“Nothing Human”
Written by Jeri Taylor
Directed by David Livingston
Season 5, Episode 8
Production episode 200
Original air date: December 2, 1998
Stardate: unknown
Captain’s log. Following a seemingly endless slideshow presentation by the EMH, Voyager is buffeted by an energy wave that does no damage to the ship, but has an audio component. They can’t translate it, but think it might be a distress call.
Tracing the source, they find a horribly damaged ship with only one survivor. The alien isn’t humanoid, and the EMH isn’t entirely sure how to treat it. Torres arrives in sickbay to report that the control interfaces on the alien ship are all chemical in nature. She hypothesizes that the aliens secrete chemicals that they use to control the ship.
Suddenly, the alien awakens, leaps through the force field that the EMH thought would contain it, and attaches itself to Torres. Kim can’t get a transporter lock on it, and the alien’s protrusions are now clinging to Torres’s entire central nervous system. Her lungs and heart are also compromised, and she quickly is rendered unconscious.
The EMH can’t surgically remove the alien without compromising Torres, and they can’t beam the alien off for the same reason. The EMH needs to consult an exobiology database, and Janeway suggests putting the database into an interactive hologram that can be used as a consultant. Kim constructs the matrix, and the EMH chooses one of the most highly regarded exobiologists in the Alpha Quadrant as the physical template: Dr. Crell Moset of Cardassia.
Kim expresses reservations about using a Cardassian, but the EMH pooh-poohs it. Moset and the EMH study the problem, and Moset requests a piece of equipment not available on Voyager. Turns out it’s a tool that Moset uses that hasn’t been accepted across the quadrant due to it coming from a Cardassian. He is able to adjust a tricorder, however.
Torres regains consciousness, and is livid at the presence of a Cardassian, but Paris assures her that it’s just a hologram, and he may be her only hope to get rid of the alien that’s leeched onto her.
Janeway and Chakotay have been unable to decipher the alien’s signal, but, given that it might be a distress call, she has Tuvok rebroadcast it through the navigational deflector. She also instructs Seven to retrieve the database off the alien’s ship. However, when she and Ensign Tabor attempt to do so, the ship destabilizes and blows up.
Moset and the EMH test a notion on a holographic version of the alien. The EMH is concerned that the procedure Moset suggests will kill the alien, but Moset points out that it may be it or Torres. Then the hologram starts to futz out, and the EMH must take Moset offline.
Kim and Tabor report to sickbay to reconstitute the Moset hologram. Torres wants no part of a Cardassian doctor, but the EMH insists that her innate prejudice against Cardassians is unwarranted. Moset is simply a good doctor.
When Kim and Tabor reactivate the hologram, Tabor nearly goes into hysterics. Moset is a butcher, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Bajorans. While he is credited with curing the Fostossa Virus, he found that cure by experimenting on Bajorans. Tabor was there, and he saw what Moset did, and two of his victims were Tabor’s grandfather and brother.
Tabor pleads with Chakotay for the hologram to be deleted, and Torres further refuses to be treated by Moset. Seven and Kim do some research, and find evidence that supports Tabor’s accusation, though nothing concrete. Still, the circumstantial evidence is not good.
Janeway calls a senior staff meeting. On the one hand, Moset’s treatment is the only thing that the EMH has found that can cure Torres. On the other hand, can they ethically use a method from such a butcher? Finally, Janeway decides to order the EMH to go ahead with the procedure, regardless of Torres’s wishes. They need their chief engineer, and that’s the only yardstick that matters to Janeway.
Another alien ship arrives, of the same configuration as the one that blew up, and sends more incomprehensible signals.
Moset’s treatment very obviously hurts the alien. The EMH hits on a solution that will do less harm to the alien, and it works. The alien detaches itself from Torres and the EMH tells Janeway to beam it to the alien ship. At that, the alien ship moves off.
Torres is royally pissed off at Janeway for disregarding her wishes, and the EMH has to reluctantly get rid of the Moset program even though he could be useful.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? For four years, the EMH’s database has had all the medical data in the Federation. Now, suddenly, he doesn’t have much on exobiology, even though it’s a subject that had to have come up prior to this.
There’s coffee in that nebula! For the second time, Janeway violates medical ethics and orders a person in her crew to undergo a medical procedure against their will.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok hears the alien message before everyone else. Love them ears…
Half and half. Torres has no love for Cardassians, and she’s angry throughout the entire episode at the notion of being treated by one. She isn’t particularly forgiving of Janeway’s going against her wishes, either.
Forever an ensign. Kim points out to the EMH that the Cardassians have long been enemies of the Federation and maybe Moset isn’t the best choice for the consultant’s avatar. For some reason, Kim neglects to mention that the entire reason the Maquis exists is to fight Cardassians, so there may be issues there, too.
Resistance is futile. Despite Torres having an entire staff, including a deputy chief engineer in Joe Carey, Seven is put in charge of engineering while Torres is incapacitated. Sure.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH has been showing slideshows to the crew. Chakotay and Kim sat through one showing, and Janeway requested that, when it was time for her, Tuvok, Paris, and Torres to watch it, Chakotay should call for some kind of alert partway through. Chakotay neglects to do so, as he feels his fellow crewmates should enjoy every excruciating nanosecond of the EMH’s stultifying presentation, just as he did.
For Cardassia! Moset ran a hospital on Bajor, ostensibly used to cure the Fostossa Virus, but also used to experiment on Bajorans.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Paris is focused entirely upon curing Torres. He doesn’t leave her side, ostensibly due to his medic training, but mostly because he won’t leave her side no matter what.
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. Moset’s lab is re-created on the holodeck along with Moset himself.
Do it.
“If the doctor uses knowledge that Moset gained through his experiments, we would be validating his methods, inviting further unethical research.”
“We’d be setting a terrible precedent.”
“We’re in the middle of the Delta Quadrant. Who would know?”
“We would know.”
“Fine. Let’s just deactivate the evil hologram and let B’Elanna die. At least we’d have our morals intact.”
–Tuvok and Chakotay arguing with Paris over what to do.
Welcome aboard. David Clennon plays the hologram of Moset, while Jed Mager makes the first of two appearances as Tabor; Mager will be back in “Repression” in season seven.
