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Posted on Facebook, and I’m posting it here as well:
okay, just have finished watching Voyager: Hope and Fear (The Dauntless episode). At the end, there is one point the producers forgot to handle: Prime Directive or not, the Bad Guy of this story does have a point: Janeway acted selfishly when signing a pact with the Borg, to get her crew home, thus intervening in the chain of events in the sector, leading to more species being assimilated by the Borg.
If it was any other daily Captain in Starfleet, he would have long ago be sentenced to exile for his actions by the main protagonist. If it was humanity at stake, the crew would find a way to travel back in time to change all of this (remember? temporal prime directive?). But when it comes to our Captain making a terrible mistake (“Who are you to judge?!”) – then it’s all okay. Heck, we need our show to go on! No time to debate ethics when things are blowing all around us!
That making Voyager and Janeway in particular an epic fail.meh. There are numerous violations of the prime directive in all the shows by Kirk, Picard, Sisko, and Janeway. You can find a list here:
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Prime_Directive
btw, Janeway’s decision with the borg/undine is not listed in the above link as a violation of PD.
@ygeva wrote:
Aye, but how many of them caused the almost-extinction of an entire race?
Well, whos to say that the same wouldn’t have happened if Species 8472 ‘won’? “The weak… will perish”.
This is what the alien in the episode has told Janeway: “Who are you to judge?”
I think this might be a private case of the butterfly effect, and that the Prime Directive is supposed to prevent such things from happening.
The debate on ‘Pen Pals’ (TNG) deals exactly in that. I’m not sure Picard would have signed the pact.
My problem is not the action and its consequence, rather the idea she got away from this by saying “I couldn’t have known”, while Ransom, doing something similar on the Equinox, got punished.
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