Tuvok and Neelix are merged into one: Tuvix.
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By Chris on Sunday, November 01, 1998 - 10:35 pm:

After the accident it is stated that part of the flower they were carying is also in tuvik, so why doesent it appear when they get separated?

Why do they both have have uniforms on when they get separated? whered the other come from?

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By Chris Thomas on Saturday, November 07, 1998 - 2:04 am:

The flower's probably in Tuvok's pants - explains why he's always got that cocked eyebrow . (Ahem) Just because we don't see it, doesn't mean it's not there.
Aren't the two uniforms derived from Tuvix's uniform, which was originally a combination of two uniforms?

Now Now Let us be careful here. No need for that kind of joke Chris.-Richie Vest

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By Murray Leeder on Saturday, November 07, 1998 - 11:51 am:

Why were the outfits combined so evenly? Why wasn't all the fabric strewn throughout Tuvix's body? That'd be weird.

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By Chris Thomas on Saturday, November 07, 1998 - 7:32 pm:

Richie, we gotta have some fun while nitpicking here. It was a very tame joke, simply celebrating our nitpicking and all this time we have on our hands. But I am now down on my hands and knees, begging your forgiveness, oh mighty one.

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By Chris Thomas on Saturday, November 07, 1998 - 8:19 pm:

For Murray: I guess if everything became intertwined, there would be just a big globular mess quivering away like jelly on the transporter pad, which would probably die very quickly, like in the accident featured Star Trek: The Motion Picture. There'd be no more Tuvok, Neelix or anything that could be Tuvix and fill up a Voyager episode.
So it's wildly inaccurate but there'd be no story otherwise.

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By Anonymous on Monday, November 09, 1998 - 12:59 am:

This was a great show. How come Tuvok & Neelix arent closer now that they have been one? Embarrassment? From a Vulcan? What up?

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By Chris Thomas on Monday, November 09, 1998 - 2:17 am:

Can you imgaine Tuvok admitting he enjoyed be part-Neelix for a while?

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By RichieVest on Monday, November 09, 1998 - 3:57 pm:

Chris it is ok You are forgiven.

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By Jenny Veitch on Tuesday, November 10, 1998 - 11:48 am:

I have 1 nit to pick from Tuvix.

Why does Nelix still call Tuvok Mr Vulcan when he shared moemories with him?

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By Chris Thomas on Wednesday, November 11, 1998 - 1:44 am:

Out of respect, maybe? He understands a bit more about how Vulcans like their privacy and to be left alone etc now he's shared Tuvok's mind

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By Johnny Veitch on Sunday, November 22, 1998 - 6:15 am:

At one point Tuvix says that Holodoc has scanned organs he didn`t even know he had. Who`s organs are these? They can`t be Tuvok`s or Neelix`s since he has their memories.

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By Adam Chmelka on Sunday, November 22, 1998 - 2:44 pm:

I believe he was making a joke.

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By Callie Sullivan on Sunday, May 02, 1999 - 4:13 pm:

Tom said that they couldn't go back to the planet for another sample of the orchid because it was currently night time. I laughed out loud at that point and said, "Well, here's a great idea, Tommy - Take A Shuttle and fly round to the day side! Duh!!"

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By BrianB on Friday, July 09, 1999 - 8:28 am:

This episode lacked an epilog suggesting Neelix has become more logical or if Tuvok would admit that for the first time in life he was happy.

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By davepob on Wednesday, September 22, 1999 - 2:40 pm:

Where was the "seeking out new life" in this episode ? A new life form is sentanced to death purely because they have the chance to resurrect the dead..ie Tuvok and Neelix.
Surely only the doctor stuck to Starfleet beleifs in this episode by refusing to assist in murder.

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By Mark Swinton on Saturday, October 16, 1999 - 12:37 pm:

In one of the early scenes (as the credits roll), we join the as-yet unnamed Tuvix in sickbay having the first of many exams (wink wink). Someone (I forget who) asks him if he recognises everyone in the room. He then rattles off a list of names, identifying everyone there. Well, almost everyone. He doesn't identify the Security Officer standing there by the doors, whom he would most certainly recognise if he had all of Tuvok's memories! Come on, creators- surely reality is not going to screech to a halt if you make out that the crew of Voyager is more than just its senior staff!

