per Aspera” earlier this season, Starfleet comes off really badly here. The only pushback to M’Benga’s actions comes from Pike at the end, but as noted above, without much conviction. Compare Pike’s discussion with M’Benga to Picard’s with Captain Maxwell in “The Wounded”. Maxwell was even correct in his assertions about the Cardassians and what they were up to! But Picard confronted him and took him down anyways because keeping the peace intact was more important than one man’s vendetta. And while I don’t expect that everyone who fought in the war would be willing to forgive, it would have been nice to see at least one character who was involved in the fighting be able to look beyond the past. Instead, Pike and those who didn’t fight are portrayed as privileged and unable to judge, while of the three veterans, M’Benga kills Rah, Chapel helps him cover it up, and Ortega’s bigotry towards Klingons is reinforced. Crackling job for what was once seen as a more hopeful take on the Star Trek legacy.
I actually really like the idea of examining how people deal with their former enemies after the fighting is done. I mean, there are all sorts of real examples of people being granted amnesty despite horrific actions because fighting on is seen as worse than allowing them to avoid the consequences of their actions to achieve peace. How you deal with that is not something I have really seen explored. Sadly, it still isn’t.
@135/twels: “The fact that he is both killer and healer (even if Rah’s killing is ruled self-defense) makes him unique among Star Trek doctors.”
Tell that to Ronin from “Sub Rosa,” Jo’Bril from “Suspicions,” the entire ship full of Lore’s Borg cultists in “Descent,” and all the Changelings Beverly Crusher vaporized in Picard season 3.
And yeah, obviously giving M’Benga more characterization is a good thing, but character depth doesn’t require covering up a murder.
Let’s add McCoy to that list. Doctors cannot provide euthanasia to a patient without consultation, especially when the patient is a family member. By his own admission, a cure was found a short time later. Of course he felt guilt about his actions but that doesn’t mean he was right.
@137/ CLB – Bashir also killed his share of Jem’Hadar, I believe (and, while he didn’t kill Sloan, he certainly wasn’t innocent of his death). But of all of these examples, I think that only Dr. Crusher’s execution-style dispatching of incapacitated Changelings could be argued to be murder.
(Interestingly, Dr. Boyce in the Captain Pike-led comic series Star Trek: Early Voyages was also a murderer; but in that case, he was possessed by the katra of one of his patient’s victims)
I honestly thought during that final confrontation between M’Benga and Dak’Rah that we’d unexpectedly come to the point where M’Benga had to leave his position on the Enterprise.
@139/jaimebabb: I was referring to twels’s use of the word “killer,” not specifically “murderer.”
As for McCoy, you could count TUC where he helped Spock modify a photon torpedo that blew up the Klingons — a scene I detested, not only because it made no sense for a doctor to do that instead of an engineer or tactical officer, but because this is a man who once said “I can’t destroy life, even if it’s to save my own” (“The Empath”).
@136 said: The only pushback to M’Benga’s actions comes from Pike at the end, but as noted above, without much conviction.
I read that scene differently. I think Pike had plenty of conviction – he was just horrified at the situation. The “Boy Scout” couldn’t see that things were going to spin as far out of control as they did. He resisted Number One’s entreaty to take a day off the trip until she convinced him that tensions had risen to a dangerous level. Then, his friend and senior officer is the one involved in the disastrous outcome – and tells him he’s not sorry that the VIP aboard is dead and reminds him that others took on the burden of war so he wouldn’t have to. That’s a lot. He (and Starfleet) assumed that the crew of the Enterprise would treat Rah better than those of other ships did – and they were wrong
F(*& That was an intense episode.
I think the ambiguity on whether or not it was murder lies in the fact that we never saw him pick up the D’k’Tagh (by the way, good to see the classic design back). I suppose the clank we hear in the cutaway is someone grabbing it. Then there’s M’Benga saying don’t before the stab. Their bout earlier shows some interesting foreshadowing. Rah was winning before M’Benga’s words through him off mental balance, so Rah has some capability left in him, but we also saw that when they engaged the bouts ended with M’Benga being pushed away. Him being pushed like that in their fight would put him at his desk with the blade. If M’Benga pulled the blade, is it murder? The way the fight plays out Rah doesn’t disengage when M’Benga gets the knife. That makes sense, not even a pacifist Klingon is going to be scared by a knife, but that doesn’t mean M’Benga was automatically going to kill him. Rah also didn’t disengage. Was he trying to wrest control of it and his counter went wrong? They were jostling for position in close, and the knife went into Rah. I think there’s lots of room for ambiguity there without M’Benga actually committing murder. It is possible for him to have legitimately killed him in self defense and be glad he’s dead. Still, there’s substantial ambiguity. And Rah is a known liar. Could he have positioned the knife and killed himself, in an attempt to frame M’Benga? And with all his talk of healing did anyone else get Sybok vibes?