Trivial matters: This is the last Trek writing credit for Jeri Taylor, who had retired from her producing duties after the previous season. She had intended to keep freelancing for the show that she co-created and for which she ran the writers room for four years, but it didn’t happen again after this for whatever reason.
Taylor was one of the creators of the Cardassians, as she wrote the teleplay for “The Wounded,” the TNG episode that introduced them, so it’s kind of fitting that her last script also involved them.
Moset has his origins in the original notion for the DS9 episode “Wrongs Darker than Death or Night,” which was supposed to have a Cardassian doctor who was the equivalent of the Nazi scientist Josef Mengele. The DS9 staff abandoned that aspect, and Taylor picked it up and used it here.
The character of Moset appears in several works of tie-in fiction, including The Battle of Betazed by Charlotte Douglas & Susan Kearny, the Spirit Walk duology by Christie Golden, and the Terok Nor novels Night of the Wolves and Dawn of the Eagles by S.D, Perry & Britta Dennison.
Your humble rewatcher wrote the Mirror Universe version of Moset in The Mirror-Scaled Serpent, part of the Mirror Universe: Shards and Shadows trade paperback, in which Moset was part of a think-tank run by Supervisor B’Elanna of the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance. Dr. Lewis Zimmerman was also part of that think-tank.
By production order, this is actually the one hundredth episode of Voyager, but “Timeless” was always intended to have that slot, and the air dates were rearranged accordingly. This had the unintended side effect of David Livingston directing two straight aired episodes, though this and “Infinite Regress” were filmed three weeks apart.
Set a course for home. “You can’t order someone to get rid of an emotion, Captain.” This episode’s heart is in the right place, but the execution just doesn’t work on any level.
The plot of this story stems from two premises that don’t make a lick of sense. We start with the notion that the EMH has gaps in his database. In more than four years, there’s been no indication of any such gaps, and indeed, he’s boasted about the completeness of his knowledge on more than one occasion. True, it might be hyperbole, but here’s the thing: if there’s any area that he should have complete knowledge of while on a space ship that is likely to encounter a myriad of alien life forms over the course of its regular missions (never mind being stuck in another quadrant), it’s exobiology. Heck, being able to treat Kes and Neelix alone would require some knowledge of it.
But even if we grant this absurd premise, we come to the other one. The EMH gathers all that’s in the ship’s medical database about exobiology and chooses this one Cardassian dude to be the visual referent. We are then asked to accept the notion that this particular avatar can never be changed, and that everything we get from the database given humanoid form is actually from Crell Moset—which is ridiculous. This is supposed to be the sum total of exobiological information the Federation has access to, so the vast majority of what comes out of “Moset’s” mouth wouldn’t be something that originated with Moset, but with one of the other hundreds, thousands, millions of exobiologists in Alpha Quadrant history!
The moment Kim said that the crew likely wouldn’t be comfortable with a Cardassian avatar for this holographic consultant, the first thing the EMH should’ve done was change it to a human or a Vulcan or an Andorian or some other friendly species. It makes no sense on a Federation starship that has a contingent of Maquis to choose to have so provocative a face and personality on the consultant when it’s not necessary.
What’s frustrating is that the moral dilemma posed by the script is a good one. I particularly like that Tuvok is on the side of Torres’ emotional stance, because it is actually rooted in logic.
But the treatment doesn’t come from Crell Moset, it comes from a hologram that happens to look like Moset. Hell, given that the information about Moset’s treatment of Bajorans isn’t entirely public knowledge, it’s impossible to credit that this hologram is anything resembling a reasonable facsimile of Moset’s personality.
It would’ve been so simple to fix this: just have the EMH use a treatment that’s in his database that comes from a Cardassian, and further research reveals that it was from Moset. You can even use an image of Moset as a holographic avatar (in much the same way La Forge used an avatar of Leah Brahms in TNG’s “Booby Trap“), but have the issue be with a preexisting treatment. As it is, we get a treatment that the hologram came up with after examining the alien. That has absolutely nothing to do with Crell Moset.
Jeri Taylor’s career as a Trek writer hasn’t, in my opinion, been sterling, but she’s had some fine moments—notably the creation of the Cardassians in TNG’s “The Wounded,” not to mention some excellent Voyager scripts (“Persistence of Vision,” “Resolutions,” “Hunters,” “One“)—but her swan song is a disaster.
Warp factor rating: 3
Keith R.A. DeCandido will have an essay in BIFF! BAM! EEE-YOW!: The Subterranean Blue Grotto Guide to Batman ’66—Season Two, edited by Jim Beard, with Rich Handley, specifically about “Hizzoner the Penguin”/”Dizzoner the Penguin.” Cover and full table of contents can be found here.
Seriously, what the f*** is up with this? For someone who would rather blow up her ship than let anyone have a replicator, Janeway certainly doesn’t seem to give a good gosh darn about medical ethics of any kind. The minute Torres was awake and able to make a decision that should have been the end of this whole discussion. I get that they are (mostly only theoretically) short on people, but B’Elanna isn’t the only engineer, and Lt. Carey has had 5 years to grow into a potential replacement for her (plus: Seven of Nine has plenty of engineering knowledge). Forcing people to accept experimental medical treatment that they do not want is, well, exactly what Crell Moset did. It isn’t the action of heroes, no matter how many times the show tries to portray Janeway as being right for doing so. Again, this would be easier to swallow if there was literally any follow-up to it whatsoever, but after this B’Elanna will apparently have forgotten all about being forced to undergo a medical experiment concocted based off torture conducted by a Space Nazi. It further irritates me because Janeway is about to do something I find extremely morally questionable next episode, too, and it makes me think that none of the reading they have to do at the Academy covers ethics.
Our hypothetical Emergency Legal Hologram might want to start encouraging the crew to write up living wills.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen this one, but I’m tempted to go watch it now.
But you’re right, the premise doesn’t make sense. If it’s all information that’s already in Voyager’s computer, why can’t the EMH access it directly?
It would almost be more plausible if they’d actually found the real Cardassian had been transported to the Delta Quadrant by sone handwavy means and they were forced to work with him.
It is a good moral question that this episode raises. In the DVD extras Robert Picardo says he disagrees with the decision of the hologram to not use the data again.
