This leans into a critic, Picard Season 1 and Lower Decks tries to address: TOS and TNG have this Alien of the Week, First Contact attitude: I came, messed around, and left. Sure, given that “I don’t care about consequences” attitude, not messing too much is a good idea. But maybe the given is the problem and eye level relationship just works differently.
As far as TNG goes, a lot of the first contact stuff from S1 was a lot of already sufficiently advanced civilizations that are capable of at least local space travel and the Enterprise would openly announce like “Hey this is the Enterprise, we’re with the Federation, lets do diplomacy.” But whenever they interacted with less technologically advanced species they would usually do so much more covertly, wearing replicated disguises.
This leans into a critic, Picard Season 1 and Lower Decks tries to address: TOS and TNG have this Alien of the Week, First Contact attitude: I came, messed around, and left. Sure, given that “I don’t care about consequences” attitude, not messing too much is a good idea. But maybe the given is the problem and eye level relationship just works differently.
As far as TNG goes, a lot of the first contact stuff from S1 was a lot of already sufficiently advanced civilizations that are capable of at least local space travel and the Enterprise would openly announce like “Hey this is the Enterprise, we’re with the Federation, lets do diplomacy.” But whenever they interacted with less technologically advanced species they would usually do so much more covertly, wearing replicated disguises.