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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DreadPirateMurphy" data-source="post: 2910877" data-attributes="member: 20715">I fully agree that a rose-colored view of the future is part of the appeal of Star Trek.  Not everything needs to be Blade Runner or Logan's Run.  I like the idea that doctors and engineers perform miracles on a daily basis, and humans are sensible enough to ignore skin color and gender as differences when there is a whole galaxy of aliens with different facial makeup.This is a fair critique, but those two are too smart to fall into that trap.  Having said that, there are bound to be similarities, and a lot of folks saw too many between DS9 and B5.  Star Trek has also always been more than willing to copy other concepts.  There is no completely original story.Or an alternative view is that any character-driven story will be more interesting.  That is a fundamental rule of story-telling:  people like to watch or read stories about other people.This is something that takes skill, but it is also something that fewer folks were willing to attempt before the era of Tivo and DVD sales.  Forcing folks to watch a show every week just so they can understand the plot is a relatively modern phenomena for mass-market television.  Shows like Alias, Lost, 24, Desperate Housewives, Battlestar Galactica, and Babylon 5 are relative novelties in the landscape of TV shows.The Prime Directive was a nice thought, but it had a flip side.  The Federation does not share humanitarian technologies.  They do not intervene directly when younger civilizations are being wiped out.  It is very much as if the U.S. decided they weren't going to sell food and drugs to starving Third World nations under the "principle" of non-interference.It also presumes three things.  1)  The Federation cannot interact with less technologically advanced societies without overwhelming or exploiting them.  2)  Alien beings, likely beings with markedly different psychologies, will react the same as humans have when confronted by a dominating culture.  3)  All alien cultures have inherent value.The first is an odd belief.  Cultures tend to persevere unless conquered or colonized.  Presumably, the advanced Federation would do neither.  They also would be quick to point out that Federation culture isn't "superior" just because the Federation is more technologically advanced.The second is endemic to the series.  Aliens really are treated, mostly, as humans in funny masks.  It would be interesting to see an alien race that was culturally incapable of seeing or acknowledging the presence of a starship crew.  If they are truly "alien," then interacting with them probably can't happen by strictly human rules.The third is hardly practical, though it seems to be popular in some circles.  The Enterprise certainly encountered plenty of cultures they saw fit to alter, bending or breaking their Prime Directive in a variety of blunt or creative ways.  Anybody remember the planet of the drug pushers?  The planet of calm, polite people who went into destructive orgies when triggered by the ruling computer?  The planet of people who calmly committed suicide when their computer wargame commanded?  The planet ruled by women who treated men as second-class citizens?  The planet of hermaphrodites who thought those with gender were abnormally diseased?  The planet of euthenizers who teleported their dying to an asteroid in another part of the galaxy?  The planets of the Romans, Nazis, and gangsters?  Would the Federation work to stop the Vidians, or the Borg, if those species just left them alone?In short, the Prime Directive never made a lot of sense as a practical tool.  I would prefer to see a set of more comprehensive rules about first contact and species interaction that actually made sense.</blockquote>

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