Star Trek Discovery Doesn’t Care About The Most Important Franchise Rule

To help you understand what the fuss is about, we need to first review the plot of “Whistlespeak.” As part of Captain Burnham’s quest to solve the mystery of the Progenitors, she and the crew land on a planet named Helem’no whose weather is partially controlled by special towers designed to generate rain. The problem is that this is a primitive planet, and the natives know nothing about the towers or the alien who installed them centuries ago while working on the Progenitor mystery in his own time period. 

This becomes the focal point for this Star Trek: Discovery episode’s treatment of the Prime Directive. Tilly discovers only too late that the competition she and Burnham participated in (they were posing as natives at the time) and that she won was meant to determine who the locals would sacrifice to the gods in hopes of getting rain. As the walls close around Tilly and a native, Burnham makes the command decision to reveal the existence of the weather-controlling technology to the native’s father. 

To its credit, this Star Trek: Discovery episode is upfront about the serious effects of this Prime Directive violation–at first. Once Burnham unloads all of this information on the native, the first thing he does is ask whether this means his culture’s gods aren’t real. A backpedaling Burnham tries to explain that the existence of advanced technology doesn’t automatically disprove the existence of native gods, but neither she nor anyone else sticks around long enough to discover whether he really believes this or what the full extent of their cultural contamination truly is.

For longtime Star Trek fans, it’s almost impossible to view this moment in Discovery and not think about how Captain Picard solved his own Prime Directive dilemma. In the TNG episode “Who Watches the Watchers,” the perfect storm of malfunctioning technology and curious natives led the locals into thinking that Picard was one of their gods, a belief that only worsened after Picard tried to demonstrate that his “powers” came from technology.

That episode climaxed with Picard letting a native shoot him with a bow and arrow, effectively risking his life to uphold Starfleet’s most important rule. In the Star Trek: Discovery episode, however, Burnham seems completely indifferent to how much she has personally contaminated an entire planet’s culture (unlike the Mintakans Picard encountered, these natives are going to have to learn how to use and maintain the weather-controlling technology) in a flagrant Prime Directive violation. Instead of reflecting on her actions, Burnham simply sat back and seemed amused by Tilly’s joke about how this was going to result in additional paperwork.

It would be one thing if Star Trek: Discovery went out of its way to explain that Starfleet had become more lax about the Prime Directive in the 32nd century, but that’s not the case. It’s still seemingly Starfleet’s most important rule, but violating it no longer results in court martials or demotions. If this episode is anything to go by, such violations merely result in some mutual humor over Burnham’s actions.

Forget solving the Progenitor mystery. At this point, I’d settle for someone trying to figure out why the Star Trek: Discovery writing team stopped caring about important franchise tenets such as the Prime Directive. Better still, maybe outside forces like Alex Kurtzman could live by this directive themselves and finally stop interfering with the natural development of everyone’s favorite sci-fi franchise.