What’s funny is how much trouble they go to to not contaminate this culture…then they ****ing let Worf’s brother stay!!
If you went back in time even just three centuries and could attain a position of power…imagine how much change even just a common doper could make. Germ theory…human rights…vaccines…maybe invent antibiotics.
I think I posted this in the last “the pd ss bs” thread
there was an episode of tng that was basically a shot at ufo culture and the xfiles and said “were not ready” in which they get caught collecting info on a new planet that was at 1990s except they had no space program that was newly discovered there was a manhunt fire fight xemophobic public officals ……
it got to the point that Picard and the president of the country planned a cover up since “they weren’t ready socially” to find out theres life in space on the enterprise and “quarantined” it off from further visits … I think even he gave the pres some help on correcting mistakes on their soon to be space shuttle… everyone who watched it has said its fulla horse sh–
There are two different aspects that are called the Prime Directive, as if it has different parts.
There is the one about not making any sort of contact or interfering at all with species that don’t have interstellar travel.
But there is also the one where they don’t interfere in the legal systems or purely internal matters of other groups. It’s why they couldn’t beam out Wesley when he broke the law on that one planet, or why the Federation couldn’t side with one side or the other when they would encounter various internal conflicts, including what seemed to be a Klingon Civil War. Worf had to resign to be able to take sides.
The latter is far more defensible than the former to be observed in a dogmatic fashion.
The big problem I have with Homeward, in addition to:
those aren’t as serious, or may not be,
3) The loss of culture – they lost some documents when they traveled, and lost even more when their historian escaped. Now what? The whole point is – we didn’t want them to become extinct, so that their cultural legacy wasn’t lost. But they already lost some. So we essentially admit, we only like these people because they’re humanoids.
My real problem is – eventually, these people will develop science, and then discover that by evolutionary genetics, they’re not from the planet they’re on. Not only could this pose an existential crisis, but it could even block rational cultural development. I don’t have a solution to this problem that makes everyone happy, but you can’t just handwave all this away.
Yes, it’s important that the Federation doesn’t use it’s advanced technology to impose their will on other planets.
But, using technology to save a doomed planet from a natural disaster should be allowed. Especially if they can do it with minimal interference with the population.
Homeward is a very flawed episode on many levels. It’s never a good sign when writers break the technology as a plot point. Oh dear, our holodeck is broken. We must hurry and drop these people off at a new planet.
Then they invent a human step-brother for Worf? I don’t remember him being mentioned before. Worf’s klingon brother appears several times.
I think you’re misremembering parts of “First Contact” (The ep not the movie)
Saving planets from natural disasters absolutely happens in TOS. “Paradise Syndrome”.
Its just crazyballs to include that in the PD. And the arguments of Pen Pals makes it worse when they start talking about “A greater plan and our part of it”
Now i admit if plagues are part of extinction level events it gets complicated.
My question was, what was going to happen when Nikolai’s wife realized her baby wasn’t a purebred?
Look at the PD from the other side. Take, say, a culture that isn’t against interference, even to the point of saving an entire race from disaster.
But they make you prove that you’re worthy. And their test is positively medieval. Involving torture, and sacrificing your life for your race.
Is that a better way?
I know, it isn’t either-or. But I’m not sure I agree with the Vians. I’d take Picard, sanctimony and all.
This thread prompted me to go and re-watch the episode. My take is, in this episode (and other Prime-Directive oriented episodes), the purpose was to create a moral dilemma with no clear solution. That is, the entire purpose was to create a no-win scenario, so that the characters would be forced to make decisions that were necessarily imperfect. Any possible course of action would have negative consequences, and they would have to live with them. That is the soul of drama.
Another example would be the Kobayashi Maru, where the only pain-free solution is to reprogram the simulation. But in this case, that wasn’t an option.
My head canon is that the Vians are SO alien that they really don’t understand how their exact actions are perceived. After all they’re so powerful as to save an entire population but they resort to such weird primitive methods?
“The Empath” gets a lot of flack but if we take it at face value I think its pretty cool from a Sci-Fi angle. Like “Spectre of the Gun” its low-budget but very Twilight Zoneish.
