Apparently this episode is about the Prime Directive, but, like, I don't get how it could be.
The Directive just says you can't interfere with others, but that was broken as soon as the Enterprise saved the freighter's crew, and that crew was dying otherwise. We're past the point of non-interference now, and every decision after that is an active one. The question then is how do you undo that interference? Well, surely you just kill the aliens, right?
Right? Send them delivery boys to alien heaven and get lit off the shipment left behind! That is undoing the damage. The Prime Directive is specifically about leaving moral concerns behind because the random chance of nature will outperform even well-intentioned meddling, so why can't we just kill them? It's the safest way – anything else and your good intentions might muck things up. Maybe you can argue that Starfleet officers would be hella traumatised by that instruction, but they're already instructed to let nature take its course when natural disaster kills millions on planets deemed "insufficiently advanced", so this isn't that out there.
Non-sickos reading this probably aren't buying it? I'm not buying it – so why are we still talking about the Prime Directive? We're in morality land now, and we still have to decide what to do next:
- do we tell the addicts they're addicts?
- do we stop the transfer of the drug?
- do we give them the tech needed to keep their current setup alive?
Picard decides that all of these qualify as interferences and are therefore wrong, and morality doesn't seem to come into it. But that's bollocks – their initial interference has allowed things to play out differently; without it, the transfer of the drug wouldn't have been possible at all, and we never would've learned they were addicts, and they never would've requested the tech to fix their ships. I don't see any good reason why the initial interference isn't relevant to the Prime Directive.
So my framing's like way off. How about this:
- do we hold back information about their addiction that we gained by interfering?
- do we allow the transfer of the drug when it was only made possible by our interfering?
- do we refuse to fix their ships when they've specifically requested it due to our interference?
Now it's not even obvious what non-interference is! Depending on your interpretation the answers to any of these could be yes or no, but I definitely don't see a 'Prime Directive' based justification that allows you to permit the drug transfer but disallow the tech provision. Plus we know morality does come into it, so there's a whole new universe of things to think about with these decisions...
This is all super fun, but I'm guessing the writers (and most reviewers) just chose to ignore the initial interference of saving the freighter. At least for me, if you don't ignore it Picard's decisions are completely absurd. I might as well have just criticised the idea that an entire civilisation is unknowingly addicted without anyone's noticing as others have already mentioned. We know the premiss of this episode is stupid, but that's not the point, so I shouldn't take cheap shots. So I guess I have to analyse it again now...