Throwback to the TOS episode "For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky", where Kirk and Spock agreed it was logical to interfere and ditch the Prime Directive when the alternative was the extinction of their people. How the mighty have fallen.
the prime directive is hypocritical when you remember the federation uses technology to avoid its demise. and extra-hypocritical when they use time travel. apparently, they don`t care about the "universe plan" when it is their necks on the line.
What I liked about that TOS episode is that they didn't call it the "Prime Directive". It was simply "Directive One". Even Spock couldn't fault Kirk's logic to ignore it, which suggests it was more a guideline than a hard limit. What's odd about "Homeward" is that a character explicitly (and correctly) calls it dogma, but the episode doesn't seem to think his position is valid.
@@JayJayM57 Although the biggest pseudoscientific turd in the "But we have to let them die, it's their (genetic/cosmic) destiny!" category still goes to that disgusting _Star Trek: Enterprise_ episode with Dr. Phlox and Cpt. Archer committing genocide on an entire civilization, despite said civilization explicitely having asked for their help, and despite Phlox having found a cure, but then refusing to hand it over.
I have to say this episodes is why I enjoyed the episode of the Orville so much where they run across a planet just hours from collapse, with the vast majority of the people already dead. The show established a non-interference policy earlier in it's run for the good reasons, but when that situation came up, that didn't even figure in. They immediately try to make contact and immediately offer aid to save anyone they can with absolutely zero hesitation. It was then I knew for whatever faults Seth MacFarlane might have, he understands both the intent and problems with the way the Prime Directive stuff went.
Even Lower Decks handled this better. There's an alien race about to die. Not all of them are grateful for the rescue. It turns out the real source of the complaint? A rich idiot who cares more about what they own than anyone else's life.
Ah is that the episode where their world is basically reduced to an asteroid and nothing else? I do like the Orville once they dropped the comedy angle abit. I think it's a version of trek with actual humans in it that still act like people but try to be good too. And I do think Seth's captain is pretty good. I do love how they handled the 'android tries romance' plot and they definitely made it more interesting than when TNG tried it. I whilst I think the Orville had a 'meh' start, by half way into season 1 it was finding its feet well and becoming a good trek spiritual successor
@@dm121984 Funny how The Oriville started off as just a pure comedy show, but got such a good reception compared to STD, that they have slowly shifted it's tone into a more serious sci-fi series. When does _that_ happen!? O_o That's like Family guy turning into a serious drama. XD
The Prime Directive was never intended to be used the disgraceful way it was. I wanted to SLAP Troi when she self-righteously said that crap about ensuring non-interference, and I RARELY find myself wanting to slap women.
Ah, yes - finally an episode that dares to ask the *real* question, namely, _"Would these people have been better off being discovered by the Borg instead of the Federation?"_
@@scockery Why did the Borg attempt to assimilate post-Apocalyptic pre-Warp Earth in _First Contact?_ For that matter, why do the Borg assimilate *any* species we see on screen, since the Borg are so vastly technologically superior to any of them?
Picard's speech of "let us honour those we cannot save" always came off as almost like a sacrificial prayer to me. He may as well have said "for those who we allow to die in the name of the Almighty PD, we salute you".
@@corssecurity I've been saying for years that the Enterprise might as well have beamed down armed away teams and personally killed everyone on the planet. Or bombarded the planet from orbit. Ultimately, these actions would accomplish the same thing as sitting on ass during a natural disaster and they'd be no less morally repugnant.
"Stand up and be counted For the death you are about to receive We're the Federation And we ignore your needs Hail, Hail, the Prime Directive Because it is the righter way You aren't a legend, aren't a cause You're not livin' after today! For those about to die We salute you! For those about to die We salute you!"
Say what you will about Discovery but one thing I really appreciated was that in the first episode it had Burnham and Phillipa rescuing a culture from a potential extinction event and noting that it was possible to do such a thing without violating the prime directive.
I do have an argument of the line "how can we grow when everything who made us who we are is gone." The character likely agreed to the journey probably thinking it would be possible to eventually return to where they once lived at a later date. Finding out that you will never be able to go back at all because more advanced beings took you from your home planet and is planning to place you on a different one would be a very hard thing to cope with.
Yeah, he probably assumed that they'd be able to go back and get their stuff eventually. That said, it's still a bit preposterous for that to be his _first_ response to learning what's going on.
heavily disagree. based on the technological development it is 100% likely they never plan to return. the reason for this is they are from a time period child labor was mandatory for survival. they didn`t have free time to take a vacation or a trip back. once they settle they would have to work constantly to ensure their basic survival. and an attempt to "go back to settle where they come from" would have been deadly.
"Finding out that you will never be able to go back at all because more advanced beings took you from your home planet and is planning to place you on a different one would be a very hard thing to cope with." (facepalm) You mean, harder to cope with than BEING DEAD? /sarcasm Look, people have had to migrate due to wars and natural disasters all throughout history, and they were able to cope with it. Fuck this "people and cultures are fragile snowflakes that can't adapt" bullshit.
@@JayJayM57 Well... not exactly, that's a rather oversimplified "game of thrones" view of the era. czcams.com/video/qvbm84iN7qk/video.html is a good video on the topic.
What gets me about this episode is that given the strong focus is on Nikolai going rogue, you didn't even need this kind of awful story point to do it. Imagine if Boraal II is not doomed to planetary destruction, but in light of recent treaties, is going to the Cardassian Union. Nikolai strongly protests this, noting that the latter has no formal Prime Directive and pointing to the recent history of the Occupation as what might happen to them. At best their culture would be disturbed, and at worst they could potentially find themselves enslaved no matter what the Cardassians say. Picard sympathizes, but notes that any potential transportation would also disturb their culture just as much, and any significant moves in regard to the planet could risk conflict with the Cardassians when the treaty is already unsteady. Thus, when Nikolai does transport the group onboard the Enterprise Holodeck Picard does furiously say that his move may have much bigger consequences than just for the Boraalians. Essentially the "Prime Directive states we must let them die" nonsense is discarded entirely with a less definitive fate for the native villagers; thus giving both sides fair beliefs. Picard would have a point in Rozhenko not seeing the big picture with what he did for people that possibly would have been ignored by the Cardassians while he can state that he couldn't take the chance of letting the people he's grown to love suffer the same fate as the Bajorans. It gives the story more nuance and even fits into the franchise subplot about the Federation's "peace" with the Cardassians being a tricky thing to navigate.
holy crap... you have just saved this episode... please write that fanfiction, in script form if you have to and make it available for all to see, cuz this is a story that needs to be seen and appreciated by fandom.
Great review and I completely agree what you said about the prime directive in fact I actually enjoy it when you go on a rant. The way they treat the prime directive and how they go so far with it like in this episode it makes me wonder what would the Federation do if for example they encountered a civilization that hadn’t invented Warp Drive but was just as advanced or even more advanced in the Federation in every other way. Or if they encountered a civilization that that never invented warp drive because they invented a completely different form of FTL given there adherence to the letter of the law for its own sake with the prime directive especially how it’s presented in this episode it wouldn’t surprise me.
Kirk: "I smashed your computers so you'll have real war." I didn't hear anyone bitch about the prime directive then. And many episodes of TOS did some pretty sketchy prime directive shit.
I think that's been cited as part of the point in one of Chuck's earlier videos - either Voyager or TNG. Or one of the "broader discussion" videos he did such as "Of Holograms and Ethics". It's also noted in the same discussion Picard has a lot of violations of the Prime Directive on file, but has never actually been punished for it.
There an episode where Kirk and co. found a generational ship and people on it have lost their knowledge to the point they don't know they are on a ship anymore. Kirk need to break the Prime Directive and inform these people about the nature of their planet and it took him like 2 seconds to said: "It is better than let them die". And Spork agree with him since Spock also think it is the logical decision.
>And many episodes of TOS did some pretty sketchy prime directive shit. And I think it could be said that Homeward marked the point where Trek writers started treating the PD as dogma that could not be argued with, rather than a guideline with some leeway. We saw an advancement of this with Voyager's "Prime Factors", and the natural conclusion of the dogmatic line of thinking with Enterprise's "Dear Doctor" where Phlox commits genocide through deliberate inaction.
In the face of extinction every alternative is preferable. TOS knew that but TNG seemed to treat the PD as immutable dogma rather than as a guild towards preserving life. The PD was originally conceived of to preserve life as interfering almost always resulted in harm but extinction is the vastly worse harm.
A story dealing with the unintentional consequences of trying to save the aliens and even the tension of trying to follow the Prime Directive absolutely could be a good story, and you can see bits of it trying to get out, but the simple, seemingly obvious point that the heroes are going to let a whole planet die essentially in the name of bureaucratic protocol makes it befuddling.
There's a good one in the Bobiverse about an alien species that is rescued but refuses to believe it was at risk, and hates the rescuer, believing them to have genocided most of their species, and they become a credible threat.
@@BrettCaton another bobverse fan?! 🥳 Yeah, the otter folk (Pavlovians? I can't remember off the top of my head). It does so the downside of their actions that the Pav growing believe they were kidnapped from their home so the bobs could mine their homeworld or something and increasingly don't believe it was a third party.
The biggest weakness in the first season of Picard (and there were many) was it set up a great chance to examine this stuff via a point where Picard could and would been questioning those high principles. A geat manifesto on if the prime directive was just skirting responsibility, if heavily written by people that have such a hatred of white colonialism they'd otherwise champion it. Instead we got some fairly retreaded synthetic life ground.
I do agree that there is a risk of colonialism when interfering with less technologically advanced societies, and we see this in the modern world too with the US and UK 'liberating' countries in a manner that just happens to focus on countries of economic or strategic importance only and often involves working with despositic regimes. However, in the fiction of the federation, I believe that in most circumstances the federation could be trusted to interfere in a way to primarily benefit the locals. Curing diseases, cleaning up pollution and environmental damage, overthrowing authoritians. The best example I've seen of this is 'the Culture' from Iain M Banks, who take the view that they would rather do the best they can to improve the lot of folk less blessed with tech as they can and accept the certainty that they will sometimes fuck up and make things worse. I believe they were written as a response to Trek's federation.
It was a weakness with Enterprise too. They could have done a much better job of showing the development of the Prime Directive. They could have had situations where they did intervene but ended up getting less advanced species entangled in interstellar politics. They could have also shown independent human groups not part of Starfleet or earth government interfering with less advanced races. It's something that the Stargate shows did well. They ran into a lot of situations where a less advanced civilization had access to precious resources or technology and there was the temptation for earth to take those resources in their fight against the Goa'uld. Enterprise did a story like that when they went into the Expanse where they stole a warp coil from that civilian ship. But it's something they could have done from the beginning. Facing the threat of the Klingons, Romulans, and other hostile species, they could have ran into a lot of situations where they were tempted to interfere in less advanced cultures to gain some kind of advantage.
I do agree in principal with what was said, if a primative peoples is going to die, and you have the power to save them, then of course, you should offer that aid and assist them to a place of safety where they can flurish. Picard in this evidence with his clinging to the Prime Directive shows all the hallmarks of the writer of the week, this is why each captain seems to bounce between different standpoints depending on each week's episode. But, in regards to the problems with force relocating someone, even for their own good, just consider. Even with Star Fleet looking for a suitable planet, it will be inherently different to the one that people knows. The plant life that their people knows to be safe to eat and use as medicine will be completely gone, replaced with a entirely new eco system for them to learn. The animals also, that they knew where able to be domesticated and used for pets or hunting or food are gone, replaced with an entirely new catalogue of animals. One village out of an entire people now has to begin experimenting with this new world, determining what plant life is good to eat, what is good for medical herbs, and what is poisonous. A Star Fleet officer is hardly likely to appear with a scroll and say People hear me, these are the plants that are safe to eat here. Also, many primative tribes would likely have used the stars for navigation. A new planet would mean brand new stars to chart and learn, in other words, a complete rewriting of their lifestyle. Many would likely die due to the lack of knowledge with local vegitation and animals. I am not saying to let them die is the correct answer, but relocating someone to a brand new lanet with no warning could do just as much harm. It's a question that has no easy answer. That said, rant over, thanks for reading fello Trek Nerd.
