Spoilers, of course. This might wind up in the Pit.
I watched this seventh season episode for the first time on Netflix last night and I’m still pissed; what the hell, Jean-Luc?
In it, after a distress call from Worf’s step-brother Enterprise arrives at his location and it turns out the planet he’s on is about to lose its atmosphere. He’s moved a single village of unsophisticated natives into a cavern system and employed a force field to protect them without their knowing it. He begs the crew to set up a concealed biosphere so that the one village can survive the extinction event. Picard refuses, citing the Prime Directive and, “it is not for us to decide that one group shall survive while the rest of the planet perishes.”
The planet’s atmo vanishes in a matter of moments and the crew has a moment of silence for the passing of a sentient culture.* Then they find out that Nikolai (Worf’s brother) sneaked the village aboard and into a copy of the caverns on a holodeck, again without their knowledge. He now requests they be moved to a new planet some two days away. Again, Picard is reluctant, afraid they will discover the ruse.
If I’d been Nikolai I would have been so tempted to hand him a phaser and say, “Fine! Go down to the holodeck and execute them, then we’ll at the point you say we should have been! No, don’t send my brother and his team to do it. Kill them yourself, you fucking fuck!”
His negotiation skills were better than mine, though and an intricate plan is devised for he and Worf to lead them to the promised land on the holodeck. During the couple days one villager, their historian, does stray from the holodeck and to my surprise Picard doesn’t order him to be spaced but rather offers him a place in the Federation or to return him to the group, even though Crusher can’t wipe his memory. Conveniently, the villager opts for ritual suicide instead and Picard’s precious Prime Directive is not jeopardized. In due course they arrive at the new home and the village is transplanted. Nikolai opts to remain with them, having impregnated one of the villagers and his Federation career was over in any event.
So, how about it Trek fans? Did you like this ep or would it have been better served by showing the logical end of the Prime Directive. Personally, I’m an uplift is good fan myself, so long as it does not stray into “white man’s burden” territory.
*It was not around 25 years ago but the “thoughts and prayers” meme passed through my mind.
That was the last season. I had almost decided to stop watching ST:NG, I was getting bored with their trite “dilemma of the week” and “moralize … moralize … ok, we’re done, abandon previous morality for a new one. See, personal growth in 20 minutes time.”
If I ran a Star Trek: Variant, I’d create some sort of “Office of Intervention” for handling sapient species that aren’t warp capable. Or I’d at least reduce the “warp-capable” requirement to something lower, like “has colonies on other planetary bodies” or “routinely probes outer planets” or even, “has covered the planet.” Only the last one would save this culture, bit the others could potentially save a species like ours.
What can I say, the whole conflict was just a blip on the radar as we raced towards “All Good Things.” We just had to deal with “Sub Rosa” first. :dubious:
On the one hand, I’ve always been a Prime Directive purist. No contact, whatsoever. The risk of affecting a culture is too great. You just can’t tell what effect you’re going to have - good, bad or interstellar Hitler.
On the other hand, as I get older my viewpoint changes. Is it better, or worse, of me to think “well, what are we out here for, if not to preserve life?” If I had the power, I’d prevent polar bears from extinction, so why not actual sentient beings?
I never, ever liked Picards holier-than-thou attitude. The PD could be gotten around with creativity. Just watch Kirk. He was a breaker of rules. I am a Kirk fan-girl. Just cannot help it.
The Prime Directive (or in other words “red kryptonite*”) never made any sense whatsoever, and the mention of it was an immediate sign that the story was going to suck.
The biggest problem was that no one ever faced any consequences for ignoring it. Picard broke it eight times a season, but always rationalized it away and never suffered the slightest reprimand. That’s an episode I would have liked to have seen.
But in actual practice the Prime Directive really was "You cannot interfere with a culture unless it was inconvenient not to do so.
*Used in 60s Superman stories when they were stuck for a plot. But, to be fair, Superman used it better than Star Trek. Indeed, the Prime Directive was introduced in TOS so that Kirk couldn’t use the obvious solution to defeat the bad guys (blast them from space).
And you know, they could have just written the Prime Directive like that. “Don’t nuke it from orbit.” That the Doctor, whoever they’re played by, always interferes, and always gets called on it, and always just shrugs and say, “I’m a Doctor. It help. Its what I do. You wanna debate the Prime Directive, don’t bring them to me. Or ya know, let me near them. Or let shit go down whenever I’m around. Or include me in away teams.”
Seriously, Prime Directive eps are some of my least favorite. At least ST:ENT showed us how the Vulcanians influenced early Federation and Starfleet attitudes. If Riker and Kirk were involved in policy, things would be different.
