Janeway's "One life isn't worth it" speech from Friendship One

[Garm Bel Iblis]

gods how i hated this. it seemed to insult anyone who's given up their lives in the nameof exploration, from the Challenger and Endeavor disasters forward, stating that if one life is lost we should "tuck tail between our legs and return to Earth."

 

[AuntKate]

gods how i hated this. it seemed to insult anyone who's given up their lives in the nameof exploration, from the Challenger and Endeavor disasters forward, stating that if one life is lost we should "tuck tail between our legs and return to Earth."

When you put it that way, it does seem a bit inflammatory. However, that is NOT what she said. It is the last scene of the episode, and she and Chakotay are discussing the death of Joe Carey. He was killed because our ancestors inadvertantly gave this alien race the tools to ruin their planet, and Carey died for their carelessness (basically). What they said was this:

JANEWAY: I think about our ancestors. Thousands of years wondering if they were alone in the universe, finally discovering they weren't. You can't blame them for wanting to reach out, see how many other species were out there asking the same questions.
CHAKOTAY: The urge to explore is pretty powerful.
JANEWAY: But it can't justify the loss of lives, whether it's millions or just one.

I think what she is saying is that we have to value human and alien life and take care that our "urge to explore" doesn't sacrifice life just for the sake of exploration. In this case, there was zero chance that the people who created Friendship One would benefit from its launch. With the benefit of hindsight, it wasn't such a good idea to send the probe out into space because of the damage it did. I don't think that is an insult to any explorer, no matter whether they are exploring space or an unknown area on Earth.

She certainly never said we shouldn't explore or that we should "tuck tail between our legs and return to Earth." That's a bit misleading, don't you think?

 

[Brit]

gods how i hated this. it seemed to insult anyone who's given up their lives in the nameof exploration, from the Challenger and Endeavor disasters forward, stating that if one life is lost we should "tuck tail between our legs and return to Earth."

She certainly never said we shouldn't explore or that we should "tuck tail between our legs and return to Earth." That's a bit misleading, don't you think?

AuntKate, I agree. No matter what action is taken there is a reaction, and the trick is to try to gauge the reaction, it's the measure of cost against gain and that always has to be a part of the equation.

Brit

 

[SpyOne]

Ack, that's some pretty bad writing there. I was watching the seventh season, so I wonder how I missed that episode.
What Janeway meant to say, obviously, was that it is a tragedy if we killed someone when all we were trying to do was meet the neighbors. And to point out that Lieutenant Carrey was the last casualty of that unfortunate probe. Millions of dead is a tragedy, but even one is too much.
But what she said, ... I agree with the OP that it is reasonably interpreted as saying we should only explore when it is safe to do so, and that the crew of Challenger dying just to satisfy our urge to explore was a travesty.
I don't think Janeway could have meant that. I think she believes that people who explore when the risk is high are heroes. I think she meant the loss of life of others when she talked about it being unjustified. As in "I was curious" is never a good reason to have done something that resulted in someone else's death.

 

[Admiral Shran]

Ack, that's some pretty bad writing there.

I agree, just bad writing.

 

[exodus]

gods how i hated this. it seemed to insult anyone who's given up their lives in the nameof exploration, from the Challenger and Endeavor disasters forward, stating that if one life is lost we should "tuck tail between our legs and return to Earth."

She certainly never said we shouldn't explore or that we should "tuck tail between our legs and return to Earth." That's a bit misleading, don't you think?

AuntKate, I agree. No matter what action is taken there is a reaction, and the trick is to try to gauge the reaction, it's the measure of cost against gain and that always has to be a part of the equation.

Brit

Exactly!

Janeway was responding to more the manner of the way he died, more than the gains of space exploration. It was a pointless death by a mad man driven beyond the point of reasoning. She was saying that he didn't need or deserve to die.

 

[teya]

gods how i hated this. it seemed to insult anyone who's given up their lives in the nameof exploration, from the Challenger and Endeavor disasters forward, stating that if one life is lost we should "tuck tail between our legs and return to Earth."

The beauty of this horrendous quote (and the first time I heard it, I imagined James T. Kirk rising from the dead and beating the shit out of Janeway), is that it's at the end of the episode and you can simply refuse to watch the final scene.

 

[kimc]

This episode happens in the second half of Season 7. 'Nuff said.

 

[JanewayRulz!]

I agree with both AuntKate and Kimc, which seems contradictory.

It was the last half of season 7.

