Justice
- Thread starter apostle83
- Start date
It was that week. Frankly, the Prime Directive varies in its coherence and specifics. Here, it only means they have to respect their civilization... but beaming down and talking about themselves, engaging in carnal pursuits and even lecturing if necessary are all okay.
Because they wanted shore leave.
Good Will Riker
Admiral
This was not established in canon until the airing of the episode "First Contact" in the 4th season.
To be pedantic, we don't know if the Edo folks were indeed ignorant of warp drive or space aliens. We see them inhabit fairly standard industrial-age buildings with fairly standard modern amenities, no different from what the people of Earth have in the 24th century. Their global police, reputedly small in numbers, is immediately on the spot at Wesley's transgression, implying advanced communications if not advanced transportation. As for dialogue, their technology level is never quite commented upon.
Sure, they don't have transporters, and the girl they beam up seems a bit overwhelmed by being aboard a starship, but apparently she knows very well what God looks like, even though God is a spaceborne apparatus that cannot be seen from the surface. And previously, Picard asked them whether they knew what he just saw on orbit around their planet, apparently assuming they would have been to said orbit.
As the episode opens, the crew has made a fairly detailed survey of the planet - Tasha has eavesdropped on their transmissions and found out everything about their laws (except for the one thing that mattered, the one thing that went unsaid), and an away team has been sent down to establish further facts and then make contact - very "First Contact" style of stuff, even if the timetable is faster than with the Malcorians in that episode. It's entirely possible, then, that our heroes have already verified the PD-compatibility of the culture before making contact.
Timo Saloniemi
Sure, they don't have transporters, and the girl they beam up seems a bit overwhelmed by being aboard a starship, but apparently she knows very well what God looks like, even though God is a spaceborne apparatus that cannot be seen from the surface. And previously, Picard asked them whether they knew what he just saw on orbit around their planet, apparently assuming they would have been to said orbit.
As the episode opens, the crew has made a fairly detailed survey of the planet - Tasha has eavesdropped on their transmissions and found out everything about their laws (except for the one thing that mattered, the one thing that went unsaid), and an away team has been sent down to establish further facts and then make contact - very "First Contact" style of stuff, even if the timetable is faster than with the Malcorians in that episode. It's entirely possible, then, that our heroes have already verified the PD-compatibility of the culture before making contact.
Timo Saloniemi
The global police only police one 'zone' for a period of time, though. We don't know how large or how small that zone is - could have just been the immediately surrounding countryside.
Whatever the 'zone' is, it had already moved on by the time the TNG crew punched them up, which is why they observe had it still been the zone all of them, not just Wesley, would face death.
I thought the episode was even less definitive on that. There might be more than one Zone at a time, and the period of time the Zone was enforced was not given as one day, but was kept secret.
All that would just make greater the need for the police to have excellent communications and a means of rapidly moving from Zone to Zone. All the more so when they weren't exactly in a state of high alert: before Wesley's transgression, they apparently hadn't been scrambled for centuries... Could the planet afford to keep tens of thousands of people idly waiting at their local district stations, or would they rather employ just a few hundred, quickly deployed using advanced transportation?
Perhaps we might also wish to go for an interpretation that would make it the least unlikely for Wesley to happen to be in a Zone that very day... The odds must be astronomically against that if there's only one Zone that doesn't even extend beyond the broken greenhouses to the location of the fisticuffs (spatially or temporally).
Timo Saloniemi
All that would just make greater the need for the police to have excellent communications and a means of rapidly moving from Zone to Zone. All the more so when they weren't exactly in a state of high alert: before Wesley's transgression, they apparently hadn't been scrambled for centuries... Could the planet afford to keep tens of thousands of people idly waiting at their local district stations, or would they rather employ just a few hundred, quickly deployed using advanced transportation?
Perhaps we might also wish to go for an interpretation that would make it the least unlikely for Wesley to happen to be in a Zone that very day... The odds must be astronomically against that if there's only one Zone that doesn't even extend beyond the broken greenhouses to the location of the fisticuffs (spatially or temporally).
Timo Saloniemi
Tasha was too busy dropping hats to worry about the laws(they make love at the drop of a hat-any hat!) Besides, if she'd found out about the death penalty, there'd have been no episode! Which probably would have been better than what we got.
If memory serves, they said 'still the Zone' or something to that effect, implying the area had been the Zone when Wesley committed his crime... but wasn't just a few moments later.
I guess on the plus side, there's no real sense in the episode of a 'planetary' society. Maybe there's no more than a few hundred of these people all-in-all, living in the same small Edenic paradise. If that's the case, you could have relatively small and moving zones.
On the subject of technological advancement, they seemed a little uncertain about the concept of space travel. They accepted that Picard and co. 'came from the sky', but were astonished when they discovered they shared an orbit with God - which must make them, in themselves, gods. They live in a paradise in two senses of the word: Lush and idyllic, but also naive and backward.
Implicitly so, yes, but not so explicitly that we couldn't wriggle ourselves out of these writer-dug plot holes...
The idea of yet another one-village culture would explain a great many things, but should raise the suspicions of our heroes. How did the natives build the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant with the resources of a local community only? Having just concluded a colonization mission, our heroes should from the beginning suspect that the Edo were also a transplanted society. And if little technology was observed, then they should immediately suspect the presence of an outside agent of some sort.
Timo Saloniemi
The idea of yet another one-village culture would explain a great many things, but should raise the suspicions of our heroes. How did the natives build the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant with the resources of a local community only? Having just concluded a colonization mission, our heroes should from the beginning suspect that the Edo were also a transplanted society. And if little technology was observed, then they should immediately suspect the presence of an outside agent of some sort.
Timo Saloniemi
It was not.
The Prime Directive absolutely applied.
There's no way any contact should have been made between Starfleet and the Kama Sutra planet.
In fact, the whole episode is idiotic.
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