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My rant on the latest Star Trek Voyager episode, The Killing Game. |
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The Killing Game
The Hirogen and the Nazis had one thing in common: neither had a problem with torturing and killing sentient life forms; nowhere in this episode could I find an indication that the Hirogen thought there was something wrong with murder. And yet at the end Janeway not only gave them Federation technology but appeared to treat them with grudging respect.
The Hirogen are characterized in the episode as "needing" to hunt prey; hunting is part of their "culture." Yet the Hirogen are also shown to be a sentient species, so presumably they have free will. They hunt because they choose to hunt; if they are self-aware enough to consider hunting virtual prey they are self-aware enough to consider other activities to fill their days, even if it goes against their nature. In a sentient species, nature is ultimately irrelevant! That's the whole point of sentience. So if they choose to continue to hunt, then they take the consequences, including lack of cooperation from species who have a problem with murder. Janeway has always shown the ability to make her choices based on some feel for the moral fabric of the species she meets but this time her writers blew it.
During the negotiation with Janeway, the Hirogen Alpha says, "My people are Hunting themselves into extinction. Your Holodeck technology might offer us an alternative, a new way of life. Instead of scattering ourselves across the quadrant in pursuit of Prey, we could simulate the Hunt and give ourselves a chance to rebuild our civilization." So the Hirogen are turning to virtual murder instead of real murder not because they see anything WRONG with real murder; it just isn't PRACTICAL anymore: the Hirogens are too "distributed;" they need to be more "centralized" so they don't become extinct. But they remain morally clueless.
The thing that distinguishes humans from the Hirogen is that humans (at least most of us) can see a moral difference, not just a practical difference, between virtual killing and real killing; in any video arcade here in the Alpha Quadrant, the players would be destroying digital images, not real people. And they would be destroying digital images because it's wrong to kill real people, not just because it's impractical.
Humans figured out the Ten Commandments over 3000 years ago, one of which is a prohibition against murder. While the practice falls short of the ideal, at least the ideal has existed that long; the Hirogen, while being warp-capable, are morally millennium behind. (And just as an aside, since they are warp-capable, one has to imagine that they have the technology to come up with other forms of nourishment besides Sentient Stew du Jour.)
The Borg assimilate because that is their nature; the Hirogen hunt because that is their nature. Despite their sentience, both lack a sense of right and wrong. And when the Alpha Hirogen has his epiphany and figures out they will need to change in order to survive, he still lacks a sense of right and wrong; the future he wants to create for his people is as lacking in morals as their past. And sadly, Janeway fails to enlighten him; one would hope that by the 24th century excuses like "it's my nature" or "it's our culture" would be seen as the affronts to common sense that they are.
Here's the speech that Janeway should have given. "Humans have survived extinction not just because we are able to change, or because we are cunning, or because we respected our prey. We survived because we made choices based upon a code of morality; that code has allowed us not just to survive but to flourish and unite with 150 other planets in a powerful Federation. You Hirogen must have some prohibitions against killing each other, yet you do not extend this prohibition to other sentient life forms. Your species will not survive or thrive until you are able to envision a future in which you honor the lives of other sentient beings. That is the change you should be contemplating if you want to lead your people to a better future. And I will give you Holodeck technology only under the condition that you not only confine your killing to Holograms, but that you begin to construct a code of morality appropriate for your culture that includes respecting the lives of others."
And if Janeway thinks the Hirogen are incapable of moral behavior, I don't know why she's accommodating them in the first place. Their actions certainly gave no indication of moral behavior; their actions also gave no indication that they were ready to confine their killing to Holograms, either, as she hoped. And if anyone should know that, it's Janeway; she got a knife in the chest. (Maybe that's what addled her normally fierce moral standards.) The Hirogen populated the holodeck with real people and hunted and killed them in one "brutal simulation" after another; that was not a virtual Seven that got a bullet in the neck, it was the real one. So if she did in fact think they were capable of reining in their "predatory instincts," her conclusion wasn't based on fact.
The thing that bothered me most about this episode is the fact that at the end, Janeway appeared to respect the Hirogen, mistaking their willingness to make a practical adjustment to their lifestyle (hey, let's centralize) for a willingness to live a moral life. She has bargained with the Kazon and the Borg and other evil aliens before, she always treated them with a well-deserved attitude of contempt. Remember how she treated the aliens who were using her crew for medical experiments? She would rather drive her ship into a nebula than let them continue; no moral ambiguity there, and no offers of holographic lab rats. At the end of this episode, with the Hirogen and Janeway solemnly nodding to one another, I got the feeling we were all supposed to think that the Hirogen had done something good; in fact, all the evidence suggests that as they walk out the door, they are still completely unaware of the fact that stalking and murdering sentient life forms is morally unacceptable. By having her countenance such behavior, I think the writers of this episode did our Captain and their audience a great disservice.
Copyright (C) 1998 The Jade Writers Group, Ltd.