(Probably speaks volumes I found this subreddit immediately after watching the episode lol.)
I say without an ounce of insincerity that for the first time in watching Star Trek I feel betrayed by the crew.
We’ve had so many occurrences of duplicates being created, whether by transporter or by some temporal anomaly, and every time they chose to side on that being’s right to exist independently of its original source.
While Tom Riker is the obvious one, it doesn’t feel like the best analogue for this scenario. Instead, I am drawing from the Deep Space Nine episode “Time’s Orphan” Season 6, Episode 24. In it, Miles and Keiko O’Brien’s daughter Molly is sucked through a time anomaly, and when they retrieve her she is a decade older, and extremely emotionally disturbed from having to survive on a barren planet from such a young age without help. While the easy option for everyone involved would have been to send her back, with that option being given at the start of the quandary, Miles and Keiko immediately accept this Molly both as their own daughter and as a independent entity with the right to life.
They try to rehabilitate her and bring her back into the civilian lifestyle to no avail, and even at that point when they have no hope left of having this Molly become their daughter, they still don’t choose to end the life of the older Molly and trade her in for the young Molly. They break Starfleet protocol, steal a runabout, and return the older Molly to the time anomaly to return to the life she had gotten used to. Luckily for them the plot seen it fit to allow both Mollys to coexist, as the young Molly was returned to them with the aid of the older Molly, but still, the resolution was ultimately that the older Molly had more of a right to live as an individual than the O’Brien’s did to their daughter.
What happened to Tuvix doesn’t just break ethics and morality in our own world, but even in the precedence set by the show. There was more consideration given for repair bots (TNG S6 E09) than there was for a living, breathing, sapient humanoid in a show that up until now chose to believe in the right to exist no matter the circumstances. I genuinely feel complicit in a murder. I am heartbroken.
Justice for Tuvix.