Star Trek’s Biggest Prime Directive Violation Hiding In Plain Sight?
One of the stranger and more memorable early episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation is “Samaritan Snare,” in which the Enterprise-D crew learns that no good deed goes unpunished. They help the relatively primitive Pakled aliens with their ship only to realize that these slow-witted aliens are dangerously nefarious when they kidnap the ship’s chief engineer. There’s a lot going on in this wild episode, so much that you might not notice something weird: the entire plot is based around a huge violation of the Prime Directive involving helping the primitive Pakled aliens.
Violating The Prime Directive In Samaritan Snare
“Samaritan Snare” seemingly explains that the Pakleds are so primitive thanks to them being a pre-warp civilization. However, later episodes and films (including the excellent First Contact movie) emphasize that the Federation tries to avoid contact with alien cultures until they develop warp technology, effectively making them part of the galactic community.
Therefore, any communication with the Pakleds would be a violation of the Prime Directive, and the Enterprise crew arguably makes things worse by fixing their ship and even providing them with advanced technology.
As the Enterprise crew discovers in “Samaritan Snare,” the Pakleds are effectively dangerous scavengers, using their apparent helplessness (they sound extremely dim whenever they try to communicate) to secure assistance from other alien cultures.
In this case, the aliens kidnap George La Forge, who was initially sent to their vessel to help make some basic repairs. They try to coerce him into building weapons for them, and we discover that the aliens always do this with others they encounter, stealing technology to make themselves stronger like some kind of backward Borg wannabes.
Because they are both very clever boys, Riker and La Forge work out some clever bluffs to defeat the Pakleds and save the day. The problem, however, is that most of these events in “Samaritan Snare” could have been avoided by the Starfleet officers following their own Prime Directive. The Pakleds are a pre-warp civilization, and while it’s never entirely clear how this particular group got to space in the first place, Federation regulations make it clear that such primitive aliens should be avoided for fears of culture pollution.
The Prime Directive Changes In Star Trek
Now, the most obvious answer as to why this huge Prime Directive violation remains in the finished episode is that Star Trek’s writers and producers were still navigating exactly how that directive worked and may have changed since Kirk’s time. They were still figuring quite a few things out by season 2 of The Next Generation, which is why Wesley Crusher infamously mentions the Klingons joining the Federation in “Samaritan Snare,” a historic event later revealed to have never actually happened.
Bad Writing
The other likely reason for this Prime Directive error is that (as Trek writer Dennis Russell Baile later pointed out) almost everything in “Samaritan Snare” is driven by “idiot plotting.” It makes little sense for the Enterprise to send their chief engineer to fix galactic car problems, and it makes even less sense for Riker to outright ignore Troi’s warnings that La Forge is in danger.
Picard is also seeking heart surgery from a Starbase where, as Bailey said, “no one was qualified to handle the operation if it went at all wrong,” so the Prime Directive violation is just a drop in the stupidity bucket.
This was hardly Star Trek’s first big Prime Directive violation, and it most certainly wasn’t the last. But “Samaritan Snare” is such a goofy fun episode that it’s easy for casual fans to overlook its glaring plot problems. Not us, though…as the Pakleds might say, “we look for plot holes to make us go!”
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