Re-watching TNG on SciFi Channel - they've just started season 2 - I've realized what my biggest gripe with season 1 is. People usually mention things like poor character development, preachiness, Wesley saving the day, outdated look, poor acting by actors other than Stewart - and while all those things stand, I rarely see people mention what's the most glaring problem to me: the fact that almost every alien race encountered are portrayed as incredibly stupid, both in the sense that they are laughable, one-dimensional caricatures, and in the sense that they are acting like complete idiots (whether this was the writer's intent, or it was because the writers themselves didn't think things through and wrote very clumsy scripts).
I suspect that this is why people often say that the Enterprise crew were arrogant, which is not quite true. It's not that they were intentionally portrayed as arrogant, it's that pretty much every alien they meet comes off as being so much intellectually or morally inferior to them, so the viewer is forced to feel that the Federation and the Enterprise crew are superior to them. Which is ironic, since the attitude of the crew, and the show itself, is supposed to be that of respecting and accepting various cultures. But the writers' idea of presenting alien and different cultures was apparently to make them look absurd, and have our heroes show their tolerance by actually talking to them like adults and pitying the poor backward unevolved bumpkins, and occasionally looking at each other and shrugging "ah, those silly people" (as they literally do in "Lonely Among Us". There's a lot of that "humans are the best" attitude in the writing itself. Unless we're speaking about 20th century Humans, that is. When they appear in "The Neutral Zone", they are the silliest of all the silly one-dimensional caricatures, only this time the Enterprise crew is free to show their contempt and arrogance outright.
(Come to think of it, that's one good thing about "Samaritan Snare" - for once the Enterprise crew meet a race who seem like idiots and they actually treat them as idiots, and then they turn out to be rather crafty and pull one over them!
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Among the most obviously silly cultures are the snickering goblin-like Ferengi from "The Last Outpost", the California beach boys and girls of "Justice", the furry aliens and their enemies from "Lonely Among Us", the Ligonians from "Code of Honor" and this is also where the Klingons were made from smart and threatening adversaries into unintelligent savages: the worst culprit is "Hide and Q", which portrayed Klingons as acting literally like cavemen or wild animals (the scene with Worf and his would-be mate), while Q calls Worf "microbrain".
No doubt, the concept of many of these cultures stems from TOS cultures, with its Planets of Hats - space nazis, space Romans, space gangsters, space hippies... But TNG season 1 aliens reached new levels of stupidity, with a particularly jarring repeated gag: for some reason, a bunch of aliens love to tell people they've just met how stupid, barbaric or arrogant they find them. I get what the writers were trying to do - they thought it was so cool to show that aliens who don't look like humans would find humans as ugly as the humans find them, or would have found human culture as strange and incomprehensible as the other way round. Now, this could work if only the aliens were portrayed as saying that to each other, or in some other similar way. But the problem is, having them tell that to the faces of the Enterprise crew is very clumsy writing, and doesn't make sense.
Example: the Ferengi daimon in "The Last Outpost" seems to think that the first thing he says to an alien captain is that his race are really as ugly as he's heard? Unless he thought that this was an effective psychological ploy, that's just stupid. But OK, the Ferengi daimon might have been a cranky, dumb asshole who thought he could afford rudeness since the Federation vessel was adversarial anyway. But what about the leading diplomat of the furry aliens in "Lonely Among Us"? Upon learning that Humans don't eat natural meat, only replicated meat, he exclaims "How barbaric" (to a lot of shrugging, grinning and eye-rolling by Riker and Yar)!
Um, and he is diplomat? Why the hell would a diplomat casually offend his hosts at an important meeting? Unless he's a moron. 
If TNG had a regular Vulcan character, they would have to say "Your behavior is not logical" every 5 minutes - and they'd be completely justified!
And this type of stupidity is not limited just to backward bumpkins - it extends even to some of the beings who are supposedly equal or superior to Humans in intelligence and development. Like the crystalline lifeform in "Home Soil", whose apparently thinks that the first thing it should say to Humans is that they are "ugly, ugly bags of water". But later the writers make it call Humans "too arrogant" - well, that really makes sense coming from someone who tells aliens how ugly they are, and generally thinks it has the right to give them lessons about the overall character of their race.
Which brings me to another problem - some of those aliens who aren't necessarily stupid, come off as incredibly hypocritical, thanks to the habit of Trek writers to make 'superior' lifeforms criticize Humans and lecture them on their arrogance, aggressiveness etc. What's even worse is that this doesn't seem to have been the writers' intent - again, it was clumsy writing. This will be repeated with the lifeform in season 2 "Where Silence Has Lease", and is also the reason why Q never seemed to have any weight as a moral arbiter, besides the fact that he is portrayed from the start as 'morally challenged' trickster who doesn't even stick to his own rules. In short, if it's not intellectually inferior, a non-Federation race in early TNG has to be obviously morally inferior to Our Heroes.