I always thought that the Prime Directive was poorly stated.
My thinking was: It was to prevent cultural contamination (e.g. - the Iotians). But, it should be perfectly OK (in fact required) to interfere with natural disasters (like the one in the OP).
Now that I think of it, letting an intelligence species die out due to rigid laws, abstract principles and an obsession with the big picture is in fact very much something God would do. Seeing someone in need and helping them? That’s human.
I can only see the Prime Directive as an extreme reaction to colonialism. It’s better to have no contact than to ruin cultures. But they take it too far. You can reject colonialism without letting entire civilizations die out due to freak accidents.
And you sure as hell don’t need some idea of “playing God.” In the Star Trek world, at least, there is no God controlling things. There is no Grand Plan. And we humans have been saving people from death for millennia. Thinking about the Prime Directive is part of what led me to say that saving those “uncontacted” tribes’ lives is moral.
The only thing is to minimize cultural contamination. And the plan put forth did that. I personally find it hard to believe the Federation didn’t know bad things were happening, and that they couldn’t have evacuated all the people: it’s seemingly not all that inhabited.
From a narrative perspective, the Prime Directive makes sense to add stakes, if you can use it consistently. But not to support negligent genocide.
I would have liked to have seen an adaptation of Clarke’s “The Star” short story into a Trek treatment. Maybe put them there before the cataclysm. Any genre of Trek, but I think Sisco would handle things differently. Even Janeway would probably be a good captain for that ep/movie.
My head canon (despite the second Star Trek Kelvin movie and aspects of Pen Pals) is that the Feds will save civs from natural disasters IF they can catch it in time. This episode seemed to insinuate that the disaster was unpreventable.
I agree sort of with Picard. How are you going to decide who to save. And sometimes saving a few isn’t nessecerily better than saving none. That group could have discovered the entire ruse, plunging them into even more chaos. Also they may not have saved enough for genetic purposes.
what REALLY should happen is that an entire govt. branch should be dedicated to just this sort of thing. I don’t know if there was time for all that but there was certainly time for Picard to ask for directions from Starfleet.
What happened probably is that ONE GROUP in the past did something ONE TIME altruistically with disasterous results, and the Federation overreacted. Then once it gets to Picards time its dogma. Inarguable dogma.
And it will stay that way until somebody important gets bitten by it. Then suddenly everyone will see the light, and decide this should be approached with nuance.
“Chancellor, I’ve discovered an instability in the core of Earth, should we tell them?”
No there was not enough for genetic variability. It was a couple dozen villagers at best and IIRC the magic number is 10,000 individuals.
And as I said in the OP, if things go pear-shaped you can always shoot them getting you to the same place Picard’s original scenario would have put them.
I am reminded about the parable where someone walking in his neighborhood during a rainstorm. He finds crouched on the sidewalk a slicker-covered kid tossing earthworms back onto the grass. “It doesn’t make any difference, kid,” he says. “You can’t save them all.”
Without looking up, the kid replies, “It makes a difference to this one, and this one, and this one…”
He’s making a humancentric argument. Maybe worms want to die together and dying away from their clan is the earthworm version of hell.
I agree in general though with the 'lets save some argument."
As i’ve said before in other PD threads, there’s GOT to be a whole protocol in dealing with shit like this beyond, “ENNNHHH…we’ll leave it up to the ranking officer on site and go with how he feels about things at any given moment.”
And the bloody thing is OBVIOUSLY ‘wink wink nod nod’ given how easy Kelvin Kirk gets off, and how there’s always extenuating circumstances. Prime Directive is literally less prime then running a stop light when in a hurry and no ones coming.
Edit: One more thing…you would think the people on Enterprise-D would be happy that Worf’s civilian brother is the one who is willing to take the hit and make the call rather than getting all righteous about it.
The biggest problem witht the PD in both series is that the best way of preventing disruption of a culture would be to not let them know you are around. Imagine the disruption of our culture of a batch of aliens popped in. Then you’d lose half the episodes, but oh well.
In TNG it seems that the PD applied to spacefaring races. But that’s not interference, that’s diplomacy. TOS did not have that problem, at least.
In this episode sentencing the village to death to not interfere was stupid. Sometime Picard deserved all of Q’s insults.
That’s not accurate. The PD specifically does NOT apply to space faring races. Details seemed a bit murky but the general rule is that two conditions applied. A) Does the race in question have faster than light ships? And B) has the race in question already made contact with sentient races from other worlds? As long as both of these questions are answered “no”, the PD applies.
The PD is generally supported by claiming it prevents more problems than it creates. From the standpoint of the Federation, this is probably true. That doesn’t mean that the PD isn’t just moral cowardice by another name.