Was I the only one who thought Jed Mager was really bad as Tabor? Every line of his felt stilted, somehow. I also didn’t like the contrivance of his confrontation with Moset: the hologram glitchted, which needed a diagnostic, which is done (in part) by Tabor and happens to take place in sickbay. Moset glitching didn’t add anything except for this scene. It all happened because the plot needed it to, and could have been a bit better.
It’s a shame the episode was clunky: I felt the underlying dilemma, of what to do with research gained from, at the very least, questionable practises, a very Star Trek-thing.
A disaster? I couldn’t disagree more. Despite the silly looking creature design, this is one of my favorites.
I feel like this was a DS9 or TNG script that got recycled to be a Voyager script, hence the things that don’t make sense.
If these events took place in the Alpha quadrant, it would be Moset in person that was brought in to consult Bashir/Crusher and provide treatment to Kira/Ro.
THEN we’d have a good story about an ethical dilemma and it would make sense. But since they are in the Delta quadrant, they tried to shoehorn it in using nonsense about an incomplete database and a hologram.
Meh.
Somebody on Facebook pointed something out that I wish I’d said in the rewatch: it makes no sense for the EMH — which is a holographic construct made up of a medical database and a programmed personality to supplement a medical staff — to have to create a holographic construct made up of a medical database and a programmed personality to supplement it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I think I also felt that the episode didn’t quite live up to the promise of its concept — that it was trying to do something meaningful but wasn’t entirely successful in the execution. Still, I didn’t think it was that bad. I think my main problem was that it felt like it belonged earlier in the series, when the Maquis and the Cardassian conflict were still fairly fresh in our memories and the characters’ attention. Also, it would’ve benefitted if Tabor had been established earlier as a recurring character. Pinning so much of the drama on a guest star of the week made it less effective.
It doesn’t bother me so much that the program was only partly based on Moset’s work. I think that underlines the ethical conundrum the episode touched on — it’s hard to separate out knowledge gained from unethical means, since so much of it has been over the generations. So the more the situation blurs the lines, the better it serves the ethical dilemma.
And the hologram was more than just a visual representation. The Doctor wanted a personality matrix that could intelligently interpret the cold, hard data, using the same skills and insight as the real-life genius it was based on. It’s the same expert-program concept behind the Leah Brahms holo in “Booby Trap” — going beyond someone’s published words to a simulation of their thinking process, their unique insight and mindset, their creativity and experience. The exobiology database was what the Moset holo knew, but the Moset personality model determined how it thought. There’s a difference. If it had just been about the raw knowledge, then yes, the Doctor could’ve just studied up himself. What he specifically wanted was another perspective on it, a colleague to bounce ideas off of. That personality model provided advantages that the raw information alone could not, just like, say, Spock could provide Kirk with more insight than just the library computer readout could. So the fact that it was Moset’s personality and point of view was important. It wasn’t just superficial.
As for why the Doctor didn’t have that exobiology information already on call in his own matrix… well, recall that the EMH’s program has gone through a number of disruptions, including a near-total memory loss in “The Swarm.” Part of the reason for that was that his program got too big and ran out of memory. So maybe now he outsources portions of his medical database to the ship’s computer so that he doesn’t get overloaded again.
“I don’t care if he’s the nastiest man that ever lived, as long as he can help us save B’Elanna.”
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. This is a mess on just about every level. I can imagine that someone went “Hey, what if we do an episode about medical experiments at concentration camps?” and got a lot of nods of approval, but ultimately it’s a failure on at least two levels. Firstly, the moral they seem to have decided on is “If there’s a known cure for a disease, it should only be used if it was discovered in a way that’s ethically appropriate.” This moral is so dubious that even the episode itself can’t stick to it. So secondly, B’Elanna’s a main titles character, so she has to be saved anyway even if that means accepting the help of the bad Cardassian. This does of course suffer from the fact that the bad Cardassian is thousands of light years away and so we have to accept the conceit that a holographic simulation is somehow responsible for the actions of the person that it’s based on even though it doesn’t remember them, as if the script wandered in from Deep Space Nine and someone had to do an awkward rewrite. (Which, looking at the trivia, I see is almost what happened!)
I was thinking back during the debate on “Tuvix” that this episode seems to see the endgame of Janeway’s belief that her orders supersede individual consent. She manages not to kill anyone this time, but neither does she have the excuse of being an advocate for those who can’t speak for themselves. Whether you agree with B’Elanna’s decision or not, she’s made an informed decision to refuse to consent to treatment, which Janeway and the Doctor override. Maybe it can be justified tactically, since it means keeping a key crewmember alive, but morally it’s very dubious. Yet we have to sit through the closing scenes of Janeway and the Doctor making self-righteous proclamations about how superior they are and how their word is law, while I found myself nodding in agreement with the war criminal pointing out what hypocrites they are.
Janeway putting Seven in charge of engineering with Torres out of action, even though there should be a score of lieutenants and ensigns with more knowledge of Starfleet procedures, is either an example of “The main characters do everything” syndrome, an example of this show’s obsession with giving Seven a large role in an episode that doesn’t really need her to have one, or both. It’s not clear what Tabor is expecting to happen when he tries to resign: Is he going to leave the ship at the next planet or does he expect to stay on board without doing any work?
Oh, and having failed to produce anything remotely resembling a workable replacement EMH back in “Message in a Bottle”, Kim finds it remarkably easy to create an exobiology expert here.
I agree with most of the criticism about the central moral dilemma, but just wish to add my mild surprise that, needing to create a colleague with a slightly different specialty than himself, the EMH did not choose to model it’s avatar on Robert Picardo.
There was a Babylon 5 episode that did something similar with the question of whether it was ethical to benefit from medical advances gained through mass atrocity, ohg V guvax va gung pnfr gur zrqvpny nqinaprzrag vgfrys erdhverq batbvat harguvpny gerngzrag. Fbzrguvat yvxr orvat noyr gb tnva vzzbegnyvgl ohg bayl ol xvyyvat nabgure crefba.
I thought it was weird that everyone made such an issue of using this medical information because of the way it was attained, but no one has a problem fully accepting Seven’s contribution using Borg technology. For example, how many people died or were assimilated horribly so that Seven would know how to bring Neelix back to life in Mortal Coil?
@11/John: Ooh, good point. Another reason this was a good idea for a standalone story in theory but didn’t really fit this particular series and situation.
For that matter, wasn’t Terok Nor/Deep Space 9 built with Bajoran slave labor? But Starfleet still uses it.
