TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

Oh boy. This one really deserves a detailed post all on its own, especially since I've seen practically no discussion about it despite being one of the most fucked up violations of the prime directive in all of Star Trek.

Star Trek TOS S02E05 "The Apple", or as I know it, "That Time the Enterprise Destroyed an Entire Civilization and Laughed About It".

Alright, so the crew finds this beautiful tropical paradise planet and goes down to investigate it. But, surprise, turns out the planet is deadly! Worse yet, something is preventing the ship from leaving or being able to transport the crew off planet.

Living on the planet is a primitive race of near-immortals. Beings who are thousands of years old, never get sick, never age, but seem to have stopped progressing mentally past the point of a child. These beings worship a "god" called Vaal, that is actually an ancient computer which controls the entire planet and has taken on itself to be a caretaker to the primitive civilization; ensuring their safety, taking care of all their needs, and being the reason they are essentially immortal. It also is the thing that's been attacking the crew and preventing the ship from leaving.

Now, everything is not perfect for the people of this civilization. Vaal is not only the reason they stop developing mentally, but he prevents them from having sex or having any physical affection beyond hugging. Now, on its own, this seems harsh, but remember; Vaal is taking care of ALL their needs. The weather is always perfect. There is abundant food. They have comfortable shelters. They never get sick. Never age. They are always happy. They live lives of such peace, that they barely even understand the concept of death. I think a lot of people would agree, that's not too bad a trade-off, and certainly a lot better a life than most places in the galaxy.

So the ship is unfortunately in an unstable orbit, and everything the crew tries to free it, fails. At the last moment before it crashes, the ship fires a phaser at Vaal and blows it up. Now, on its own, this is not great. Without Vaal, these people are doomed. No longer will they be safe from disease. No longer will they live forever. No longer will they have free food, free shelter, or anything. But, an argument COULD be made that the Enterprise crew was out of options. Sure, it's kind of screwing the prime directive in favor of their own lives, but the directive has been bent for less, and who knows what the ship crashing into the planet would do.

However, and here's where things go from an unfortunate situation to "holy shit, what the fuck is wrong with you?!", after Vaal is destroyed, Kirk and the crew meet with the primitive beings to let them know their God is dead. They are understandably concerned and ask what will they do? Kirk responds that they'll live. They'll grow farms, and build houses, and have children. They then ask, proving the extent of their innocence, "what are children?" and Kirk responds "Oh... You'll figure it out" then the entire crew laughs before abruptly leaving. End of episode.

What. The. Fuck?! These people have zero life skills. You just destroyed the one thing keeping them alive and then you're just... Leaving? While laughing about it? Oh, but they can have sex now. That's clearly the only important thing. Not teaching them how to farm. How to build shelters or clothing. How to cope with disease. Bad weather. Death. How to raise a child. Nope. They can have sex now, and to the crew, that means it's a job well done.

That civilization is dead. Their odds of survival are about as good as if you took a bunch of 5 years olds and dumped them in the wilderness. The only member of the crew who questions any of this is Spock at the very end where he wonders if they had essentially just ruined the Garden of Eden and doomed an entire people by destroying their paradise. Then McCoy chimes in with, "Well if that's the Garden of Eden, would that make you the devil since you have pointed ears?" And then they all laugh again.

I have a vague memory of Data stating in that episode that he was re-syncing ships clocks because "the anomaly" had a temporal something-or-other. The ship experienced 30 seconds, but they were jumped ahead.

Since time is affected by gravity and the differences are magnified by distance (according to relativity), ships clocks must constantly be re-syncing if their standard time is set in sector 001.

Another more general issue: On rewatching TNG as an adult I realized how flawed the argumentation in many of the law case episodes is. I often thought how I'd approach the issue in court, got excited and then Picard or others just start talking about the wildest stuff ever. There are some valid points in most episodes, and often they end up winning (yay), but I'd enjoy the wins more, if the arguments presented by the crew were good, and not because the writers brute forced the plot that way.