On the subject of Pike, I agree, bringing up that Rah’s death torpedoes the peace he was going to negotiate at their destination would’ve been a powerful blow, as while Rah’s death may give some form of catharsis to the Doctor and the Nurse, the work Rah was doing was real, and is now at an end. I rather disliked M’Benga’s assertion that Pike was privileged to not have these things on his conscience, but while true, I find it to be a cheap shot. It’s utilized as a catch all excuse for traumatized people’s behavior and anyone calling them out on it. Bad form. I think Pike doesn’t offer a rebuttal because he’s empathetic before he’s anything else. I also think he doesn’t want to open that can of worms. What would that gain him? His friend and a fellow Starfleet officer pulled away for disciplinary action, and potentially unforeseen consequences. He just went through that with Una is Pike gonna have to see his entire senior staff court martial-ed before all is said and done?
On Ortegas, I understand why she couldn’t hold it in, I think it’s natural for her character. Ortegas is the most extroverted and exuberant character on the show, she takes joy in her job, and the people around her. She always lets her emotions shine through and it’s usually great because she’s actively experiencing the joy of what she’s doing and she emits that all the time. She’s funny and always has the snarky remark or the cool wit to offer. She keeps things light. The inverse of this is that when her emotions are negative, those also get broadcast. Erica can’t keep her happy in, but she can’t keep her angry in either. In some ways that gives her an easier outlet than M’Benga and Chapel who maintain control and keep their trauma buried. Ortegas keeps her trauma close to the surface, it’s not in there festering. Of course her experiences aren’t direct like theirs are either. If she was was the Battle of Binary Stars, I think seeing T’Kuvma in the flesh would give her a similar reaction.
17. Chase,
The Kirk from Obsession may have understood. Kirk was of course trying to arrest Kodos, but the intense trauma, seeing a mass murdered walking about free, with no one to punish him for his crimes, oh Kirk would most certainly understand and empathize with that.
On the Great Tuvix debate, I must be the only person in the world who by the end didn’t like Tuvix. Not the episode, the character. I come down even harder than Janeway did. I understand Tuvix wanting to live, that’s natural for livings things from microscopic on up. But it’s simple to me. Allowing Tuvix to live is allowing the death of Tuvok and Neelix when they could be restored. Attempting to utilize dangerous hazardous anomalies and accidents to recreate one time events is a cop out and destroys the nature of said events, namely that they’re ridiculously dangerous unique accidents (Lower Decks duplicating Boimler for comedy not withstanding). The attempt to duplicate Tuvix could fail and instead kill all three in one fell swoop. I think it’s annoying for him to be heralded as new and improved Tuvok and Neelix. I also thought it would be really awkward to try and explain to T’Pel why her husband has spots, fur, and is expressing his emotions openly now.
As for the Mariposan Cloning incident. Riker and Pulaski are asked to volunteer to give their genetic material to be cloned, refused, beam down to help the Mariposans another way, are then assaulted, and have their material forcibly taken anyway. Now a complaint could be made to the government over this assault, except the government is the ones who executed this violation and were not inclined to be held responsible. The Federation has no jurisdiction. Vaporizing the gestating clones seems to be setting things back to zero. Nor did the Enterprise crew leave the Mariposans to extinction. Arguably part of the Star Trek formula is “cowboy diplomacy” solutions on the edge of the known. Both sides there agreed to let bygones be bygones.
Due to travel and other things going on, I was unable to see the episode until today. I thought it was interesting and well-acted. Nice direction as well. I’m not sure I would say I “enjoyed” it exactly, but I appreciate that it leaves plenty to think about.
It reminded me a little of the Twilight Zone episode “The Encounter” with George Takei and Neville Brand — a two-hander about a bitter WW2 vet and a young Japanese-American man locked in a room together. It didn’t end well there, either. Serling said this of it:
Two men in an attic, locked in mortal embrace. Their common bond, and their common enemy: guilt. A disease all too prevalent amongst men both in and out of The Twilight Zone.
@141 – As well as The Man Trap where he killed the salt vampire at the urging of Spock (!). Ever hear of a stun setting? They used one against Dr. Crater earlier.
What bugged me the most was the Rah was stabbed in the middle of a fully functional, fully stocked Federation sickbay. They can’t fix a stab to the heart by then, when that close to all the tools? Current medical science has heart/lung machines that can pump blood during a transplant procedure plus artificial hearts. In this episode, during flashback, they were talking about organ mending devices. The heart, while important, isn’t that complicated an organ. Hook up a pump until you can fix the heart, or just install a pump. If they wanted to (which M’Benga obviously didn’t, but Chapel…?) and moved promptly you’d think they could have saved him.
@144/P.A.: “It reminded me a little of the Twilight Zone episode “The Encounter” with George Takei and Neville Brand — a two-hander about a bitter WW2 vet and a young Japanese-American man locked in a room together. It didn’t end well there, either.”
For a long time, that episode wasn’t included in syndication packages because of its controversial content, notably its false claim that there was a Japanese-American traitor at Pearl Harbor, which seems to legitimize the internment of Japanese-Americans like Takei and his family. It wasn’t broadcast again in the US until 2016, 52 years after its debut. So for decades, I was only able to read about the episode in The Twilight Zone Companion.
I finally saw it about a year after its re-release, and I found it underwhelming. Takei gives an excellent performance, but the story is pretty incoherent. Still, it’s sad to see how familiar Brand’s character’s attitudes about race, immigration, and unexamined white privilege sound today. People like him haven’t changed their views in over half a century.
