SFDebris wrote: ↑Sun Apr 22, 2018 2:17 am
Remember that the day before I wrote this, the ceiling collapsed while I was putting in a 16 hour day on my birthday. Neelix gets every body-punch I can give him on days like that.
Poor Neelix! What did he do to deserve... that...
Oh, right. It's Neelix. There's a wake of dead bodies and lies behind him. Carry on!
EDIT: Oh, right. The episode.
This was a dumb episode that's reasonably entertaining. The worst part about it is that you KNOW they're not going to get home through the wormhole.
I actually liked the "fulfill the prophecy and remove the Ferengi from the planet, and get the populace to reject the rules of acquisition" ending, but the part with the wormhole was just dumb. The episode would have been MUCH better had they encountered the Ferengi after they had wheeled and dealed away from the wormhole, with the wormhole a non-issue.
I'm going through my memory to see if there were any other similar cases on other series. The closest I can come to is "A Private Little War". It's odd in that the Prime Directive was never mentioned. It's stated that the policy of non-interference was due to Kirk's recommendations from years prior. The Klingon actions are treated as a treaty violation which is apparently what give Kirk the authority to act as he sees fit. Other TOS episodes dealt with contamination by either pre-Federation Earth ships (A Piece of the Action) and idiot Federation citizens (Patterns of Force, Omega Glory). In those cases, the "solution" appears to involve not messing with what's already occurred, but try to steer it back on course as best as possible without causing another upheaval.
Presumably, Tyree's planet is in the disputed territory mentioned in "Errand of Mercy" and where Sherman's planet is in "The Trouble With Tribbles". The Organian Peace Treaty must include rules for planets without a native intelligent population(Sherman's) and for ones that do like in APLW. Since it was never mentioned in Voyager, we can only assume no such treaty exists between the Federation and the Ferengi, probably because they don't have that kind of border issue.
Voyager is not in Federation space, so they really have no authority in the matter and Tuvok is probably the most correct. Replace the Ferengi with any warp capable society native to the Delta Quadrant, would they have acted? Would it depend on whether they'd encountered them before? I doubt the Federation acts in regards to pre-warp civilizations within the Romulan, Klingon, or Cardassian territories. Theoretically, those two Ferengi might have been able to claim that they'd claimed the entire Delta Quadrant for Ferenginar. We saw in "Arena" that the Federation will colonize a world that might be within another race's claimed territory because space is big and it's not always easy to check on such things.
DS9, unfortunately, throws a wrench into things. Theoretically, they should have stopped all incursions into the Gamma quadrant once they learned the Domnion claimed everything within range of the wormhole. Perhaps sending and unmanned, unarmed probe to begin treaty negotiations would have been permissible.
Anyway, I lean towards Janeway not having authority in this case. The Federation has no claim on the planet or the territory it's in. There's no apparent agreement with the Ferengi NOT to mess with pre-warp worlds in "non-aligned" territory. The whole thing would have resolved itself once the Ferengi tech aged to beyond repair and/or they eventually die. The natives couldn't reverse engineer the tech given their level.
SFDebris wrote: ↑Sun Apr 22, 2018 2:17 am
Remember that the day before I wrote this, the ceiling collapsed while I was putting in a 16 hour day on my birthday. Neelix gets every body-punch I can give him on days like that.
Poor Neelix! What did he do to deserve... that...
Oh, right. It's Neelix. There's a wake of dead bodies and lies behind him. Carry on!
EDIT: Oh, right. The episode.
This was a dumb episode that's reasonably entertaining. The worst part about it is that you KNOW they're not going to get home through the wormhole.
I actually liked the "fulfill the prophecy and remove the Ferengi from the planet, and get the populace to reject the rules of acquisition" ending, but the part with the wormhole was just dumb. The episode would have been MUCH better had they encountered the Ferengi after they had wheeled and dealed away from the wormhole, with the wormhole a non-issue.
Well they had to get rid of the Ferengi at the end of the episode. We didn't want them hanging around.
SFDebris wrote: ↑Sun Apr 22, 2018 2:17 am
Remember that the day before I wrote this, the ceiling collapsed while I was putting in a 16 hour day on my birthday. Neelix gets every body-punch I can give him on days like that.
Poor Neelix! What did he do to deserve... that...
Oh, right. It's Neelix. There's a wake of dead bodies and lies behind him. Carry on!
EDIT: Oh, right. The episode.
This was a dumb episode that's reasonably entertaining. The worst part about it is that you KNOW they're not going to get home through the wormhole.
