Star Trek and Time Travel Ethics

Hopefully this one will be more light-hearted than my previous post because the topic is less likely to be one humans have to deal with any time soon. I watched two episodes of Voyager last night while I was high but didn't get around to posting my thoughts on the time travel one.

So in this season 7 episode, the ship hits an anomaly that shakes things up so that different parts of the ship are living in different time periods. It is told to us from the perspective of Chakotay, who is from the "present" time the episode is set. He teams up with pre-series Janeway to fix the problem and get everything back to normal. At one point, they stumble into the future and meet future versions of Icheb and Naomi, who inform them that they are destined to die soon.

Past Janeway considers the idea that thy should sync the ship to her time period so she can make it so the ship never got lost, but Chakotay talks her out of it because it would also undo the good results of that incident. The moral of the story is we shouldn't change the past because it would undo the good as well as the bad.

Here is my issue with the moral: from Past Janeway's perspective, the future hasn't happened yet. She is seeking to change her future. The show's moral is from the perspective of Chakotay's time period. But why should we sync the ship to his time period instead of syncing it to Icheb and Naomi's time period? Changing Chakotay's future changes future Icheb and Naomi's present and undoes their experiences, both good and bad. From the perspective of Icheb and Naomi's time period, Chakotay is changing their past. The show's moral is biased to the present time period. If we take the moral to its logical extreme, the only moral thing to do is sync the ship to the furthest in the future time period.

I will likely have some follow up comments after I get to the series finale. I don't know for sure, cause I haven't seen it yet, but I think a future version of Janeway from decades in the future ends up changing her past. It wouldn't be the first time, there was another episode when Harry Kim from decades in the future changed his past to benefit our present-day characters and a similar thing happened in Deep Space 9 with Jake Sisko. The show centres its morality on the present day but if they were morally consistent, characters in the future should protect their present rather than modifying it to benefit characters in the present.

 

I have now seen the series finale of Voyager and, as promised, I have some follow up comments. SPOILERS obviously

the show creators are HYP-OH-CRITS!

The finale begins in the future (more so than the show is already in the future, I mean relative to the show's main time period). Voyager returned home after 23 years and 10 years have passed since. Most of the former crew are happy. Harry Kim is a starship captain. Naomi Wildman has a daughter. the daughter of Paris and Torres is a Starfleet officer who seems to have embraced her Klingon heritage, unlike her mother. the Doctor is married (even though he's a hologram so I wonder how that works sexually. maybe his wife is ace and doesn't want sex. maybe they can do it in the holodeck. anyway, I'm sure they got something worked out, it's off topic) and he has a great career as a medical researcher. Barclay has overcome some of his issues (in a realistic, imperfect way) and is a professor at Starfleet Academy. But on the downside: Seven of Nine is dead and never made it back to Earth, Chakotay is dead, and Tuvok is mentally ill. and if they had gotten home sooner, Tuvok would have been cured of his illness before too late and Seven wouldn't have died.

So of course, to correct these ills, Admiral Janeway decides she has a right to alter everyone's lives by going back in time to make sure Voyager gets home 16 years sooner. At least Starfleet is consistent in being against the altering of time but fuck them, Janeway does what she wants. Kim tries to stop her but he changes his mind. After all he did the same thing once (but in his case he prevented the deaths of everyone on Voyager, he didn't take anything good away from the crew of Voyager). Admiral Janeway successfully goes and sacrifices herself to ensure Voyager gets home the day Paris and Torres baby was born.

As a consequence of Admiral Janeway's actions,
Naomi's daughter doesn't exist,
the daughter of Paris and Torres has her life reset to the day she was born and has 26 years of experiences that shaped who she is taken away,
the Doctor may not meet his wife or invent any of the things he originally invented,
Kim may not become a captain,
Barclay may not have the growth he did (though I suspect in his case, this new timeline may work out better),
Seven of Nine makes it back to Earth but the downside is her relationship with Chakotay is changed and they may not end up married,
the crew overall lose 16 years they would have built further camaraderie and now they may not stay as united and they miss out on 16 years of experiences that shaped them and the people and worlds they would have interacted with miss out,
Starfleet misses out on potential connections they made throughout the galaxy

But Tuvok is cured and Seven of Nine survives. And Seven of Nine is my favourite character, so from a purely selfish perspective I'm glad she was saved and I get to see her story continue in Picard. But does this make Janeway's actions right? In the previous episode I talked about in this thread, a moral point was made that changing the past would be bad because it changes the good as well as the bad. if Voyager never got lost to begin with, Seven of Nine would still be a Borg drone and many other people's lives would also be different. The characters decided it wasn't worth undoing those things to save the lives of several people who died over Voyager's journey. But we're supposed to be happy about what happened in the finale because it worked out for our characters in the show's present.

