Angel One?

[GalaxyClass1701]

Watching TNG Bluray which is amazing but have a question about thisepisode. Angel One is a prewarp culture aren't they breaking the primedirective by visiting the planet?

[Timo]

For one thing, nowhere in the episode is it stated that they are pre-warp. All we know is that they resemble mid-20th century Earth in some ways (but we see technologies more advanced than that in use in the episode itself), and that they warranted a Federation visit sixty years earlier already (which either means visiting planets from the time of the Lumiere brothers, Daimler and Edison is perfectly fine, or establishes that this world does not develop at exactly the same rate as Earth).

For another, nowhere in Star Trek is it stated that possession of warp drive would have anything to do with whether to make contact with a planet or not. That's just an urban myth, no doubt also believed by many Trek writers but thankfully never turned into actual onscreen dialogue.

Clearly, the folks on Angel One are familiar with the existence of the interstellar community and its alien cultures from the very start, that is, before Picard and friends arrive. There'd be no point not to contact them, then.

Timo Saloniemi

[Gojira]

In the episodes First Contact and Whose Watching the Watchers it seems that some stealth spying is done prior to first contact. But I did see Angel one as being a contradiction because they do seem to just pop in and visit a pre-warp society.

[Timo]

Why not pop in? They make it clear pretty early on in "Angel One" that this planet has already received interstellar visitors in the past, so there'd be little point to try and hide the existence of the Little Bald Men from the locals...

And lack of technology doesn't really need to have anything to do with whether a culture is aware of space aliens or not. It would be a situation analogous to, say, TOS "Friday's Child" where the Capellans are familiar with the existence of ETs (ECs, whatever) and thus can be visited by our heroes even though their highest technology apparently is a sharpened boomerang.

It is in "Justice" that there appears to be no explicit mention that the local Edo are veterans of interstellar contact and therefore can be freely visited... We just have to assume such a thing, seeing how little fuss these alien visitors cause on Edo overall.

The funny thing about "Angel One" is that the Prime Directive does not prevent open contact with the locals - but it does prevent the removal of Federation citizens from the planet against their will!

Timo Saloniemi

[Trekker4747]

I think the "pre-Warp" qualifier is too strictly enforced by fans. We've only seen ONE instance of this in the series (First Contact) where Starfleet officers step and introduce themselves to a society that has just achieved Warp Drive.

But I think there could be other reasons in there too, like a society already aware of alien civilizations. This could be the case for Angel One where it obviously was aware of alien cultures and even had the means for two-way visual transmission with orbiting spacecraft. Just because they personally may not have had warp drive or an operating space flight system doesn't mean they can't be visited without harming the PD.

If they're aware of alien civilization, and have been visited by them, "cultural contamination" has occurred so anything Starfleet does won't have an impact.

.... Unless they go down there and challenge all of their laws and ways of living and such.