Voyager has been lost for nearly 8 years, with no real prospect of getting home in the next 8 years. Janeway's crew has just finished their first "real" Starfleet mission in those 8 years, a simply little thing, really. Search for signs of an ancient spacecraft. No danger, right? And what happens? A man, a valued member of her crew, someone who has a wife and children waiting on Earth for his next video stream via the Pathfinder array this month, a man who was just following her orders, dies.

Needlessly. Meaningless.

For the first time we "see" what Janeway does after a crewmembers death. We see her sitting in his room, among all the material things that speak of his life, and we wonder what is going through her head. Why did he die that day, after surviving so many threats more powerful than their little Intrepid class ship over the last 7 years. How many more of her dwindling crew will fall before she can get them home, and for as little meaning?

Enter into this Janeway funk, we see one of the few officers she will confide her doubts to... the one who braved her wrath during the void of "Night", her crazed logic during the chase of the "Equinox", her cooking during "Voyager Conspiracy". And to him she'll expose her inner sense of fatigue, something she'll mask in front of nearly everyone else on Voyager who questions her.

He died.

Not for glory, not to save the crew, not for wealth or recognition or even for "science". He died for Starfleet Academy's "Interest", and because her forebears were too thoughtless to consider the consequences of their actions on other unsuspecting worlds.

I don't see it as sloppy writing. I see it as a foreshadowing of the Admiral Janeway to come. The elderly woman who will work for years to find a way to change Voyager's past and save 22 lives, 2 hearts, and 1 mind in "Endgame".

Realizing all the while, that even THAT won't satisfy her, won't absolve her of all the other deaths.

Like Joe Carey's death.


As always, YMMV.

 

[SpyOne]

My mileage varies a little.

See, future Janeway could have returned to any point in Voyager's journey, and there were a couple of other places where she could have changed things and gotten the ship home.
So from one way of looking at it, Janeway wasn't picking a point where she could save those others, she was specifically picking the first point after Carey died. If Carey meant a lot to her, she could have just picked some earlier point to travel to.

Unless Carey's death was somehow historically significant, there was no reason not to save him too.

Sorry, I got a little wound up.
I actually liked the Voyager finale when it aired. It was only when I started to think about it that I realized the massive holes in it.

 

[JanewayRulz!]

I think there was a reason for Admiral Janeway to show up just 2 or 3 days after they reached the nebula. She knew herself "enough" to try and limit the introspection her younger self would go through, to try and prevent Captain Janeway from doing exactly what she did. Find a reason not to simply hop into the Borg conduit and go home. She knew her former self enough that the younger woman would try and be the Starfleet HERO we expect all our Captains to be.

If the Admiral had gone back to year zero, and prevented Janeway from leaving Deep Space Nine, then Chakotay, Tuvok, B'Elanna et al would have been stranded in the DQ.

If the Admiral was able to return in year 2 to convince Janeway to trust Q in "Deathwish" and rule against suicidal Q then millions would have died on that planet from the Dreadnought torpedo. But it wouldn't end there, Seven would have remained BORG, and Icheb, Mezoti, Rebi and (?) Azan would have died alone on that BORG cube. Not to mention a little thing like species 8472 winning their battle against the BORG and sterilizing the galaxy of humanoid life. Ditto (everthing post Dreadnought) if the Admiral was able to convince Captain Janeway to ignore the Ferengi and hop into the migrating wormhole in season 3's "False Profits".

I don't think they had another creditable chance to get home until the begining of year 7, and that assumes that the resistance sphere in Unimatrix Zero could have transported them home. Of course, had they done that, then the nomadic Klingon tribe they ran across in "Prophecy" would have died since B'Elanna's fetus would not have been there to save them.

As Chakotay told the Romulan astrophysicist that first year, in "Eye of the Needle"...

TELEK: I can assure you, Captain, that I would not do anything that might contaminate the future and perhaps harm the Romulan Empire, but, in twenty years I could alert Starfleet not to launch the mission which sent you here.
CHAKOTAY: I’m afraid that’s not possible either. We’ve already had a huge impact on this quadrant. People and events here would be drastically affected.

In "Shattered", Chakotay told Janeway it would be "presumptuous" of her to change the timeline and affect everyone's future, but I suspect that argument wore thin the longer she was in the Delta Quadrant as more lives were needlessly lost.

(His argument itself was presumptuous, because he was arguing against Janeway doing the very thing he and Harry did in season 5's "Timeless". Change the past, and thus everyone's future.)