Changing the past is probably impossible in real life. But we all sometimes wish we could change the past. But every event leads to both good and bad consequences. In deciding whether to change the past, you have to decide if the good is worth sacrificing to prevent the bad. From the perspective of the people in Admiral Janeway's time period, she has taken a lot away from them because she selfishly decided some people were more important than others. Then again they all probably carry on as normal in their universe and she has merely created another one. They never really clarify that in these time travel episodes. I wonder how much fan fiction is set in all these alternate timelines.

Harry Kim also changed the past to save our present characters. Kes at one point made her future daughter and granddaughter cease to exist to save Janeway and Torres (Torres being what stands in the way of Tom Paris marrying Kes). Jake Sisko undid his whole adult life to bring back his father. But when Season Six Kes tried to go back and change things that happened in season one, we couldn't have that.

you see, it would be WRONG from the show's perspective to alter the past of the current time because it undoes the good as well as the bad. ever hear of protagonist centred morality? that's when a writer bases morals on thee perspective of one character and doesn't recognize other perspectives. Like how people with main character syndrome think they're the only important people and don't realize from everyone else's perspective, you're just another random fuck. Star Trek has a temporal version of protagonist centred morality. Fuck characters in the future. fuck characters in the past. fuck their perspectives and what will help or hurt them. It is all about the characters in the show's "present". only their past shouldn't be altered. altering the future's past is fine so long as it benefits our characters in the present. HYPOCRITS!

 

A good point, most time travel stories assume you just stay in the same place relative to Earth but realistically would you? there is a theory that aliens and UFOs are really time travellers. I have considered maybe the reason they need spaceships is time travel puts them in outer space. The Earth will never be in the same place twice because the objects we are orbiting are also moving.

 

My relationship with Star Trek is complicated. I like it overall but some episodes really make me mad, either for moral reasons or just plain inconsistency. I think this particular case is somewhere in between, I'm upset that the show is inconsistent in its own morals. Maybe upset isn't the right word, I'm not taking it that seriously, just bothered I guess.

The series has a lot of nonsense, the writers have shown in multiple different series that they don't understand evolution (for example, when Voyager encountered dinosaurs. No matter how sophisticated the computer tech is, it shouldn't be able to extrapolate how dinosaurs will evolve over time without more info on the environment they are evolving in. As for the time Paris and Janeway became lizards, I try to pretend that episode never happened). But there is also a lot to like in Star Trek, with its exploration of different types of society and moral questions. I wish the franchise was better with continuity, not making so many episodes standalone stories where major events happen but are never mentioned again. Seven of Nine resurrected the dead and this miraculous power was never used again. But sometimes the lack of continuity is good because it makes it easier to ignore the stupid episodes. One of my favourite aspects of the last few seasons of Voyager is Seven of Nine becoming a guardian to Borg children, I'm pleasantly surprised that was for more than one episode. Another episode I really liked is when B'Elanna is stranded on that planet with a playwright who uses Voyager inspired stories to prevent a war. I also loved seeing Barclay and Deanna Troi return in this series.

Getting back to the time travel and moral inconsistencies, I have ultimately decided I accept that Janeway is a hypocrite about this, after all I wouldn't want the characters to be perfect moral beings anyway. I think it is in-character for Janeway to be a hypocrite and make the decision to travel back in time to benefit those close to her. Most of the crew were happy in the future but Tuvok was mentally ill, Seven of Nine had died, and Chakotay had been a sad widower. Of course Janeway wanted to fix things for those three crew members she cared most about, to hell with the greater good. And it is consistent with the previous episode where she was talked out of meddling with time because, though to would have saved some lives, it would have prevented Seven of Nine form being liberated from the Borg. In a way, I find it kind of beautiful that both times, Janeway's decision revolves around what is best for Seven of Nine. She contradicts her moral code because of love for hr protege who she saved from the Borg and helped be human again. I can definitely see why there are people who ship Janeway and Seven romantically. I do not se their love as romantic, I see it as more of a mentor and protege relationship, but their love is strong.