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I like that McFarlane just said “fuck that” in The Orville. He kept the gist — leave developing civilizations alone — but doesn’t even consider allowing them to go extinct for stupid reasons.
Really early on, too. It was one of the things that made me go “oh wait this isn’t just fart jokes in space”.
Though to be fair, the reality is that no matter how advanced we get there’s still gonna be fart jokes in space. That scene in the cafeteria where everyone’s getting Bortus to eat random things seems like a far more realistic vision of a space-faring post-scarcity future.
Maybe it’s an unpopular opinion given how reasonably popular Below Deck and SNW appear to be, but The Orville, for me, is the best post-2002 Trek thing. This is one of the reasons.
They save them in tos as well.
Yeah, but in TOS we also see what happens if you forget a book about the chicago mob of the 1920s on a developing planet.
“You will be remembered for a week or so.”
I’ve been thinking about the prime directive recently and it just doesn’t make sense in the grand scheme of things. You don’t involve yourself because “well what if this extinction level event was meant to happen?” Could just as easily be phrased as them being there with the capacity to fix the problem was also meant to happen.
Especially if they can magic the problem away without even exposing knowledge of their existence to the pre-warp civilization. Would people who don’t know about starships really notice if a tachyon field was routed through the deflector dish to [science fiction jargon], causing the tectonic activity to stabilize?
It’s one thing to not interfere with internal politics, but another entirely to not save a planet from a random space anomaly while you happen to be passing through the system.
If we’re having a serious conversation about the PD, it’s important to note that it’s a blanket “don’t interfere” rule that applies to all civilizations, warp-capable or otherwise.
Most of the time, it makes sense, but these edge cases are wild.
The prime directive is a great example of how even a good rule taken to the extreme can end up causing more harm than good.
But beyond that, it’s just an easy aid for the writers to add a point of conflict for their stories. The prime directive as a value within the federation seems secondary to me.
The Prime Directive is one of those weird artifacts of the context of the original series. When naked imperialism was starting to be challeneged in pop culture but was still very much considered the status quo in the West, the idea not to interfere in other cultures was a bold stance. However, the idea of a “natural cultural progression” is unfortunately a product of its time and wasn’t even something Kirk actually believed when it came down to it. Picard was more by the book but even he couldn’t watch innocent people die when his crew pushed back. It’s now pretty much universally regarded in canon as a stupid rule.
Yeah it’s pretty stupid. If it’s a random act of nature that’s about to wipe out an entire species, why is warp capability the cut off for helping? Perhaps it was meant to happen even if they have warp technology.
I could see leaving them to destroy themselves if they invented nuclear bombs and hated each other so much they would kill themselves to harm the others, but a supervolcano or meteor or something? Lend a hand dude.
Also I found it very human-centric.
That’s an entire planet about to get destroyed. You going to condemn the other hundreds of thousands of species to death because the one intelligent species isn’t smart enough?
Meanwhile:
GCU The Gravitas Meme is so Last Year: I’m gonna sort out that extension event, then we should probably send a couple of Special Circumstances operatives to guide them in the right direction. In the past picosecond I’ve absorbed and analysed their global information net so know exactly what actions we need to take to give them the correct nudge.
The “correct nudge” has been determined to be “give a specific citizen a cheese danish.”
So the question the Prime Directive poses is: what aspects of the Great Filter do we leave in place?
Do we save a developing civilization from an asteroid they have zero way of stopping?
Do we defuse a political situation that will end in nuclear war and destruction of their civilization?
Great filters are strictly hypothetical anyway.
“More of a set of guidelines” Kirk and Picard in unison with a chorus of “Exactly” from every other Federation Officer or Official except any featured in anything involving a speech about the prime directive by that episode’s primary cast.
Laughs in Bobiverse