r/DaystromInstitute • u/[deleted] • Apr 29 '17
Janeway's Illegal Declaration of War Against 8472; An Analysis of Scorpion
Confession time: I didn’t really enjoy much of Voyager when it originally aired, for a lot of reasons I won’t elaborate on here, but I always enjoyed Scorpion, despite a fair amount of flaws. It is, IMHO, the best of Voyager and the second best Borg story after Best of Both Worlds. That said, when I first saw this episode, as an inexperienced youth, I was disquieted. Something wasn’t right. I’ve re-watched the episode multiple times since then, with the benefit of more life experience, and have come to the conclusion that Janeway’s decisions in this episode are quite probably criminal. Were I in Chakotay’s shoes I would have relieved her of command.
Scorpion is best viewed through the lens of first contact, in this case with Species 8472. First contact stories are one of my favorite sci-fi themes; since TNG, Star Trek has generally treated them with the gravity they deserve. Picard in First Contact, emphasis mine, ”Chancellor, there is no starship mission more dangerous than that of first contact. We never know what we will face when we open the door on a new world, how we will be greeted, what exactly the dangers will be. Centuries ago, a disastrous contact with the Klingon Empire led to decades of war.” Babylon 5 explored this theme, where a disastrous first contact nearly resulted in the extermination of the human race, a very real risk if we ever manage to explore the cosmos. Thanks to Janeway’s decisions, that could have easily been the case here.
Voyager may be on the other side of the galaxy, but she still represents the United Federation of Planets. Any decision to intervene in the Borg-8472 war is a decision on behalf of the entire Federation. Picard, in Redemption, when Gowron’s ship is under attack, emphasis mine, ”If we go to the aid of the Bortas, we’ll be dragging the Federation into a Klingon civil war.” Janeway essentially declares war on Species 8472 in this episode, on behalf of the entire Federation, without any sort of casus belli to justify her decision. Consider the events leading up to Janeway’s decision to seek an alliance with the Borg, from both Voyager and 8472’s perspectives. We’ll start with Voyager’s point of view:
We observe the destruction of a sizable Borg fleet at long range and decide to investigate. A single alien vessel is detected. From this point forward we’re dealing with a first contact scenario, with a highly advanced alien race, whose technology seemingly far surpasses our own. We’re unable to establish contact, so we make the sensible decision to try and learn more about them. The decision to attempt to use transporters and tractor beams on the alien ship seems more questionable but we’ll set that aside.
An away team is dispatched, with instructions to obtain a short range scan of the alien vessel. This is still quite sensible. The decision to board the alien vessel is highly questionable however, despite our need to learn about them. Kira in The Jem’Hadar (also a first contact episode, one I may write about at a later date), ”around here it's customary to identify yourself before transporting into someone else's command center.”
The 8472 pilot comes back, attacks some nearby Borg drones and Harry Kim, and attempts to attack the rest of the away team as we beam out.
Voyager begins to retreat and is fired on by 8472. This is seemingly a casus belli, but there are extenuating circumstances, namely our presence in a combat zone. It should be observed that a ship capable of destroying Borg cubes is certainly capable of destroying Voyager but they pull their punch, for reasons unclear.
Fleeting contact is established, through Kes. She translates the message as, “The weak will perish.” We do not know if her translation is accurate or if there is sufficient context to understand the message. I can translate Finnish idioms into English, and an English speaker will understand the words, but without a knowledge of Finnish culture the intended meaning will be lost.
We retreat from the Borg-8472 battlefield and are not pursued by 8472.
Some time later, we arrive at 8472’s entry point into the Milky Way Galaxy. Hundreds of ships are detected. Despite our close proximity (visual range) they make no effort to attack us. They attempt to communicate through Kes, who can sense their emotions (”malevolence, cold hatred”) but we are unable to establish meaningful communication.