It's more of a general ST trope but the whole "Ensigns are the lowest ranks" instead of just being the lowest of the top tier rank on a ship.

Like they are still officers, the majority of a ships crew complement are supposed to be Enlisted Rates but we never see them.

The DS9 2 parter Homefront & Paradise Lost

A badmiral plans a military coup using a supposed Changeling attack as justification. He uses an elite group of cadets (Red Squad) to sabotage the planetary power grid, preplans drastic moves for his former loyalist crew to positions of power, and has the ability to mobilize personnel onto every street corner and test people at random.

Keep in mind he'd already been shown to be replaced by a changeling infiltrator once, and one of the infiltrators tells Sisko there are 4 of their people on the planet causing chaos.

Yet Sisko talks Leyton down who resigns his commission, Benteen probably got demoted or court marshalled, Red Squad gets tossed on a super secret mission (that is revisited later)...and everything just kinda goes back to normal.

What about the remaining 4 changelings on Earth? What about all the others culpable with the coup?

I mean…ghost fuckin’.

I always thought Picard having a secret Bad Motorcycle Girlfriend was really contrived.

Hemmer didn't have to die. Step out into the cold to slow down the xeno larva inside you, bro.

Even ignoring the plot, the writers really thought "let's kill probably the 3rd most interesting character on this show". I do love the immortal lady that replaced him, but what they did to him was so messed up.

This is a great topic!

There's a multipart Voyager series where they manage to email the holographic doctor back to Starfleet to check in. It's fantastic overall. But at the end there's a nail biting plotline where they send the doctor back.

1. That's not how file copying works.
2. Even accepting some plot nonsense reason it needed done, it would still just be a bored and tired ensign waiting on the file copy and pressing "retry" if it didn't work.

The one where DoucheMcBurger tried to claim Data was starfleet's property and therefore he should be allowed to study his brain so they could make more datas, and Ryker just folded and prosecuted the case like, "hey, he's my friend, but I'm going to argue to get his brain fried because I'll lose my job."

1. Ryker's assholishness is on perfect display.
2. the JAG lady from the station is uterly stupid and fucking incompetent. Basically, in order for the Prime Directive to even be a thing, they would have had to establish a legal test to determine if a species were sentient or whatever. the entire question would have already been settled, and she'd just have to tick off boxes. But naw.
3. When Ryker detached Data's hand, Picard should have had Worf detach his hand as a counter argument (and reattached by Crusher.) 3B) when Ryker turned Data off, Picard should have shot him with a phaser, (and maybe have Crusher bring him back. maybe multiple times.)

also, in Voyager, there's the entire Year of Hell story arc that just annoys the hell out of me. Classic example of why time travel should be offlimits to any sci-fi writer or producer. (Exceptions exist, of course. Dr. Who... but then time travel is kinda the point there, and it never takes itself seriously.) it's just too much of a cop out to be like "Oh. we reset the timeline and it's all good." Same with that episode where the planet blew up from something and Janeway gets sucked into the past with Paris. (this is where the romance began, probably. and this shit leads to having salamanders for kids...)

(Trial and Tribulations in DS9 is the rare exception, mostly because it was just a gratuitous nod to one of the best TOS episodes ever.)

I think the plan was once they discovered the clocks were off, Data would BS that it must have been from the wormhole.

How has nobody mentioned 'Threshold' yet?

Enterprise. S2E22 Cogenitor.

I understand that they're trying to tell a story here about morality and culture and blah blah blah but even if this didn't fly in the face of what Starfleet is supposed to be, the way they callously employed suicide at the end? And the way Archer informed Trip of it, then blamed him, then turned it into a "lesson" for him?

I have no words for how much I hated this episode. What the fuck.

E: I'm also watching it for the first time and just saw this episode so I'm not looking forward to... is this next episode beginning with Borg? What the ever-loving fuck, Enterprise?

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I tried to watch Strange New Worlds.

Second episode has a Star Fleet officer just walking up to a strange machine and grabbing it.

Nope.