Daystrom Institute
Welcome to Daystrom Institute!
Serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek from both in-universe and real world perspectives.
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Rules
1. Explain your reasoning
All threads and comments submitted to the Daystrom Institute must contain an explanation of the reasoning put forth.
2. No whinging, jokes, memes, and other shallow content.
This entire community has a “serious tag” on it. Shitposts are encouraged in Risa.
3. Be diplomatic.
Participate in a courteous, objective, and open-minded fashion. Be nice to other posters and the people who make Star Trek. Disagree respectfully and don’t gatekeep.
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5. Tag spoilers.
Historically Daystrom has not had a spoiler policy, so you may encounter untagged spoilers here. Ultimately, avoiding online discussion until you are caught up is the only certain way to avoid spoilers.
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Episode Guides
The /r/DaystromInstitute wiki held a number of popular Star Trek watch guides. We have rehosted them here:
- Kraetos’ guide to Star Trek (the original series)
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Animated Series
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- Darth_Rasputin32898’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- OpticalData’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
- petrus4’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
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Ah. Tuvix was a person, EvilKirk was not?
I'm admittedly dancing around EvilKirk a bit, because the episode engages with the two Kirks in such a way that they're treated as a problem to be fixed, rather than a moral dilemma.
The Tom Riker situation is perhaps more fitting in terms of the way the episode itself handles the situation. Of course, that episode also is fairly uncompromising about Will and Tom each being individuals with the right to live...
I think that's an oversimplification of what GP was getting at.
Tuvix was an accident, knew and accepted that fact, and initially was voluntarily assisting in finding a way to undo it. He seems more than capable of grasping, even at that early point in his existence, that undoing the accident means the end of him.
GP made the argument that his demeanor started changing as he got a name, a job, responsibilities etc. All the superficial hallmarks of a "person" in the very limited environment of the ship.
Nobody is saying he wasn't a person from the start, but getting assigned all the trappings of what he saw to be individual persons undoubtedly started him thinking of himself as a person as well instead of just an accident to be corrected.
I'm going to add to that, as this post made me rewatch it as we speak 🙂
The two very first lines Tuvix speaks, when challenge 6 for his identity, are "I am luitenant Tuvok. And I am Neelix."
He really didn't realize he was a person yet - he thought he was two persons.
Had you asked, in that initial time, whether he would like to be split up, I'm sure he would have answered in the positive.
Of course he's allowed to change his mind as realization grows, so the whole thing remains a dicey proposition, but imo it just reinforces the fact that it was Janeway who triggered his (becoming aware of his own) personhood.