What would kirk have done?

[Marsden]

And in several thousand years the whole thing will be dismissed as a myth and be fodder for alien conspiracy guys.

You know, I was just thinking yesterday that I'm in the wrong line of work. H2 channel is almost all Ancient Astronaut stuff anymore I heard the phrase "Ancient Astronaut Theorists" so many times.

Whatever they are being paid, it's too much. I want in on that action.

 

[The Old Mixer]

Kirk's actions supplanted a whole belief system.

In either timeline, James Kirk would call that "Tuesday".

 

[Hartzilla2007]

Kirk's actions supplanted a whole belief system.

In either timeline, James Kirk would call that "Tuesday".

True, at least in Into Darkness he didn't talk their god to death.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Kirk's actions supplanted a whole belief system.

In either timeline, James Kirk would call that "Tuesday".

True, at least in Into Darkness he didn't talk their god to death.

He was on a tight schedule.

 

[Timo]

Kirk had amnesia in "The Paradise Syndrome". All the futility was by ever-logical Spock.

The mission always was to deflect the asteroid, even before our heroes beamed down and Kirk got lost in the basement. And even at this point, all the heroes already knew about the "asteroid alley" thing and the futility of deflecting merely one of those. Kirk really was willing to wrestle with giants for the slightest excuse...

There might be 2 reasons why Boraalans weren't placed in stasis.
1) Maybe there wasn't information about the Boraalan body, placing them in a standard stasis "field" might have killed them, so without more studying, there was no way to take the risk.
2) It would've made a boring episode.

0) It wasn't Picard's decision or desire to do anything about the Boraalans in the first place. Only Nicolai was doing anything, and he didn't have the resources or clearance to try anything as complex as stasis (which in VOY requires either the careful setting up of sarcophagi for all the patients, or advanced longterm trickery with the transporter).

Picard says at the end something along the lines of "Did we cause as much damage as the stellar fragment"?

Well, that's a pretty valid question. The answer might be very close to "yes" - these people had continued eating, breathing and breeding because they believed in certain narrow-minded ideals. Thanks to the help from Picard's crew, their entire society might well be dead in one generation.

What would Kirk have done? The problem of the week was solved by applying 24th century technology through a very large and powerful starship. Kirk would have had access to neither. So Kirk would probably have organized an evacuation somehow. Could he have devised a means to keep these people happy and free to follow their own path? That's not our Kirk - he forces people to abandon their dreams and dance to the Federation tune. So there wouldn't even have been a problem that particular week, just a standard evacuation mission.

Ship's captains should be trained to know when the prime directive applies and when it doesn't, and have the personal wisdom to know the difference.

But that, supposedly, is the very purpose of the Prime Directive - to stop starship captains from ruling the universe however they see fit. The rule doesn't protect native societies from Harry Mudds: civilians are exempted. It just ties the hands of starship captains, and justly so, or else there would be no point in having a Federation government. Conversely, the government is the one with the mandate to think, so it and only it can waive the PD.

Beyond this, it's just a matter of proper delegation. The Federation Council can't be on the spot every time to solve all crises hands-on like some North Korean great leader. So the skippers have to be given some powers of decision. But the limits can't be soft, and the erring must always be on the side of caution, or else too many societies will be destroyed per week - sometimes many times over, as every visiting starship skipper has his own ideas about what is a proper way of life and what is not.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[suarezguy]

Another one I wanted to roll my eyes about Picard was "The Masterpiece Society". They helped the colony that practiced genetic engineering to create a perfect society, tried to help them keep their biodome from being destroyed by a stellar fragment. Some of them wanted to leave with the Enterprise. Picard says at the end something along the lines of "Did we cause as much damage as the stellar fragment"?

That was probably him at his most extreme/annoying.

Kirk often intervenes with societies he meets but often only after he has been threatened.
I think "The Paradise Syndrome" was the only time where a society faced a natural disaster and he tried and ultimately succeeded in saving the people through technology, not intentionally interfering with their internal development. The other thing that was closest to a natural disaster was "The Mark of Gideon" (there he offered information on contraception, seeing nothing wrong with helping a society change if its leaders wanted it to, but had to be forced to give the kind of help that the aliens wanted).
While Kirk regards the Prime Directive in less absolute terms than Picard, I think he intervenes less extremely than many remembers (aside from, yes, the computer-run societies). For example in "Patterns of Force" he intervenes to end persecution but in a pretty minimal way and in response to earlier intervention. In "The Cloud Minders" he forces a pretty moderate reform. I think it's unclear what he would do if he had a choice between letting a society perish or drastically change it by revealing advanced technology.

 

[Timo]

Kirk often intervenes with societies he meets but often only after he has been threatened.

Which, according to his own words, means he has broken his "most solemn oath" and should instead have given "his life, even his entire crew". He sounds like a pretty selfish guy, to claim that he has the right to self-defense when his oath clearly says he does not.

For example in "Patterns of Force" he intervenes to end persecution but in a pretty minimal way and in response to earlier intervention.

Which may actually mean he didn't end persecution at all. He just watched Melakon kill Gill and then get killed - an apparently natural course of succession for the retro-Nazi society - and then left. If Kirk really believed that Gill was fundamentally good but had been corrupted by the power in his hands (a nonsensical theory in face of the evidence, but that's what he seemed to believe), then he should also believe that Eneg and Daras (or whichever survived their mutual fight to death) would soon be setting up concentration camps and gas chambers.

I think it's unclear what he would do if he had a choice between letting a society perish or drastically change it by revealing advanced technology.

Indeed. But he rather freely revealed advanced technology in the backstory of "A Private Little War", so there's precedent to him thinking that many forbidden things are justified at least on small scale. Since there's also precedent to him unleashing upheavals on a massive scale, combining the two doesn't sound at all unlikely. Which makes it rather sanctimonious that he'd get angry at Ron Tracey for doing that in "Omega Glory".

Timo Saloniemi