Nikolai is a rare "Suddenly Season 7 Relative" that I like, even though he should have come up before (and after.) I can easily imagine the friction between them growing up where they each felt like the other was the favorite, Worf because Nikolai was their "real" son, and Nikolai because of the lengths their parents went to accommodate Worf. And the contrast and symmetry between Nikolai and Kurn is nice.
Another very annoying thing with the prime directive dogma is that in its current form is that it prevents very interesting stories. Great adventures where the heroes must save entire worlds without being seen. Or trolley problems where they prevent a natural disaster, but then a faction from the planet uses the threat to subjugate the rest of the planet, and the crew must decide until which point they can intervene. You know, actual ethical dilemmas.
I think what TNG was aiming for, was what we saw happening with Desert Storm (where we eventually left Iraq to find it's own way afterwards, despite some very terrible things happening and the betrayal of Kurdish allies) vs. the Iraq invasion. (Where our good intentions ended up creating a civil war that killed way more people and benefited the terrorists we were supposed to be fighting in the first place.) The reason why it doesn't work, is because our interference mostly failed due to the worst instincts of humanity. In Star Trek's future, there aren't huge gaps in empathy, greed isn't a factor, and nobody has a burning desire to sexually torture the prisoners. So to rationalize the Prime Directive? You have to make story writing decisions based on the unexamined empathy gaps, greed, and sadism of the creative team, instead. Not that I'm comparing the tragedy they inflict on fictional characters to a real life tragedy. The scale is very, very, different. But it all comes from the same place.
The biggest mistake modern Trek made was the twisting of the Prime Directive, and you've explained perfectly why. Any ideas on how it got so twisted over the years? I get a feeling it's as a result of one writer or producers taking it to the extreme, and then no one bothered to tweak it back again to something more nuanced.
From what I understand, the PD wasn't really a thing during TOS, it really formed as we know it during the TNG era. As to how it happened, well mostly because of the post-Vietnam era thinking, which was still somewhat a thing when TNG started.
@@mikegates8993 PD featured in a good number of episodes in TOS, and it was handled in much the way Chuck was ranting about how TNG onwards really didn't. When Kirk was going to tell a species they're on an asteroid about to crash into a planet, Spock tells him about the PD. Kirk says: "Well it's better to be changed than annihilated." To which Spock simply responded: "Logical."
@@KiltedCritic Fair enough, I must be thinking of the interruption then. I swear that the use of the actual term Prime Directive didn't start being used until TNG though.
It was never well-defined in the original series, but in the zeitgeist of the 1960s there were a lot of anti-colonialist and indigenous rights movements underway and that's what's informing the Trek writers of the time. Because it's pretty inconsistent in TOS as well. There's generally 3 kinds of TOS PD episodes: 1) The PD has already been broken, usually by other Federation personnel (e.g. "Patterns of Force", "A Piece of the Action", "The Omega Glory") but sometimes the Klingons (e.g. "A Private Little War"*, "Friday's Child") and Kirk's just trying to fix things. 2) The culture is ruled by an evil AI and it's apparently okay to free them from that? In "Return of the Archons" Kirk says the computer Landru is stifling the culture's natural development so it's okay, and Spock seems to accept that, but McCoy makes the same argument in "The Apple" and Spock pushes back hard. 3) Weird edge cases like "A Taste of Armageddon"--the culture knows the Federation exists and has a good idea of Starfleet's capabilities and they threaten the Enterprise or her crew directly--are they protected by the PD in that case? I wouldn't think so. It's debatable whether that gives Kirk licence to disrupt their whole society but the Federation diplomat in that episode seems to accept the result and in fairness offers to stay behind and help them work out the transition--they're not just being abandoned after the Kirk-imposed societal upheaval. Then there's my favourite TOS PD episode, "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky". The culture lives on a generational starship disguised as an asteroid, and are ruled by an AI they think is their god. But the AI has developed an error and is aiming the asteroid ship towards a densely populated planet and refuses to be corrected. So what does Kirk do? A) Not interfere, allowing both the asteroid culture and millions on the planet to die, B) destroy the asteroid, killing that culture of thousands but saving the planet of millions, or C) destroy the AI, disrupting the asteroid culture but saving both peoples. The moral answer is C, and Kirk takes it. The problem with a lot of long-running media franchises is that the original logic or thematic underpinnings of the setting are often forgotten or ignored and they become merely "lore". The answer becomes "this is what they did in the original" without asking "but what were they trying to say?" *Interestingly, in "A Private Little War", the Klingons seem to have their own version of the PD. They're giving their faction advanced weaponry they haven't invented themselves, but they aren't giving them phasers, they're arming them with black powder firearms. This could just be prudent colonial policy: don't give a people you intend to rule the means to overthrow you. But it's clearly more thought out than the TNG Federation's "once you develop warp drive you can join the club and immediately access everything we've developed since."
It seems logical to assume the PD was never intended to be followed to the exact letter. However I know they needed to create tension somehow and Sir Patrick could sound dignified reading the phone book.
As a dig at the rules lawyer nature of the prime directive: I am a christian, and my higher power says that the federation should have been saving these people as soon as they realized they were going to be killed by their planet going kersplat. The way the prime directive was implemented in TNG and beyond was and is completely backwards and foolish at best. Edit: Cain: "Am I my brother's keeper?" God: "If all were right in the world, you would be."
This script needed a couple more revisions before it was ready for filming; it makes the main characters look callous and bureaucratic, and it introduces a lot of personal drama that overshadows the more compelling large-scale drama of trying to save these people.
I liked this episode because it showed the problem of a good idea that becomes a rule and then the idea goes away, only the rule is important. No one wants these people to die, but the rule gets in the way. Also showing how the Federation fails is always more grounded to me.
This is an episode I've been waiting for you to get to, and glad to see we stand on the same side. The Prime Directive shouldn't be an excuse to sit around and watch people die.
This really seemed set to cast the Enterprise-D crew as the villains of the piece. The only reward was Worf acknowledging that sometimes it's good to break the rules, but it wasn't worth assasinating the characters of the rest of the crew.
Ah the old stupid readings of the prime directive. Now, the intended affect of the prime directive isn't bad - I still disagree with it, but it's at least a reasonable view; "don't interfere with natives because you will likely affect their cultural development and/or exploit them or their resources". That rule is generally a good first approach to interactions with aliens below you on the tech level until you have an idea of the best approach. And Kirk was willing and able to break the prime directive when circumstances called for it, such as when there was already interference, or when the lower tech folk are going to all die.
This episode is one I like (thanks to the guest Actor). This was one of the times that Picard let the DOGMA of the Prime Directive condemn an entire people for no other reason than The Prime Directive. A minor change to the culture is better and much more preferable to UTTER EXTINCTION. There was no way this people would survive this natural disaster (that was even beyond Federation technology), so a little meddling wouldn't change things more than EVERYONE DYING. Seriously, I really feel bitterness towards Picard during this episode; sometimes Picard can be a D*ck.
Exactly what I think. Yes you should not fuck with other people´s lives...but at some point you´re supposed to get off your ass and do something. Like with everything in life there´s no one rule to follow, you´ll have to make a decision and live with the consequences. When the consequence of not acting is extinction the decision should be the easiest, like in this case here.
One reason Sisko is my favorite is because whenever the Prime Directive comes up, it's always an admiral bringing it up and pissing him completely off before he tries to come up with ways to get around it or sometimes straight up completely ignore it. He doesn't even care about the Temporal Prime Directive. Pretty sure had he been in Homeward, he'd beamed up anyone they could and told Picard to file a complaint and suck it.
@@BlazingOwnager To be fair, at least 3 times Sisko got people killed, captured forever, or maimed ignoring the prime directive. Now in all those cases there were unforseen circumstances, but then...isn't that the whole point?
@@SageofStars I'm not sure what episodes you're referring to, so I can't respond to specifics, but in general, every scenario that Starfleet encounters has unpredictable risks, and Starfleet officers do have to accept that possibility. The commanding officers job is to try and make sure those risks are only taken when the outcome is worth those risks.
@@BlazingOwnager I like DS9, but Sisko should've been courtmartialed a dozen times. I mean, they did that with Picard after the Stargazer had to be abandoned. He was cleared. I can chalk Sisko getting away with massive violations to a remilitarizing Starfleet, in a post Wolf 359/Dominion era and Sisko being 'The Emissary". Sisko was needed. 10 years earlier, he'd be a in penal colony.
@@scockery Actually the higher up admirals liked his willingness to go outside the rules so much they promoted him. I think if all the appearances of Star Fleet show anything, once your get past the people who believe in the PR face of the Federation you have a lot more.. flexible people at the real top. One of the reasons Picard never really worked as an Admiral.
The Prime Directive needs an Exemption Clause. There needs to be a paragraph added that says, “In the event of a pre-warp species imminent annihilation, be it by environmental devastation or foreign invasion, it is the responsibility of every Starfleet Officer to take whatever action is within their power to preserve the species’ existence and, if possible, preserve their cultural integrity.”
Like Chuck and many, I've always thought that the Prime Directive during this era of Star Trek was poorly implemented, but the PD in itself was never a bad idea, as Chuck points out at the beginning, allowing a culture to unfold naturally and have their own victories and failures is important, and for me the episode of Doctor Who "The Lie of the Land" from Peter Capaldi's run demonstrates what happens if such a rule never exists, if a culture has people that always come in to fix their problems (even if the reason for this was purely altruistic and not for conquest like in that episode) then what would be the point of them doing anything, they would be so codependent on them that they would become stagnant, complaisant, and eventually unable to help themselves or even others, they wouldn't even bother to develop their own culture and become so unmotivated to do anything, in a way it's also why I hate the "ancient aliens" theory and many other historical conspiracies, they take away the achievements that we (for better or worse) did, as Albert Einstein once said "A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new" But again like Chuck and many, if extinction is what's threatening a culture like in "Homeward", then they have a moral obligation to do something, even if it's to save a handful of people and they are changed from the experience, after all that culture isn't going to learn from their own victories and failures if they're all dead, and it's really annoying that during this era the Prime Directive was treated with absolute and not a case by case basis, not only for the reasons Chuck gave, but for me it turns the supposed heroes of the story into villains, and while I run the risk of being shouted down and told that I'm "an idiot" or not a "real fan" by saying this, it's one of the many reasons why I love the current run of Star Trek, whether it's Captain Georgiou and Commander Burnham saving an alien species from a long drought that would lead the their extinction, or Admiral Picard twisting the Federations arm to helping the Romulans evacuate their homeworld from the supernova, the characters in these series actually want to help when a crisis like this happens, and are written as actual heroes.
You nailed it on the misuse of the prime directive. It’s interesting to compare the hands off Trek approach to the other fiction like Babylon 5 or the Lensman Series (of books). Where superior races offered guidance to help develop society’s , sometimes for their own purposes.
I just watched an episode where Crusher was using that doohickey that’s on Worfs forehead to scan somebody’s eyes. Eh I’m sure they know what they’re doing.
