It might have been an experiment or test, to see what the lower life forms did. Or part some kind of long term plan of social manipulation. For that matter, if they were at all interested in being subtle there’s no way to tell if they were interfering in the affairs of the Federation and so on or not. They could have been spending the entire time period between TOS and TNG wandering around the Federation imitating humans and doing who-knows-what.
There are plenty of online farming games. The Organians have just taken it to the next level.
Yes, but just as important was that they found interfering in others affairs ***almost ***as distasteful as violence, which is why they waited before finally intervening. Sort of their version of The Prime Directive. I always thought of the Organians as being non-corporeal, pure energy beings, but not god-like, Q continuum ones. They couldn’t snap their fingers and alter the gravitational constant of the universe, but they could manipulate matter & energy in their area of space. This is how the movies got around the Organian Treaty, it only applied to their region of space.
I liked the Enterprise episode (though it did use the ‘reset button’). It made it even more clear how much they valued non-interference.
The mid-eighties DC Comics Star Trek series started with a four-issue story to explain why the Organians seemed to take no further interest in Federation/Klingon relations - something along the lines of them getting entangled in extended astral-plane conflict with the similarly-powerful Excalibans (from “The Savage Curtain”) who had been trying to manipulate the Federation and Klingons into a major war in furtherance of their “good vs. evil” research. Thus, the two races effectively cancelled each other out.
As good a theory as any, I suppose.
Right, but here’s the thing … if I remember correctly (I saw that episode first-run in the 60s, and only bits of it since), the catalyst for the conflict was the presence of Klingons on the planet in question. If the Oregonians (ha, I lived in Portland for a while) kept their planet shrouded and secret, there may have been no hostilities between the Federation and the Klingons anywhere near them.
The planet sort of felt like a trap, luring warlike primitives, neutering them, so-to-speak. They claimed to want to be left alone, but seems like they set the whole thing up. They could re-route spaceships as far away from their little corner of space as they wanted … they had the power.
Yep this is what inspired my whole post, they claim that they just want to be left alone but the way to do that is to not be there at all. This can’t even have been the first time their presence has attracted the primitives they claim to want to leave them alone, you’re right in that it very much feels like a trap. I mean you have to wonder how many space pirates or whatever their little community has attracted.
But that’s the point. By choosing to appear as backwards farmers, they make Kirk think they don’t know what they are talking about. It would be absolutely unethical for Kirk to let the Klingons conquer the planet because its inhabitants were too stupid to realize what was happening.
Because, despite the message of the episode, the Federation and the Klingon Empire are not the same thing. The difference is even in their names. The Federation, being a coalition of the willing, asks you if you want to join. The Empire conquers you. Yes, Kirk was there to hopefully add a new planet to the Federation. But he was merely asking, trying convince them. The Klingons were trying to force them by using violence. Kirk had every moral right to defend them from this.
Their righteous indignation about Kirk trying to help them was absolutely ridiculous. What’s worse is that we know they have been observing both sides even before they got to the planet. (It’s pretty obvious in the episode, and made even clearer by the Enterprise prequel.) They know Kirk is trying to help. They are just dicking around because they needed an excuse to force them to stop fighting. And, from an outside perspective, the show needed an excuse for Kirk not to be constantly trying to destroy the Klingons.