Synopsis
The Enterprise is in a star system to observe a particularly active star when they receive a garbled distress signal from a cargo ship in a decaying orbit. While Picard struggles to communicate with the captain of the vessel, Riker and Lt Yar attempt an emergency beam out of the crew. They are surprised that instead of beaming to safety, the crew sends their cargo across first before eventually beaming over themselves. Within seconds, the wounded vessel is destroyed in the atmosphere.
Along with the crew, there were also two passengers. These are merchants involved in a trade involving the contents of the lost cargo ship and several metal cylinders that the crew transported to the Enterprise. The cylinders contain a medicine that is necessary to treat a plague that is raging on the freighter's homeworld of Onara. The merchants are immune to the plague and come from another world, Breka, who supply the medicine in exchange for the necessities of life manufactured by the Onarans. With the loss of the goods on the freighter neither side is willing to yield their rights to the medicine in the cylinders.
When one of the freighter's crew begins to display advanced symptoms of the plague, Dr. Crusher discovers that the Onarans do not suffer from the plague but from withdrawal symptoms from a narcotic dependency. The substance in the cylinders is not medicine but a heroin-like drug. The Brekans are keeping the Oharans hooked on drugs, under the guise of supplying them with medicine.
Crusher is outraged at this discover and urges Picard to intervene, but the Captain invokes the Prime Directive and says he is forbidden from interfering. The Brekans, however, have a problem. If they don't keep the Onarans supplied with the drug, they will eventually work through their withdrawal symptoms and will end up no longer addicted to it. Because of this, they suddenly change their minds and agree to provide the current drug shipment for free, thus tipping their hand to the fact that they knew about this predatory arrangement all along.
At the end, Picard decides to deliver the drug to the Onarans but refuses to help them replace their destroyed freighter, ensuring that the trade between the two worlds will eventually break down and the drug addiction will be revealed and dispelled.
Analysis
There are three major problems with this episode, and the primary is one of pacing. The first act, setting up the problem and bringing the squabbling merchants on board, takes entirely too long and consumes over a third of the run time. This is something we should have achieved in the first 5 minutes of the show and a sense of urgency here would have set the tone for the entire episode.
The freighter is breaking up in the atmosphere, while Picard and Riker are seemingly having a laugh at the competency of the freighter's crew. We go back and forth trying to establish communication through the solar interference while hoping to make the audience feel the tension of an imminent catastrophe. But the audience cannot feel a tension that the Enterprise crew does not display. As it was, the lack of focus seemed to have cost two lives from the freighter's crew and made Picard to appear callous.
It's hard to exaggerate how inane the writing of this scene is. Worf is very clear that the distressed freighter has mere minutes before it will be destroyed, and Picard is consumed with rolling his eyes, "Well, finally we're getting somewhere..." With seconds to live, they are proposing to beam over a major engine component that the stricken crew are supposed to install and align, a clearly impossible task in the time available.
They make a feeble stab at using the tractor beam, with the inevitable "Too much interference..." as the response. No heroic efforts, no ingenious plan from Geordi or Data. Just a shrug of the shoulders and a smirk from Captain Picard, who wastes more time with snide remarks, "How long have you been captain?" Let that sink in a moment. Picard actually spends time insulting the imperiled crew mere moments before they die, with a grin and a nudge to Riker standing beside him, all the while exhibiting incompetence of his own, blaming it on sunspot activity.
The storytelling here creates a disconnect between what the writers would like to convey, and the message that the audience is receiving. The building blocks of story are cycles of tension and resolution. The tension here appears to be the imminent danger to the freighter. The resolution of the arc happens when we get the crew off the ship before it explodes. So we actually resolve a different tension, the danger to the lives of the crew. By deflecting this arc, the writer creates confusion: Were the heroes successful or not? Since the ship exploded and we killed two crewmen, it seems that the heroes were not successful, which should create a reaction of its own; either dismay or regret, apologies or resolve to do better next time. Instead, the writers completely ignore what just happened and move on, seeming to place the blame on the odd choices of the rescued crew.
As a development in this arc, we introduce a second tension. The imperiled crew doesn't appear to be very competent, or particularly concerned for their own safety. Why do they seem to make these non-sensical choices? The resolution here is that we discover 1.) they are suffering from the plague, and 2.) they are actually behaving as drug addicts. The trouble this cycle creates, is that the story never goes back and connects the initial irrational behavior with the narcotic addiction. Dr. Crusher would have been ideal to make this connection, but she wasn't present on the bridge to observe the crew's communication.