@146/Cc: Good point. Also, what happened to Klingons having two hearts and lots of redundant organs, making them extremely hard to kill?
@146/147: I guess Worf did try to ritually kill Kurn with a single dagger to the chest, and killed Duras in a similar manner, so it’s not entirely unprecedented. (I think he uses two daggers to kill Gowron though? Maybe people wrote in.)
But yeah, one of the weaknesses of the franchise is that Federation medicine is incredibly good at saving the near dead and clinically dead if they get to them fast enough, except when the script says it isn’t.
As I recall, Klingons have only one heart but it is much more complex than a human’s. A good stabbing there can still finish them off. Maybe that’s one reason the D’k’Tagh has three blades.
This is not a plot hole, though.
I mean, Rah is right next to a doctor but that’s not going to help him.
@149/Chase: Here’s a thought: If Klingons have reinforced rib cages and such, then it’s probably a lot harder to stab a Klingon in the heart — you’d need superhuman strength. So would M’Benga even have been capable of stabbing Rah? Maybe it was suicide, and that’s why M’Benga cried “Don’t!”
But then, fiction is wildly inconsistent about whether normal humans can do things that should require superhuman strength. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Slayers were superhumanly strong, explaining how they could drive a wooden stake through a vampire’s rib cage with their bare hands instead of needing to hammer it in with a mallet like in most vampire lore; but after a season or two, once Buffy had a support team fighting vampires with her, it was routine for her normal human friends with no particular physical strength to be able to pierce vampires in the heart as effortlessly as if they were stabbing styrofoam.
Then there’s the action cliche of twisting someone’s neck from behind to snap their neck and instantly kill them. That would require exceptional, nearly superhuman strength to do, would probably not be instantaneous, and most likely wouldn’t even be lethal, at most causing paralysis. But many shows and movies depict people of ordinary strength doing it. The 2002 Birds of Prey TV series even showed Harley Quinn, played by the dainty 5’4″ Mia Sara, killing someone that way with ease, even though another episode of the same show claimed it was a specialized Delta Force technique.
@150/C.T. Phipps: “I mean, Rah is right next to a doctor but that’s not going to help him.”
Yeah, but Chapel’s in the room too, so she’d have to go along with the choice to let him die, and that would make her an accomplice to the homicide as well as the cover-up. I’d rather not go there.
Long-time reader here (have made my way through all the re-watches!) but first-time commenter.
I loved this episode up until the end, and can probably cope with the moral obfuscation, but I can’t get over the following plot hole: surely the real crime was M’Benga and Chapel not immediately starting treatment after Rah is stabbed?? I’d have thought a straightforward stab wound in a well-equipped sickbay is worth at least an attempted fix. Whoever started the fight, records would show M&C just stood there gawping in the aftermath going “oh well, guess that’s it for him”.
Will be forever grateful if someone can help me out with this.
After all the Tuvix threadjacking going on, I’m going to instead note that in my eyes, the failure of “The Most Toys” is a little different than what CLB said it was. They were missing a line from Fajo: “You’ve seen what that weapon can do. There’s not a place on my body that you could hit me where I won’t die horribly.” I always took the death of his assistant as “Oh, everything that was her and her clothes is gone. Therefore everything and HIS clothes would be gone.”
Have not had time to see this episode but I already love the debate. I’m even going to add another option: what if it’s self defense but he’s horrified that he’s glad Rah is dead? Anyone who’s assuming that the writers and director had a clear vision of what happened may have to hear Nolan concept about Inception: his intent is that we don’t KNOW whether Cobb succeeded. We just know he believes he did. Maybe they know some watchers will have different standards of what could be beyond the pale and they want us to think about it? But now I really need to watch this on my own time. I’m tempted to call out of work to watch the episode. And then UN call out (Work From Home FTW! But I kid, really).
@153/wizardofwoz77: “They were missing a line from Fajo: “You’ve seen what that weapon can do. There’s not a place on my body that you could hit me where I won’t die horribly.””
But that’s just what I’m saying — because the field device was on Fajo’s hip, Data could’ve taken a shot that wouldn’t even have touched Fajo’s body. Granted, looking at the screencaps again, it seems the device wasn’t quite as far off to the side as I’d thought, so it could be that Data didn’t have a clean shot like I imagined. But he could’ve just stepped to the side to find a vantage where he could’ve grazed the edge of the device without the beam touching Fajo. Given his precise aim, he could’ve calculated the angle exactly.
It did occur to me that maybe the weapon’s effect was such that even a grazing contact with the positronic inhibitor device would have still disintegrated Fajo, or caused the device to explode and kill him. But as you say, they didn’t mention anything to that effect, so it remains a plot hole.
Quoth Christopher: ” It wasn’t broadcast again in the US until 2016, 52 years after its debut. So for decades, I was only able to read about the episode in The Twilight Zone Companion.”
It was available long before that: the episode was released on VHS as part of a boxed set called “Treasures from The Twilight Zone” in 1992. I interviewed Takei for The Chronic Rift (a public access TV show I cohosted and coproduced in the early 1990s) when it came out
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@155/krad: It was available on video, yes, but it wasn’t aired on TV until 2016. There was a “Silver Anniversary” TV special in 1984 that aired three of the four lost episodes previously left out of syndication due to legal disputes or unknown reasons, including the hourlong “Miniature” with Robert Duvall (which was partially colorized for the special), “A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain,” and “Sounds and Silences.” “The Encounter” was the only one they didn’t show, and the only one that didn’t get added to the syndication package afterward (until 2016, anyway).
