"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.
Risa
Star Trek memes and shitposts
Come on'n get your jamaharon on! There are no real rules—just don't break the weather control network.
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?
Well, the second one is a direct result of their own and controllable actions. The first is entirely out of their control and just got dealt a bad hand lol
I've always assumed the Prime Directive was Rodenberry's attempt to explain why we aren't being obviously contacted by more advanced aliens attempting to fix all our problems for us, and his awareness how we would likely react to such intervention at the height of the Cold War.
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.”
Laughs in Bobiverse
It's an interesting space version of non-interventionism. In the real world, intervention is a very complex issue to navigate. Particularly since most forms of national intervention have monetary drivers that make the choice much more about how it benefits the intervening country rather than the intervened.
I think DS9 is the only series to really address Statfleet's long term effects of intruding onto other cultures and forcing them to change.
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.
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.
I've watched some of the Orville season 1 and I can't believe that claim. What season does it get good?
Season 1 is wildly uneven. Some episodes are a TV-14 Seth McFarland raunchy comedy in space and others are Star Trek, but with real people. If you don't enjoy the (admittedly purile) sense of humor, The Orville probably isn't for you. The show never completely abandons that tone even as it explores more classic Trek style writing.
There are some episodes though, like S01E08 which are played almost totally straight and those are the ones that feel the most like a TNG revival to me.
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.
The Orville is Star Trek if the federation actually had to recruit real people.
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.
In TOS Kirk really leans into not interfering with the “healthy” development of a civilization. If it isn’t healthy in his judgement, he interferes. So, essentially when it comes to Kirk if it offends his sensibilities he assumes free reign change it while paying lip service to the idea of non-intervention.
"You will be remembered for a week or so."
And logged in ships virus infected logs.