I did. At least one was fully impacted.
Nope, I just watched the whole chase straight through a second time, and unless you're referring to the aforementioned gunner's impact with the ground in the first rollover, no Kolarans were hit. Data's phaser shot doesn't hit anyone (freeze frame reveals that it goes just to the side of the buggy he fires toward), and all of Worf's shots hit the dirt. The two buggies that flip are not directly hit, but are flipped by the eruption of the ground just ahead of or beneath them.
More irritatingly, it was introduced to just have a driving scene. It doesn't feel organic, it feels very out of place with TNG, and is just an odd scene over all. I find it unnecessary.
I don't dispute any of that. If we were talking about the
quality of the scene, I'd be the first to say it was stupid and pointless. My ideal fan edit of
Nemesis would cut back to the
Enterprise immediately after B-4's head is discovered (and would restore the plot-crucial earlier scene of Picard and Data's toast in the ready room).
I merely dispute the oft-trotted-out claim that fleeing from the Kolarans was a Prime Directive violation. Again, we're talking about a choice between two scenarios:
- A bunch of Kolaran troops come back in from the desert with some crazy tale about finding spacemen that ran away from them and shot at them with ray guns and flew off in a flying saucer. They have no physical evidence beyond a few mysterious scorch marks on the desert floor, so at best it just gets filed away somewhere with a hundred other unverifiable UFO reports, and the soldiers who saw the aliens probably learn not to talk about it if they don't want to get laughed at.
- A bunch of Kolaran troops come back in from the desert with a tale about finding spacemen that sat there passively and allowed themselves to be gunned down, and they proceed to prove that tale by displaying the shot-up corpses of a human, a Klingon, and an android (and extra head), along with a captured spacecraft and ground vehicle built by a technology centuries ahead of their own. The bodies and vehicles are taken to the nearest government research base, the tech is reverse-engineered, and in a few decades you've got a warlike state using Starfleet-derived tech to conquer its enemies, then expand into space seeking new conquests.
Now, you tell me: If your objective is to
minimize cultural disruption, which of those two options would you choose?
Sure, arguably going down to the planet without Kolaran disguises was itself a reckless move in PD terms; but they were going to a desert area for just a brief time, and they didn't expect to be spotted by anyone. Once they
were spotted, though -- more to the point, once they were spotted and immediately fired on with machine guns -- their only options were to fight back and create a slight disruption, or to not fight back and create a massive, massive disruption. So fighting back was the only available way to
honor the Prime Directive in that context.