The Voyager crew never seems to have an issue using Borg technology that was obtained through genocide. I’m not sure I see the difference between that and what this episode does.
cuttlefishbenjamin: Something happened to your post #10, it turned into gibberish….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@@.-@ – You weren’t the only one. That was some really bad acting.
Where is the information for the hologram coming from? Moset acted like he had the actual memories of the real Moset (minus the experiments apparently).
@14 Isn’t it ROT-13?
@10, @14, @16
Yes, the last few lines of @10 were somehow offset by 13 characters–a classic Caesar Cipher!
The intended text was:
“…but I think in that case the medical advancement itself required ongoing unethical treatment. Something like being able to gain immortality but only by killing another person.”
@14 Rot13 is an old cypher from the usenet days for hiding spoilers, if you go to Rot13.com you can paste the gibberish into the decode field and it’ll give you the spoiler text. It is a good [better?] alternative to mucking about with font colours.
@1
Yeah, but they thought they killed Carey off back in Basics, the production team got him mixed up with Hogan. That is why he only appears in flashbacks, except for one episode near the end when they found out they hadn’t killed him.
For once I am on Team Janeway. She is the Captain, and Torres is crew, and that means Torres has limited medical autonomy just by virtue of being so. If the ship needs and captain wills, and all that. She might be able to say no as a civilian, but as even a provisional member of Starfleet, then her needs are subordinate to the needs of the ship and the decisions of the captain. Also Torres is being racist again, so I don’t care about her ‘tude.
Plus, this hologram is not Mosset. The show, as much as I disagree with it, has taken a stance that holograms are alive and sapient in their own right. So when Janeway orders the hologram deleted, she’s just killed an innocent member of her crew [again, RIP Tuvix, pouring one out for my Vulaxian buddy] who has done none of the things the real Mosset allegedly has. Also, we use the medical data no matter where it comes from, but we prosecute the hell out of assholes who behave unethically in the first place. History doesn’t record them as heroes for being garbage if it produces good data, we tear down their statues just the same and condemn them in the history books. Their victims, them we remember and honour.
I loved the scene where the senior staff is debating whether or not to save Torres and when things started getting out of hand between Chakotay and Paris Janeway takes control and says they’re both right and then makes the final decision. It was one of my favorite Janeway as Captain moments. Also I have to say I was completely on Paris and Janeway’s side. If someone I loved was dying and there was a way to save them I couldn’t just stand by and watch them die even if they wanted me to. I’d save them and deal with the moral implications later and if they never forgave me for it so be it. For the record I also agreed with Janeway’s decision in Tuvix which was another of my favorite Janeway as Captain moments.
@15/Austin: “Where is the information for the hologram coming from? Moset acted like he had the actual memories of the real Moset (minus the experiments apparently).”
No doubt, as with Leah Brahms, it was a personality model based on Moset’s writings, public appearances, news accounts, etc. I’ve seen it hypothesized by futurists that it might actually be possible to create a fairly accurate simulation of someone’s personality based on such sources, using them to reconstruct how the person thought and acted and create a predictive model that could fairly accurately approximate how they’d actually respond in a given situation. Apparently people are more predictable than we like to think we are.
@18/kayom: “The show, as much as I disagree with it, has taken a stance that holograms are alive and sapient in their own right.”
Not all of them, any more than all vertebrates are equally sapient. Just a few exceptional ones that are more complex, like Moriarty and the EMH. We call them “holograms,” but they’re really artificial intelligences; the holograms are just avatars they control. Some of those avatars are operated by very simple algorithms like NPCs in a computer game (or are really just puppets of the holodeck computer), some are operated by more complex but nonsentient personality simulations like Minuet, Leah Brahms, Moset, or a typical EMH, and a very few are sophisticated enough to cross the threshold into consciousness.
I’ve said it before — there’s a popular misconception that the Turing test is proof of AI consciousness, but it’s actually just the opposite, proof of how easy it is for a non-conscious piece of software to convincingly fool us into thinking it’s a person. Something like the Moset program is just a ton of brute-force calculation extrapolating how the real Moset would be most likely to respond to a given input, based on records of his past responses and views.
I’d somehow managed to forget that ROT-13 was even a thing. It’s been a while.
I gotta ask, do we really need to spoiler-code something from 27 years ago, especially in a post that’s discussing something from 23 years ago with no such coding?
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@Rot13- I don’t think that we need to, no, and I wouldn’t be offended to come across a discussion without it, but I tend to err on the side of Rot-13ing spoilers when I have any doubt. In this case, I figured anyone who read through the rewatch would be expecting plot points from Voyager, but not necessarily the twist in an episode of a completely different series- especially one that just got a new remastered edition released and might, I hope, be getting appreciated by a new generation.
@11, good point. And speaking of “Mortal Coil,” there’s an idea, just let the creature kill Torres and then revive her, worst case scenario she needs a good talking down when she doesn’t visit Sto’Vo’Kor.
@9: “Janeway putting Seven in charge of engineering with Torres out of action, even though there should be a score of lieutenants and ensigns with more knowledge of Starfleet procedures, is either an example of “The main characters do everything” syndrome, an example of this show’s obsession with giving Seven a large role in an episode that doesn’t really need her to have one, or both.”
Seriously. So Seven is technically competent, but she doesn’t know how to manage people and this isn’t her “regular” job– she can’t just slot into it because she won’t know about ongoing maintenance, or work schedules, or whatever, and whoever Torres’s deputy is would logically know all those things. If Janeway wants to play this game, then she should really give Seven a rank and a job. And they have a guest star from engineering anyway, just put a Lieutenant pip on him and make him the person in charge (which would still leave the riddle of where the hell Carey is, but whatever, that’s an issue anyway), then have Seven working in engineering like she usually does and it’s basically the same script. Very strange.
@cuttlefish I for one appreciate the gesture. I’ve seen B5 before but I know how annoying it is to be reading comments on one thing and stumble into spoilers on something else that I haven’t seen. It’s not necessary but it’s a courtesy, and I appreciate it.
As for the review, I think “disaster” is a rather harsh descriptor. I really like that they finally dig into their prop department and give us an alien that couldn’t possibly be a human in a suit. The nonsensical technical aspects don’t bother me too much, though I’ve found that I’m consistently more forgiving of those than a great many fans. The dilemma is a good try at tackling a complex moral issue.
