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Comment by linhchi | Hacker News Reader

There is a Star Trek episode that says "No intervention is not just a rule, it's a philosophy. History has shown that, no matter how good our intention is, the intervention of imposing Earth's value on other cultures only makes things worse. And in the other case of no intervention, we never know."

So the Enterprise just leaves that system of two stars hosting two societies that have developed a symbiosis relationship (one exploiting the other based on lies) without exposing the lies even though they can give a better solution. The only thing they tell them is that "Maybe you'd discover that there are ..options"

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Which episode was that?

The Prime Directive was a great idea; I really wonder what exactly spurred Roddenberry to come up with that. But TOS was chock full of episodes where Kirk brushed aside the Directive and intervened anyway, frequently by blowing up some big computer.

In Star Trek the Next Generation I think. It's quite old and some episodes are less intriguing for today's standard but some really really great.

If you like, you can go on dailymotion.com/video and search for it.

>It's quite old and some episodes are less intriguing for today's standard

WTF? I completely disagree; ST:TNG (and TOS) is a breath of fresh air compared to modern TV. No over-the-top ultra-violence, no half-second-long Michael Bay-style shots, no requirement that you've followed the series religiously and are watching the episodes in order; it's a great way to relax and watch something enjoyable. It's also nice that all the characters are hyper-competent; this is a nice break from the real world which is full of incompetent morons. If I want to see "dark, gritty realism", I'll go walk around a ghetto or something.

No I watch ST to relax also (and I don't watch anything else). But I just say some of them.

For example, there is this one episode that develops a bit strange. Piccard shouts "shut up Weasley" and blindly ignore the fact that Data is acting weird. Of course that's the plot, but I don't find it convincing.

Also, the episode Hide and Q (I like Q character), it's a bit trivial in script writing compared to today understanding. However, Q comes back at the end of the next generation and make a profound appearance (he puts Piccard on a trial because he is interested in Piccard as a superior human which is a nice thing because he and the Q continuum regards publicly human as an inferior species).

I just say that there is "some" plot holes but overall, it's still something I'd stick to.

Well yeah, to be fair, TNG had a lot of problems, particularly in the first two seasons. The first season was a near-disaster really, between Wesley's horribly annoying character, Q, Data, a whole lot of wooden acting all around, and really awful scripts like anything with "the traveler". Season 2 was pretty bad too with Dr. Pulaski trying to ape McCoy vis-à-vis Spock in her interactions with Data and failing miserably. Basically, the problem was the Gene Roddenberry was too hands-on at the time; the guy was just like Lucas: he had some great ideas, but really sucked at execution, and things went much, much better when he sat back and let other people do all the nitty-gritty work of writing, direction, etc. After he got less involved and his drinking buddy Maurice Hurley left the show, and they brought back Crusher (who Hurley had forced out) and put Rick Berman in charge, that's when we got all the greatest episodes, at least until the writers ran out of ideas in seasons 6-7.

Haha I haven't watched all of them. I learn to occasionally watch so that they don't run out like Dr Who. I like the Traveler ^^. Seems like a good idea that you can travel across dimensions (more freedom) and I like it that he told Weasley to "have faith in people's ability to resolve their own problem". Sometimes if the path is too divergent, we have to let go of people.

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