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By kyjada on Saturday, October 16, 1999 - 9:05 pm:

True they could have had Tuvix say something like and that is Ensign so and so who I put on report last week or some other tidbit of information to give the show a little more realism.

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By Brian Lombard on Tuesday, October 26, 1999 - 6:55 am:

Couple of questions. First, Neelix has an Ocampan lung. How did the transporter know to give it back to him? Remember, it was separating the two combined DNAs (Talaxian and Vulcan.) Second,
"Blood Fever" showed us that Tuvok has a metal joint in his arm. Same question.

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By Chris Thomas on Tuesday, October 26, 1999 - 7:45 am:

Wouldn't their most recent transporter patterns be logged in the ship's computer - so it knows of such modifications to the body?

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By Mark Swinton on Friday, November 26, 1999 - 2:54 pm:

This is pure speculation, but it could be that Tuvok needed the replacement joint after this episode.

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By Mark Bowman on Thursday, December 23, 1999 - 10:52 pm:

I don't see how the 2 bodies could function
at all while intertwined. First, the body would
be much heavier and dense if all Tuvoxes
and Neelex's molicules were in there.
Second, their blood vessles and other
organs would be crossing *through* eachother,
blocking the flow of blood, among other things.
And is the transporter programmed to
assemble two bodies into one? It would take a
very, very large amount code, just to tell the
transporter to assemble the 2 uniforms together
perfectly as shown here. Imagine the code
needed to fuse two bodies, without killing
both people and to adjust for differences
and uniqueness between each and every body.
Do programmers at starfleet R&D sit around
dreaming up wild scenios and spend
time coding programs for situations like this?
Is this merging an emergency feature they
put into the transporter??! (Ack! Remind me to
never use a transporter if they ever do come out

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By Mark Bowman on Thursday, December 23, 1999 - 10:58 pm:

Do programmers at starfleet R&D sit around
dreaming up wild scenios and spend
time coding programs for situations like this?
Is this merging an emergency feature they
put into the transporter??! (Ack! Remind me to
never use a transporter if they ever do come out
>>>>>>

I think they spend so much time
on this stuff, they don't have any time
left to design descent circut breakers or
consoles that don't explode

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By weirddave on Wednesday, January 19, 2000 - 11:27 am:

Just saw this episode for the first time, and it is my humble opinion that when Voyager gets back to earth, ( after having travelled probobly 140,000 LY to cover 70 the way the creaters ignore continuity ) Janeway should be indicted for murder, period. Tuvok and Neelix were gone. For all intents and purposes, dead. Tuvix was alive, a living, breathing, functioning member of Voyagers crew. He clearly wished to stay alive, and was a sentient being. Janeway ENDED his life to bring back the other two. I bet you a first year DA could take this into court and get a conviction. Look at it this way. suppose Voyager were in a battle, and, say, Tom and Seven were killed. Q appears and says he will resurrect them if Janeway kills, say, Ensien Expendable, and she does it. Would that not be murder? Yes. This is the same thing.

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By Jwb52z on Wednesday, January 19, 2000 - 12:51 pm:

The only problem with the idea that re-separating Tuvix is murder, is that Tuvix was never meant to be created in the first place.

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By Mark Swinton on Wednesday, January 19, 2000 - 5:45 pm:

Look on it this way- there's a couple of Siamese twins in America who featured on a documentary here in England about two years ago. They are joined at the head and have to do what seem like the most precarious, uncomfortable and complex actions in order to achieve tasks that we take for granted. Yet they refuse to go in for separation- because, in their own words, "Why fix what's not broken?" And why indeed: they are used to being conjoined and their lifestyle, although odd-looking to us, reflects that. Neelix and Tuvok were conjoined by accident and the resulting entity, Tuvix, became accustomed to living as himself. By the time the big moral debate of the episode comes, Tuvix is happy and functional, just like the siamese twins. And then Janeway comes in (urged on, I might add, by a very emotional speech from Kes) and separates the twins- "fixing what's not broken."
Whatever happens, happens. Surely everyone should have accepted what happened to Tuvok and Neelix and left it at that. One wonders, if those two siamese twins were serving on Voyager, would Janeway order them to be surgically separated? If she did, the individual entities would not be able to function because it would mean "unlearning" all that they have learned to survive in a conjoined state. (Admittedly, since Tuvok and Neelix came out of it unscathed, that particular problem isn't relevant, but you get the idea...)
Of course, the real reason why Tuvix was destroyed to bring back Tuvok and Neelix was because the creators didn't want him to be a regular character and wanted to keep Tim Russ and Ethan Phillips on their contracts (although it would have been a saving to cut off an extra person's wages in that way...).

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By Jwb52z on Wednesday, January 19, 2000 - 9:37 pm:

It's not really my idea of ok to take away the lives of 2 characters just because of an accident to preserve a life form that was never meant to exist in the first place. Tuvok and Neelix were there first.

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By Clifford Smythe on Thursday, January 20, 2000 - 12:41 am:

Fix what's not broken? I think Tuvix and Neelix were a little broken when Tuvix was created, they didn't exist anymore.
And weirddave it doesn't what a first district DA thinks now - Voyager is in the future and the law could be entirely different for all we know.
Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few here?
Neelix dies in another episode and, instead of accpeting it, they inject Seven's nanoprobes to resurrect him.
The argument that Tuvix was never meant to be created in the first place is spurious - there are many pregnancies that were never supposed to happen, Geordi didn't mean to make Moriarty a sentient being on the Enterprise and so on.

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By Chris Thomas on Thursday, January 20, 2000 - 12:45 am:

Re: "they couldn't go back to the planet for another sample of the orchid because it was currently night time - Take A Shuttle and fly round to the day side"

Perhaps the orchid only grows on one continent or even smaller area, which was currently experiencing night, meaning flying to the day side would be pointless because what they needed wouldn't be there.

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By Jwb52z on Thursday, January 20, 2000 - 11:15 am:

::The argument that Tuvix was never meant to be created in the first place is spurious - there are many pregnancies that were never supposed to happen, Geordi didn't mean to make Moriarty a sentient being on the Enterprise and so on.:: Clifford Smythe

It's not the same thing. I guess you are not getting my meaning of "never supposed to happen." I guess I mean "shouldn't have ever happened. An entity such as Tuvix was never meant or supposed to exist. You just can't take away lives of those before to allow a new one to exist. I see this differently than a baby because you have to make a choice to have sex or not, and sex isn't an accident.

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By Clifford Smythe on Friday, January 21, 2000 - 1:38 am:

What about Moriarty on the Enterprise? Tom Riker?

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By ScottN on Friday, January 21, 2000 - 9:46 am:

The difference was that nobody was "killed" to create them. Tuvok and Neelix were destroyed to create Tuvix.

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By Jwb52z on Friday, January 21, 2000 - 12:16 pm:

Thank you ScottN, I was just about to say that same thing.

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By weirddave on Monday, January 24, 2000 - 12:28 pm:

Ok, how about V'ger?

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By mf on Monday, January 24, 2000 - 4:26 pm:

I thought this was one of the most powerful episodes of Voyager - because there *was* no clear cut answer. Personally, I disagree strongly with Janeway's choice. He was a sentient lifeform, regardless of what accident formed him.

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By Chris Thomas on Friday, February 04, 2000 - 10:07 pm:

The solution to separating Tuvok and Neelix lies in a radioactive isotope. Harry and the Doctor say it will attach itself to one species' DNA so then they know which bits to take away in the transporter to form one being, leaving the other one behind. Fine if you have two species: but, as mentioned above, there are three, including the orchid. That means the orchid is still either in Neelix or Tuvok, meaning the problem could occur again in the future, given the orchid's properties of fusing species together.
You may note when the Doctor and Harry do their test with the flowers, they only have two that have been separated, the orchid is nowhere in sight.
It's a way to bring back Tuvix if they wanted to but you'd wonder why neither Tuvok nor Neelix (depends on who still has the orchid in them) have had transporter problems.