Really great episode. While I don’t dispute that M’Benga killing Rah was wrong (and I’m assuming it wasn’t actually self-defense), I do want to push back on the idea that it was cold-blooded murder.
M’Benga had very clearly been pushed past his breaking point. He repeatedly tried to get Rah to leave him alone, even begging him at one point in that scene. Rah ignored him and kept pushing even though it was obvious M’Benga was not okay. And when Rah went so far as to put his hands on M’Benga, he finally broke.
I’m not a lawyer but that sounds to me like what many jurisdictions would call voluntary manslaughter. Still wrong, still a very serious crime, but there were sufficiently extreme circumstances that calling it outright murder doesn’t seem appropriate.
@147. Not to justify the internment program, or the quality of the episode in question, but that’s not quite true about there not being a Japanese-American “traitor” at Pearl Harbor. Though this unfortunate incident was on a neighboring island following the attack and not Pearl Harbor exactly, perhaps it inspired that part of the episode, I don’t know.
@157/KP: You make a good point, but in that case, I say that’s all the more reason he should confess what he did. If there are mitigating circumstances, that would be taken into account by the penal system, but covering it up would just make things harder on him if the truth came out (not to mention putting Chapel at risk of facing conspiracy and/or obstruction charges). Also, as I said before, the UFP’s enlightened rehabilitation system could help him cope with the trauma that drove him to it.
@157 I am a lawyer, and I’ll give you the standard lawyer answer: “It depends.” States have wildly different statutory schemes for homicides. We have no idea what the model was for the Federation’s criminal laws, but it’s not a stretch to say they would have adopted something similar to the Model Penal Code. The MPC has a provision for voluntary manslaughter which is essentially what you describe. I think M’Benga might have some trouble with that one, though. Far too many of his actions here show premeditation.
That being said, I’m going to keep beating the suicide drum here. It just fits too many of the circumstances to ignore. As for M’Benga and Chapel not immediately trying to save his life, it was pretty clear that he died right away (which also supports the suicide theory, I believe). Could they have done something? I’m honestly not sure. Do M’Benga and Chapel know enough about Klingon biology to save a life instead of take it? 40 years after this, even Dr. McCoy said he didn’t know Klingon anatomy (which is a line I really hate in a movie full of them, but it’s still out there). So quite apart from them wanting him to die (which they obviously did), I’m not convinced they could have done anything.
@154 I think it’s interesting that we keep differing on one point that’s so slightly different, but I remember the author and YouTube film critic Lindsay Ellis savaged some movies and reboots for explaining every little thing someone could question because she thought it took the magic away (though in those cases, to be fair, it was over Beauty and the Beast’s responses to nitpicking on the Internet where the answers given, in her opinion, made the story worse). Basically we found an inconsistency that the writers never noticed, and it’s interesting that we’ve had some pretty differing answers to resolve it. But that’s what I love about fiction, everyone brings their own expectations into the experience.
Regarding M’Benga’s ability to strike a killing blow despite Klingon anatomy being supposedly so robust, remember this is someone who apparently has a record number of hand-to-hand kills. Even without the super-soldier serum, that certainly means he knows exactly the right place to strike to get a lethal effect. (His being a doctor probably even enhances his knowledge of Klingon anatomy.) Even suits of armour have weak spots. That part at least didn’t bother me.
One thing that hasn’t come up much in this thread so far is that the Enterprise wasn’t the only ship where Rah had problems. Pike actually says that there were “protests” against him on the other ships that have ferried him around.
I get the public relations coup of having a Klingon talking about peace and cooperation but this particular project feels like a failure from the start. Especially when you add the fact that Federation bureaucrats were ordering Klingon War veterans aboard the ship to make a public show of accepting him. This felt very true to life in terms of a government entity having a good-in-principle-bad-in-practice idea that it is unwilling to let go of until the consequences become completely out of control.
Also if we’re talking about “The Most Toys” – I have never understood the position that Data did something wrong by deciding to kill Fajo.
The answer to objections like why Data didn’t fire at the personal shield generator or otherwise find another way of handling the situation is obviously that the writers didn’t intend for Data to have any options besides killing Fajo or backing down and returning to captivity. They could have added even more technobabble and exposition to explain why everything else was impossible but that wouldn’t have improved the episode. We all understand the dilemma they wanted to set up so why not just give them the benefit of the doubt? I wouldn’t even call it a plot hole. Just assume that Data is as intelligent as we are always led to believe, and so he would have considered every other alternative but apparently ruled each of them out for various reasons.
If we do accept the scenario as the writers intended, how could Data do anything but try to kill Fajo? It wasn’t only justifiable, I’d argue it was actually obligatory in that situation because Fajo was a threat to more people than just Data. Like he said before he fired, Data couldn’t let what was going on continue.