What I find odd about this one is that in a different, harder Sci Fi setting with lower technology, the situation in this episode could actually be a good demonstration for why the prime directive could be a good idea. Think about all the problems that would actually arise from trying to relocate these people. How are we going to talk to these people let them to follow? Without a magic Universal Translator, that's a much harder problem. Put them on a new planet? the soil won't take their crops and the new diseases will hit them hard. And that's if they aren't incompatible with the planet in the first place. Without the omniscient computers, perfect medicine, and all aliens being genetically identical, how can you be sure they will be compatible with their new home? Or the original suggestion. "We're going to use tech to bolster the atmosphere in this one small area." Okay, but how long before the machines break? do you think the people back home are going to support this atmosphere dome for centuries or millennia for this society to develop in order to maintain them themselves? Who's going to pay for that and who's going to do the maintenance? Further, let's think about Picard's "society" argument. we have a society of at most 100-200 people. remember they aren't packed like sardines and the holodeck doesn't have a shrink ray. there is enough space for these people to spread out and think they're really traveling in the space the size of a middle school gym. even using all the holodecks this is at most 1000 people? Do they have all of the professions to even sustain their way of life, let alone their culture? Their culture is dead from the word go. Getting back to biology, how do you avoid serious genetic problems with such a small population taken from such a small area of the planet. Again you need omniscient computers when selecting these people and understanding their genetic diseases, or this whole colony dies in two generations. Speaking of small areas of the planet, why is the planet the size of a sound stage? There is no way the population is homogenous, so why not grab from multiple locations to try to deal with the genetic bottleneck? You're going to have to pull from all over the planet to get enough variety. Which will likely lead to language issues and potentially violent conflict. Moral questions in politics, ethics or anywhere else arise from limitations. If we could save everyone we would, but we have imperfect knowledge, limited resources, limited tools, and many demands on our tools and resources. In reality, prioritization is necessary and some limitations are insurmountable. This is why DS9 used the Dominion as an adversary. The might of the Dominion was greater than our characters enforcing limitation, forcing compromise and moral dilemmas in order to succeed. But here the writers gave the characters near god-like technology and no scientific considerations for either the writer's convenience (universal translators, perfect germ filters) or for Star Trek's utopian vision (perfect holodecks, a government that won't just pull up stakes on a small project the voters don't care about). And with the limitations gone, the moral dilemma goes away as well. So where as in a harder sci fi setting with lower tech, say Mass Effect, this situation would be an unavoidable tragedy with the best case scenario being two inbred generations all dying out within 50 years anyway without titanic effort for centuries on the part of the Federation, we have Picard standing by with the power of a god and refusing to take half an hour to fix the problem perfectly because he's a prick. Tl;dr you can have a moral dilemma or the characters can have no obstacles to save everyone. Not both.
As a biologist who majored in ecology, zoology and botany, I agree with you on all points except the inbreeding. On Earth, many animal species, including _Homo sapiens_ and various geographic sub-populations, have gone through multiple genetic bottlenecks. In case of our species, the minimum number of fertile adults needed as viable population has been calculated: 350 people. That's it. How do we know? That's roughly the size of Polynesian "first settlement" populations who settled Pacific islands and New Zealand, calculated from their tribal records of family trees and the crew size of their traditional catamarans that carried settlers and their domesticated plants and animals to new shores.
Picard at 13:00 is quite consistent with his character as seen in Season One's "The Neutral Zone" when he was visibly annoyed at Data for not daring to remove the 20th century people from their cryogenic tubes
Excellent critique of a really rotten episode of TNG. What you said I agree with 100%, although you said it in a much more eloquent way than I could have ever managed. This one really was when Picard's morality was completely destroyed for me. To stand on the Enterprise, spouting Federation dogma while an entire civilisation was about to be wiped out, really showed his whole image was just a sham. And I will add Troi doesn't come out of this one squeaky clean either. Nikolai is, of course, the true hero of this episode, with Crusher also showing a willingness to do the right thing, Picard is the villain of the piece, I wouldn't have been too surprised if he'd sent armed stormtroopers into the holodeck to slaughter all the survivors that had been beamed into it. No, a truly awful episode saved only by the superb performance of Paul Sorvino.
This episode is like Picard was on the opposite side of his own argument from the episode "A Matter of Time" Do Nothing & Thousands Will Die, Do Something & Millions Could Die argument and then finally decides . . "I choose to try". Or the episode where Q shows up without powers an the Enterprise is trying to push a moon back into orbit. Natural course of planet evolution right? What makes those things different? Just the fact that those planets had the technological ability to communicate with you and this one doesn't? Lives saved are still lives saved just because someone doesn't have the ability to ask shouldn't exclude them. Someone unconscious wouldn't exclude the doctor from trying to save their life on them because, well they can't communicate with me they want me to save their lives so I'm going to let them die. Dogma is right .
I can think of a reason not to shelter them under a shield as being against the prime directive: Eventually, they're going to notice that only within this bubble is safe. They're going to be like 'We were saved by the gods!' That's a big, big influence on their natural development as a species. And eventually, they're going to outgrow the place that's been shielded. They're going to find the equipment. TOS is *rife* with these kinds of places, refuges set up to protect those within and it turns out Things Went Bad because nobody was around to maintain the equipment, or there *was* somebody who decided to meddle, or one of the locals found the gear and figured out how to use it for their own benefit. I know they didn't SAY any of that, and instead said some kind of DUMB stuff instead, there ARE reasons that it'd be a Prime Directive violation on the grounds of it actually impacting their development as a civilization/society. Saving the planet in Pen Pals for example was a 'nobody's looking' sort of thing. Nobody knows they were there to fix it, nobody's likely to find out. All these people would have to do is bounce off the shield - or go through and die. Or see the complete desolation outside of it.
Even that is better than death, but the transplant to another world thing was the obvious and correct solution. Honestly even beaming them all onboard and telling them "Hey there medieval space farmers, you're about to become Federation citizens" would have destroyed their culture but at least saved their lives, still a favorable outcome to 'let them all choke to death.'
@@BlazingOwnager Sure, but it's still a Prime Directive violation on the grounds of irrevocably altering a society's future and thus, the argument against it isn't as completely invalid as Chuck asserts. (For that matter, so's the guy knocking up a local, *somebody* is going to eventually notice there's some weird genes or anatomy or something.)
I think I pretty much hate all TNG era Prime Directive episodes. In TOS they were at least well-intentioned, informed by the post-colonial and indigenous rights movements the writers were reading about in media of the day, and most TOS PD episodes are really about Kirk cleaning up someone else's violation (something most fans and later writers seem to forget when they make their "Kirk was the biggest PD violator" jokes--kind of like blaming the cleaning staff when your coworkers don't clean up the break room after their lunch). In the TNG era the PD is just Trek lore. It's something that happened in multiple TOS episodes, so it has to be in continuity, but we're just going to use it for drama without wondering why it was created in the first place. And as a result it always feels really parochial and paternalistic when the PD is the basis for an episode.
"Captain: the holodeck's on the fritz again!" "Jiggle the handle, ensign." "Right, sir!" "And if that doesn't work, kick the snot out of it!" "Yes sir, sir!" tavi.
"Grand plan" and happenstance or freak occurrence are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Just the same as not everything being a grand conspiracy means that no successful complex conspiring exists, or that just because complete chaos doesn't reign supreme at all places at all times doesn't mean entropy and absence of order don't happen.
Your final line reminds me of a quote from Iron Man in the comic books. Although granted he says it as a villain, I think the sentence has A new meaning when applied here. I think I'll leave everybody to decide for themselves what it means. "You see I'm not playing God, all this time I've been playing human."
Interesting quote! I think people forget the god concept respects free will and doesn't force it's ideals on others ..instead let's things run their course. Humans, however, almost always want to force their ideals. Picard upheld the directive as best as he could....not always hitting the mark but he tried. Sometimes people can't be saved and sometimes saving them makes things worse. Sometimes not saving them makes things worse. It's a difficult situation but people in the comments think in black and white only.
Nicholai could have made the point more poignantly, such as "If you and your Captain want these people dead so badly, you're going to have to kill them yourself. I'm serious! Go ahead, beam them into space! I'll be standing on the transporter pad right next to them."
The PD only applies to star fleet right? What's stopping randos from going around and messing with undeveloped worlds? I get that they may get in trouble "legally" But...shouldn't instances be far more rampant? I know if I had a warp capable ship I'd be messing with soooo many worlds lol.
I feel like the first half of Insurrection more or less remade this episode, I thought it was funky the first time I saw it and saw the secret holodeck ship I said "Like what Worf's brother did that one time?".
I've been curious, has there ever been a Prime Directive episode that's after a planet has discovered warp travel? Say, an observation post is around for a major historical effect, has the full view of the event, but the observed planet does not. If they develop issues after the fact, as the true events are obscured, forgotten, etc., what would be the outcome of a Federation actor sharing or not sharing the truth with them?
Well, it will be extinction one way or another, since those are way too few people for a viable population. It's a bit sad that this was never pointed out once by the PD advocates as this would have been way more effective than insisting on following a rule to the latter. So, relocating those people will actually only delay the problem for a few generations and then the Boralaans will have degenerated into slobbering hillbillies who are probably also sterile. Pointing out that really saving the Boralaans would inevitably require a way more heavy-handed approach would have made for a much more interesting debate.
I guess we're supposed to assume there will be enough to support a growing population. It's true they didn't show that because they only hired a small group of extras so we didn't see a very large group, but I took it as something safe to assume from their eventual successful transfer.
I sometimes wonder why there wasn't (to my knowledge--I haven't seen every episode of Trek) a Prime Directive episode exploring what things would be like if there weren't a PD. Like maybe show a renegade group of Ferengi that have taken over a planet and turned it into a mercantilist captive market or even source of slave-in-all-but-name labor (well, there was that one Voyager episode...). Or the Cardies or Romulans. Maybe even have some collaborators among the aliens who talk about how much the colonizers have uplifted them ("now we have roads and schools, where my children go to learn how to oppress their neighbors"). I suppose DS9 explored this with Bajor, but I don't think they ever made it an explicit link--"we have the PD to keep us from turning into the Cardassians."
tos did one it became gangster planet well two i you count the NAZI planet.....three count the gun running episode and the generational sip where bone got some... okay they did a lot PM episodes and they all were better then tng era
There is an episode in voyager where a pair of Ferengi have accidently got lost in the delta quadrant too and have become the 'sages' to a world (seems like they are seen as emissaries of god's or something) and have begun warping it into a capitalist type world with them at the top. I do see the colonialism argument, but I don't hold that position. Under the PD, if a world has 100,000s a year dying of preventable diseases because of a lack of medical tech or economic systems that prevent the use of the cures (like on earth) then I would argue that carefully planned interference would be a moral good and standing by would be, by definition, allowing preventable suffering.
@@Deadxman616 I'll have to watch more TOS--I got into Trek through TNG, really enjoyed DS9, and still haven't seen every TOS episode. Much less Voyager.
Ah Homeward, the ultimate Prime Directive episode. I knew there'd be rants and I looked forward to them. Only 6 minutes in and yeah, he is explaining what the PD is SUPPOSED to be! The show points this out. And our main characters make up BS excuses to watch the world burn. So gross. Now I do think his original plan is bad. If they set up this bubble, they would have to babysit this planet for the rest of time to ensure it kept working and that the people stayed where they were supposed to. How do you keep them in that bubble forever without fundamentally affecting them? The alternative, moving them, is a much better plan and I guess that makes sense. He knew they wouldn't go for the better plan anyway so doesn't want to give it away so they could stop him. I love Nikolai and he really helps buoy up the episode. But Chuck's right that it is a mess with many of our main characters acting like assholes because of the PD. It's a frustrating episode because there are aspects I like but the terrible takes by main characters, especially Picard, suck. Like, that scene with Vorin. Suddenly Vorin was acting like Picard was for some weird reason and Picard was making the points Nikolai was! Without a hint of self-awareness.