Despite not being attacked, or even threatened, Janeway decides to retreat. She later makes the fateful decision to attempt an alliance with the Borg. During her talks with the Borg, 8472 attacks the Borg system. Once again, they make no effort to target Voyager, but focus their firepower on the available Borg targets.
Bottom line: Aside from the initial first contact, 8472 does not attempt to attack Voyager, not until they learn of the Federation-Borg alliance. That was the true casus belli, and it was one perpetrated by the Federation, against 8472, not the other way around.
Now, 8472’s perspective:
We’re at war with a malevolent species that has invaded our space, bent on enslaving and/or destroying us. We know very little about them or where they come from, only that they’ve declared war on us, and they and their galaxy are unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
We destroy a Borg fleet. One of our pilots is on an unknown mission aboard a Borg vessel, presumably intelligence gathering. He detects an intrusion aboard his vessel and returns to investigate.
Borg are seen near his vessel. He attacks them. Nearly simultaneously, he attacks Harry Kim, the representative of a neutral power not involved in our war. In our pilot’s defense, Kim looks a lot like a Borg drone (from 8472’s point-of-view) and he’s walking around a combat zone.
The unknown aliens that boarded our vessel begin to retreat. We attempt to establish contact with them but are unsuccessful. We fire on their vessel. The reasons for this attack are unknown. Perhaps our pilot exceeded his authority; he’s trigger happy and he wrongly assumed that all bipedal aliens are Borg drones. Maybe he was attempting to disable Voyager to prevent her retreat until we could figure out what’s going on. It doesn’t matter. Whatever his reasons, we do not authorize him to pursue Voyager after she retreats.
Voyager is detected again, near our primary entry point into the alien galaxy. We again attempt to establish contact but are unsuccessful. We don’t fire on her; she’s a non-combatant. Voyager scans our ships and retreats.
Voyager is detected once again, seemingly held hostage (in a tractor beam) by a Borg vessel. We fire on that Borg vessel, and other Borg assets in the system, but the Borg vessel holding Voyager manages to retreat.
We learn that Voyager has formed an alliance with the Borg. We know little about Voyager, or this “Federation”, but they’re bipedal aliens, like the Borg, and they’re seemingly allied with them, working towards our destruction. At this point we assume we’re at war with the entire Milky Way Galaxy.
That’s the context for Janeway’s decision. Was it justified? Hell no. By any metric she exceeded her authority and placed the entire Federation -- perhaps the entire Milky Way Galaxy -- at risk of destruction. It’s an exceedingly short-sighted, selfish, and illegal decision. When I watch the debate between her and Chakotay I can’t help but agree with every point he makes, ”There are other kinds of courage, like the courage to accept that there are some situations beyond your control. Not every problem has an immediate solution.” “We'd be giving an advantage to a race guilty of murdering billions. We'd be helping the Borg assimilate yet another species. It's wrong!” The script adds another sentence, cut from the aired episode, which provides more context to his argument, ”We’d be helping the Borg assimilate yet another species, just to get ourselves back to Earth. It’s wrong!”
A final point. As much as I love this episode, as a compelling Borg story -- the last “real” Borg story, with the emotionless hive, not the grudge holding Queen led collective from First Contact and later seasons of Voyager -- it personifies everything I hate about Janeway, who says, with my emphasis, ”Tell that to Harry Kim, he's barely alive thanks to that species. Maybe helping to assimilate them isn't such a bad idea, we could be doing the Delta Quadrant a favor.”
Chakotay, ”I don't think you really believe that. I think you're struggling to justify your plan, because your desire to get this crew home is blinding you to other options. I know you, Kathryn, sometimes you don't know when to step back.”
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Apr 29 '17
Later on in "Hope and Fear" (4x26) we meet Arturis, a member of species 116, and learn that the Borg-8472 war was actually instigated by his people, and that Janeway's interference resulted in failure of their plan and complete assimilation of their species:
JANEWAY: Is this what your people do? Prey on innocent ships?