When Tuvix explains what happened on the planet he mentions the orchid samples were in containers but when he arrived on the transporter pad, they were nowhere in sight? Does Tuvix have an inorganic compound in him as well? If the isotope pulled Neelix away from Tuvok in the transporter, does than mean Tuvok has the orchid and the compound inside him?

I don't know why but at the end I found myself asking: what would Picard have done?

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By Viv Lyall on Thursday, April 20, 2000 - 10:16 pm:

Guess Tom Wright as Tuvix hasn't made much of an impact anywhere else; he's not even credit at the Internet Movie Database: http://www.imdb.com/M/person-exact?+Wright,+Tom

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By DonnaL on Saturday, April 22, 2000 - 1:17 pm:

The thing is that Tuvok and Neelix were not "dead" but trapped within that one merged body. It would be one thing if there had been no way to ever fix the problem.

But since a solution was found, it was as though the conjoined personality began holding the original two men hostages, and using their bodies for his own purposes. I noticed neither Tuvok nor Neelix was complaining when they were "freed" again. There was no "murder" because there was no separate being or entity to kill. Janeway did the right thing. IMNBSHO

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By Spock on Saturday, April 22, 2000 - 9:45 pm:

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few?

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By Chris Booton (Cbooton) on Saturday, April 22, 2000 - 10:42 pm:

I see this differently than a baby
because you have to make a choice to have sex or not, and sex isn't an accident

What if you are raped? I would hardly call that sex? What about the women who became pregant as a result of the rapes?

By Viv Lyall on Saturday, April 22, 2000 - 11:57 pm:

And what about artificial insemination? Didn't Seska steal some of Chakotay's DNA or something?

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By Charles Cabe (Ccabe) on Sunday, April 23, 2000 - 3:42 pm:

>The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few?>

Apparantly not IJO (In Janeway's Opinion). 2 episodes prior, the didn't take Q bribe to return to Earth. In that case, apparantly the needs of the few (Q3) out weighed the needs of the many (the crew of the Voyager).

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By Spock on Sunday, April 23, 2000 - 11:55 pm:

Janeway is not logical.

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By Corey Hines on Monday, April 24, 2000 - 10:17 am:

A mutual solution can be found easily. The transporter is already known to be able to duplicate people, in "Lonely Among Us" and "Second Chances"(TNG), so why not duplicate Tuvix, and use the duplicate pattern to return Tuvok and Neelix?

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By Jwb52z on Monday, April 24, 2000 - 11:21 am:

Corey, that won't work because you are forgetting the REASON that Riker was duplicated. It was an atmospheric problem combined with an overworried transporter chief that thought he needed more to hold the pattern than he really did so when the transport began the second pattern was "thrown out" but in reality it was reflected back toward the planet and created a new Riker. Simply using a pattern can't be a way to recreate a person. If it could, it wouldn't matter if anyone ever died.

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By Viv Lyall on Monday, April 24, 2000 - 9:29 pm:

Why couldn't they try to duplicate the same effect?

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By Viv Lyall on Monday, April 24, 2000 - 9:29 pm:

Why couldn't they try to duplicate the same effect?

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By Jwb52z on Tuesday, April 25, 2000 - 11:32 am:

The atmosphere on the planet station that Riker helped evacuate was rarely unique. It would have been almost impossible or completely impossible to recreate an atmosphere like that. The only reason it was done in the first place with Riker was an incompetent person running the transporter at that specific time.

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By Surak on Tuesday, April 25, 2000 - 11:58 am:

Put Neelix in charge then.

And you don't think the Delta Quadrant has its unique share of phenomena?

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By Chris Marks on Wednesday, March 21, 2001 - 3:43 am:

Finally got to see this episode,
When they developed the radioactive dna markers, Harry talked about using radioactive barium in x-rays to show up the digestive tract.
Barium meals are quite dense and block X-Rays, they don't tend to be radioactive.