If you mean ultimate Prime Directive episode in terms of how warped it has become then this episode has nothing on Dear Doctor in which not only do they leave an entire race to die but pat themselves on the back for it.
Just saw this episode for the first time and had to seek out a review because the plot seemed so absurd, cruel and morally backward from any other episode I could think of. I needed to hear others thoughts and opinions because this episode actually found a way to make me detest Picard and the rest of the crew. Glad I'm not alone, but seriously how did this script make the clear? I'm floored.
I have always agreed with SFDebris on his assessment of the prime directive (in it's TNG and later form), and I agree with his view on how it is handled in this episode. However, just one point about the "how can we grow, when everything that made us who we are is gone?" line. For me this wasn't a mistake or error, it was perfectly understandable and quite poignant: In the real world, the natural environment has always been inexorably linked to our culture, not just in terms of myths and legends but even our languages and identities. The words people use in most languages to refer to themselves, the world around them, their tribe, their civilization are all informed by and rooted in the geography and environment in which they developed. The character in the episode wouldn't be able to view this in the way we can now, in a sort of sociological, historical, scientific way. For him and his people those myths and legends and connection to their homeworld are all still 'real'. Even though he knew they would have to go on a 'journey' and lose most of their possessions, for him they were still in the lands of their gods, or their heroes or ancestors or what not. Whatever creation myth they believe in was the creation myth of _that_ place. Imagine taking an ancient Egyptian not just out of the Nile flood plain, not just out of the desert but to another world where those things no longer exist, even far away and inaccessible, imagine the religions upheaval. It's tragic and wrongheaded but his choice of suicide in the face of such a loss of his entire framework for understanding his universe and place in it, is all together realistic I'd argue. Now, would a Picard speech to argue the opposite, something very much like what is included in the video, have been a good addition? Absolutely yes in my opinion, I agree on that and the sentiment behind it completely. I just didn't have a problem with that line or the logic behind it.
An episode that is even worse for this is the one where Data is in contact with someone from a dying planet. As in that episode the Enterprise DOES have the technology to save the planet, but Picard refuses to do it due to "but prime directive" until Data forces it. If Picard had his way he would have walked away knowing a planet was dying which he could have saved and done nothing about it. I usually like Picard but some episodes like these really portray him as an uncaring monster.
TNG Prime Directive episodes do a really good job at vilifying the Federation and especially Picard and the Enterprise all because the showrunners and writers of the time didn't fully understand what they were writing about. Even Gene himself interpreted his own rules in a dumb way. Although this worked for the best in the long run, as it led to them creating stories out of it. An author creating something in their work that the consumer not just interprets differently, but more logically and better than the creator, is rare. But as Star Trek proves, it can happen.
Finally! SFDebris is covering my single most hated episode of TNG, if not the entire franchise. The absolute dumbest and worst Prime Directive episode, often overlooked.
I still think the worst Prime Directive episode is the one where Archer and the doctor refuse to give a dying people a cure for their disease, because they want evolution to kill them all. And the end of that story tries to claim this is the right decision, and it's why we need a Prime Directive. For murderous eugenics. By that episode's logic, Troi and Picard were completely in the right. And it makes you ask - how many people has Starfleet sadistically refused to help, while watching them live out their last days? No wonder why we evolve into stupid salamanders.
This episode has always pissed me off. The Feddies don’t even consider saving the people because of dogma. Not logistics, not moral choices, DOGMA! Kirk or the Sisko wouldn’t have hesitated to do all they could. But the high and mighty Picard is all. “Well these things happen, I’m going to wring my hands anD act morally superior as this culture dies!
"See! One guy is really upset! He's traumatized forever, because he knew it was time for his species to die. By the way, have you ever heard of 20th century philosopher named Adolf Hitler? A book he wrote in prison helped us create the Prime Directive...."
What's the point of having it - either in-universe or out - if it has the "I really don't feel like it" exemption? And I'm pretty sure that you've done "The End of Eternity" at some point, Chuck, which has a very compelling argument for being a stickler about non-interference rules.
It's not about having an "I can't be bothered" exemption clause, it's about the insanity of including a "you can't save people from extinction unless they have warp drive" clause. Especially since saving people from natural disasters is never suggested to be a PD violation in TOS. Kirk violated the PD all the time, sure, but it was usually at least mentioned that he was violating the PD when he did it, and I don't think it's ever suggested that Starfleet regulations prohibit saving pre-warp cultures from disasters outside their control. As I see it, you should at least be able to save people *secretly,* because there's absolutely no ethical justification for banning Starfleet crews from helping people avoid extinction due to events outside their control. You can still have a PD episode of this nature without this clause if you, say, play it like Farscape's Different Destinations: the crew try to save a culture without contaminating it too much, only for the situation to spiral out of control due to bad luck, and the crew have to try and fix it without making it worse.
In modern Trek it honestly feels like the Prime Directive is a tool to justify cowardice. It exists solely to espouse the virtues of centrism, of how doing nothing what so ever is actually better than actually doing anything to improve things, lest it turn out in the outlier's chance of making things "worse". At it's heart in modern trek it's about preserving the status quo and then congratulating yourself for it, no matter how badly doing so makes untold numbers of people suffer. The Prime Directive is literally, you see someone trapped inside of a burning building, and you choose to do nothing to help them, not even calling the fire department because for all you know that person is a serial killer, and then having the gall to congratulate yourself on the correct moral choice afterward. Edit, it's actually worse than that. It's literally someone is trapped in a burning building, you can save them, at literally zero risk to yourself, and then you choose not to, because there's a slim chance that they might be a serial killer, and then congratulating yourself on making the right choice.
When you save an entire sapient species and they look at you like your a Nutzi. Time to rethink much? XD This one always frustrated me. Maybe Maxwell was right Picard, at least in this instance.
is the PD just a Starfleet rule, or is it actual federation law? that would just make this whole thing even stranger, Starfleet ship hell no, a private ship then it's cool...or is this one of the strange things where it appears Starfleet just leads the federation
It's a shame that this episode went down the route it did because I did really like the character of Worf's brother. The whole prime directive thing bugs me, always has and always will. What surprises me the most is that they never bother to show the negative consequences of saving civilizations. Look, if you are going to have this stupid rule because that's, apparently, how the prime directive works. Then at least give us the audience a reason to care for that sentiment. Try to show why they make a choice that is this drastic.
How many worlds have they found natives that are almost identical to Terran humans? How many of those world have an ancient myth about the gods bringing them to a new land?
I really do like this episode. Yes it's supposed to be about the prime directive, but it's also about the Fatal flaw in the prime directive. That's bureaucracy. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred those are excellent percentage. So what happens when that 1% comes up at one time when the rules just don't apply. You make an exception? Can't you always find a reason for an exception though? Cannibalism is Illegal. So what happens when you're on a boat in the middle of an ocean and you're all going to starve to death. Some people have starved to death in that situation and others have drawn Lots to see who would be sacrificed. Some people may have made the choice for others. However in the cannibal situation that's about the people involved. If you were in that situation you would have to figure it out. What if you're just a bureaucrat though? Do you risk everything you have accomplished for that one time the rules don't fit.
It requires everyone to behave like sociopaths, and it's convinced the sociopaths are right. Your interpretation would make a better episode, but it doesn't actually exist.
It's not "ninety-nine times out of a hundred it's better to follow the Prime Directive," it's "ninety-nine times out of a hundred it's better to follow the Captain's orders." I can't remember even one Prime Directive episode in which slavish adherence to Federation dogma was actually the morally and ethically correct choice, even when the writer(s) of a particular episode tried to ham-fist it down the audiences' throats.
@@Philistine47 Does the Nazi planet count? Or does it not count since the violation of the directive happened before the Enterprise reaches the planet? Either way you are correct that nearly any time it comes up being misinterpreted.
@@juststatedtheobvious9633 And the difference between a bureaucrat and a sociopath is? I've seen too many Zero Tolerance policies to think there's much of a difference. One of the things all of the prime directive episodes are missing seems to be higher authority. Nobody ever reviews the decisions. Which is a pity it would have made a good clip show.
@@mikegates8993 That's a good catch, I wasn't thinking of that episode. I'd say it does count, since it's Starfleet's Prime Directive and not the Enterprise's. It's still not a particularly strong argument in favor of the PD, though. "Don't re-create the National Socialist Workers' Party of Germany in an alien culture" is the kind of thing you really shouldn't need an actual _rule_ to prevent. Especially in a society that claims to be oh-so enlightened.
Throwback to the TOS episode "For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky", where Kirk and Spock agreed it was logical to interfere and ditch the Prime Directive when the alternative was the extinction of their people. How the mighty have fallen.
I guess according to TNG logic the right course of action was to just let the 200+ year old children eventually all go mad in "Miri"
the prime directive is hypocritical when you remember the federation uses technology to avoid its demise. and extra-hypocritical when they use time travel. apparently, they don`t care about the "universe plan" when it is their necks on the line.
What I liked about that TOS episode is that they didn't call it the "Prime Directive". It was simply "Directive One". Even Spock couldn't fault Kirk's logic to ignore it, which suggests it was more a guideline than a hard limit.
What's odd about "Homeward" is that a character explicitly (and correctly) calls it dogma, but the episode doesn't seem to think his position is valid.
@@JayJayM57 Although the biggest pseudoscientific turd in the "But we have to let them die, it's their (genetic/cosmic) destiny!" category still goes to that disgusting _Star Trek: Enterprise_ episode with Dr. Phlox and Cpt. Archer committing genocide on an entire civilization, despite said civilization explicitely having asked for their help, and despite Phlox having found a cure, but then refusing to hand it over.
@@TF2CrunchyFrog They didn't die, they became the Pakled and the Breen (god I love that bit of Chuck's headcannon).
Rest in peace Mr. Sorvino.
You played Worf's brother well.
April 13, 1939 - July 25, 2022
An Italian guy playing a Russian?
That's like...a guy from Chicago playing a Russian.
I like his daughter....hhhhnnnngggg
I have to say this episodes is why I enjoyed the episode of the Orville so much where they run across a planet just hours from collapse, with the vast majority of the people already dead. The show established a non-interference policy earlier in it's run for the good reasons, but when that situation came up, that didn't even figure in. They immediately try to make contact and immediately offer aid to save anyone they can with absolutely zero hesitation. It was then I knew for whatever faults Seth MacFarlane might have, he understands both the intent and problems with the way the Prime Directive stuff went.
Even Lower Decks handled this better. There's an alien race about to die. Not all of them are grateful for the rescue.
It turns out the real source of the complaint? A rich idiot who cares more about what they own than anyone else's life.
Ah is that the episode where their world is basically reduced to an asteroid and nothing else? I do like the Orville once they dropped the comedy angle abit. I think it's a version of trek with actual humans in it that still act like people but try to be good too. And I do think Seth's captain is pretty good. I do love how they handled the 'android tries romance' plot and they definitely made it more interesting than when TNG tried it.
I whilst I think the Orville had a 'meh' start, by half way into season 1 it was finding its feet well and becoming a good trek spiritual successor
Which episode of the Orville is that? Sorry I do not remember it.
@@danielyeshe season 2, episode 2, "primal urges"
@@dm121984 Funny how The Oriville started off as just a pure comedy show, but got such a good reception compared to STD, that they have slowly shifted it's tone into a more serious sci-fi series.
