I offered up my opinions. I think most folks think the TNG version of the Prime Directive is pretty callous and not in the spirit of Star Trek.
20 most Cringeworthy Scenes in the New Trek films???
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I offered up my opinions. I think most folks think the TNG version of the Prime Directive is pretty callous and not in the spirit of Star Trek.
And I agree to that. What I offered up was perhaps an extreme end result to the foibles of the PD as seen by TNG's era. :-)
I don't think anyone was attacking your ideas, personally. It's just that it's impossible to predict what affect interference in a culture will have, good or bad. Seeing the Enterprise could have the effect you said, or it could have an opposite effect, or it could have no affect at all. Who really knows, and who can assign realistic probabilities to the outcomes? One can't.
That said, I'd say the presumption Picard uses for total non-interference (it can turn out bad as often or more than good) is a false premise.
The most obvious reason for the prime directive was to prohibit what McCoy fantasized in B&C that he'd like to do someday, beam down to a world and say, "Behold! I am the Archangel Gabriel."
In "Dear Doctor" basically the origin episodes for the Prime Directive Phlox basically condemns an entire civilization to death by a virus he can cure becuase the other sentient species on the planet that wasn't very advanced is starting to advance more so he feels that evolution is weeding the more advanced race out so the less advanced one can inherit the planet.
Basically Social Darwinism, and the sort of crap the Nazis would throw around to justify exterminating ethnic groups they didn't like.
Yeah. As much as Dear Doctor was a moving episode on its surface, the conclusion was terribly messed up. Basically, because one group of people was racist to another group of people and treating them as inferior, it is OK to let nature weed the first one out because they have a genetic defect, and that utterly random genetic defect was somehow supposed to be there to solve the original injustice. By condemning billions to die no less. I'm sure blowing the planet with red matter would have spared both sides from their suffering too, and I am not sure why nobody suggested that...
It was a disease, and the Phlox as a doctor should have helped, and that moral argument was totally off. It should have been him who had to stay awake and reflect on his own ideals of non-interference and reconsidered them to do the right thing, not Archer.
No doubt that the mistreatment of the Menk should have left everyone and the audience uncomfortable, but not to the point of OKing the death of billions. And if they were really concerned about it, the crew had leverage in terms of their cure. It's interference, but at least you're doing it by letting billions die, which is not only interference, it is directly deciding the destiny of everybody on the planet. Not to mention that the entire world had a genetic defect that could be cured with the DNA of the "inferior". Who's to say that wouldn't have sparked the needed shift in societal attitudes? Phlox could have stopped an extinction, the suffering of billions and social injustice simultaneously, and I don't think any of his arguments justified the choice he and Archer made.
If that's what a strict Prime Directive leads to, a strict Prime Directive is probably not that great an idea. I wouldn't want the reboot to live up to it. (But then we would miss all the voices of reason in the ready room, and Data proving himself to be more humane than humans for a billionth time.)
Hi, Franklin,
Yeah, total non-interference, in truth I feel is unavoidable. :-)
It's one thing to save a primitive society on a planet from an incoming asteroid. ... they may never have the slightest idea that they were ever in any danger in the first place. And if they did look to the skies and see some inexplicable event in the heavens, well, it's not quite like they saw precisely what happened or what brought it about.
And if there was more visual contact involved....any number of things could've occurred in the aftermath. As you rightly pointed out, it's really hard to predict what, if anything, could happen.
That's the understanding I was hoping folk would have with the possible aftermath I laid out. Just one in a number of possibilities. .. not an absolute. ... but definitely an extreme.
Yeah, total non-interference, in truth I feel is unavoidable. :-)
It's one thing to save a primitive society on a planet from an incoming asteroid. ... they may never have the slightest idea that they were ever in any danger in the first place. And if they did look to the skies and see some inexplicable event in the heavens, well, it's not quite like they saw precisely what happened or what brought it about.
And if there was more visual contact involved....any number of things could've occurred in the aftermath. As you rightly pointed out, it's really hard to predict what, if anything, could happen.
That's the understanding I was hoping folk would have with the possible aftermath I laid out. Just one in a number of possibilities. .. not an absolute. ... but definitely an extreme.
Yes, for the heinous of daring to save an entire planet.
Seriously Pike's whole "not playing god thing" is a bunch hypocritical bullshit.
the Prime Directive is all about deciding a planets destiny based on how advanced they are.
How is that not playing god?
In fact how is that not freaking evil?
And I'm supposed to think that its a good thing that Kirk is punished for basically not being a complete monster why exactly.
Regardless of our own personal politics in the real world, he's still subject to the rules of Starfleet and the Federation and he was punished as such in the fictional world.
My point was to counter another poster who thought it was cringeworthy that he got away scott-free. He didn't, and I pointed it out. Now, if you find the rationale for his punishment cringeworthy, then have at it, but the point remains is that someone thought he Kirk got away without consequence when he didn't.