But, it does have holes. Primarily the fact that the episode seems to take both sides. Not in a “this is a tough call, we need to respect everyone’s opinion” way, more of a “this conundrum has one right answer, and we think it’s both answers.” Either Torres is right that Moset’s research is inherently tainted and should never be used, which the episode ends by supporting when the Doctor deletes the data, or knowledge is only as evil as the people who use it and if you have what you need to save a life you use it no matter the atrocities that created it, which Janeway chooses over B’Lanna’s objections and the show never tells us this was wrong or that Janeway should be chastised for it.
Overall a good concept let down by a failure to think it through. A problem I find is endemic to Voyager.
IMO, knowledge is knowledge. The genesis of that knowledge does not matter. I would go so far as to say that it’s nonsensical to deny knowledge just because of how it was obtained. Let’s say a doctor spent decades kidnapping and performing experts on people in secret in order to find a cure for cancer. Then one day he finally does, shows it to the world, gets arrested and is rightly convicted. Is the world supposed to pretend his cure doesn’t exist? That would be just as evil.
IIRC, the Gul who tortured Picard in “Chain of Command” was also named Moset. I wonder if they were meant to be the same character?
Ugh, that should say “performing experiments” @26
@27/Nina: No, Picard’s torturer was Gul Madred. You’re probably thinking of Gul Macet, Marc Alaimo’s character in the Cardassians’ debut episode, TNG: “The Wounded.” A similar name, but not identical.
I actually don’t think that the Doctor not having access to exobiology research in his databanks is a plot hole. Medicine is a very narrow version of biology, so what the Doctor probably has is more of a distilled version of exobiological knowledge, one that’s presumably focused on humanoid life.
@30/Xomic: Come to think of it, that’s an excellent point. Medicine is applied rather than theoretical. The EMH’s comprehensive medical knowledge would be based on the experience of all Federation doctors in treating the life forms they’ve encountered. But when it comes to a kind of life form never before encountered, then you get into theory and extrapolation of broader universals, so you need a theorist rather than a practitioner. By the same token, you wouldn’t expect an engineer to be an expert in theoretical physics.
@26 I think that would be a fair point if Torres was unconscious and couldn’t make this choice for herself. Then they would have a legitimate argument to be made among themselves about the ethics of using his research. But all of that is made more than a little moot by the fact that Torres doesn’t want the treatment. And frankly, as long as she is in her right mind, she doesn’t need a reason to decide she doesn’t want to undergo a surgery. Leaving aside that forcing people to undergo experimental procedures without their consent is assault (and there are plenty of extremely ugly cases from American history that show exactly why such things are not allowed), people are also just allowed to decide that they don’t want to be treated. It might be a religious reason, or a moral reason, or just not liking the odds of success, but informed consent exists for a reason in our world (and, one assumes, in the supposedly near-utopian universe of the Federation). And I don’t buy the “Janeway is the captain and what she says goes, and if Torres didn’t want to be subject to experimental Nazi treatments well, she shouldn’t have gotten herself pressed into service!” argument. Hell, I’m in the Army now and we can’t be forced to take the COVID vaccines because they aren’t fully approved. And even if it was a fully approved vaccine, I still couldn’t be held down and have it administered to me the way Torres essentially does, here (I would just be kicked out of service). And the U.S. Army doesn’t claim to be some super-evolved organization the way that the Federation and Starfleet do. There is an interesting moral quandary in here about using research that comes from bad places, but IMHO all that is overridden by the fact that Torres is being assaulted and experimented on and no one really seems to find *that* part of it problematic. I actually find it really disturbing that Torres’ wishes about her medical treatment (not to mention her moral beliefs) are so casually disregarded.
@32/wildfyrewarning: “people are also just allowed to decide that they don’t want to be treated.”
Another good point. I often bring that up in relation to TNG: “The Enemy” and Worf’s subplot about being asked to provide a transfusion for the dying Romulan soldier. Everyone says “Worf refused and let the Romulan die,” but they overlook that the Romulan refused to accept the transfusion. So that took the decision out of Worf’s hands. The Romulan wouldn’t have consented to the treatment even if Worf had said yes, so Crusher couldn’t have forced it on him. Worf didn’t refuse, he just accepted the Romulan’s refusal. It always seemed to me that he was willing to agree, but the Romulan made the decision for him.
So it is problematical that the episode gives Torres the opportunity to clearly refuse treatment. I can see the logic of Janeway deciding “We’re alone out here, we can’t get a replacement engineer, so we can’t afford to lose Torres, ethics or no ethics.” But that makes it contradictory to simultaneously have ethical qualms about using Moset’s research.
Hi there – and thank you for your brilliant rewatch write-ups. I think there’s someone missing from the “welcome aboard” section – though might be pushing the definition of “aboard”. The cytoplasmic lifeforms voice was performed by Frank Welker of Futurama fame. Apologies if this has already been mentioned
@32 – I agree. But since there was no way they were going to kill off Torres (nowadays it might not be a big deal, but back then it would almost be impossible to imagine a main character getting killed off), I can’t really get worked up about it. The “out” provided by Janeway forcing the issue was predetermined, with, I’m assuming, no real thought to actually getting rid of Torres. The choice here, then, at least in my head, wasn’t really presented with any force.
I haven’t watched this one in a long time, so it’s somewhat difficult for me to make a direct comparison, but just reading the synopsis of this episode reminds me a lot of “Jetrel.” Similarly, in that story, you have another alien scientist of ill repute, whose knowledge is being using used to help people and one of the main cast, this time Neelix, doesn’t want anything to do with him. But that episode was a lot better because it lacks the contrivances of this one, in particular, it had the real scientist present on Voyager, whereas here it’s just an avatar and so it seems silly that everyone gets up in arms over something that’s not even a real person. Just use a different avatar for God’s sake!
@18: “Yeah, but they thought they killed off Carey back in Basics, the production team got him mixed up with Hogan.”
Except that they started acting as though Carey didn’t exist about 30 episodes before Basics, and then suddenly mentioned him as still being around (sort of) 20 episodes after Basics, so that doesn’t make much sense.
@34/robairdrie: Good catch about Frank Welker. He’s actually a returning performer for Trek, since he voiced the cries of the regenerating Spock on the Genesis planet in STIII. (Which is one of two characters he shares with Leonard Nimoy, the other being Galvatron in Transformers.)
