Normally I’d agree, but I only just watched the TNG episode where they fucked up the prime directive so badly that a bunch of primitives declared (the) Picard a god.
didn’t Picard let himself get hit by a spear or something to prove he wasn’t one though? pretty sure he was like “fuckin OW. see? SEE? DAMNIT to SHIT that hurts.”
That’s the one. A noble gesture that might have been avoided by simply having someone on watch for natives during the repairs to the observation post, or by keeping the injured alien sedated, under observation or even isolated in sick bay.
Unfortunately the plot required then to be remarkably careless and unobservant.
I believe that is too make a fundamental point, originally made by Claude Levi Strauss (not the jeans guy), about exploration.
The sadness of exploration is that you fundamentally can’t undo first contact. Once it’s made everything changes.
That episode shows this and under scribes the necessity of the prime directive and why it is there in the first place. Even with the best intentions one can destroy the fabric of society of an entire civilization.
The other interesting though this episode evokes is the question weather we are ready at this moment. It holds a mirror to us imagining to be space explorers, but how would we cope today?