"Suspending disbelief" and "checking your brain at the door" are different things. Not that I don't think you know that, but I think you're mixing them up here.
"Suspending disbelief" for fictional creeations, like letters of transit in Casablanca for isntance, is no big thing as long as the story plays by the rules it sets up. (Haven't seen Casablanca in a while but I don't remember it too obviously fluffing anything in this sense.) "Checking your brain at the door" is what you have to do when there are no evident rules. Trek has veered between those two poles over the years, but it's pure revisionism to suggest it's always just inhabited the latter.
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I guess in the greater context of what I was saying, my point was when you get down to it, I would maintain that "Star Trek" has always been rather silly at its core and therefore hard to take too seriously. For example, TVH is a very entertaining movie, but stop for a minute and really think about what's happening, there. It's absurd. It's even kind of stupid. But it's well executed absurdity, and consistent with the kinds of things Trek has done, before. It's also fun.
I've never sat down in front of the TV or in a theater seat expecting anything other than a nice romp with some characters I like. Bear in mind I have over 6000 posts on these boards to prove that don't over-think it.
You're not a sixteen-year-old kid of the 21st century, so you wouldn't care, but the kids of today care about said movies just as you cared about the teen-orientated movies of your youth, and I cared about the ones of mine (Pretty In Pink & Some Kind of Wonderful are two favorites from the 1980's of mine.) And they will have nostalgia for Twilight and She's All That when they get older, most likely.
Again, question of degree. Trek's always had its goofy elements -- dialed up in some stories, down in others -- but also worked because it evolved a consistent enough set of rough rules to be inviting and believable as a setting. (Yes, even TVH, goofy premise and all, works because it abides by the rules of storytelling. Aside from the familiar Star Trek technologies and tropes, it tells us what the specific rules of its scenario and the goals are, and it sticks to those. That's the difference between "suspending disbelief" and "switching off your brain.") The better outings do that better, the worse do it worse.
Can't say I agree. There's lots of things I loved when I was a kid that were just bad, and then I grew up, and I realized how bad they were.
Well, it seems that that's what Buzzfeed is for these days.
But I'm also very, very glad that we don't live in an era where teenage beach party movies are the norm, either.
TNG in general isn't exactly in the spirit of Star Trek...
Rewatching the B&B series' again, I realize what flat, stereotypical, and contrived (and sometimes unlikable) characters there are. And that's just the main ones!
<glares at Berman era DVD collection with contempt>
Funny how things change. I once would have, (and did) sacrificed myself on the Alter of Loyalty to defend them. Now I'm contemplating having a bonfire with them.
Funny how things change. I once would have, (and did) sacrificed myself on the Alter of Loyalty to defend them. Now I'm contemplating having a bonfire with them.
Yes, for the heinous of daring to save an entire planet.
Seriously Pike's whole "not playing god thing" is a bunch hypocritical bullshit.
the Prime Directive is all about deciding a planets destiny based on how advanced they are.
How is that not playing god?
In fact how is that not freaking evil?
And I'm supposed to think that its a good thing that Kirk is punished for basically not being a complete monster why exactly.
Regardless of our own personal politics in the real world, he's still subject to the rules of Starfleet and the Federation and he was punished as such in the fictional world.
My point was to counter another poster who thought it was cringeworthy that he got away scott-free. He didn't, and I pointed it out. Now, if you find the rationale for his punishment cringeworthy, then have at it, but the point remains is that someone thought he Kirk got away without consequence when he didn't.
I'm thinking that Orci and the other writers were allegedly fans of TNG and probably thought of their version of the PD.
Maybe they think that Kirk 'got away' with his dubious PD 'violations' because of some creative report writing by him and Spock.
And in nuTrek Spock hadn't got that memo yet.
Sorry, that went over my head. What's that referring to?
Also, in regards to other peoples posts, do most people really think the Prime Directive is callous? It's a no brainer and common sense, it's essentially scientific method...
The TNG version is callous. We can help but we'd rather sit here and watch you die. I don't see anything scientific about it.
It's worth noting that Pike in Into Darkness subscribes explicitly to the TNG version: "I wouldn't have risked my first officer's life in the first place. You were supposed to survey a planet, not alter its destiny!"
It has problems. The notion that planets have an abstract Destiny that observers can interfere with is pretty dodgy, and letting people die when it's in your power to save them is worse. OTOH it was an upside of TNG that Picard really treated the Prime Directive as the mortally serious commitment TOS initially claimed it was, and it's not like a better rule respecting the independence and rights of primitive cultures is necessarily easy to formulate.
It has problems. The notion that planets have an abstract Destiny that observers can interfere with is pretty dodgy, and letting people die when it's in your power to save them is worse. OTOH it was an upside of TNG that Picard really treated the Prime Directive as the mortally serious commitment TOS initially claimed it was, and it's not like a better rule respecting the independence and rights of primitive cultures is necessarily easy to formulate.
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