Yeah, I remember watching the second season as a teenager and having the epiphany that the first seasons of shows were gonna suck.
I remember that episode. Data asks the Captain if the Enterprise can help, and Picard turns him down on the basis of the Prime Directive. So Data pipes the little girl’s distress call into Picard’s private quarters.
The next scene should be Geordi in Engineering, installing a new positronic ass on Data, to replace the one Captain Picard chewed off. But, of course, Picard goes all Captain White Hat and rides to the rescue.
The PD is a joke…supposedly the most important law…but the Captain is constantly having to explain it to people.
It was actually worse than that. When Spock mentions the location of their star system, Kirk says “isn’t that on the southern side of the galaxy?”
Or something incredibly ham fisted like that. I haven’t seen it in decades though.
That’s true.
I still like the episode myself. The absurdity of their prejudice - black on the left v black on the right - makes the point despite the heavy handedness, rather than itself being heavy handed.
In my opinion.
there was a tng episode that was basically snark on the ufo phenomena
they find a unknown planet that’s pretty much the world in the mid 90s so they go down collecting info with out breaking the rules ie no contact no traces but one one of them gets hurt and taken as a john doe to the er
the security chief is xenophobic trying to catch them and causes a panic and gets killed the er nurse helps them out and picard and their version of the prez basically decide there not ready for contact …although the prez is starting his own nasa so picard creates a no fly zone someone even comments it reminds them of roswell…
Charon is in “the southern part of the Galaxy,” not side.
This script likely morphed from another of Roddenberry’s “springboards,” in which the alien civilization was made up of blacks who enslaved whites. Such a story was apparently written, but never put into production. In the third season, a lot of rejected scripts were pulled out of the wastebasket because of budget cuts.
Also, bacteriological war is a **bad **thing. Bad, bad, BAD! :mad:
Plus, it was a planet that had isolated itself from the Galactic community, just like South Africa.
Yeah, but it takes a special kind of bungling to pick a ‘weird alien property’ that happens to line up with one when you’re talking about the other. And it highlights just how local a lot of SF is. The concept of someone’s gender not matching their biological sex as so weird Star Fleet is not quite sure how to deal with it, but there were actually people like that on Earth. And the Universal Translator is supposed to be able to deal with completely alien beings, but (if I’m remembering how it dealt with gender in the episode) actually wouldn’t be able to handle something as close to home as Native languages, since a number of them included vastly different gender categories than 20th century English.
I know that what bothered a lot of people about “The Outcast” was that there had been a lot of fans wanting Star Trek to be inclusive of gays. I think it irritated folks that rather than doing this by simply including a gay character, TNG did a “very special episode” in which they treated the issue metaphorically. In the process, as has been pointed out, accidentally getting into issues of trans- and genderqueer identity instead, while really saying nothing about gay people.
The episode is so clumsy that it’s kind of hard to tell what we’re supposed to think. I’ve run into people, honest to God, who think that the message of that episode is “Don’t pretend to be the gender you’re not. It only leads to disaster.”
Lt Hawk from the First Contact movie was supposed to be gay as well but a lot of the character development got excised from the movie due to time restraints/studio interference/whatever the reason. Star Trek gets a lot of credit for pushing for progressiveness, as it should, but Roddenberry and the other show runners weren’t perfect either.
In more fairness, nobody was watching her for her acting ability in the first few seasons…
… And then Jellicoe put her into a regulation uniform. :mad:
Supposedly Dr. Crusher was also originally given the same type of miniskirt uniform that Troi wore in the TNG pilot. Gates McFadden flatly refused to wear it and the costumers put her in more sensible slacks and lab coat. Marina Sirtis claims she didn’t know she could have asked for a more covered-up look.
I suppose it took her six seasons to figure it out.:dubious:
And look what happened to Hawk.
There they go again, undercutting their own message.
Because it was a stupid black and white rule in a shades of gray galaxy.
The Outcast definitely but Justice* is a close second. Basically it is the Federation paying lip-service to another planet’s laws unless they disagree with the laws then applying Federation morality and forcing the natives to accept it is the right thing to do. Always saw this as a metaphor for the US attitude towards other countries.
*Wesley is sentenced to death for breaking a greenhouse.
But the PD is black on the left side!
The camera still leered at her even then. For example, there’s a 7th season episode where when Picard and Data go down a ladder, the camera just follows their head and arms but when Troi comes down, the camera stays still so her whole body moves passed the camera.