@35/Austin: “back then it would almost be impossible to imagine a main character getting killed off”
That’s hardly true, considering that this episode aired just six months after Jadzia Dax was killed off on DS9, and ten years after Tasha Yar was killed off on TNG.
Killing off a main character has always been a fairly common means of writing out an actor who was leaving a series. It happened all the time in the ’80s and ’90s. There was also ST:TNG’s syndication sister show War of the Worlds: The Series, which killed off half its main cast (i.e. both of the non-white cast members, ugh) in its second-season premiere in 1989. Sliders killed off John Rhys-Davies midway through season 3 in early 1997. IIRC, TekWar killed off the hero’s partner halfway through season 1 in 1994. And those are just the examples I can think of offhand.
The only difference between then and now is that in those days, main characters were only killed off for behind-the-scenes reasons, because the actor was leaving/being fired or the producers wanted to retool, rather than for reasons growing organically out of the story arc.
@36/garreth: “Just use a different avatar for God’s sake!”
As I said, it’s not just the avatar, it’s an expert program based on a model of Moset’s personality, drawing on his documented expertise and research to simulate his way of thinking. It’s not just raw data, it’s a simulated personality able to interpret that data creatively like a person could. So the personality matters. The EMH wanted to consult with an approximation of the greatest exobiologist known to the Federation, not just because of what he knew, but because of how he thought. He wanted a second opinion, not just raw data that he could read in the computer. And it happened that the greatest known exobiological mind was a Cardassian war criminal.
I guess he could’ve switched to a simulation of the second-greatest known exobiologist, but then he would’ve had to start over with a new “consultant” and they didn’t have time for that.
@39:
When I was writing my comment, I knew I should have specified. Of course actors who wanted to leave the show are usually killed off. I was referring to the relatively rare occurrence of killing off a main character for story purposes.
Given that the ship was full of Maquis, they at least could have given Moset a different appearance and not tell anyone who the personality was based off of.
@40/Austin: “Given that the ship was full of Maquis, they at least could have given Moset a different appearance and not tell anyone who the personality was based off of.”
But they didn’t know about Moset’s war crimes until Tabor entered the holodeck and saw “him” there. Before then, the only people who were aware of the holographic exobiologist’s identity were the EMH, Harry, and Tom, and none of them knew there was a problem.
@41/CLB:
(1) Knowing of the Federation’s and Maquis’s antagonistic history with the Cardassians, it seems common sense the EMH and Harry could have still used Moset’s personality in the avatar but chosen/programmed the avatar’s appearance from literally thousands of different options of people, even a talking glowing ball of light.
(2) It’s very contrived that the EMH even needs to consult with another talking hologram. The knowledge from Moset and other exobiologists should be directly downloaded into his programming (which it should have been already from the EMH’s very inception). But then that wouldn’t have been very dramatic for the purposes of this story.
I’m partial to this episode. I’m always fascinated by any take on Mengele. Nothing Human isn’t a perfect episode, by any means, but it still works well. As pointed out, it feels like a repurposed DS9 story, and it also feels like a product of the earlier VOY seasons, and it could have made better use of the Maquis (Tabor, a Bajoran, appearing out of nowhere was a big neon sign).
As for the EMH insisting on using Moset, I have no problem buying that idea. The EMH has long been established as someone who doesn’t put the feelings of the crew into account when making decisions. And yes, I’d argue that the EMH needed Moset’s ongoing help. Medicine isn’t just about knowledge. It involves experience and spur of the moment decisions, which is why the EMH’s final choice in using a solution less harmful to the alien works both as a partial rejection of Moset’s approach, and a classic Trekkian solution to the problem, not unlike dealing with the Horta back in 1967. Speaking of Moset, David Clennon is yet another hit in terms of guest casting, following in the footsteps of Kurtwood Smith and Joel Grey.
And Janeway’s decision to treat Torres while disregarding her feelings in the matter is very much a return to Tuvix Janeway, but this time we have someone actually blaming her for it. That ending alone makes the episode worth the viewing.
@8/Christopher: That’s pretty much what I was thinking. It was the one time they could have brought up the EMH’s memory gaps as a result from what happened in The Swarm, over two years before.
@42 Also, everyone on board knows Torres’ history with the Cardassians. She *just* had an episode where she was in severe self-harm and depression because all her Maquis friends had been wiped out back in the Alpha Quadrant. You can’t tell me *no one* on the ship might have thought she would be upset to find out a Cardassian doctor was working on her. Not Tom, her boyfriend, not Chakotay, her mentor and former commander, not even Tuvok, who was with her on the Val Jean– NO ONE seems to have thought “Gee, maybe this might not be the best idea.” Even if Moset wasn’t experimenting on unwilling Bajoran slave labor, you have to wonder what sort of ethical medical standards the Cardassians have at the best of times (this are people who pull the molars of all their citizens just to be able to ID them later). There are like 3 or 4 interesting ethical dilemmas, here, and all of them are fumbled pretty badly. This would have worked a lot better over on DS9, where they had the characters, writers, and commitment to characterization to properly deal with this.
@42/garreth: “Knowing of the Federation’s and Maquis’s antagonistic history with the Cardassians, it seems common sense the EMH and Harry could have still used Moset’s personality in the avatar but chosen/programmed the avatar’s appearance from literally thousands of different options of people, even a talking glowing ball of light.”
It is not Starfleet policy to pander to racism. It was not the Cardassians’ species or their appearance that was the problem with how their government and military treated the Maquis. Did Starfleet demand that Worf get plastic surgery to stop looking Klingon when the Klingons became the enemy again?
“It’s very contrived that the EMH even needs to consult with another talking hologram. The knowledge from Moset and other exobiologists should be directly downloaded into his programming”
For the third time, it wasn’t about the raw knowledge, it was about the insight and thinking process of a brilliant scientist. You could know everything about physics that Albert Einstein knew but still not be able to theorize new physics like Einstein could. You could study the rules and techniques of basketball as thoroughly as Michael Jordan but still not be able to play on Michael Jordan’s level. Genius is not about how much you know, it’s about what you can do with it.
@45/CLB: Yes, Torres is a racist with anger management issues as well. Also, she’s not Starfleet. Why antagonize her in her already delicate medical state with an avatar that will upset her and that she could possibly refuse medical treatment from?