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By Chris Pope on Thursday, April 19, 2001 - 12:21 am:

Just thought I'd point out that Tom Wright is in the Internet Movie Database; search for Tom Wright (I). He's done dozens of movies, as well as L.A. Law and several TV guest appearances. In fact, he's done more than either Tim Russ (Tuvok) or Ethan Phillips (Neelix).

Oh, and here's one other solution: Create a holographic body for Tuvix (a la "Lifesigns"). Place a copy of his consciousness into the computer (it's been done before), and then split the physical Tuvix into the two original crew members.

Then if Janeway still wants to kill somebody, she can go after Neelix. (Was that unkind?)

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By Merat on Thursday, April 19, 2001 - 1:59 pm:

yes, but I forgive you for making fun of the little Bar-Rat!

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By Keith Alan Morgan (Kmorgan) on Thursday, July 12, 2001 - 4:39 am:

If Kes wanted Tuvix to remain still, why did she keep asking him questions? Why did this scan need to take twenty minutes? We've seen scanners do very complex scans in less time.

Toward the end of the episode, Tuvix is stopped by two members of Security. Shouldn't Tuvix be strong enough to overcome them?

Of course, it was the small woman who grabbed Tuvix first while the big man grabbed him afterwards. That seems to be some odd Security training, the weaker member grabs the person's hands while the stronger one comes up from behind. Riker and Worf used this technique against Data in Phantasms.

At the end Tuvix is materialized into Tuvok and Neelix and they are both wearing uniforms. Since the two uniforms were created from one uniform, does this mean that they are only half as thick as regular uniforms?

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By Vicky on Wednesday, July 18, 2001 - 12:23 pm:

I thought this episode was really good and thought-provoking. I disagree with Janeway's final decision but I was thinking it over. What would I do? I like both Tuvok and Neelix but I also like Tuvix. In the end I just thought, "thank God I don't have to make this decision..." Still, I think Janeway was wrong...

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By Jwb52z on Wednesday, July 18, 2001 - 3:27 pm:

Vicky, you don't want to start that argument again.

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By Grammar Inspector on Wednesday, July 18, 2001 - 9:13 pm:

"I thought this episode was really good and thought-provoking. I disagree with Janeway's final decision but I was thinking it over. What would I do? I like both Tuvok and Neelix but I also like Tuvix. In the end I just thought, "thank God I don't have to make this decision..." Still, I think Janeway was wrong... "

GI: I agree, Vicky. It's one of the few moral dilemma shows Voyager has done, it did it well. It's also the only Trek allegory episode on abortion (if you choose to see it that way, as I did). You can tell Janeway's decision weighs heavily on her at the end of the episode.

Personally, I think she did the right thing.

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By William Berry on Monday, August 13, 2001 - 4:34 pm:

Any episode that relies on the transporter is going to have to much speculation and contradiction of other episodes for my taste. Just wanted to put my $0.02 in. (Hey, where is the little "c" with a line through it?)

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By The Chronicler on Monday, August 13, 2001 - 6:29 pm:

You can usually get ¢ by holding down the "Alt" key while typing 0, 1, 6, and 2.

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By Jesse on Wednesday, March 27, 2002 - 3:07 pm:

Janeway did the WRONG thing in this episode. That is why I dislike her character so much: she becomes the All-knowing Conscience of the Delta Quadrant. If Tuvix did not want to be separated, then she had no right to do so. Period.

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By Jwb52z on Thursday, March 28, 2002 - 8:06 pm:

Jesse, you missed the whole conversation the first time about that idea. The original beings had the right to exist because they were there first and Tuvix was never meant to be created in the first place. That's it.

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By Nobody on Wednesday, July 03, 2002 - 7:36 pm:

You know what's the biggest problem with this episode? There's no time element to it. There's no ticking clock -- no reason that Tuvix needs to be separated NOW. But nevertheless, Janeway still separates Tuvix NOW, at the point of a gun, no less. She behaves like a fascist, enforcing her way with violence. The force of law is not behind her. There has been no hearing, no back and forth discussion. Tuvix's rights have been egregiously breeched, and Janeway has committed murder just 'cause Kes was teary.

If Starfleet allows that kind of latitude to its military commanders, I'm terrified.