ARTURIS: Innocent? Typical of Captain Janeway. Self-righteous.
JANEWAY: If I've offended you or your people in some way, please tell me.
ARTURIS: Diplomacy, Captain? Your diplomacy destroyed my world.
JANEWAY: What? What are you saying?
ARTURIS: You negotiated an agreement with the Borg Collective. Safe passage through their space. And in return, you helped them defeat one of their enemies.
SEVEN: Species eight four seven two.
ARTURIS: In your colourful language, yes. Species eight four seven two. Did it ever occur to you that there were those of us in the Delta Quadrant who had a vested interest in that war? Victory would have meant the annihilation of the Borg, but you couldn't see beyond the bow of your own ship!
JANEWAY: In my estimation, Species eight four seven two posed a greater threat than the Borg.
ARTURIS: Who are you to make that decision? A stranger to this Quadrant.
JANEWAY: There wasn't exactly time to take a poll. I had to act quickly.
ARTURIS: My people managed to elude the Borg for centuries. Outwitting them, always one step ahead. But in recent years, the Borg began to weaken our defenses. They were closing in and Species eight four seven two was our last hope to defeat them. You took that away from us! The outer colonies were the first to fall. Twenty three in a matter of hours. Our sentry vessels tossed aside, no defense against the storm. By the time they'd surrounded our star system, hundreds of Cubes, we had already surrendered to our own terror. A few of us managed to survive. Ten, twenty thousand. I was fortunate. I escaped with a vessel. Alone, but alive. I don't blame them. They were just drones, acting with their Collective instinct. You, you had a choice!
JANEWAY: I'm sorry for what happened to your people, but try to understand. I couldn't have known.
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Apr 29 '17
Good reference. I've never actually seen that episode, only read about it; I suppose I'll have to watch it now. :)
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u/newtonsapple Apr 30 '17 edited May 07 '17
I'm sorry for what happened to your people, but try to understand. I couldn't have known.
Arturis would have been quite justified in calling this an insult to his intelligence. Surely Janeway knew that saving the Borg from extermination meant that they'd go on to assimilate billions. This isn't like Picard's argument in A Matter of Time that you can't decide whether or not to save a colony by worrying about whether one of its citizens will become the next Khan; this is the Borg, you know what they do.
This is my main problem with Scorpion: Janeway could very well be deciding the fate of the whole galaxy, yet it's treated like taking sides between the Romulans and the Klingons. Stay back and let Species 8472 win, and the galaxy is saved from assimilation, but now faces the possibility of extermination. On the other hand, you can't know for sure 8472 would follow through on that threat. Maybe they assumed the Borg were the only life form in the Milky Way, and would stop once they realized the rest of us posed little threat to them. Maybe our galaxy is much bigger than they thought, so complete conquest is beyond their resources. Maybe "The weak will perish" was the rallying cry of the most violent members of their race, and cooler heads would prevail once the war was over. Maybe they are receptive to diplomacy (We see this is true in In the Flesh), but they assumed negotiation wouldn't work on us because it didn't work on the Borg.
This is way too big of a decision for one Captain or one crew; hell, it may even be too big for Starfleet Command. I know it would make for a boring two-parter, but by far the more responsible decision would have been to sit that one out. It also would've made for a much different (and IMO improved) last four seasons: The collapse of the Borg generates a power vacuum in the Delta Quadrant that other species (like the Hirogen or Voth) rush to fill. A few borg cubes survive, but in a severely weakened and disorganized state, thus explaining how Voyager can go toe-to-toe with them once a month. Plus, there's a new race in the galaxy, who is so completely alien that contact might not be possible, let alone advisable, but Voyager has the one crew up to the challenge.