Season 3 pushed harder on the truly alien then any other season of Trek I’ve seen. Vians, Melkotians, Medusans, Tholians.
I don’t remember if they specifically referenced the PD here, but that is the kind of thing I meant. Though Worf had to resign because a Star Fleet officer can’t get involved in an outside war or politics. That would be the case for an Army officer in the US today.
There may be good reasons for the Federation not to get involved in internal politics, but it ain’t the PD.
More likely the light you’d be bringing to them would be from the fire that burns you after you’ve been condemned as a witch, but okay.
There’s a Wild Wild West from that era that also has the same set design. Don’t know if the same people worked both, or just a coincidence.
Gene Coon worked on both series. There was a B&W episode of ***WWW *** that had a mad scientist accelerated just like the Scalosians in “Wink of an Eye.”
There may be other such examples, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head.
Oddly enough, the WWW speedsters episode was more scientifically accurate than WoAE.
I mean, neither was accurate, but WWW was closer to being accurate. 
Right; the mad scientist in WWW burst into flame at the end, due to friction from the atmosphere.
Jeez, can you imagine Kirk and Leela having sex while accelerated? Talk about friction! :eek:
Sorry; Deela, not Leela. **DUH! ** :smack:
Silly savage.
There’s another half to the Prime Directive that doesn’t get mentioned often. I didn’t see anyone mention it above, and I apologize if someone did.
When people discuss the Prime Directive, they almost always discuss it in terms of protecting the native culture from contamination. But the part that doesn’t get mentioned often is that the Directive also protects Starfleet from the moral burdens of caring for less-developed cultures. Let’s say that Starfleet made some sort of Herculean effort to protect the planet or relocate the people. That then sets a precedent by which they should also save the next planet that is in peril. If we want to take that logic to its obvious conclusion and say that Starfleet bears moral responsibility for their inaction, it follows that they should be intervening in every culture so as to share their medicine and technology. After all, they want to save planets in danger of destruction, but aren’t people also dying of disease and famine and internal wars?
In short: The Prime Directive insulates Starfleet from responsibility for shepherding every single primitive planet they encounter.
I don’t mean to threadshit here, but I’d like to give some real examples of how this plays out. Back in the 90’s, the USA chose not to intervene in Rwanda. The logic was that we had no reason to intervene in someone else’s civil war, when we had no strategic interests. The fact that it turned into sheer anarchy and slaughter directly impacted many leaders’ decisions to intervene in future conflicts such as Kosovo or Libya.
When I was in Afghanistan, I often suggested to my fellow soldiers that we might need our own version of the Prime Directive. We experienced a lot of ‘mission creep’ in that many of our military goals were being obstructed by Afghanistan’s social problems, which we had neither the expertise nor the mandate to resolve. I won’t recall the details here, but there were also well-publicized incidents in which soldiers had to choose whether or not to intervene in Afghan civilian crimes, despite the fact that they had no mandate to participate in Afghan law enforcement.
Anyway, I thought it was a good episode when it first aired. I re-watched it two or three years ago, and I still thought it was quite good. As you’ve gathered, I’m not an adherent of the idea that Picard must intervene, but I agree with OP that once they were brought aboard the ship it becomes impossible to reconcile the problem because Picard cannot morally take the step of executing them. As others have pointed out, this is not so much a matter of Picard being a dick as it is a matter of cultivating the drama in the situation. I agree very much with Tim R. Mortiss that forcing the characters to choose among unpleasant options with competing moral priorities is how you wring drama from the story. If the moral conundrum had a clear-cut solution, it would be a short and boring episode.
I also think this was a good example of the maturity in the scripts we saw in the later seasons. I’ll be the first to admit that Season 7 still had some clunkers (remember, the very next episode was ‘Sub Rosa’) but on the whole they were vastly superior to the early seasons. I really enjoyed episodes in which the characters made bad choices, or had to live with the consequences when there was no obvious ‘good’ choice. My other favorites are ‘TNG: Lower Decks,’ ‘DS9: In the Pale Moonlight,’ and ‘ENT: Damage’