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By Blue Berry on Thursday, July 04, 2002 - 3:06 am:

Yet another example of the transporter violating the conservation of matter and energy. If Neelix and Tuvok each weigh 170 lbs. then Tuvix's 340 lbs should break chairs and such or there should have been an explosion as 180 lbs of mass was converted to energy. (BTW, this is not a Voyager only nit -- Tom Riker and and Will Riker should weigh 0.5 x the origional Riker, but scales are hard to find on starships, so they never figured it out.)

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By KAM & KAM on Thursday, July 04, 2002 - 3:30 am:

Same with the two Kirks in The Enemy Within.

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By LUIGI NOVI on Friday, July 05, 2002 - 1:14 am:

I hear he does a really good Bill Cosby impression
Great Line: "Mr. Neelix, do you think you could possibly be a little less like yourself?" -Tuvok to Neelix, after the security chief says that one cannot act more or less like himself.

---Notes:
---This episode was originally titled "Symbiogenesis."

Beats me, but I know smoking some kinds of them can turn people into inanimate objects
Hal Schuster, in The Trekker’s Guide to Voyager wondered how a plant could merge inanimate objects.
Trek production staffperson 1: "Where’s the science advisor?"
Trek production staffperson 2: "He’s over there unwrapping his brand new cold fusion machine."
Hal Schuster also wondered where the extra mass went when the two people merge. Tuvix is not the size of two people; he is of normal height and size.
Trek production staffperson 1: "The science advisor’s disappreared again. Where’s he now?"
Trek production staffperson 2: "Consulting his astrologist on the best brand of perpetual motion machine."
Hal also wanted to know if the transporter converts both Neelix and Tuvok into energy, how can they chemically interact? In the briefing room, Tuvix and Harry talk about microcellular activity and DNA. But subatomic particles, as Hal pointed out under nits for Jetrel, are homogenous. Cells don’t exist at that level, only atoms, protons, quarks, etc.
It’s part of the transporter computer’s "gay fashion designer" subroutine
When Neelix and Tuvok are down on the planet in the beginning of the episode, Neelix has on a jacket with a diagonal criss-cross pattern. When they merge as Tuvix, the transporter also merges their uniforms, and it has a floral pattern. Where did this come from? Was there a floral pattern somewhere in the transporter files that the transporter decided to throw in to decorate the newly merged lifeform?
Going through an airport metal detector is going to be hell for him now
And by the way, what happened to the two sample containers that Tuvok and Neelix had on the planet to collect the orchids? Tuvix doesn’t have even one of them when he first appears on the transporter pad at the end of the teaser.
Or the Italian side of him
When first examining Tuvix, Kes attaches a delicate scanner to Tuvix’s hand and tells him to remain still. Tuvix says he will do his best. Unfortunately, he doesn’t try very hard. Not only does he turn and raise his hand to gaze at the scanner, but even after Kes tells him again to remain still, he continues to gesture with his hands, even getting up to walk over to Kes. I guess it must be the Neelix side of him.
Personally, I’ve always wanted to strap down Neelix. But a scanner isn’t he device I wanted to use on him.
Speaking of which, why does Kes have him try to stay still for 20 minutes? Does she really think he can do so? Why doesn’t she put his arm on an armrest and strap it down or something to keep it immobile?
Back in the day, we used to have episode dialogue with a primitive quality called "plausibility"
Doc proposes to Janeway a separation solution for Tuvix based on what he calls "a primitive imaging technology called x-rays." It would have made more sense to say "a primitive technology that used x-rays." The way Doc worded it sounded as if Janeway never heard of x-rays, which is absurd. X-rays are a part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Janeway should know what they are.
From a desire not to gross out the audience
And speaking of the uniforms again, Tuvix has one on at the end of the episode when he is split back into Tuvok and Neelix, but when Tuvok and Neelix appear on either side of where Tuvix was sitting, each one has a uniform. Tuvok was wearing one on the planet when merged, but Neelix wasn’t. Where did the second one come from?

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By Electron on Friday, July 05, 2002 - 3:45 pm:

Blue Berry, I think in the case of Will&Tom there was more energy added after the first beam dropped to 50%.