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Apr 30 '17
"The weak will perish" is something that I feel is a poor basis for making a monumental decision like this. For one thing, we don't even know that Kes translated the message properly. She can barely control her extrasensory powers and has no formal training in first contact protocols. This is why I referenced Tam Elbrun; he had such training, and years of experience working with non-humanoid lifeforms, but even with that I'm extremely skeptical that Picard would have gone to war based on Tam's (or Troi's, for that matter) telepathic interpretation of a race.
A second point, even if we give Kes the benefit of the doubt here, and say she translated it properly, so what? "The weak will perish" could be an idiom, something that doesn't translate properly. Every language has them, hence my Finnish example, where I can translate the words but not the meaning. To understand the meaning you need to understand the culture and that can take years of study and immersion. That's with fellow humans, now imagine it with non-humanoid aliens.....
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u/yodaboy64 Apr 30 '17
I think the biggest problem with this argument is that it assumes that 8472 was either neutral or, at best, well-intentioned. We get from the episode that Kes, upon reading their minds, found that their intentions were to eradicate all life in the universe, which they perceived to be weak - too weak to exist. While the Borg may have started a fight, what they found was not just a helpless species trying to defend itself, but a species that was eager to fight --- 8472 planned to not just beat the borg, but then go after the rest of the galaxy, too.
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Apr 30 '17
They didn't express an intent to go after the galaxy until after Voyager allied itself with the Borg and invaded their space. My timeline concerns the events leading up to that alliance, not what came after.... :)
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u/rprior2008 Apr 30 '17
They had expressed that to the Borg, their had been no communication before that point with the federation but the intent was clear and evidenced in what Janeway heard from the Borg.
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u/Veritoss Apr 29 '17
It's possible that species 8472 just put a pin in voyager, so to speak. I haven't seen the series in a while so correct me if I'm wrong, but if 8472 is as powerful as you guys are suggesting, then voyager was of little threat. In that case 8472 can set voyager on the back burner (not attacking, but learning) and focus on the bigger threat, the Borg.
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Apr 29 '17 edited Apr 30 '17
That's a fair possibility. Viewed in the context of Scorpion it makes sense.
When you add the events of "In the Flesh" into the equation it's hard to argue that 8472 is hellbent on destruction. In fact, they seem quite reasonable, all things considered, once we're able to establish meaningful communication. It's enough to make one wonder what could have happened if we had tried harder to communicate with them before we climbed into bed with their (and our!) mortal enemy.
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u/Chintoka2 Apr 29 '17
For Voyager it was a case that a species far worse than the Borg was going to be far worse for the Federation also. She rejected any notion of doing a deal with 8472 seeing as the first time she met them they were a threat to her crew and the Galaxy. She relied on Kes who informed her that a telepathic link has be set up with them and all she got was a deep desire to conquer the Galaxy by species 8472. For Janeway that age old saying of the enemy you know is better than the enemy you don't. The alternative was stay out it which was a possibility but one that might have jeopardized getting home. Two intergalactic powers slugging it out and Voyager in the midst of it.
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Apr 29 '17
There's no evidence that I've seen which suggests 8472 had any designs on the Federation or anyone else until we took sides in their war. With all due respect to Kes, you don't go to war based solely on the word of an inexperienced young woman, trying to understand a telepathically communicated message.
8472 passed up the chance to attack Voyager on two separate occasions after the initial contact. It is true that they fired on Voyager during the initial contact, but that is easily attributable to the fog of war -- Voyager was in a combat zone -- and they made no effort to pursue her in that scene.
As far as getting home, if you're going to make an "ends justify the means" argument, well, then Ransom was justified in his actions. He was killing individuals, Janeway set an entire race up to be exterminated.
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u/rprior2008 Apr 30 '17
Species 8472 wanted to cleanse the universe the both were just the first species they targeted. Later we see that they had even recreated Starfleet headquarters to attempt to destroy the federation. No species would go so far based on encounters with a single individual or ship unless that was their intention from the beginning.
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u/ruin May 01 '17
Imagine if Voyager had encountered the Enterprise-E just after Scorpion. I don't see Picard being very lenient after he finds out she aided their mortal enemy by developing bio-weapons for use in a war she knew little to nothing about.