@161/wizardofwoz: “I think it’s interesting that we keep differing on one point that’s so slightly different, but I remember the author and YouTube film critic Lindsay Ellis savaged some movies and reboots for explaining every little thing someone could question because she thought it took the magic away”
But in this case, it’s not a little thing. The detail itself is little, but the fact that it exists is crucial. The climax of the story depends entirely on the premise that Data could see no nonlethal way to stop Fajo. Since I could instantly see one, it means the climax failed to convince me of its essential premise. There’s a vast difference between a detail that’s incidental to the story and a detail that the whole story hinges upon.
@164. But that’s not good enough, in my opinion. If the writers wanted to make it a binary choice where Data had to either kill or not kill, then they should’ve done a better job presenting it that way. Sure, it’s a good moral dilemma and adds some noir-ish depth to Data, but it fails in execution, no pun intended. “Tuvix” was far more successful in this regard, I thought.
@157/KP:
Regardless of whether M’Benga’s actions are justifiable, manslaughter, murder (or other), there is another important conversation here being overlooked. Given the advancements we are trying to make in understanding PTSD now, it’s hard to accept that by the time we get to Strange New Worlds that Starfleet as an institution could get PTSD so wrong. The encounter between M’Benga and Rah should have never happened.
M’Benga should already have in his file that he has PTSD. Hiding it should be even harder in the future than now. He should have been offered counseling when Rah was on board. He should not have been asked to attend dinner with him. And every officer should have had a duty to report that they saw Rah grab M’Benga at the dinner as he was leaving.
In the 21st century, an ambassador at a minimum would have a security officer to advise of security threats. One as high-profile and notorious as Rah would be assigned a bodyguard, maybe an entire security detail. Even if the security detail could not convince Rah to not engage in martial arts with M’Benga, the detail would at least make sure the bodyguard was present. The bodyguard, after witnessing the martial arts session, would never allow Rah to be in sickbay alone with M’Benga.
This security detail would also investigate Rah’s death. It would ask for the transporter log and point out that Rah never beamed a d’k tahg to the ship, nor did the transporters beam the DNA from the deceased Klingons over. This would point to M’Benga being the one who introduced the weapon and not Rah.
@164/KP: “Also if we’re talking about “The Most Toys” – I have never understood the position that Data did something wrong by deciding to kill Fajo.”
I think it’s more that I don’t like it when writers go “Oh, here’s a good, decent character who values life — let’s turn him into a killer because it’s Edgy.”
I’m a child of the 1970s. I grew up at a time when violence on TV was discouraged, so I grew up with heroes who valued life and refused to kill, or who were deeply troubled if they ever did have to kill. Having lost my mother when I was seven, experiencing the grief of bereavement at a very early age, I appreciated heroes who refused to inflict that kind of loss on anyone else’s families. I still do.
Then along came the ’80s and the age of Rambo. Network standards were loosened and many shows featured “heroes” who gunned down dozens of bad guys a week without feeling the slightest qualm, without caring how many families they were bereaving just so they could reach the end of a hallway. I did not consider that an improvement. So I didn’t like seeing a character like Data, who hearkened back to the life-cherishing heroes I grew up with, placed into a situation contrived to force him to kill. I would’ve rather seen him triumph over that nihilism and find a way for life to prevail. And fortunately he was spared from having to cross that line, but I didn’t like the implication that he had made the choice.
I also had trouble with the implication that he lied about it. Why would Data lie? If he had, in fact, concluded that he was left with no ethical alternative except to kill Fajo, surely he would have had no reason not to say so, and could’ve defended his actions in court if necessary. That’s the other reason the ending doesn’t convince me.
My reactions to the ending here have similar motivations, both in terms of what M’Benga may have done and whether it makes sense for him to lie about it.
@167/Steve: Excellent points. I’m struck by how much less our culture seems to understand mental health now than it did a generation or two ago. Back in the ’80s, it was seen as sensible to include a therapist as a member of a starship command crew. Now we’re getting stories about people going through serious trauma and getting no help at all in coping with it.
Although at least that’s consistent with the state of things in TOS, where the closest a captain could get to therapy was a visit from his doctor/bartender.
@165 Well, this is what makes it so interesting: I was satisfied with the lack of option to wing the generator when his assistant completely vaporized. In my head I thought, “Oh, I get it. It’s the whole “everything attached to the thing that is shot vaporizes and it doesn’t spread to the floor because, oh, technobabble ‘ thing.” I just don’t know how to write some line or action that both describes that idea and isn’t contrived AF, as the kids say. And I’ll concede that in your primary medium you have the perfect tool, the inner monologue. Data could recall at the speed of his thoughts that he knows that disruptor isn’t conducive to that solution, he’d make his own decision, and Bob’s your uncle.
@166 I just rewatched the scene and I’m really not sure what more you wanted. They have Fajo explicitly say that Data has only 2 options: Fire or stand down. They then show Data clearly thinking it over for several seconds (which we know is an eternity for an android, more than enough time to fully consider every possibility) and he doesn’t disagree. That seems to me like confirmation there are no other options unless we think Data is gullible enough that he’s just taking Fajo’s word for it.
I’m not a writer but I can’t see what more they could have done besides having Data inexplicably start listing out why every other option is indeed not viable.