Hmmm. I guess we both get wound up over these plot points, or missed opportunities for points as the case may be.

Happy Holidays.

 

[Brit]

I think the whole point is not what you gain by changing time but what are you willing to lose. That was never the focus for any Trek reset but maybe it should have been. What is obvious is that a person willing to change time is at a point where the loss is much less than the gain, and maybe we should be asking why rather than accusing the character of anything.

I think the best illustration of this is from the DS9 episode "The Visitor," Jake Sisko changed time to save his father. We can actually see that the change cost Jadzia her life, but the question is what was truly lost and what was gained.

Brit

 

[SpyOne]

Congratulation, JanewayRulz, you have done what noone before you has done: provided me with a good, canon-supported reason why Janeways would have picked that particular moment in time in Endgame.
It would have been nice to have that explicitly discussed in the episode ("I assure you Captain, in the rest of this trip you will not save anybody, you will only lose more crew.") But they had limited screen-time, and they had a lot to fit in, and they might have assumed that we'd remember that episode since it was just a few weeks ago.

I think the whole point is not what you gain by changing time but what are you willing to lose. That was never the focus for any Trek reset but maybe it should have been. What is obvious is that a person willing to change time is at a point where the loss is much less than the gain, and maybe we should be asking why rather than accusing the character of anything.

Actually, Voyager did a good one for this: Year of Hell. The Krenim scientist in that episode kept trying to change history in order to prevent his wife dying in an alien attack, but things kept going wrong. Then he realized that he hadn't accounted for Voyager (since he hadn't known about Voyager), so he tried to change history to destroy Voyager.
In the end, he was able to undo the damage he had done to Voyager and his own civilization. He even managed to save his wife, and all it cost him was his own life.

 

[Brit]

I think the whole point is not what you gain by changing time but what are you willing to lose. That was never the focus for any Trek reset but maybe it should have been. What is obvious is that a person willing to change time is at a point where the loss is much less than the gain, and maybe we should be asking why rather than accusing the character of anything.

Actually, Voyager did a good one for this: Year of Hell. The Krenim scientist in that episode kept trying to change history in order to prevent his wife dying in an alien attack, but things kept going wrong. Then he realized that he hadn't accounted for Voyager (since he hadn't known about Voyager), so he tried to change history to destroy Voyager.
In the end, he was able to undo the damage he had done to Voyager and his own civilization. He even managed to save his wife, and all it cost him was his own life.

I was under the impression from multiple viewings, that it was Kathryn Janeway, sacrificing her life and her ship that distroyed the time ship, not Annorax. The credit for that one belongs to Kathryn Janeway.

Brit

 

[exodus]

I think the whole point is not what you gain by changing time but what are you willing to lose. That was never the focus for any Trek reset but maybe it should have been. What is obvious is that a person willing to change time is at a point where the loss is much less than the gain, and maybe we should be asking why rather than accusing the character of anything.

Actually, Voyager did a good one for this: Year of Hell. The Krenim scientist in that episode kept trying to change history in order to prevent his wife dying in an alien attack, but things kept going wrong. Then he realized that he hadn't accounted for Voyager (since he hadn't known about Voyager), so he tried to change history to destroy Voyager.
In the end, he was able to undo the damage he had done to Voyager and his own civilization. He even managed to save his wife, and all it cost him was his own life.

I was under the impression from multiple viewings, that it was Kathryn Janeway, sacrificing her life and her ship that distroyed the time ship, not Annorax. The credit for that one belongs to Kathryn Janeway.

Brit

Yes, yes it does.

Annorax was like Ahab.
Even at the end when he's strapped to the whale and drowning to death, he still doesn't have any remorse for what he's done. He never redeems himself, he just makes a different choice in the past.
Janeway is the true hero of the ep.

 

[JanewayRulz!]

TUVOK [OC]: All our ships have been disabled, Captain. Do you have weapons?
JANEWAY: Negative. Torpedo launchers are down. I'm setting a collision course. Janeway to the Fleet. Take your temporal shields offline.
TUVOK [OC]: Captain, we won't be protected.
JANEWAY:Exactly. If that ship is destroyed all of history might be restored. And this is one year I'd like to forget. Times up!"

In a world of reset buttons, I liked the fact that Captain Janeway purposefully and with great deliberation pounded that button herself.

 

[Anwar]

Given how trashed the ship was and the crew negatively affected, she had every right to push the button...