Friday, October 22, 2010

The Prime Directive (and the Main Deflector)

Star Trek morality is kind of messed up. First of all, the Federation is totally atheistic, and I don’t really see how you can argue for a moral code in that sense. (Which I guess explains why they don’t have a problem with the messed-up morality of some of the cultures they encounter.) But what really bugs me is the virtue that they uphold as the Prime Directive. That is, that you don’t interfere with the natural progression of pre-warp civilizations. There’s a Next Generation episode where the Enterprise is sent to witness the destruction of all life on a planet due to some natural phenomenon. They can’t relocate the people, because that wouldn’t be “natural.” Likewise, they can’t stop terrorists or provide medical care or anything else to anyone who hasn’t developed warp drive. What’s so sacred about warp drive? That’s sort of like us saying that any we can’t do business or provide humanitarian aid to any country that hasn’t developed its own aircraft.

I should note that I do agree with the Temporal Prime Directive, which states that you shouldn’t mess with the timeline. This is especially important because I’m pretty sure that time travel is impossible, in the same sense that drawing a four-sided triangle is impossible. Actually I think that involving time travel is one of the worst decisions a science fiction writer can make, because the moment you involve it, readers/viewers end up asking “Why didn’t you just use that to solve that problem?” to every problem. (Hence the Temporal Prime Directive.)

Speaking of innovative solutions that make you wonder why characters don’t repeat them, Starfleet engineers have a habit of using their ships’ main deflector arrays to do magical things that apparently only work once. I was recently watching a Deep Space Nine episode where they were trapped in this special anomaly, and I was thinking, “Use the main deflector!” And moments later, Chief O’Brien proposed just such a solution, which worked perfectly. Starships should be equipped with two or three main deflectors, just so they’d never run out of magical solutions.

2 comments:

  1. Agreed on all accounts. The Back to the Future trilogy is the one exception to the "no time travel" ultimatum, because it's awesome enough that you don't care about plot holes, and not serious enough that it matters anyway (i.e. the world is not at stake).

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'll add it to my bookmarks so I can visit it often! And I will share it with my acquaintances.
    And there is a lot of useful information on our website too,
    so please take a look and take a look. Then have a good day

    Also visit my webpage - 대구오피
    (jk)

    ReplyDelete