When does _that_ happen!? O_o That's like Family guy turning into a serious drama. XD
A good response to the Prime Directive: "To ignore the plight of those one might conceivably save is not wisdom─it is indolence."
The Prime Directive was never intended to be used the disgraceful way it was. I wanted to SLAP Troi when she self-righteously said that crap about ensuring non-interference, and I RARELY find myself wanting to slap women.
@@oddish4352 It's a good thing you added the last part, otherwise everyone would have thought you often want to slap women.
Ah, yes - finally an episode that dares to ask the *real* question, namely, _"Would these people have been better off being discovered by the Borg instead of the Federation?"_
The Borg would have no interest in a pre-industrial culture.
@@scockery Why did the Borg attempt to assimilate post-Apocalyptic pre-Warp Earth in _First Contact?_ For that matter, why do the Borg assimilate *any* species we see on screen, since the Borg are so vastly technologically superior to any of them?
@@scockery true, so they would have been equal to the Borg. Which probably isn't the best statement for the federation.
@@scockery Not entirely true; the Borg have, from time to time, mentioned adding others' biological diversity to their own as well.
@@boobah5643 Well, the Kazon weren't even worth assimilating for that.
Picard's speech of "let us honour those we cannot save" always came off as almost like a sacrificial prayer to me. He may as well have said "for those who we allow to die in the name of the Almighty PD, we salute you".
If Picard had said those we may not save or must not save, would be intellectually honest if morally bankrupt
Makes you want to scream bad words and throw things at the screen.
@@corssecurity I've been saying for years that the Enterprise might as well have beamed down armed away teams and personally killed everyone on the planet. Or bombarded the planet from orbit. Ultimately, these actions would accomplish the same thing as sitting on ass during a natural disaster and they'd be no less morally repugnant.
"Stand up and be counted
For the death you are about to receive
We're the Federation
And we ignore your needs
Hail, Hail, the Prime Directive
Because it is the righter way
You aren't a legend, aren't a cause
You're not livin' after today!
For those about to die
We salute you!
For those about to die
We salute you!"
Say what you will about Discovery but one thing I really appreciated was that in the first episode it had Burnham and Phillipa rescuing a culture from a potential extinction event and noting that it was possible to do such a thing without violating the prime directive.
I'll give Sorvino this: he's excellent at making you like his characters.
I don't really know him outside this episode but him and his character are the best part.
Oh, this is one of the more infamous Prime Directive episodes, isn't it? Well, this should be good.
I do have an argument of the line "how can we grow when everything who made us who we are is gone." The character likely agreed to the journey probably thinking it would be possible to eventually return to where they once lived at a later date. Finding out that you will never be able to go back at all because more advanced beings took you from your home planet and is planning to place you on a different one would be a very hard thing to cope with.
Yeah, he probably assumed that they'd be able to go back and get their stuff eventually.
That said, it's still a bit preposterous for that to be his _first_ response to learning what's going on.
heavily disagree. based on the technological development it is 100% likely they never plan to return. the reason for this is they are from a time period child labor was mandatory for survival. they didn`t have free time to take a vacation or a trip back. once they settle they would have to work constantly to ensure their basic survival. and an attempt to "go back to settle where they come from" would have been deadly.
"Finding out that you will never be able to go back at all because more advanced beings took you from your home planet and is planning to place you on a different one would be a very hard thing to cope with."
(facepalm) You mean, harder to cope with than BEING DEAD? /sarcasm Look, people have had to migrate due to wars and natural disasters all throughout history, and they were able to cope with it. Fuck this "people and cultures are fragile snowflakes that can't adapt" bullshit.
@@JayJayM57 Well... not exactly, that's a rather oversimplified "game of thrones" view of the era.
czcams.com/video/qvbm84iN7qk/video.html is a good video on the topic.
The '37s killed, over that.
Glad someone else figured out the painfully obvious solution of filling the holodeck with anesthazine gas, then sorting out the holodeck.
What gets me about this episode is that given the strong focus is on Nikolai going rogue, you didn't even need this kind of awful story point to do it.
Imagine if Boraal II is not doomed to planetary destruction, but in light of recent treaties, is going to the Cardassian Union. Nikolai strongly protests this, noting that the latter has no formal Prime Directive and pointing to the recent history of the Occupation as what might happen to them. At best their culture would be disturbed, and at worst they could potentially find themselves enslaved no matter what the Cardassians say.
Picard sympathizes, but notes that any potential transportation would also disturb their culture just as much, and any significant moves in regard to the planet could risk conflict with the Cardassians when the treaty is already unsteady. Thus, when Nikolai does transport the group onboard the Enterprise Holodeck Picard does furiously say that his move may have much bigger consequences than just for the Boraalians.
Essentially the "Prime Directive states we must let them die" nonsense is discarded entirely with a less definitive fate for the native villagers; thus giving both sides fair beliefs. Picard would have a point in Rozhenko not seeing the big picture with what he did for people that possibly would have been ignored by the Cardassians while he can state that he couldn't take the chance of letting the people he's grown to love suffer the same fate as the Bajorans.
It gives the story more nuance and even fits into the franchise subplot about the Federation's "peace" with the Cardassians being a tricky thing to navigate.
holy crap... you have just saved this episode... please write that fanfiction, in script form if you have to and make it available for all to see, cuz this is a story that needs to be seen and appreciated by fandom.
Yes, this would have made a more balanced episode where both sides would have a point.
That is a significantly better plot.
Well done. Shame it wasn't the way they went with it.
Are you going to write this? I'm an amateur writer, and would love to collaborate.
Great review and I completely agree what you said about the prime directive in fact I actually enjoy it when you go on a rant. The way they treat the prime directive and how they go so far with it like in this episode it makes me wonder what would the Federation do if for example they encountered a civilization that hadn’t invented Warp Drive but was just as advanced or even more advanced in the Federation in every other way. Or if they encountered a civilization that that never invented warp drive because they invented a completely different form of FTL given there adherence to the letter of the law for its own sake with the prime directive especially how it’s presented in this episode it wouldn’t surprise me.
Kirk: "I smashed your computers so you'll have real war." I didn't hear anyone bitch about the prime directive then. And many episodes of TOS did some pretty sketchy prime directive shit.
I think that's been cited as part of the point in one of Chuck's earlier videos - either Voyager or TNG. Or one of the "broader discussion" videos he did such as "Of Holograms and Ethics". It's also noted in the same discussion Picard has a lot of violations of the Prime Directive on file, but has never actually been punished for it.
There an episode where Kirk and co. found a generational ship and people on it have lost their knowledge to the point they don't know they are on a ship anymore. Kirk need to break the Prime Directive and inform these people about the nature of their planet and it took him like 2 seconds to said: "It is better than let them die". And Spork agree with him since Spock also think it is the logical decision.
>And many episodes of TOS did some pretty sketchy prime directive shit.
And I think it could be said that Homeward marked the point where Trek writers started treating the PD as dogma that could not be argued with, rather than a guideline with some leeway.
We saw an advancement of this with Voyager's "Prime Factors", and the natural conclusion of the dogmatic line of thinking with Enterprise's "Dear Doctor" where Phlox commits genocide through deliberate inaction.
In the face of extinction every alternative is preferable. TOS knew that but TNG seemed to treat the PD as immutable dogma rather than as a guild towards preserving life. The PD was originally conceived of to preserve life as interfering almost always resulted in harm but extinction is the vastly worse harm.
A story dealing with the unintentional consequences of trying to save the aliens and even the tension of trying to follow the Prime Directive absolutely could be a good story, and you can see bits of it trying to get out, but the simple, seemingly obvious point that the heroes are going to let a whole planet die essentially in the name of bureaucratic protocol makes it befuddling.
There's a good one in the Bobiverse about an alien species that is rescued but refuses to believe it was at risk, and hates the rescuer, believing them to have genocided most of their species, and they become a credible threat.
@@BrettCaton another bobverse fan?! 🥳 Yeah, the otter folk (Pavlovians? I can't remember off the top of my head). It does so the downside of their actions that the Pav growing believe they were kidnapped from their home so the bobs could mine their homeworld or something and increasingly don't believe it was a third party.
"...To seek out new life, and new civilizations (but not too new since they need warp drive before we can say hello)..."
Troi‘s answer in the conference room scene is one of the stupidest things ever said in Trek
The biggest weakness in the first season of Picard (and there were many) was it set up a great chance to examine this stuff via a point where Picard could and would been questioning those high principles. A geat manifesto on if the prime directive was just skirting responsibility, if heavily written by people that have such a hatred of white colonialism they'd otherwise champion it.
Instead we got some fairly retreaded synthetic life ground.
I do agree that there is a risk of colonialism when interfering with less technologically advanced societies, and we see this in the modern world too with the US and UK 'liberating' countries in a manner that just happens to focus on countries of economic or strategic importance only and often involves working with despositic regimes.
However, in the fiction of the federation, I believe that in most circumstances the federation could be trusted to interfere in a way to primarily benefit the locals. Curing diseases, cleaning up pollution and environmental damage, overthrowing authoritians.
The best example I've seen of this is 'the Culture' from Iain M Banks, who take the view that they would rather do the best they can to improve the lot of folk less blessed with tech as they can and accept the certainty that they will sometimes fuck up and make things worse. I believe they were written as a response to Trek's federation.
It was a weakness with Enterprise too. They could have done a much better job of showing the development of the Prime Directive. They could have had situations where they did intervene but ended up getting less advanced species entangled in interstellar politics. They could have also shown independent human groups not part of Starfleet or earth government interfering with less advanced races.
It's something that the Stargate shows did well. They ran into a lot of situations where a less advanced civilization had access to precious resources or technology and there was the temptation for earth to take those resources in their fight against the Goa'uld.
Enterprise did a story like that when they went into the Expanse where they stole a warp coil from that civilian ship. But it's something they could have done from the beginning. Facing the threat of the Klingons, Romulans, and other hostile species, they could have ran into a lot of situations where they were tempted to interfere in less advanced cultures to gain some kind of advantage.
@@KingOfMadCows Thought of SG1 specifically. They even had the whole species there to put us on the receiving end of the PD.
@@chrisw207 Which one? The Gould? The ones with the gene weapons? The Wraiths?
@@bthsr7113 The tolan. They had ion cannons that held off the G'ould...at least for a while.
I do agree in principal with what was said, if a primative peoples is going to die, and you have the power to save them, then of course, you should offer that aid and assist them to a place of safety where they can flurish. Picard in this evidence with his clinging to the Prime Directive shows all the hallmarks of the writer of the week, this is why each captain seems to bounce between different standpoints depending on each week's episode. But, in regards to the problems with force relocating someone, even for their own good, just consider. Even with Star Fleet looking for a suitable planet, it will be inherently different to the one that people knows. The plant life that their people knows to be safe to eat and use as medicine will be completely gone, replaced with a entirely new eco system for them to learn. The animals also, that they knew where able to be domesticated and used for pets or hunting or food are gone, replaced with an entirely new catalogue of animals. One village out of an entire people now has to begin experimenting with this new world, determining what plant life is good to eat, what is good for medical herbs, and what is poisonous. A Star Fleet officer is hardly likely to appear with a scroll and say People hear me, these are the plants that are safe to eat here. Also, many primative tribes would likely have used the stars for navigation. A new planet would mean brand new stars to chart and learn, in other words, a complete rewriting of their lifestyle. Many would likely die due to the lack of knowledge with local vegitation and animals. I am not saying to let them die is the correct answer, but relocating someone to a brand new lanet with no warning could do just as much harm. It's a question that has no easy answer. That said, rant over, thanks for reading fello Trek Nerd.