I actually liked the "fulfill the prophecy and remove the Ferengi from the planet, and get the populace to reject the rules of acquisition" ending, but the part with the wormhole was just dumb. The episode would have been MUCH better had they encountered the Ferengi after they had wheeled and dealed away from the wormhole, with the wormhole a non-issue.
Well they had to get rid of the Ferengi at the end of the episode. We didn't want them hanging around.
Yeah. The Ferengi would have easily taken Neelix' spot in the show. They might have even been more popular than Neelix with slightly better writing.
I'm pretty surprised at this rating (which is fine of course- different viewers with different opinions and all that).
I don't like the general stupidity of it all, but what I really hate is the casual flaunting of a wormhole home when you know that Voyager is going to incompetently squander the opportunity. The climactic scene where they try to make it into the wormhole moves at a comically slow pace, and the way the crew acts and speaks shows that there is no urgency to actually get home. It's questionable to constantly bring up the possibility of a shortcut home in the first place, but in this case it's nothing more than a cheap, completely ineffectual means to inject drama and a ticking clock into the narrative. This, in my view, undercuts the already stupid (and overused) plot.
More could be said about not taking the ticket home when you have the chance, and of Star Trek's tendency to treat less technologically advanced species in a very condescending way, but the whole thing breaks down too easily to seriously analyze.
This episode always encapsulated the "But nature documentaries!" part of the prime directive debate. Only now not only does it apply to the Feddies, but to ANY warp-capable power and the Federation has decided it is the referee in these contaminations.
Because that won't lead to imperialism! Great job, Rick...
ChiggyvonRichthofen wrote: ↑Sat Apr 28, 2018 1:19 pm
I'm pretty surprised at this rating (which is fine of course- different viewers with different opinions and all that).
Remember - Chuck rates episodes on a curve based on how they stand within their respective series, and not on an objective scale. So he'll often spend ten minutes throughout a DS9 review praising the episode only to end up giving it a 5/10, while simultaneously mocking an ENT episode and giving it the same rating.
That said, the finals score does still seem a bit inconsistent with the review. While I didn't care for Voyager, I don't think it was so terrible that an episode that's "like being continuously beaten with a rubber chew toy - it stings, it's annoying, and it's humiliating" should be considered above average for the series. Voyager was inconsistently mediocre and wasted a lot of potential, but it wasn't that bad.
cdrood wrote: ↑Wed Apr 25, 2018 7:42 pm
DS9, unfortunately, throws a wrench into things. Theoretically, they should have stopped all incursions into the Gamma quadrant once they learned the Domnion claimed everything within range of the wormhole. Perhaps sending and unmanned, unarmed probe to begin treaty negotiations would have been permissible.
Note that the Federation can not be taking whatever some interstellar power says as gospel with regards to what belongs to who etc. Otherwise the Dominion could just win the war with the Federation by saying "We claim all Federation territory, no touch backs." and the Federation would have had to surrender. So the Federation knew that the Dominion "claimed" all that space, but it may well have viewed the claim as unjustified and therefore they could ignore it. After all some of the planets the Dominion claimed were completely uninhabited with no evidence of any kind of Dominion presence or that the Dominion had ever visited, others were in open rebellion against the Dominion, some planets within the Dominion sphere appeared to have their own governments and military and just offer occasional tribute to Dominion forces and so on.
The real conflict with this episode is more then way things were handled in TNG first season Angel One. Here some non-Federation humans crashed on a planet and are interfering with the culture and the crew can only say "please come back with us and stop with the interfering" and the non-Feds can just say "no thanks we like our new alien families" and the crew can't (or at least won't) do anything. They give the human survivors of the crashed ship in Angel One way more slack than they give the Ferengi here.
Dicking with warp capable people does not seem to necessarily be a prime directive violation because trading with, fighting and so on warp capable people is not automatically interference, but it seems like there are rules where they can't just decide I don't like this guys face, so punch him and into the brig with him. Also at some point they are not supposed to interfere with internal matters (as with the Klingon civil war) which seems like a prime directive argument, but clearly that is a wider discretion than what happens with pre-warp people.
Yours Truly,
Allan Olley
"It is with philosophy as with religion : men marvel at the absurdity of other people's tenets, while exactly parallel absurdities remain in their own." John Stuart Mill
When Chuck gets around to reviewing The Price, he needs to mention that the two Ferengi were left to a fate worse than death: getting stuck in a Neelix episode of Voyager....
i know this is rather late but if anyone is interested in seeing the base story idea (someone with modern knowledge and access to magical power placed in a position of power in a pre-industrial society) look up a book called "Release that witch" it is much more imaginative and entertaining that this episode