@170/KP: It is, of course, obvious what the writers intended the choice to be. All you’re doing is restating what we already know. But, as I’ve explained, the way the scene was staged and the device was designed implied an option that the writers failed to account for. If the anti-Data field generator had been, say, in a box directly over Fajo’s heart, then the scripted premise would have been convincing. Having it worn off to his side created the slim possibility that Data could’ve taken a grazing shot, which undermines the writers’ intent.
You can’t focus only on the writing when talking about a TV or film production, because the writing is just one part of the equation. Sometimes the execution conflicts with what the writers intended, creating problems. For instance, in the season 1 Discovery episode where they say Starbase 1 is 100 AUs from Earth (i.e. 100 times the distance to the Sun) but the VFX artists put it in orbit of Earth, blatantly contradicting the dialogue.
@170.
Leave the room, lock the door. Fajo is now Data’s prisoner. Done.
Or
Take the Glass Onion route and threaten to destroy Fajo’s priceless collection if he threatens anymore lives. For starters, the Mona Lisa — goodbye!
Or
Data could make use of his tendency to babble. Keep Fajo talking endlessly as a hostage negotiator would until further options are available.
—
See, if other options are coming to me, then I’m not convinced of this decision that must be made. And if Data agrees with Fajo’s cynical and simplistic worldview to kill or not kill, then that doesn’t strike me as intelligence on Data’s part, it strikes me as something like Stockholm Syndrome.
However, what saves the episode for me is the followup scene in the brig. Data delivers a very effective shutdown to Fajo’s arrogance, without emotion, just a simple statement of facts. Joe Friday would be proud.
@168 That’s fair. I was probably overstating it by saying it was “obligatory” for Data to kill Fajo. I can respect just simply not wanting to kill another being.
As for it not making sense that Data lies: I completely agree with this. There’s just no reason that Data would both come to the conclusion that he was justified in killing Fajo, but also come to the conclusion that he’d need to lie about it to Riker. According to krad’s rewatch of the episode he says it was “a line that was apparently inserted at the insistence of the producers”. So my interpretation is just to basically throw that line out since it doesn’t make sense to me.
And also to be fair, if I can just throw out a line that doesn’t fit to me, I guess can’t reasonably argue it’s any less valid to not buy the dilemma if that doesn’t fit to you.
@172/P.A.: “And if Data agrees with Fajo’s cynical and simplistic worldview to kill or not kill, then that doesn’t strike me as intelligence on Data’s part, it strikes me as something like Stockholm Syndrome.”
Yes. Exactly. The hero should be able to find a better way, not let himself be dragged down to the villain’s way of thinking. That’s why I hate Superman killing Zod in Man of Steel. It means that, even though Zod lost the fight, he won the argument. He convinced Superman his more cynical worldview was the correct one, and dragged Superman down to his level. Superman should’ve been able to find a better way, and so should Data. They both failed only because the writers compelled them to fail.
Again trying desperately to stay on topic, I suppose I can’t say the same about M’Benga here, because the outcome is a consequence of his wartime trauma, not of the villain convincing him to abandon his values. Although you could say the Andorian special forces guy was the one who did that, but in the context of the war, it doesn’t seem as artificial that he’d feel compelled to make that choice.
@171 I do get your point but I guess I’m more resigned to the fact that they often don’t seem to pay enough attention to basic details like having what we see match what they say.
@174.
Agreed about Man of Steel. That movie… yeah…
As for M’Benga, I appreciate what the episode was going for, but this is another example of me wondering why he didn’t just leave the room and take a deep breath. He’s a doctor. He should know all about PTSD and the triggers. I’m not an expert, but I’m pretty sure having weapons nearby isn’t a good idea during stressful periods.
Like someone else said, I can see why Starfleet has full-time counselors aboard by the 24th century.
@176/P.A.: To be fair, M’Benga did ask Rah to leave, but Rah pressed the confrontation, intruding on his personal space. If M’Benga had tried to leave, Rah might well have stopped him. Indeed, maybe something like that is what happened behind the partition.
@CLB The TL:DR about “The Most Toys” is that I agree to disagree with you on how it was an option, I hope you consider you may be FAR more observant than I am, and I agree that it’s a convention I’m not fond of, the one where we figure out what makes someone who doesn’t kill, do. Because I figured out another solution to the problem today that I’m sure others have: Data holds him at bay, recites something that sounds like if Fajo approaches him it’s self defense and his protocols will allow him to fire, and it’s still Data overcoming his programming to save others, only now all he does is, very likely, lie. And bluff.
Again on topic, as regards M’Benga, I still prefer the concept that he killed in self defense, is angry at himself for not being horrified at himself, and lied or prevaricated because he feels like the bad guy. But I’ll have to watch it closely for myself.
Considering the war being fought very near us (ok, it’s more than a 1000 kms but it still feels to be close), this story was even stronger than it would have been otherwise.
I was surprised by two things: 1) a war criminal is not held responsible for his deeds, but is praised by the Federation. Yeah, i understand that a peace-seeking klingon is useful, but that does not justify to forgive without at least a trial.