I‘m not sure how Worf having plastic surgery to appease anyone has any direct comparison to simply changing the avatar of a non-sentient hologram so as to not upset a particular member of the crew?
And again, whether it’s the raw knowledge “or the insight and thinking of a brilliant scientist,” my point is all of that can be downloaded into the EMH for him to have an inner monologue with. There doesn’t need to be another hologram around for him to talk it out.
@46/garreth: “Why antagonize her in her already delicate medical state with an avatar that will upset her and that she could possibly refuse medical treatment from?”
The Doctor literally said to Torres, verbatim, “I never took you for someone who would make generalizations based on race.” The episode told you outright that it never occurred to him that this could be an issue. So you already have your answer. He didn’t expect B’Elanna to be racist. He gave her more credit than you do.
“I‘m not sure how Worf having plastic surgery to appease anyone has any direct comparison to simply changing the avatar of a non-sentient hologram so as to not upset a particular member of the crew?”
Because they’re both based in the ugly and disgusting premise that it’s right to discriminate based on race. Racism SHOULD NOT BE PANDERED TO, EVER. It should be condemned and rejected in every context. If a patient is willing to die rather than be treated by someone they’re bigoted against, then they’re an idiot and they bloody well need to have some sense slapped into them before their petty hatred gets them killed.
@47 – It’s not about racism, but sensitivity. If you had a Jewish concentration camp survivor woken up by a German speaking doctor and went into a panic attack, I think most people would understand the context. Yes, it wouldn’t be fair to that doctor to be associated with Nazis, but I imagine some sensitivity would be applied to the situation without dismissing it as racism that shouldn’t be tolerated. The EMH was overly dismissive with a morally superior attitude. He applied absolutely no context or understanding to her reaction. Torres wasn’t prejudiced just to be prejudiced. She had a very understandable reaction.
@48 Yea, I think that is a good analogy. The Cardassians are pretty obviously modeled after the Nazis, and the Maquis (down to their name) are pretty obviously modeled after the people who fought them. Is a former French resistance fighter refusing treatment from a German doctor bigoted? Yea, maybe, but it is also pretty darn understandable. And even if he wasn’t Cardassian Mengele, Torres still has plenty of reason to suspect that Cardassians might not be huge on medical ethics in general.
@48/Austin: An understandable initial impulse, but not one that should be binding on her entire life-or-death treatment. Prejudice is natural, but we have to resist and overcome it, not embrace it as the governing doctrine of our lives, or as a hill worth dying on.
Anyway, it’s a non-issue. Again, the episode stated in as many words that it never occurred to the Doctor that Torres might react that way. That was his oversight, but it’s an oversight explicitly addressed in the text, so we know why it happened. And once she found out, the damage was done. She knew the expert program was based on Moset, so it would’ve served no purpose to disguise it visually after that point.
@50/CLB: As I understand it from this synopsis, Harry cautioned the EMH about using a Cardassian but the EMH ignored him. So it’s not like the Doctor didn’t have any warning about how Torres might react to the Cardassian avatar.
@51/garreth: “So it’s not like the Doctor didn’t have any warning about how Torres might react to the Cardassian avatar.”
Yes, Harry warned him, and he dismissed it. “What difference does it make?” Like I said, it’s right there in the text, so it doesn’t make sense to ask “Why didn’t he do that?” The episode told you why — because he didn’t think it mattered.
After all, the Doctor never lived in the Alpha Quadrant. The only Cardassian he’s ever met is Seska. All he knows about the Cardassians and their conflict with the Maquis is secondhand and abstract. So he didn’t realize how B’Elanna would react. And even if he had, he wouldn’t have let it affect her treatment, because his responsibility was to save her life and that was all he cared about. Again, the episode literally had him say that — “I don’t care if he’s the nastiest man who ever lived, as long as he can help us save B’Elanna.” It’s all right there in the dialogue.
@21, I want to point out that I am new to Trek and I’m doing my best to avoid knowing anything about what’s coming up to the best of my ability. I love watching things for the first time and I don’t want my experience to be diminished just because I arrived at something late. Thankfully, my “spoiler senses” are fine tuned and you usually do a pretty good job of starting a portion of your rewatches with “this thing that happens later” so I can avoid knowing something that I haven’t gotten to yet.
I appreciate when people try their best to not spoint something for someone else.
To your point, though, I know if I’m in the comments there are likely to be things “spoiled” for me… so I tread carefully.
Some people like to read and watch in wonder, and others like to watch the world burn. There are others still who read the last chapter before the first, and those people can just GTFO.
TA: Good point.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I know the show was intended for the general public but even back then there were a lot people having a good idea how a computer works. It is eithen in the database or if not, it can be dumped from the other and pasted in the one you need. In Jordi’s case he e is a human and talking to a hologram is the most useful way of obtaining structured knowledge. The EMH could have learned all the info in two seconds and would have saved valuable time for his dying patient! So VOY creators could have been a little less offensive to viewers’ intelligence.
As for Janeway, I am the last one to defend her generally butbin thia case? Torres is infected by an unknown organism, she might be delirious, why would her wish be considered sober and paychologically sound? If anyone has a legal insight into this, please let me know. When ia a patient’s word to be taken into account for medical decisions?
This episode always stuck with me. It’s an incredibly strong concept. And the emotional resonance works. This is one of those episodes that makes you wonder what your position is.
But my thing is, in the end the Doc didn’t use Moset’s solution. He was able to take what Moset knew and create a new better solution. While I understand that the real Moset was a horrible person, and using his thought process, not just his knowledge but his style could potentially be reprehensible, the EMH being a doctor first was able to bypass Moset to solve the problem. Ultimately Moset was just a stepping stone. To sweeten the pot Moset’s solution would’ve killed the alien, but the EMH’s solution saved both patients.
So the moral dilemma really comes down to is it ever acceptable to work with someone responsible for/who committed war crimes? This is a different situation than the war crimes he’s accused of as well. That was work in virology, while this basically consulting on a surgical procedure, so the war crimes the real one is accused of, that body of knowledge doesn’t apply? Is everything Moset ever did, even things probably created ethically get erased? Do people, do Bajorans, use his cure for the Fostossa virus? And why was he such a good exobiologist? Was it due to actual genius or advanced study? Or were his advancement because of a total lack of ethics, his willingness to do anything to anybody that allowed him to make his discoveries?