All this makes me long for some intelligent aliens, which one has to wait for the later seasons to see - be it antagonists who aren't stupid and whose attitudes, however different from the Federation, make sense from their point of view (like the Romulans, Cardassians or even the Borg), or non-adversarial races in need of help who aren't portrayed condescendingly as oh those poor backward bumpkins (like the Bajorans).
I suspect that this is why people often say that the Enterprise crew were arrogant, which is not quite true. It's not that they were intentionally portrayed as arrogant, it's that pretty much every alien they meet comes off as being so much intellectually or morally inferior to them, so the viewer is forced to feel that the Federation and the Enterprise crew are superior to them. Which is ironic, since the attitude of the crew, and the show itself, is supposed to be that of respecting and accepting various cultures. But the writers' idea of presenting alien and different cultures was apparently to make them look absurd, and have our heroes show their tolerance by actually talking to them like adults and pitying the poor backward unevolved bumpkins, and occasionally looking at each other and shrugging "ah, those silly people" (as they literally do in "Lonely Among Us". There's a lot of that "humans are the best" attitude in the writing itself. Unless we're speaking about 20th century Humans, that is. When they appear in "The Neutral Zone", they are the silliest of all the silly one-dimensional caricatures, only this time the Enterprise crew is free to show their contempt and arrogance outright.
(Come to think of it, that's one good thing about "Samaritan Snare" - for once the Enterprise crew meet a race who seem like idiots and they actually treat them as idiots, and then they turn out to be rather crafty and pull one over them!
)Among the most obviously silly cultures are the snickering goblin-like Ferengi from "The Last Outpost", the California beach boys and girls of "Justice", the furry aliens and their enemies from "Lonely Among Us", the Ligonians from "Code of Honor" and this is also where the Klingons were made from smart and threatening adversaries into unintelligent savages: the worst culprit is "Hide and Q", which portrayed Klingons as acting literally like cavemen or wild animals (the scene with Worf and his would-be mate), while Q calls Worf "microbrain".
No doubt, the concept of many of these cultures stems from TOS cultures, with its Planets of Hats - space nazis, space Romans, space gangsters, space hippies... But TNG season 1 aliens reached new levels of stupidity, with a particularly jarring repeated gag: for some reason, a bunch of aliens love to tell people they've just met how stupid, barbaric or arrogant they find them. I get what the writers were trying to do - they thought it was so cool to show that aliens who don't look like humans would find humans as ugly as the humans find them, or would have found human culture as strange and incomprehensible as the other way round. Now, this could work if only the aliens were portrayed as saying that to each other, or in some other similar way. But the problem is, having them tell that to the faces of the Enterprise crew is very clumsy writing, and doesn't make sense.
Example: the Ferengi daimon in "The Last Outpost" seems to think that the first thing he says to an alien captain is that his race are really as ugly as he's heard? Unless he thought that this was an effective psychological ploy, that's just stupid. But OK, the Ferengi daimon might have been a cranky, dumb asshole who thought he could afford rudeness since the Federation vessel was adversarial anyway. But what about the leading diplomat of the furry aliens in "Lonely Among Us"? Upon learning that Humans don't eat natural meat, only replicated meat, he exclaims "How barbaric" (to a lot of shrugging, grinning and eye-rolling by Riker and Yar)!
Um, and he is diplomat? Why the hell would a diplomat casually offend his hosts at an important meeting? Unless he's a moron. If TNG had a regular Vulcan character, they would have to say "Your behavior is not logical" every 5 minutes - and they'd be completely justified!
And this type of stupidity is not limited just to backward bumpkins - it extends even to some of the beings who are supposedly equal or superior to Humans in intelligence and development. Like the crystalline lifeform in "Home Soil", whose apparently thinks that the first thing it should say to Humans is that they are "ugly, ugly bags of water".
But later the writers make it call Humans "too arrogant" - well, that really makes sense coming from someone who tells aliens how ugly they are, and generally thinks it has the right to give them lessons about the overall character of their race.Which brings me to another problem - some of those aliens who aren't necessarily stupid, come off as incredibly hypocritical, thanks to the habit of Trek writers to make 'superior' lifeforms criticize Humans and lecture them on their arrogance, aggressiveness etc. What's even worse is that this doesn't seem to have been the writers' intent - again, it was clumsy writing. This will be repeated with the lifeform in season 2 "Where Silence Has Lease", and is also the reason why Q never seemed to have any weight as a moral arbiter, besides the fact that he is portrayed from the start as 'morally challenged' trickster who doesn't even stick to his own rules. In short, if it's not intellectually inferior, a non-Federation race in early TNG has to be obviously morally inferior to Our Heroes.
All this makes me long for some intelligent aliens, which one has to wait for the later seasons to see - be it antagonists who aren't stupid and whose attitudes, however different from the Federation, make sense from their point of view (like the Romulans, Cardassians or even the Borg), or non-adversarial races in need of help who aren't portrayed condescendingly as oh those poor backward bumpkins (like the Bajorans).
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