Nikolai is a rare "Suddenly Season 7 Relative" that I like, even though he should have come up before (and after.) I can easily imagine the friction between them growing up where they each felt like the other was the favorite, Worf because Nikolai was their "real" son, and Nikolai because of the lengths their parents went to accommodate Worf. And the contrast and symmetry between Nikolai and Kurn is nice.
Another very annoying thing with the prime directive dogma is that in its current form is that it prevents very interesting stories. Great adventures where the heroes must save entire worlds without being seen. Or trolley problems where they prevent a natural disaster, but then a faction from the planet uses the threat to subjugate the rest of the planet, and the crew must decide until which point they can intervene. You know, actual ethical dilemmas.
I think what TNG was aiming for, was what we saw happening with Desert Storm (where we eventually left Iraq to find it's own way afterwards, despite some very terrible things happening and the betrayal of Kurdish allies) vs. the Iraq invasion. (Where our good intentions ended up creating a civil war that killed way more people and benefited the terrorists we were supposed to be fighting in the first place.)
The reason why it doesn't work, is because our interference mostly failed due to the worst instincts of humanity. In Star Trek's future, there aren't huge gaps in empathy, greed isn't a factor, and nobody has a burning desire to sexually torture the prisoners.
So to rationalize the Prime Directive? You have to make story writing decisions based on the unexamined empathy gaps, greed, and sadism of the creative team, instead. Not that I'm comparing the tragedy they inflict on fictional characters to a real life tragedy. The scale is very, very, different.
But it all comes from the same place.
Enough is never enough of The Stuff!
The biggest mistake modern Trek made was the twisting of the Prime Directive, and you've explained perfectly why. Any ideas on how it got so twisted over the years? I get a feeling it's as a result of one writer or producers taking it to the extreme, and then no one bothered to tweak it back again to something more nuanced.
From what I understand, the PD wasn't really a thing during TOS, it really formed as we know it during the TNG era. As to how it happened, well mostly because of the post-Vietnam era thinking, which was still somewhat a thing when TNG started.
@@mikegates8993 PD featured in a good number of episodes in TOS, and it was handled in much the way Chuck was ranting about how TNG onwards really didn't. When Kirk was going to tell a species they're on an asteroid about to crash into a planet, Spock tells him about the PD. Kirk says: "Well it's better to be changed than annihilated." To which Spock simply responded: "Logical."
It's a common problem with long running franchises, Star Wars is rife with this
@@KiltedCritic Fair enough, I must be thinking of the interruption then. I swear that the use of the actual term Prime Directive didn't start being used until TNG though.
It was never well-defined in the original series, but in the zeitgeist of the 1960s there were a lot of anti-colonialist and indigenous rights movements underway and that's what's informing the Trek writers of the time. Because it's pretty inconsistent in TOS as well.
There's generally 3 kinds of TOS PD episodes: 1) The PD has already been broken, usually by other Federation personnel (e.g. "Patterns of Force", "A Piece of the Action", "The Omega Glory") but sometimes the Klingons (e.g. "A Private Little War"*, "Friday's Child") and Kirk's just trying to fix things.
2) The culture is ruled by an evil AI and it's apparently okay to free them from that? In "Return of the Archons" Kirk says the computer Landru is stifling the culture's natural development so it's okay, and Spock seems to accept that, but McCoy makes the same argument in "The Apple" and Spock pushes back hard.
3) Weird edge cases like "A Taste of Armageddon"--the culture knows the Federation exists and has a good idea of Starfleet's capabilities and they threaten the Enterprise or her crew directly--are they protected by the PD in that case? I wouldn't think so. It's debatable whether that gives Kirk licence to disrupt their whole society but the Federation diplomat in that episode seems to accept the result and in fairness offers to stay behind and help them work out the transition--they're not just being abandoned after the Kirk-imposed societal upheaval.
Then there's my favourite TOS PD episode, "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky". The culture lives on a generational starship disguised as an asteroid, and are ruled by an AI they think is their god. But the AI has developed an error and is aiming the asteroid ship towards a densely populated planet and refuses to be corrected. So what does Kirk do? A) Not interfere, allowing both the asteroid culture and millions on the planet to die, B) destroy the asteroid, killing that culture of thousands but saving the planet of millions, or C) destroy the AI, disrupting the asteroid culture but saving both peoples. The moral answer is C, and Kirk takes it.
The problem with a lot of long-running media franchises is that the original logic or thematic underpinnings of the setting are often forgotten or ignored and they become merely "lore". The answer becomes "this is what they did in the original" without asking "but what were they trying to say?"
*Interestingly, in "A Private Little War", the Klingons seem to have their own version of the PD. They're giving their faction advanced weaponry they haven't invented themselves, but they aren't giving them phasers, they're arming them with black powder firearms. This could just be prudent colonial policy: don't give a people you intend to rule the means to overthrow you. But it's clearly more thought out than the TNG Federation's "once you develop warp drive you can join the club and immediately access everything we've developed since."
Thanks Chuck, I did not know teenage boys wore bras before listening to this lol.
Ahh wow I just talked about This episode before
Worf mentioned his human brother ONCE and now we figure out why.
This episode is a precursor to Insurrection, using the holodeck to relocate a civilization without their knowledge.
The Sorvino Switch.
It seems logical to assume the PD was never intended to be followed to the exact letter. However I know they needed to create tension somehow and Sir Patrick could sound dignified reading the phone book.
As a dig at the rules lawyer nature of the prime directive: I am a christian, and my higher power says that the federation should have been saving these people as soon as they realized they were going to be killed by their planet going kersplat.
The way the prime directive was implemented in TNG and beyond was and is completely backwards and foolish at best.
Edit:
Cain: "Am I my brother's keeper?"
God: "If all were right in the world, you would be."
This script needed a couple more revisions before it was ready for filming; it makes the main characters look callous and bureaucratic, and it introduces a lot of personal drama that overshadows the more compelling large-scale drama of trying to save these people.
I still hold that the Lumati in Babylon 5 were 100% the Federation.
You have made an amazing and interesting and intelligent thesis
I liked this episode because it showed the problem of a good idea that becomes a rule and then the idea goes away, only the rule is important. No one wants these people to die, but the rule gets in the way. Also showing how the Federation fails is always more grounded to me.
Worf even got his brother into it, "I find no honor in this whatsoever, captain."
In this episode's defense: server maintenance can take hours. One would expect a holographic matrix might need a bit more time.
"I could've saved that little girl!"
"You were right not to."
Our heroes ...
That was one of the best Picard speeches I have ever heard.
16:54 Maybe he hated Gene's absolutists vision for the Prime Directive so much he just went out of his way to make this scene so jarring
This is an episode I've been waiting for you to get to, and glad to see we stand on the same side. The Prime Directive shouldn't be an excuse to sit around and watch people die.
Now I can't wait til you finally get to ENT The Communicator, where Archer's adherence to the still nonexistent PD probably causes a war.
What would a group of baby Geordies be? A litter of Geordi? A clutch?
A forge of Geordies.
This really seemed set to cast the Enterprise-D crew as the villains of the piece. The only reward was Worf acknowledging that sometimes it's good to break the rules, but it wasn't worth assasinating the characters of the rest of the crew.
Ah the old stupid readings of the prime directive. Now, the intended affect of the prime directive isn't bad - I still disagree with it, but it's at least a reasonable view; "don't interfere with natives because you will likely affect their cultural development and/or exploit them or their resources".
That rule is generally a good first approach to interactions with aliens below you on the tech level until you have an idea of the best approach. And Kirk was willing and able to break the prime directive when circumstances called for it, such as when there was already interference, or when the lower tech folk are going to all die.
This episode is one I like (thanks to the guest Actor). This was one of the times that Picard let the DOGMA of the Prime Directive condemn an entire people for no other reason than The Prime Directive. A minor change to the culture is better and much more preferable to UTTER EXTINCTION. There was no way this people would survive this natural disaster (that was even beyond Federation technology), so a little meddling wouldn't change things more than EVERYONE DYING. Seriously, I really feel bitterness towards Picard during this episode; sometimes Picard can be a D*ck.
More like the WRITERS are to blame for all of those "let's interpret the Prime Direction to the dumbest possible Letter of the Law extent" episodes.
Exactly what I think. Yes you should not fuck with other people´s lives...but at some point you´re supposed to get off your ass and do something. Like with everything in life there´s no one rule to follow, you´ll have to make a decision and live with the consequences. When the consequence of not acting is extinction the decision should be the easiest, like in this case here.
Love the content. By this point in the series, how many times has Picard given the finger to the Prime Directive as he follows his gut?
One reason Sisko is my favorite is because whenever the Prime Directive comes up, it's always an admiral bringing it up and pissing him completely off before he tries to come up with ways to get around it or sometimes straight up completely ignore it. He doesn't even care about the Temporal Prime Directive. Pretty sure had he been in Homeward, he'd beamed up anyone they could and told Picard to file a complaint and suck it.
@@BlazingOwnager To be fair, at least 3 times Sisko got people killed, captured forever, or maimed ignoring the prime directive. Now in all those cases there were unforseen circumstances, but then...isn't that the whole point?
@@SageofStars I'm not sure what episodes you're referring to, so I can't respond to specifics, but in general, every scenario that Starfleet encounters has unpredictable risks, and Starfleet officers do have to accept that possibility. The commanding officers job is to try and make sure those risks are only taken when the outcome is worth those risks.
@@BlazingOwnager I like DS9, but Sisko should've been courtmartialed a dozen times. I mean, they did that with Picard after the Stargazer had to be abandoned. He was cleared.
I can chalk Sisko getting away with massive violations to a remilitarizing Starfleet, in a post Wolf 359/Dominion era and Sisko being 'The Emissary". Sisko was needed. 10 years earlier, he'd be a in penal colony.
@@scockery Actually the higher up admirals liked his willingness to go outside the rules so much they promoted him. I think if all the appearances of Star Fleet show anything, once your get past the people who believe in the PR face of the Federation you have a lot more.. flexible people at the real top. One of the reasons Picard never really worked as an Admiral.
The Prime Directive needs an Exemption Clause. There needs to be a paragraph added that says, “In the event of a pre-warp species imminent annihilation, be it by environmental devastation or foreign invasion, it is the responsibility of every Starfleet Officer to take whatever action is within their power to preserve the species’ existence and, if possible, preserve their cultural integrity.”
That would be logical, lol.
Like Chuck and many, I've always thought that the Prime Directive during this era of Star Trek was poorly implemented, but the PD in itself was never a bad idea, as Chuck points out at the beginning, allowing a culture to unfold naturally and have their own victories and failures is important, and for me the episode of Doctor Who "The Lie of the Land" from Peter Capaldi's run demonstrates what happens if such a rule never exists, if a culture has people that always come in to fix their problems (even if the reason for this was purely altruistic and not for conquest like in that episode) then what would be the point of them doing anything, they would be so codependent on them that they would become stagnant, complaisant, and eventually unable to help themselves or even others, they wouldn't even bother to develop their own culture and become so unmotivated to do anything, in a way it's also why I hate the "ancient aliens" theory and many other historical conspiracies, they take away the achievements that we (for better or worse) did, as Albert Einstein once said "A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new"
But again like Chuck and many, if extinction is what's threatening a culture like in "Homeward", then they have a moral obligation to do something, even if it's to save a handful of people and they are changed from the experience, after all that culture isn't going to learn from their own victories and failures if they're all dead, and it's really annoying that during this era the Prime Directive was treated with absolute and not a case by case basis, not only for the reasons Chuck gave, but for me it turns the supposed heroes of the story into villains, and while I run the risk of being shouted down and told that I'm "an idiot" or not a "real fan" by saying this, it's one of the many reasons why I love the current run of Star Trek, whether it's Captain Georgiou and Commander Burnham saving an alien species from a long drought that would lead the their extinction, or Admiral Picard twisting the Federations arm to helping the Romulans evacuate their homeworld from the supernova, the characters in these series actually want to help when a crisis like this happens, and are written as actual heroes.