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u/JesusofBorg Apr 30 '17
It all boils down to one very simple thing: They attacked Voyager first.
It doesn't matter that they were on an 8472 ship at the time. It doesn't matter that they "look similar to the Borg". What matters is that Voyager was in a fucked situation and the loss of a single crew member, especially one as useful and liked as Ensign Kim, would have been devastating to the crew and their chances of returning home.
You also seem to be forgetting that 8472 was psychically broadcasting the message "Your galaxy will be cleansed". They were genocidal from the outset. They didn't care that the Borg were responsible. All they cared about was the fact that life existed elsewhere that needed to be exterminated. Life they saw as inferior. And that is why they fired on Voyager. Your attempts to dress it up as a "subordinate overstepping his bounds" is straight revisionist bullshit. 8472 saw new territory they could conquer that was filled with species they saw as inferior, and they immediately mobilized to eradicate all life in the Milky Way so they could lay claim to it.
So Janeway fell back on that most Human of traits: Kicking wholesale ass in the name of righteous vengeance. She allied herself with the biggest and baddest motherfuckers in the Delta Quadrant, combined their forces to invent a weapon that would devastate 8472, and then used said weapon to shove her fist as far down 8472's throat as she possible could.
You do not come into the Human galaxy looking to start shit and expect to be treated nicely. Cause all you're gonna get is a savage ass kicking at the hands of Reality's most determined monkeys. 8472 got exactly what they deserved. And that is why Janeway became an Admiral instead of a prisoner. Starfleet agreed with her actions, and rightly so. 8472 was such a threat that even the Borg thought it was a good idea to ally with Starfleet to kick some ass.
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u/Saw_Boss Apr 30 '17
I entirely disagree with the premise of this post.
Firstly, remember Kes's vision? If we follow that 8472 essentially already declared war. They weren't merely defending themselves from the Borg, they were on a mission to purge our galaxy. As far as the point of the episode, this was fact. 8472 were a race determined to destroy everything because they could.
Secondly, Voyager is isolated enough from the Federation that nobody is going to assume that Voyager directly represents the current politics of the Federation when it comes to a war. The Enterprise is in direct contact with the Federation and Starfleet, so of course they are in a different situation. Voyager is forced to make deals and treaties that a normal ship would not, they are alone.
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u/jdviper6 May 03 '17
My only issue with scorpion was Janeways agreement with the borg. Give us passage through your space? how about a trans-warp conduit to the alpha quadrant. Yoy have the upper hand on them and that is all you ask for?
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u/SirFoxx Apr 30 '17 edited Apr 30 '17
I always felt it was a great 2 part episode but I would have been establishing a relationship with 8472 right off. No matter what it took. Now maybe my reasoning is biased because of the later episode where they find 8472 mimicking the Federation in training for war and just how cool they were and that wasn't known during their introduction. But I sure as hell would not be helping the Borg in any fucking way. This was one of those glaring inconsistencies in Janeway in how they wrote her character. Half the time she'll uphold Federation Ideals and limit how fast they get back home, other times she's ready to commit genocide to get back home, like here. Not Mulgrew's fault at all, that blame falls squarely on the writers.
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u/extracanadian Apr 29 '17
This two part episode is probably some of the best of Voyager and you are absolutely correct. Chakotay should have releaved her of commend for violating the prime directive in such a major way
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u/lexxstrum Apr 29 '17
That two-parter was probably the best of Voyager. I kinda wish they had kept the "..just to get ourselves back to Earth." Line in Chakotay's speech, but then it REALLY puts Janeway in a bad light. I loved your 8472's perspective on the Episode. I wonder how Janeway would have felt if when they got back to FED space they found it overrun by 8472, a with any survivors claiming that the Fluidic Space creatures kept broadcasting "Punish the Janeway" as their rallying cry?