The audience can make the connection on their own in hindsight, but the initial confusion that this created in the opening scenes is never resolved and the audience is left with the ongoing feeling that Picard is an unfeeling jerk. This becomes a problem later when Picard has to defend the prime directive, and the audience continues to think he's an unfeeling jerk.
The middle section of the episode was entirely static and at times felt almost boring. We established the basic premise: that the cargo ownership is in dispute, and that one side needs the medicine desperately. And after 20 minutes, we are in exactly the same place, with no movement on either side, and the captain having done nothing. We move locations from the transporter room to the sick bay to the bridge to the observation lounge to the guest quarters, but nothing essential has changed. We continue to replay the initial scene where we squabble over the cargo.
The development and resolution happens in the final 10 minutes of the episode and there was no reason why it couldn't have happened 35 minutes earlier. There's an interesting moment when the anguished Onarans stun Riker with their personal electrical charge. This could have been a pivotal moment where we see the desperation of the addicts and we come to terms with how their society is suffering. This could have been a catalyst for some kind of insight on the part of the Captain or any of the players. Instead, it passes without incident. Picard simply talks them down. It actually proves the opposite of what the writers intended. Instead of showing the hopelessness of the Onaran's dire situation, it functionally showed that their situation wasn't that bad after all.
The Prime Directive
The third issue with the episode is that this was intended to be a major discussion of the Prime Directive. From the perspective of Picard, this was a clear case of non-interference that the Prime Directive demanded. And this was the opportunity, created by the show, to demonstrate how it worked, and the underlying truth to it. The problem here is that the writers couldn't present a really convincing argument.
There are two phases to the treatment in this episode. The first was to define exactly what the prime directive is. The second phase delves deeper into why the prime directive is such a good idea
Picard offers us two statements of the premise:
"It is not our mission to
impose Federation or Earth values on any others in the Galaxy."
"I am bound by the rules of the United Federation of Planets, which order me not to interfere with other worlds, other cultures. If I were to tell them any of this, I would violate that Prime Directive."
This was the clearest articulation of the Prime Directive that we ever
get in Star Trek. Humanity is not mandated to cruise the galaxy imposing their will on other cultures because of their superior technology. It prevents them from being a "bunch of meddling do-gooders" as Q would later remark. From a storytelling perspective, this can be a useful device because it presents an internal source of conflict or tension. As writers, we can use this to cause secondary conflict, between bridge officers for example, or between Picard and his superiors. It represents a serious change to the basic Walk The Earth model that Star Trek uses. On the other hand, the crew of the Enterprise very often IS a bunch of meddling do-gooders as evidenced in show after show.
This definition is so broad that we find ourselves in violation any number of times. Interfering in other cultures, and imposing Earth values on others in the galaxy, "seeking out new life and new civilizations," is what they do in almost every episode. Later, to address this contradiction, we soften the issue by narrowing the focus to "pre-warp civilizations",
How do you define "less developed", for example? And what constitutes intereference? To some, simply appearing in orbit would represent an interference of some kind. And with how nosy the human explorers are, this rule has been violated any number of times. For example, the planet Bajor from DS9 would appear to be less developed and yet the Federation doesn't have any problem jumping in to that conflict.
The second phase of this discussion is to try to defend the prime directive as being a good idea. Like Hercules, we travel the galaxy seeking new knowledge, but the actual heart of the stories clearly revolves around fixing things, understanding conflicts and moderating them.
Beverly Crusher showed that this story was a clear example of one species exploiting another. This was an example of Parasitism, not Symbiosis, as the episode title claimed. Picard was only able to walk away from this situation because he foresaw that it would correct itself in the near future when the Onarans shipping capabilities failed. But if that were not the case, would Picard be forced to leave them in this clearly oppressive situation, by the prime directive? For a show about overcoming adversity, this would not be a satisfactory storytelling model.
If we were to find this situation on the streets of Los Angeles in a cop show, we would absolutely feel that correcting the situation would be the honorable thing to do. Yet here it is presented as more honorable to leave the exploited in their torment. The writers set up this situation to fully discuss the ramifications of their choices, but when the time came, Picard was more dismissive of Beverly's arguments than meeting them with a well developed philosophy of his own. This could have been a Measure of a Man moment in season 1. Instead, it left the audience ambivalent and dissatisfied.
"Beverly, the Prime Directive is not just a set of rules. It is a philosophy, and a very correct one. History has proved again and again that whenever Mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well-intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous."
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