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By Brian Lombard on Monday, November 04, 2002 - 1:42 pm:

It's very hard to see, but the 2nd uniform is laying on the biobed. Tuvix actually sits on the thing.

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By John A. Lang on Saturday, May 22, 2004 - 9:11 pm:

Comment: Oh, yawn! It must have been a slow week at Paramount. They had to resort to the extremely tired plot of a Transporter malfunction AGAIN.

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By Thande on Sunday, May 23, 2004 - 1:52 am:

Luigi: I think 2 of your nits are explained (though not necessarily plausibly ) by something I read the creators said about this episode: supposedly not only Tuvok and Neelix were merged, but they were merged WITH the orchid. This is why the sample containers disappear and Tuvix's uniform has the 'floral pattern' - it's an attempt to show the orchid's influence on the combined being.

And if Tuvix had still been wearing that hybrid uniform when Janeway 'killed' him, Neelix would probably have come back wearing his outrageous clothes rather than a Starfleet uniform.

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By LUIGI NOVI on Sunday, May 23, 2004 - 10:49 pm:

First of all, I think that’s ridiculous, since decorative patterns on clothing aren't derived from anything that exists on the genetic level. The transporter reconstructs clothes based on their stored pattern. The idea that images of flowers would show up on a beamed unform simply because of an aspect of their biology is preposterous.

Second, the episode stated that the flowers caused Neelix and Tuvok to undergo symbiogenesis, which merges lifeforms. Clothing isn't a lifeform. It's an inanimate object.

Lastly, this explanation does not explain the sample containers. Yes, the orchid merged Tuvok, Neelix, and itself into one being. So again, I ask: What happened to the sample containers? You're telling me all that metal/glass/whatever is also somewhere inside Tuvok and Neelix? To say nothing of all that other mass that apparently disappeared? It makes no sense.

None of this is explained at all, IMHO, to say nothing of whether it is explained "plausibly."

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By Thande on Monday, May 24, 2004 - 2:19 am:

Oh, I didn't say it made sense, I just said it's the explanation given by the creators in an interview.

"Neelix has an Ocampan lung." Brian

I believe that since the Viddians(?) had such advanced medical technology that they were able to alter the lung's DNA into Neelix's.

"When they merge as Tuvix, the transporter also merges their uniforms, and it has a floral pattern." LN

I didn't really see it as a floral patter, just a similar shiny, for lack of a better word, pattern to Neelix's attire.

"The original beings had the right to exist because they were there first and Tuvix was never meant to be created in the first place. That's it." Jwb52z

No I'm afraid that's not it. Saying they were there first is like the old "he started it" argument. Janeway claimed she was speaking for Tuvok and Neelix but their best advocate is the person who contains both of their memories and experiences, Tuvix. Ultimately, I probably would've sided with Janeway, but I would've at least had a hearing of some kind first. This was a great episode, but it goes against the 'seeking out new life' ideals when that new life has no rights.

It appears several plants were pulled out by their roots yet no dirt was on them. A very clean planet indeed.

Picard argued, and won, that a machine (Data) should be considered sentient and given the same rights as all other sentient beings. Particularly the right not to be disassembled against his will.

In this episode we clearly have a sentient biological being (Tuvix) who does not want to be disassembled, but in this case Janeway affords him no rights or even a trial and terminates his life.

Is this the same Janeway who lectured Tuvok about negotiating for the Sikarian trajector with platitudes about preserving Federation values and ideals and such?

The best case scenario is if you look at it as a captain ordering a crewmember to do a suicide mission in order to save lives. Does a Starfleet officer have a right to refuse a suicide mission? Could Tuvix have had resigned and forced a trial?

I spose that Janeway thought she'd have a better chance of making it home with Tuvok and Neelix than just Tuvix, it was probably supposed to show Janeway compromising her principles to get the crew home, however as that theme was abandoned by Voyager near the start this episode jars horribly. She made the right call but it was clearly illegal and he should have had a trial but leagilty is often ignored by the show, remember Sisko poisoning the Maquis planet.