2) the same goes to the murdering doctor. I do hope that there will be consequences to the end of this episode in the future, because that would be the second criminal going unpunished in a row…
But besides this, this is a strong story excellently told from every angle – story, acting, directing, visuals, sounds – everything. It’s amazing to see compared to earlier war episodes in Star Trek…
@19, you might want to think about Comrade Duch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kang_Kek_Iew
People can surprise you. Having said that, Dukat never struck me as a being a well-intentioned extremist.
@74 – M’Benga may very well be capable of compartmentalizing; to his colleagues and in general, he is a moral and compassionate man. He also might see killing Rah not as murder, but as execution, in much the same way as he dispatched Rah’s officers on J’gal. The difference there, of course, is that his killing those officers was in the heat of battle.
Maybe Rah wanted to die? It wasn’t clear to me whether he was aware that M’Benga was the one he was fleeing from on J’gal when his subordinates were covering his escape, so maybe not clear who or what he was facing. Also, as a Klingon, he should be more attuned to when a potential opponent is nearing the breaking point where he’d attack. He was pressing M’Benga pretty hard, and M’Benga told him several times to go away and leave him alone. Rah had sufficient opportunity to do that. Was he that unobservant, or did he have a death wish?
As for Piper becoming M’Benga’s replacement, and when: I’m not sure it matters. The character, if I remember correctly, was an older man, so should be cast with an older actor. He may well have been on his last tour before retiring from the service. If I were writing it, I’d play it that way, and I might introduce McCoy as a member of the medical staff who will be promoted to CMO when Piper leaves the ship and the service.
I still say that if there’s a new doctor, I’d rather they create another interesting new character like Pelia than just check off an inconsequential continuity box like Piper. We’ve already had more than enough legacy characters and revisited continuity. This show literally has “New” in its title. I want it to live up to that.
My least favorite episode of the series. As the author, Keith R.A. DeCandido said above, all of us lose at the end of this episode. This may have made a good Mirror Universe episode, it’s a good dramatic television episode, but — in my opinion — not a good Star Trek episode. It’s like the writer grafted a mid-late 20th century (or early 21st century) war story on to Star Trek, forgetting about science fiction and that this series is set in the 23rd Century. If you are going to craft a strong and at times compelling drama, you need to make sure that the story does not resemble a piece of swiss cheese — full of holes.
Let’s take a look at some of the more serious holes:
– The flashbacks were like a M*A*S*H* episode, but M*A*S*H wasn’t set in the 23rd century. The Starfleet mobile medical unit didn’t need to requisition mobile medical equipment — they just needed to replicate the mobile medical tech they needed. So they had transporters, but not replicators, really?
– two centuries years down the line and we haven’t learned any more about how to work with PTSD and War Trauma, really?
– many veterans have noted that the PTSD and War Trauma were depicted very accurately. What was not depicted accurately, is that anyone with the baggage that Dak’Rah had could not have become a mediator-diplomat, no less a successful one. Although we are shown M’Benga and Chapel in action in the past, we are never shown Dak’Rah in the past as a general and in the present as a mediator.
– Captain Pike is rather schizophrenic-ally portrayed here. Sometimes he realizes that members of his crew are having difficulty, other times he seems fairly oblivious and ineffective.
– the absolute worse continuity hole begins when Pike says there will be an inquiry but it won’t be any problem(!). The Starfleet poster-boy for peaceful diplomacy was just killed by a Starfleet medical officer and there won’t be any problem? The inquiry panel will go over M’Benga and Chapel’s psychological profiles with fine-toothed comb. They will have tons of questions, including why there was no attempt to medically save Dak’Rah — after all, they were in a fully equipped Starfleet medical lab. And there was no visual security logs of what happened in the lab? M’Benga and Chapel will lie again and again to the inquiry panel, possibly under oath. And their innocence is based on the absurd idea that the knife that killed Dak’Rah was his own. Let’s take a closer look at this for a moment:
– in whatever way Dak’Rah was originally arrested and/or recruited, his weapons would have been confiscated and not returned to him. It also would have been noted in the transporter logs if he had beamed aboard the Enterprise carrying a knife. Lastly, no mediator would ever carry a weapon, even a ceremonial one, as doing so would immediately draw suspicion upon them.
– The episode ends with M’Benga having violated his Hippocratic oath as a doctor and, along with Nurse Chapel, having lied to their superior officer (Pike). They were soon to be telling lies to the Inquiry Panel.
Yes, everyone loses. We all do.
@183/SteveDenoso: “So they had transporters, but not replicators, really?”
In the 23rd century, replicators shouldn’t exist yet (although that certainly seemed to be one creating the raktajino in this episode). They use food and material synthesizers instead. Transporter-based replicators were introduced in TNG.
@184/ChristopherLBennett: “In the 23rd century, replicators shouldn’t exist yet (although that certainly seemed to be one creating the raktajino in this episode).”
Yes, seeing the raktajino was what made me think they had replicators. Then again, I never before saw a 23rd century mobile transporter like the one they had in the field medical unit.
Unlike the first five Star Trek series (where I believe they had someone keeping an eye on continuity), the new shows seem only partially interested in both series continuity and character continuity. The characters of M’Benga and Chapel seem like they were altered to fit this storyline. Major crew members committing murder and covering it up is not why I watch Star Trek. My personal opinion is that the drama here didn’t serve the spirit of the characters or the series; in fact, it violated it.
