As tragic as it was, M'Benga kept to the ancient adage of doctors on Earth: "To help, or at least, to do no harm." He had to make a tough choice, but at least the guy who was in the buffer felt no pain or anything. Better than dying in agony.
Triage, one of the most traumatizing things a human can do for another is make a choice on thier life. But in the face of tragedy and conflict, It has to be done.
Yep. I think everyone should read M*A*S*H. Don't just watch the movie or binge watch the TV series. There are a few parts in the book that are...very unvarnished. You save this guy's leg, three more die waiting to get into the OR, etc. It will give you a much better perspective on the choices doctors have to make.
Yeah, that was a stupid decision. Even under more ideal circumstances it's a bad idea but this is a war. What if the equipment gets destroyed? What if all the humans die and there's nobody to bring you out (like Ant-Man)? Or what if the Klingons capture the device and bring you out on the Klingon home world just to be tortured?
@@protorhinocerator142 His pattern was stored there, not him. He didn't experience anything, if he was forgotten there, the pattern would stay there. It's not like he was imprisoned there. I'd take the risk of being captured to Klingons for a chance of survival.
They had no choice, he would have died in agony if they did not put him in the buffer. So it was death right then or the chance of living in the buffer. This was a no win situation, a medical Kobayashi Maru
I assume when you're in the pattern buffer you arent conscious, so then that one guy's last memory before ceasing to exist was being told he'd be okay.
@@Writ3r_Dude Yep, I read the book that episode was based on and it had more on how he and the crewman that Scotty was in the buffer with got in there (the crewman's pattern was too degraded by time to be recovered btw for those who don't remember) essentially those two were the only survivors of the crash on the Dyson sphere surface and managed to restore limited backup power in the ship, and while the section of the ship they were in was intact life support was failing and they wouldn't be able to breath within a day or so. Anyways Scotty used a few of the tricks he and Spock had created with the Enterprise transporters over their years together to juryrig the transporter computer to constantly recycle the pattern buffer kinda like in this episode but for a much more extended loop. He was expecting them to be found in a few months maybe a year or two at most, not decades. He had told the young crewman he was with "Aye lad we'll be just fine, someone will be along to find us in a few weeks beam us out of the transporter and we'll continue on our way", but he knew the longer it took for them to be found, the greater the chances of their patterns to degrade, and that once they started to dematerialize that might be the last thing they saw. He just didn't say anything to the young crewman so that once his juryrigging was done they would then shutdown all systems but the transporter to save power and immediately enter the transporter maximizing their chances. In this case however his juryrigging wasn't quite good enough to last the decades for both of them.
he knew she would eventually make the choice but she would be destroyed by it and there more people would die if she delayed. so he made the choice and took the guilt.
As a data scientist my first reaction is, for the love of God, don't purge the backlogs! But more heartbreakingly, and as a human, it's devastating to think what their purge cost them. It was the literal trolley problem. In my opinion, it was the right decision. But that moment would have cost them both so much no matter what happened.
Also a DS here. What's also horrifying is that the victim was turned into data (probably a nasty .json file). Then that file was deleted. Now there's literally nothing of him left. It was bloodless, but somehow the fact that someone can be "deleted" makes it worse.
Yeah, you see it all the time in any mass casualty event of any type, because there's only so many doctors, so many nurses, so many EMTs, so many firemen, so many ambulances. Those who seem to have a chance of making it but are the most critical/serious are the ones who get taken to the hospital first, while the ones most likely not to even survive the trip there..... don't. Do they make the wrong decisions sometimes as to who might live and who might die, of course, they're only human, they only make their best guess based on what they see and know, and they often have nightmares of what they could have done better even if there was nothing more they could have done at all.
the dude was a wounded soldier not expected to live considering the medical supplies on hand (major injurys internal organs with no organ regenerator on hand) they would need a starships medbay, so they put him in the buffer to keep him in stasis until a proper casevac ship could take him and treat him then they needed to bring the Transports back up from being out of power, to do that you did what they did and Purge the backlog this time there was someone in the buffer
It's an odd future, where the RAM of a transporter buffer is apparently more expensive than hard disk space where they could have filed the transporter buffer that needed to be freed up.
In the TNG era, the buffer is a superconducting tokamak tank that can hold a pattern for 420 seconds before the pattern degrades. I've interpreted that as an analogue storage device, because there's far to much quantum information in a matter stream to store in even future digital memory.
@@epiendless1128 concepts of technology limitations change overtime with the real world, i would agree the amount of data for a living being would be phenomenal but so would the process of matter transportation. Probably best if we don't think to deeply about it 🙂it was one critically injured soldier versus many, its a touch choice but a necessary one sadly.
You have to look at what a transporter actually is. It's not a system for travel. They disintegrate you, with the promise of un-killing you later. But the first step is always, we kill you by disintegration. It was always a bad idea and I would never ever ever agree to something like this.
@@protorhinocerator142 certainly the StarTrek ones and those of the Asgard in SG1, but the ring teleporters of the Ancients didn't appear to work like that, they seem to use something similar to stargate tech, perhaps opening a wormhole over a short distance.
@@HepCatJack I think the Stargate ones started out as wormholes but they needed to make it disintegration for one of the stories. Then they built a lot on top of that, like if people are gating in and you close the iris they're dead.
Watching this episode last night and it was a classic backstory for a couple of characters. I think season 2 has been a bit hit and miss but this episode steered it back on track...especially when you think about all the conflicts going on in the world at the minute. Sobering stuff to watch.
Cannon asides stories can lead to new ideas, such as Starships having dedicated storage capacity for injured crews to allow time for treatment or long term storage; replicators and transporters recreating crew or body parts etc. That we did not have replicators or Holo decks in the original show was more an issue of conception and budget, whilst the franchise has its issues its helped open the imagination or many many people.
As soon as they captured him in the transport buffer, you knew something would happen to the buffer. He was already dead going in. And if they can do this, why not make an army of Kirk, Spock, Geordi, Data, etc.? Why would anyone ever die in space like that? Someone dies on Cold Rock 7, and they activate the backup copy they made before he left. Kinda like that general in Avatar 2. Just make another one.
interesting that they have made this character so deeply flawed. He had no trouble purging someone from the transporter, but was unwilling to do so for his own daughter, resulting in the Enterprise becoming contaminated with a virus and almost killing everyone.. And then Una doesn't report him but enables him to keep doing this. Love how in SNW there are zero consequences to anyone's immoral actions. How inspiring for the current generation of viewers.
