S05.E22: Children of Time

[John Potts]

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The DS9 cast discovers a small colony on a remote world that was originally populated by them 200 years earlier due to a time-travel accident with the Defiant. The current colonists lives depend on making sure that accident happens again, even though they've now forwarned the crew that it will happen. Each crew member needs to decide if they are willing to give up their lives on DS9 in order to preserve the history of the colony.

This plot is based on an old Philosophical quandary: You're in a junction control tower for a railway. A train is hurtling down the tracks toward a crowd of people. You can choose to divert the train onto a siding but there is one person trapped there - do you pull the lever and divert the train? (Essentially the dilemma is whether it is right to consciously choose a lesser number of deaths over passively allowing a greater number: in purely theoretical terms it's clear which is the right decision - the one which causes least deaths - but IRL people find it very hard to make similar choices). You can even see it as a extended abortion metaphor.

But the thing that really struck me this time, is that for all his supposed dedication to justice, just how immoral Odo is. On almost any basis, his actions here are monstrous: he consciously chooses to kill (or rather, allow to un-exist) thousands of people to save just one; he ignores the choices of all the DS9 crew (even those like Miles and Sisko who have families to get back to) because he can't bare to let Nerys die - when you think about it that way, it's not so surprising that he will

Spoiler

choose Linking with the Female Changeling and allow the minefield protecting the Alpha Quadrant to fall at the start of next Season.

Edited June 4, 2017 by John Potts

[blueray]

I always thought it was interesting that the future "odo" always seemed like an outsider. In that episode you never see him interacting with other people from the planet or get mentioned at all. To him he not only had to bury Kira but the rest of the crew at some point. Obviously "future Odo" made his decision to save Kira. But did also allow Sisko and Miles to return home to their families. And it's nice that Kira didn't blame our Odo for what his alternate future self did. 

[readster]

9 hours ago, blueray said:

I always thought it was interesting that the future "odo" always seemed like an outsider. In that episode you never see him interacting with other people from the planet or get mentioned at all. To him he not only had to bury Kira but the rest of the crew at some point. Obviously "future Odo" made his decision to save Kira. But did also allow Sisko and Miles to return home to their families. And it's nice that Kira didn't blame our Odo for what his alternate future self did. 

Exactly, because that Odod spent decades with the grief, much like Dax did. Since it was Dax's fault because she just had to make a discovery and didn't think twice of just sending a probe first and if it was too dangerous for the probe. They would have went home but it was: "Come on Benjamin, let's make a discovery!" 

[BBHN]

To me, there was no real moral dilemma. I never saw the future people as being "real", so I never got why everyone was in such a quandary about it. Odo's actions may have been monstrous, but...alternate universes and all that.

[John Potts]

3 hours ago, BBHN said:

I never saw the future people as being "real", so I never got why everyone was in such a quandary about it.

That view might be understandable if it had been Kira or O'Brien (who would have understandable reasons for discounting the theoretical lives of the colony against the real personal costs) who sabotaged the Defiant, but Future!Odo had lived alongside the colonists for centuries - their lives should be MORE meaningful to him, not less. He's pining for somebody he knew for five years two centuries ago and is discounting the lives of people he has seen alive throughout that time.

I could get all philosophical and talk about how Odo violates the Categorical Imperative (he definitely does) or wonder about how to assess the utility of the lives of potential people (which Bentham/Mill didn't really consider) and it's certainly fine to take an opposing view (it wouldn't be a dilemma otherwise!) but I find it hard to see Odo's actions as anything but highly immoral.

[BBHN]

I didn't just mean with regards to Odo (future or present), I meant among the regular cast as well. And again, because I don't see him as killing "real" people, then I'm fine with his decision.
 

[iMonrey]

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To me, there was no real moral dilemma. I never saw the future people as being "real", so I never got why everyone was in such a quandary about it. Odo's actions may have been monstrous, but...alternate universes and all that.

That's sort of my take as well. I don't know that it's really the equivalent of the philosophy posed above (regarding the train). I see a distinction between killing people and changing history so that they never existed in the first place. So the actual comparison would be do you let the train crash into the crowd of people or do you change history so that the train never went there in the first place.

But I do agree with John Potts' assessment of Odo. We're expected to believe that his feelings for Kira were so profound they outweighed the last 200 years of his life experiences. I also wondered why he didn't simply go with them, but I guess if they managed to destroy the timeline his future self would no longer exist either. In that sense maybe that's why he was OK with wiping out all these people - he took the same attitude that they'd never exist anyway and nobody would notice the difference.

[rmontro]

I thought this was one of the best episodes of the season, and thus probably the series as well.  I especially liked the way Worf and the Sons of Mogh interacted with each other.  But wow, it's hard to believe Future Odo acts like such a dick.

On 6/5/2017 at 5:25 AM, John Potts said:

Future!Odo had lived alongside the colonists for centuries - their lives should be MORE meaningful to him, not less. He's pining for somebody he knew for five years two centuries ago and is discounting the lives of people he has seen alive throughout that time.

That is a really good point.  Whatever feelings Odo had for Kira, if his feelings are similar to human in any respect at all, you would think he would have developed a crush on someone else over that period of time.

I didn't really agree with everyone saying that the colonists would die.  They would have just never existed in the first place.  A subtle difference maybe, but I don't think there would be any pain involved.  Honestly, I find it hard to believe that they would not live in some sort of alternate timeline.  But for the purposes of this episode at least, such things do not exist.