I know I’m days late on this thread, but whether the writers intended this or not, I interpreted M’Benga and Chapel’s actions as a pretty clear case of an injured animal being the most dangerous/an animal in a trap being willing to gnaw its own foot off.
Starfleet and Pike should never have asked survivors of the specific battle that Rah is infamous for to spend time with him. Rah should have stopped cornering M’Benga in sickbay. On multiple occasions, M’Benga clearly says that he doesn’t want to interact with him. Pike or Number One or even Chapel should have stepped in and stopped Rah and M’Benga from practicing judo together. Maybe M’Benga had the box of war mementos out because he was looking at it while grieving. Maybe he was planning a murder. Or a suicide. But he’s literally backed into a corner in a space where he’s supposed to be in charge and relatively safe. Of course he snaps.
The tragedy isn’t that Rah was killed years after the war for war crimes he admitted to, while he was supposedly trying to repent. Narratively, th tragedy is that M’Benga broke more of his clearly already fragile psyche by killing him (and probably losing Pike’s trust). Rah’s death is almost an inevitable byproduct.
Depending on how the writers handle this going forward, this episode could seem better in retrospect or much worse. Here’s hoping.
@7 “I don’t like seeing such a pessimistic ending in a Trek episode. Trek is supposed to be about how people can overcome their differences and work together, not how they can’t.”
Sometimes people can’t. Those stories are part of the fabric of Trek too. Look at “The Outcast,” or Sisko’s meeting with Picard at the start of DS9.
@187/Kate: “Look at “The Outcast,””
In which case it’s the guest aliens who can’t find a better way. It’s different when it’s the protagonists themselves.
“or Sisko’s meeting with Picard at the start of DS9.”
Bad example, because they did reconcile at the end. It’s meaningless to cite the beginning of a story, since most stories are about characters learning and changing, so it’s where they end up that matters.
I have a different take on what happened: Rah committed ritual suicide when he realized that M’Benga could expose his dishonor. He announced his intention to do do when he asked M’Benga to “let me help you heal.”
The evidence?
1. They explicitly did *not* show M’Benga picking up the knife before cutting to the opaque glass scene.
2. During the scuffle, Rah asks, “don’t you see it”? That line makes no sense if M’Benga is pointing a knife at Rah. But it makes a lot of sense if Rah surreptitiously picked up the knife. That scenario also is consistent with M’Benga’s next line, “get your hands off!” Everyone is thinking that means “get your hands off me”; but it may mean “get your hands off my war-trophy knife!”
3. Rah replies, “so selfish a human.” My first reaction to someone pointing a knife at me would not be to call that person selfish. But if Rah, in a moment of atoning for his cowardice and dishonor, is about to commit seppuku, it makes perfect sense to call M’Benga selfish to trying to stop the seppuku. If M’Benga succeeded, it would rob Rah of the latter’s chance to restore his honor.
4. M’Benga then cries, “don’t!” As in, “don’t stab yourself.”
5. When they show Rah lying on the floor, his hand slumps to the floor, starting roughly from the area where the knife handle is. It could, of course, be that he touched the knife after M’Benga thrust it; but it could also be that Rah was wielding the knife himself.
6. La’an says she “tracked the movements,” meaning she probably looked into the forensics of what happened.
7. Later, M’Benga says, “I told you, I didn’t start the fight. But I’m glad he’s dead.”
Clearly a case of self-defense.
Well, maybe. But that situation was very much sui generis; it would be a real roll of the dice as to whether a prosecutor could obtain a conviction, since Janeway would argue that she was merely separating two fused lifeforms. (If a surgeon separates siamese twins joined at the head, does that constitute murder?)
Yes, under Federation law. But it’s clear that Klingon law applied on board K’mpec’s ship. Picard acknowledges as much; the KLingons considered the matter closed.
Once his assimilation became inevitable, it was probably a mercy killing, rather like what Seven did to Icheb.
Possibly, but it probably depends on whether the clones had been “born” yet or not.
Military duty.
Yes, this one I agree with.
Setting aside whether the admiral’s actions constituted a threat to “ikidnap” her, there’s no mens rea — no “malice aforethought.” And in any case, there also no cause and effect. If Lal’s positronic matrix was that unstable, any other traumatic event could have produced the same result.
@190/Temarc: “* Agnes should at least be placed on leave and investigated for killing Maddox,
Yes, this one I agree with.”
That did happen in the two years between seasons 1 & 2. There was a throwaway line in 2×1 about her being acquitted, which would mean that she was not merely investigated but actually put on trial and found not guilty.
This episode is a fascinating study in ambiguities that will make it very difficult to ever again regard Doctor M’Benga with the same easy affection: it’s easy to see why this ‘diplomatic incident’ might see the doctor demoted from the position of Chief Medical Officer when a Captain other than Christopher Pike assumes command of NCC-1701.
On a less serious note, now I’m wonder whether Pile jambalaya can possibly match Sisko jambalaya: I think we can all agree that the only sensible solution is a Cook-off and that we’ll just have to subvert the Department of Temporal Investigations to see it done,
@ChristopherLBennett, I believe you have connections in that particular institution whom can potentially be suborned for our own vicarious amusement? 😉