TNG had some amazing episodes and some terrible ones, but this one is near the very bottom. As someone else said, it felt like the writing process was a “let’s make Wesley guilty and figure out how they get him out of it” and they worked backwards from there.
The law on the planet is stupid and it feels like they are violating the prime directive just by being there because the civilization can’t be warp-capable. They don’t know they’re being ruled by a computer in orbit because they think it’s a god. The lady Picard terrifies by beaming onto the satellite made that clear.
So basically even their presence on the planet is pretty inexcusable
The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules. It is a philosophy, and a very correct one. History has proved again and again that non interference should be inversely proportional to how hot the native species is.
TNG had some amazing episodes and some terrible ones, but this one is near the very bottom. As someone else said, it felt like the writing process was a “let’s make Wesley guilty and figure out how they get him out of it” and they worked backwards from there.
The law on the planet is stupid and it feels like they are violating the prime directive just by being there because the civilization can’t be warp-capable. They don’t know they’re being ruled by a computer in orbit because they think it’s a god. The lady Picard terrifies by beaming onto the satellite made that clear.
So basically even their presence on the planet is pretty inexcusable
The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules. It is a philosophy, and a very correct one. History has proved again and again that non interference should be inversely proportional to how hot the native species is.
Yeah, I really cannot come up with an ethical reason for them to be on that planet openly as Starfleet officers.