You nailed it on the misuse of the prime directive.
It’s interesting to compare the hands off Trek approach to the other fiction like Babylon 5 or the Lensman Series (of books). Where superior races offered guidance to help develop society’s , sometimes for their own purposes.
I just watched an episode where Crusher was using that doohickey that’s on Worfs forehead to scan somebody’s eyes. Eh I’m sure they know what they’re doing.
I can just imagine Picard's version of the story of the Good Samaritan.
Homeward is a GREAT story!
What I find odd about this one is that in a different, harder Sci Fi setting with lower technology, the situation in this episode could actually be a good demonstration for why the prime directive could be a good idea. Think about all the problems that would actually arise from trying to relocate these people. How are we going to talk to these people let them to follow? Without a magic Universal Translator, that's a much harder problem. Put them on a new planet? the soil won't take their crops and the new diseases will hit them hard. And that's if they aren't incompatible with the planet in the first place. Without the omniscient computers, perfect medicine, and all aliens being genetically identical, how can you be sure they will be compatible with their new home? Or the original suggestion. "We're going to use tech to bolster the atmosphere in this one small area." Okay, but how long before the machines break? do you think the people back home are going to support this atmosphere dome for centuries or millennia for this society to develop in order to maintain them themselves? Who's going to pay for that and who's going to do the maintenance?
Further, let's think about Picard's "society" argument. we have a society of at most 100-200 people. remember they aren't packed like sardines and the holodeck doesn't have a shrink ray. there is enough space for these people to spread out and think they're really traveling in the space the size of a middle school gym. even using all the holodecks this is at most 1000 people? Do they have all of the professions to even sustain their way of life, let alone their culture? Their culture is dead from the word go. Getting back to biology, how do you avoid serious genetic problems with such a small population taken from such a small area of the planet. Again you need omniscient computers when selecting these people and understanding their genetic diseases, or this whole colony dies in two generations. Speaking of small areas of the planet, why is the planet the size of a sound stage? There is no way the population is homogenous, so why not grab from multiple locations to try to deal with the genetic bottleneck? You're going to have to pull from all over the planet to get enough variety. Which will likely lead to language issues and potentially violent conflict.
Moral questions in politics, ethics or anywhere else arise from limitations. If we could save everyone we would, but we have imperfect knowledge, limited resources, limited tools, and many demands on our tools and resources. In reality, prioritization is necessary and some limitations are insurmountable. This is why DS9 used the Dominion as an adversary. The might of the Dominion was greater than our characters enforcing limitation, forcing compromise and moral dilemmas in order to succeed. But here the writers gave the characters near god-like technology and no scientific considerations for either the writer's convenience (universal translators, perfect germ filters) or for Star Trek's utopian vision (perfect holodecks, a government that won't just pull up stakes on a small project the voters don't care about). And with the limitations gone, the moral dilemma goes away as well. So where as in a harder sci fi setting with lower tech, say Mass Effect, this situation would be an unavoidable tragedy with the best case scenario being two inbred generations all dying out within 50 years anyway without titanic effort for centuries on the part of the Federation, we have Picard standing by with the power of a god and refusing to take half an hour to fix the problem perfectly because he's a prick.
Tl;dr you can have a moral dilemma or the characters can have no obstacles to save everyone. Not both.
As a biologist who majored in ecology, zoology and botany, I agree with you on all points except the inbreeding. On Earth, many animal species, including _Homo sapiens_ and various geographic sub-populations, have gone through multiple genetic bottlenecks. In case of our species, the minimum number of fertile adults needed as viable population has been calculated: 350 people. That's it. How do we know? That's roughly the size of Polynesian "first settlement" populations who settled Pacific islands and New Zealand, calculated from their tribal records of family trees and the crew size of their traditional catamarans that carried settlers and their domesticated plants and animals to new shores.
Picard at 13:00 is quite consistent with his character as seen in Season One's "The Neutral Zone" when he was visibly annoyed at Data for not daring to remove the 20th century people from their cryogenic tubes
Indeed. And Picard was terrible in season 1.
@@KnightRaymund And apparently still is in season 7!
Oh no, the Holodeck is malfunctioning, and takes time to reboot? Can't we just hypospray them to sleep..?!
Excellent critique of a really rotten episode of TNG. What you said I agree with 100%, although you said it in a much more eloquent way than I could have ever managed.
This one really was when Picard's morality was completely destroyed for me. To stand on the Enterprise, spouting Federation dogma while an entire civilisation was about to be wiped out, really showed his whole image was just a sham. And I will add Troi doesn't come out of this one squeaky clean either.
Nikolai is, of course, the true hero of this episode, with Crusher also showing a willingness to do the right thing, Picard is the villain of the piece, I wouldn't have been too surprised if he'd sent armed stormtroopers into the holodeck to slaughter all the survivors that had been beamed into it.
No, a truly awful episode saved only by the superb performance of Paul Sorvino.
If I ever saw Paul S coming towards me, makeup or no, I would probably turn 180 degrees and run away screaming.
This episode is like Picard was on the opposite side of his own argument from the episode "A Matter of Time" Do Nothing & Thousands Will Die, Do Something & Millions Could Die argument and then finally decides . . "I choose to try". Or the episode where Q shows up without powers an the Enterprise is trying to push a moon back into orbit. Natural course of planet evolution right? What makes those things different? Just the fact that those planets had the technological ability to communicate with you and this one doesn't? Lives saved are still lives saved just because someone doesn't have the ability to ask shouldn't exclude them. Someone unconscious wouldn't exclude the doctor from trying to save their life on them because, well they can't communicate with me they want me to save their lives so I'm going to let them die. Dogma is right .
People don’t how good “ the Stuff “ was “ do you why the call me more cause I always want mo “
I can think of a reason not to shelter them under a shield as being against the prime directive: Eventually, they're going to notice that only within this bubble is safe. They're going to be like 'We were saved by the gods!' That's a big, big influence on their natural development as a species. And eventually, they're going to outgrow the place that's been shielded. They're going to find the equipment. TOS is *rife* with these kinds of places, refuges set up to protect those within and it turns out Things Went Bad because nobody was around to maintain the equipment, or there *was* somebody who decided to meddle, or one of the locals found the gear and figured out how to use it for their own benefit.
I know they didn't SAY any of that, and instead said some kind of DUMB stuff instead, there ARE reasons that it'd be a Prime Directive violation on the grounds of it actually impacting their development as a civilization/society.
Saving the planet in Pen Pals for example was a 'nobody's looking' sort of thing. Nobody knows they were there to fix it, nobody's likely to find out. All these people would have to do is bounce off the shield - or go through and die. Or see the complete desolation outside of it.
Even that is better than death, but the transplant to another world thing was the obvious and correct solution.
Honestly even beaming them all onboard and telling them "Hey there medieval space farmers, you're about to become Federation citizens" would have destroyed their culture but at least saved their lives, still a favorable outcome to 'let them all choke to death.'
@@BlazingOwnager Sure, but it's still a Prime Directive violation on the grounds of irrevocably altering a society's future and thus, the argument against it isn't as completely invalid as Chuck asserts. (For that matter, so's the guy knocking up a local, *somebody* is going to eventually notice there's some weird genes or anatomy or something.)
This is a Prime example of why Kirk is the better captain over Picard.
I think I pretty much hate all TNG era Prime Directive episodes. In TOS they were at least well-intentioned, informed by the post-colonial and indigenous rights movements the writers were reading about in media of the day, and most TOS PD episodes are really about Kirk cleaning up someone else's violation (something most fans and later writers seem to forget when they make their "Kirk was the biggest PD violator" jokes--kind of like blaming the cleaning staff when your coworkers don't clean up the break room after their lunch).
In the TNG era the PD is just Trek lore. It's something that happened in multiple TOS episodes, so it has to be in continuity, but we're just going to use it for drama without wondering why it was created in the first place. And as a result it always feels really parochial and paternalistic when the PD is the basis for an episode.
"Captain: the holodeck's on the fritz again!"
"Jiggle the handle, ensign."
"Right, sir!"
"And if that doesn't work, kick the snot out of it!"
"Yes sir, sir!" tavi.
"Nuh nuh nuh nuh no."
- Chuck explaining how the P.D. _really_ works. 😎🤘😉
"Grand plan" and happenstance or freak occurrence are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Just the same as not everything being a grand conspiracy means that no successful complex conspiring exists, or that just because complete chaos doesn't reign supreme at all places at all times doesn't mean entropy and absence of order don't happen.
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Paul Sorvino…
Your final line reminds me of a quote from Iron Man in the comic books. Although granted he says it as a villain, I think the sentence has A new meaning when applied here. I think I'll leave everybody to decide for themselves what it means. "You see I'm not playing God, all this time I've been playing human."
Interesting quote! I think people forget the god concept respects free will and doesn't force it's ideals on others ..instead let's things run their course. Humans, however, almost always want to force their ideals. Picard upheld the directive as best as he could....not always hitting the mark but he tried. Sometimes people can't be saved and sometimes saving them makes things worse. Sometimes not saving them makes things worse. It's a difficult situation but people in the comments think in black and white only.
As a us citizen if im a civilian contractor and I flat out refuse to fallow military orders whst could happen to me
Nicholai could have made the point more poignantly, such as "If you and your Captain want these people dead so badly, you're going to have to kill them yourself. I'm serious! Go ahead, beam them into space! I'll be standing on the transporter pad right next to them."
OOOOOooo
Damn you should write
I like the cut of your jib sir
The PD only applies to star fleet right?
What's stopping randos from going around and messing with undeveloped worlds? I get that they may get in trouble "legally" But...shouldn't instances be far more rampant? I know if I had a warp capable ship I'd be messing with soooo many worlds lol.
It's nice to see The Original Detective and ADA from Law and Order, didn't know they worked together before then. Neat.
Sorvino was the second lead detective. George Dzunda was the first.
I feel like the first half of Insurrection more or less remade this episode, I thought it was funky the first time I saw it and saw the secret holodeck ship I said "Like what Worf's brother did that one time?".
You didn't mention that we in the real world looking back at this episode know that the Kardassian Empire would fall just a few years later😅
Oh wow, this one was written by the showrunner of the Expanse? I didn't even know he wrote for TNG
I've been curious, has there ever been a Prime Directive episode that's after a planet has discovered warp travel? Say, an observation post is around for a major historical effect, has the full view of the event, but the observed planet does not. If they develop issues after the fact, as the true events are obscured, forgotten, etc., what would be the outcome of a Federation actor sharing or not sharing the truth with them?
Well, it will be extinction one way or another, since those are way too few people for a viable population. It's a bit sad that this was never pointed out once by the PD advocates as this would have been way more effective than insisting on following a rule to the latter. So, relocating those people will actually only delay the problem for a few generations and then the Boralaans will have degenerated into slobbering hillbillies who are probably also sterile. Pointing out that really saving the Boralaans would inevitably require a way more heavy-handed approach would have made for a much more interesting debate.
I guess we're supposed to assume there will be enough to support a growing population. It's true they didn't show that because they only hired a small group of extras so we didn't see a very large group, but I took it as something safe to assume from their eventual successful transfer.
