this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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The prime directive seems more like an excuse rather than a philosophy most of the time. The prime directive gets reinterpreted harder than the prophecies from Nostradamus.
On screen it suffers from the audience's availability heuristic. We see the times when it's hard to follow or should be broken because those are the encounters worth making an episode about. The mundane "Here's a planet in its Bronze Age. We take only holographs and leave only footprints."
Who Watches the Watchers kinda is a mundane episode about the prime directive since it's morality isn't really being questioned. The interesting part of the episode is watching the Enterprise crew repeatedly screw up trying to uphold the prime directive before deciding that they've already violated it like crazy on accident, might as well use that as a way to try and fix it now. The scenes actually about the prime directive were the most boring parts of that episode.
The problem is that the Prime Directive as presented in Star Trek is shown as this fully formed dictate without anyone having a good idea as to why it is important. It is made worse with Star Trek's episodic form that doesn't go back to previous worlds to check up on them; Lower Decks makes it a point to show that the Federation is really bad at this.
In contrast, Stargate has a few episodes which show how such a policy would be good for the program.
I love that one episode in Atlantis with the "strategy game" in the Atlantean computer for this. Arguably one big difference is that the Tau'ri were always closer in tech to the places they visited than the Goa'uld et al.
I always took it more as the Tau'ri were never in a condition to control the space around primitive cultures, so they never bothered trying to protect local cultures. You also don't have a utopia economy yet, so the Tau'ri government was far more willing to not worry about societal impacts if it meant gaining access to technology or resources.
As fucked up as that was the show does play it for laughs, which makes it considerably worse.
The directive is simple though. Do not interfere.
The rest is just captains disregarding it.