Work Text:
This is about the end justifying the means, and in our profession, that's a very slippery slope. - Carson Beckett, "Poisoning the Well"
He is sad, yet angry. It isn't hard to say why. He doesn't comprehend how an entire planet of people can choose for half of them to commit suicide so that the other half may live.
Certainly it's a concept that anyone from Eastern Europe understands intimately. It manifests itself strongest in Russia, with the national fatalism that pervades the culture. But we Slavic peoples know this tradition quite well. You send three messengers through the wolf-infested forest, because you know that two will be eaten by the wolves. The messengers know this too, but they know that the message they carry is vital. They are all strangely pessimistic about their survival, and stress the odds against them. But the important thing is that the message gets through. Other lives will be saved because some were deliberately sacrificed.
While I am certain that Carson understands sacrifice, I'm not sure he understands it on such a scale. What Carson doesn't understand is desperation, at least not like this. Growing up in Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia, you learn about desperation. You recognize it when you see it, no matter what galaxy you're in.
These people are desperate and that makes them courageous and careless at the same time. If they had waited a bit longer, I believe Carson's continued work on the drug might have made it safe. But they are convinced that they don't have that time to wait. After millennia of living under the threat of the Wraith, they are impatient to seize their freedom.
It disturbs him greatly that they use his work to accomplish their plan. He takes the Oath he swore very seriously indeed, and it shakes his foundation that someone would take his results and use them in what he perceives to be a perverted, almost obscene manner. He blames himself, but I honestly can't see that he is the one at fault. The commissars have spoken and the people have voted the Party line and damn the consequences.
The Hoffans have chosen to make their sacrifice to the wolves, and thus gain their victory. Major Sheppard believes that they will not survive that success for very long, and I think that he is correct. Once the Wraith find out that they are toxic to them, the Hoffans will be exterminated, tree, root, and branch. But they will live uneasily for a very long time in the memory of the man who tried to save them all.
My only question is which one he will forgive first - them, or himself?