I sometimes wonder why there wasn't (to my knowledge--I haven't seen every episode of Trek) a Prime Directive episode exploring what things would be like if there weren't a PD. Like maybe show a renegade group of Ferengi that have taken over a planet and turned it into a mercantilist captive market or even source of slave-in-all-but-name labor (well, there was that one Voyager episode...). Or the Cardies or Romulans. Maybe even have some collaborators among the aliens who talk about how much the colonizers have uplifted them ("now we have roads and schools, where my children go to learn how to oppress their neighbors"). I suppose DS9 explored this with Bajor, but I don't think they ever made it an explicit link--"we have the PD to keep us from turning into the Cardassians."
tos did one it became gangster planet well two i you count the NAZI planet.....three count the gun running episode and the generational sip where bone got some... okay they did a lot PM episodes and they all were better then tng era
There is an episode in voyager where a pair of Ferengi have accidently got lost in the delta quadrant too and have become the 'sages' to a world (seems like they are seen as emissaries of god's or something) and have begun warping it into a capitalist type world with them at the top.
I do see the colonialism argument, but I don't hold that position. Under the PD, if a world has 100,000s a year dying of preventable diseases because of a lack of medical tech or economic systems that prevent the use of the cures (like on earth) then I would argue that carefully planned interference would be a moral good and standing by would be, by definition, allowing preventable suffering.
@@Deadxman616 I'll have to watch more TOS--I got into Trek through TNG, really enjoyed DS9, and still haven't seen every TOS episode. Much less Voyager.
Ah Homeward, the ultimate Prime Directive episode. I knew there'd be rants and I looked forward to them. Only 6 minutes in and yeah, he is explaining what the PD is SUPPOSED to be! The show points this out. And our main characters make up BS excuses to watch the world burn. So gross.
Now I do think his original plan is bad. If they set up this bubble, they would have to babysit this planet for the rest of time to ensure it kept working and that the people stayed where they were supposed to. How do you keep them in that bubble forever without fundamentally affecting them? The alternative, moving them, is a much better plan and I guess that makes sense. He knew they wouldn't go for the better plan anyway so doesn't want to give it away so they could stop him.
I love Nikolai and he really helps buoy up the episode. But Chuck's right that it is a mess with many of our main characters acting like assholes because of the PD.
It's a frustrating episode because there are aspects I like but the terrible takes by main characters, especially Picard, suck. Like, that scene with Vorin. Suddenly Vorin was acting like Picard was for some weird reason and Picard was making the points Nikolai was! Without a hint of self-awareness.
If you mean ultimate Prime Directive episode in terms of how warped it has become then this episode has nothing on Dear Doctor in which not only do they leave an entire race to die but pat themselves on the back for it.
Just saw this episode for the first time and had to seek out a review because the plot seemed so absurd, cruel and morally backward from any other episode I could think of. I needed to hear others thoughts and opinions because this episode actually found a way to make me detest Picard and the rest of the crew. Glad I'm not alone, but seriously how did this script make the clear? I'm floored.
I have always agreed with SFDebris on his assessment of the prime directive (in it's TNG and later form), and I agree with his view on how it is handled in this episode. However, just one point about the "how can we grow, when everything that made us who we are is gone?" line.
For me this wasn't a mistake or error, it was perfectly understandable and quite poignant: In the real world, the natural environment has always been inexorably linked to our culture, not just in terms of myths and legends but even our languages and identities. The words people use in most languages to refer to themselves, the world around them, their tribe, their civilization are all informed by and rooted in the geography and environment in which they developed. The character in the episode wouldn't be able to view this in the way we can now, in a sort of sociological, historical, scientific way. For him and his people those myths and legends and connection to their homeworld are all still 'real'. Even though he knew they would have to go on a 'journey' and lose most of their possessions, for him they were still in the lands of their gods, or their heroes or ancestors or what not. Whatever creation myth they believe in was the creation myth of _that_ place. Imagine taking an ancient Egyptian not just out of the Nile flood plain, not just out of the desert but to another world where those things no longer exist, even far away and inaccessible, imagine the religions upheaval. It's tragic and wrongheaded but his choice of suicide in the face of such a loss of his entire framework for understanding his universe and place in it, is all together realistic I'd argue.
Now, would a Picard speech to argue the opposite, something very much like what is included in the video, have been a good addition? Absolutely yes in my opinion, I agree on that and the sentiment behind it completely. I just didn't have a problem with that line or the logic behind it.
no air is bad.
Yet again, I will point to Into Darkness for showing the good and bad of the prime directive.
I agree with sf and worf brother
Re; 19:05, so you’re saying Picard needed to be a bit of a Tyler Durdin? “You are not your job! You are not how much money you have in the bank…”
An episode that is even worse for this is the one where Data is in contact with someone from a dying planet. As in that episode the Enterprise DOES have the technology to save the planet, but Picard refuses to do it due to "but prime directive" until Data forces it. If Picard had his way he would have walked away knowing a planet was dying which he could have saved and done nothing about it. I usually like Picard but some episodes like these really portray him as an uncaring monster.
Do you still have the Demons and Terra Prime reviews?
Yup!
TNG Prime Directive episodes do a really good job at vilifying the Federation and especially Picard and the Enterprise all because the showrunners and writers of the time didn't fully understand what they were writing about. Even Gene himself interpreted his own rules in a dumb way. Although this worked for the best in the long run, as it led to them creating stories out of it.
An author creating something in their work that the consumer not just interprets differently, but more logically and better than the creator, is rare. But as Star Trek proves, it can happen.
So is it wrong I am more concerned about Worf and Nickolai's relationship? That was the story for me and I didn't even bother with the whole PD issue.
Finally! SFDebris is covering my single most hated episode of TNG, if not the entire franchise. The absolute dumbest and worst Prime Directive episode, often overlooked.
I still think the worst Prime Directive episode is the one where Archer and the doctor refuse to give a dying people a cure for their disease, because they want evolution to kill them all.
And the end of that story tries to claim this is the right decision, and it's why we need a Prime Directive.
For murderous eugenics.
By that episode's logic, Troi and Picard were completely in the right. And it makes you ask - how many people has Starfleet sadistically refused to help, while watching them live out their last days?
No wonder why we evolve into stupid salamanders.
I don't think there will ever be any concept more divisive among Trek fans than the Prime Directive 😟
This episode has always pissed me off. The Feddies don’t even consider saving the people because of dogma. Not logistics, not moral choices, DOGMA! Kirk or the Sisko wouldn’t have hesitated to do all they could. But the high and mighty Picard is all. “Well these things happen, I’m going to wring my hands anD act morally superior as this culture dies!
"See! One guy is really upset! He's traumatized forever, because he knew it was time for his species to die. By the way, have you ever heard of 20th century philosopher named Adolf Hitler? A book he wrote in prison helped us create the Prime Directive...."
@@juststatedtheobvious9633 He was famous for advocating strict non-interference with other cultures.
It is a good episode, that makes me loathe the Federation.
What's the point of having it - either in-universe or out - if it has the "I really don't feel like it" exemption? And I'm pretty sure that you've done "The End of Eternity" at some point, Chuck, which has a very compelling argument for being a stickler about non-interference rules.
It's not about having an "I can't be bothered" exemption clause, it's about the insanity of including a "you can't save people from extinction unless they have warp drive" clause. Especially since saving people from natural disasters is never suggested to be a PD violation in TOS. Kirk violated the PD all the time, sure, but it was usually at least mentioned that he was violating the PD when he did it, and I don't think it's ever suggested that Starfleet regulations prohibit saving pre-warp cultures from disasters outside their control. As I see it, you should at least be able to save people *secretly,* because there's absolutely no ethical justification for banning Starfleet crews from helping people avoid extinction due to events outside their control.
You can still have a PD episode of this nature without this clause if you, say, play it like Farscape's Different Destinations: the crew try to save a culture without contaminating it too much, only for the situation to spiral out of control due to bad luck, and the crew have to try and fix it without making it worse.
In modern Trek it honestly feels like the Prime Directive is a tool to justify cowardice. It exists solely to espouse the virtues of centrism, of how doing nothing what so ever is actually better than actually doing anything to improve things, lest it turn out in the outlier's chance of making things "worse". At it's heart in modern trek it's about preserving the status quo and then congratulating yourself for it, no matter how badly doing so makes untold numbers of people suffer.
The Prime Directive is literally, you see someone trapped inside of a burning building, and you choose to do nothing to help them, not even calling the fire department because for all you know that person is a serial killer, and then having the gall to congratulate yourself on the correct moral choice afterward.
Edit, it's actually worse than that. It's literally someone is trapped in a burning building, you can save them, at literally zero risk to yourself, and then you choose not to, because there's a slim chance that they might be a serial killer, and then congratulating yourself on making the right choice.
When you save an entire sapient species and they look at you like your a Nutzi.
Time to rethink much? XD
This one always frustrated me. Maybe Maxwell was right Picard, at least in this instance.
is the PD just a Starfleet rule, or is it actual federation law? that would just make this whole thing even stranger, Starfleet ship hell no, a private ship then it's cool...or is this one of the strange things where it appears Starfleet just leads the federation
It is kinda odd that charity organizations based in the Federation but working outside it could very well be illegal...
It's a shame that this episode went down the route it did because I did really like the character of Worf's brother. The whole prime directive thing bugs me, always has and always will.
What surprises me the most is that they never bother to show the negative consequences of saving civilizations. Look, if you are going to have this stupid rule because that's, apparently, how the prime directive works. Then at least give us the audience a reason to care for that sentiment. Try to show why they make a choice that is this drastic.
How many worlds have they found natives that are almost identical to Terran humans? How many of those world have an ancient myth about the gods bringing them to a new land?
I really do like this episode. Yes it's supposed to be about the prime directive, but it's also about the Fatal flaw in the prime directive. That's bureaucracy. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred those are excellent percentage. So what happens when that 1% comes up at one time when the rules just don't apply. You make an exception? Can't you always find a reason for an exception though? Cannibalism is Illegal. So what happens when you're on a boat in the middle of an ocean and you're all going to starve to death. Some people have starved to death in that situation and others have drawn Lots to see who would be sacrificed. Some people may have made the choice for others. However in the cannibal situation that's about the people involved. If you were in that situation you would have to figure it out. What if you're just a bureaucrat though? Do you risk everything you have accomplished for that one time the rules don't fit.
It requires everyone to behave like sociopaths, and it's convinced the sociopaths are right.
Your interpretation would make a better episode, but it doesn't actually exist.
It's not "ninety-nine times out of a hundred it's better to follow the Prime Directive," it's "ninety-nine times out of a hundred it's better to follow the Captain's orders." I can't remember even one Prime Directive episode in which slavish adherence to Federation dogma was actually the morally and ethically correct choice, even when the writer(s) of a particular episode tried to ham-fist it down the audiences' throats.
@@Philistine47 Does the Nazi planet count? Or does it not count since the violation of the directive happened before the Enterprise reaches the planet? Either way you are correct that nearly any time it comes up being misinterpreted.
@@juststatedtheobvious9633 And the difference between a bureaucrat and a sociopath is? I've seen too many Zero Tolerance policies to think there's much of a difference. One of the things all of the prime directive episodes are missing seems to be higher authority. Nobody ever reviews the decisions. Which is a pity it would have made a good clip show.
@@mikegates8993 That's a good catch, I wasn't thinking of that episode. I'd say it does count, since it's Starfleet's Prime Directive and not the Enterprise's.
It's still not a particularly strong argument in favor of the PD, though. "Don't re-create the National Socialist Workers' Party of Germany in an alien culture" is the kind of thing you really shouldn't need an actual _rule_ to prevent. Especially in a society that claims to be oh-so enlightened.
Ahb yes, the badly written episode that made our heroes monsters.
Worf meeting Siskos girlfriend !