@10/Cuttflefish Benjamin
Another B5 episode that sticks out to me, I wasn’t big into Babylon 5, but this episode HIT, was the episode where their doctor was dealing with a family whose child was dying, but could be saved via a simple surgery, but they refused on religious grounds on account of their faith not allowing blood to be spilled. Which seems a challenging way to live.
@12/ChristopherLBennett
Pragmatism and reclaiming a monument to their pain. It was built by Bajoran Labor, around Bajor, out of materials strip mined from Bajor. The station is of Bajor, by Bajor, and after they kicked the Cardassians out it became for Bajor. A perfectly functional piece of hardware that the Bajorans wouldn’t have been able to simply rebuild themselves in the Provisional Government period. As it relates to the cure of the Fostossa virus cure, I think that it should be considered that it be used so that the Bajoran prisoner’s sacrifice doesn’t go in vain. But Mosset’s name should be taken off of it, and he should still be thrown in prison for the war crime of forced Bajoran experimentation and murder. No fame, no accolades, just a 4x4m cell in a Bajoran penal facility.
@51/Robert Carnegie
“ although in real life the U.S. collected actual Nazi scientists and put them to work, including “medical” researchers according to Wikipedia. So “the matter” in reality does include Nazis themselves as well as Nazi data. “
Project Paperclip. The US Government competing with the Soviets to snap up Nazi Germany’s brightest minds. There’s also the US Government getting information from the Japanese about the after effects of nuclear bombardment.
@57/Mr. D: “So the moral dilemma really comes down to is it ever acceptable to work with someone responsible for/who committed war crimes?”
You mentioned Operation Paperclip. Wernher von Braun knowingly used slave labor in the V2 rocket program, and of course those rockets were used to bombard Britain. But he went on to be vital to the US space program and helped us set foot on the Moon.
The objection in a case like Moset’s is not about working with the individual per se; it’s about using the specific knowledge that was gained through the commission of atrocities. The principle is that if you do that, it sets a dangerous precedent for others in the future to use unethical or harmful means to gain knowledge.
It’s like the difference between, say, a) hiring a paroled bank robber to work in your store and b) using the stolen money to open your store. It’s not automatically unethical to work with a criminal — only to benefit from their crime.
Bit late to be asking this but what makes you say this was the hundredth episode produced, Keith? That’s only the case if you count “Caretaker” as two episodes, which I didn’t think you did.
@21 Yes, we do need to. Every rewatch is someone else’s first watch, and they deserve the same enjoyment you had on your first time.
I’m with @57/Mr. D in that the atrocities everyone is objecting to seem to only be related to the cure of the Fostossa Virus, and doesn’t apply to Moset’s knowledge of exobiology. So when everyone is objecting to using Moset’s knowledge to help Torres, it’s unfounded and therefor not an argument. Of course there may have been unethical behavior in Moset deriving that knowledge as well, but that isn’t brought up in the episode. Naturally Torres doesn’t need to be justified in order to refuse treatment, so that argument doesn’t apply to her, only the debate among the senior staff isn’t justified.
And of course the EMH is just being an idiot. “I don’t care if he’s the nastiest man who ever lived, as long as he can help us save B’Elanna.” Great, so you don’t care. What if the patient does? Is this your first time hearing about patient consent?
EMH: Hello, Holocavust survivor patient. I brought a hologram of Adolph Hitler to treat you.
Patient: Get the fuck away from me!
EMH: Whaaaaaaat?
Strangely I can forgive a lot of the logical problems with this episode but not the penultimate scene between Torres and Janeway. B’elanna is completely justified in her anger for the captain going against her wishes, and Janeway’s essentially ordering her to get over it (while she’s still recuperating no less) comes off as incredibly controlling and frames the whole thing like it’s B’elanna being petty.
My biggest problem with this episode is that it implicitly perpetuates the myth that Mengele and his colleagues were scientists in any real sense. Nazi Germany is occasionally portrayed as some sort of ultra-scientific state—mostly by people who want to denigrate science for one reason or another—but the truth is, the Nazis were terrible scientists. In a perverse sort of way it’s almost impressive—despite being able to conduct experiments on human subjects completely unrestrained by any sort of ethical considerations, they produced little to nothing of any scientific value. They were extraordinarily sloppy, failing to control or record the most basic aspects of their “experiments”, like the clothing their victims wore during hypothermia studies. Many experiments were patently absurd, like testing to see if dyeing the eyes of one twin would change the other twin’s eye color. It is clear that their actions were motivated not by anything even remotely resembling scientific curiosity, but by cruelty and sadism. In a way, their incompetence makes sense—if you don’t care about people, how can you care about variables?
Hi all. Very late commenting on this episode, but what strikes me as biggest problem in plot is that a year before this in the episode “message in a bottle”, Tom tries to get Kim to create a new Doctor while the Doctor was off on his away mission, and Harry COULDN’T do it! Creating a medical hologram was considered too difficult, too complex, etc. In this episode it took two minutes! And this side-car doctor was able to amend sick bay instruments, perform surgery, do complex medical analysis, in other words, be an upgraded diagnostic doctor. I’m not a slave to canon, but come on, these episodes were (less than) twelve months apart..
@65/FSS: All holograms are not created equal. The Moset hologram was a simulation of a single individual drawing on his documented writings and records of his behavior, like Geordi’s Leah Brahms hologram. It’s just an expert program, a way of organizing all the published work of an expert into a single easily consultable form. It’s very different from an EMH, which needs to incorporate a vastly wider range of knowledge, to be a generalist able to adapt to any situation, rather than merely a specialized model focused on one person’s knowledge to deal with one specific situation.
I thought it was an excellent episode. For one, you finally had a lifeform that wasn’t humanoid. Two, I think it’s an important conversation to be had. So, while I immediately was puzzled about why they even wasted time giving the exobiologist a damn face, and then further mystified by the decision to let a virtual Kardassian on board a ship with Maquis, I just took it as a given.
I’m also with the commenter who says that exobiology is not medicine and there would be no reason to fill up Doc’s databanks with specialized knowledge. That didn’t bother me in the slightest.
Also, I agree with Janeway. Purely on an emotional level; logic be damned.