What Does the Prime Directive Prevent?

The United Federation of Planets in Star Trek follows the General Order One, also known as the Prime Directive, but not every power in the galaxy does. In the cases of the Romulan Star Empire and Klingon Empire, their entire cultures evolved around the expansion onto inhabited worlds, not to mention the interference their own species have received from others like the Arretans and Hur'q.

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This Video is for critical purposes with commentary.

[QuarkGamingLLC]

The Prime directive prevents episodes from ending after 10 minutes

[DinoJake]

Fun Fact: The reason the Prime Directive is a thing in Star Trek is because Gene Roddenberry was very critical of the Vietnam War. The brutality of the war led him to believe that no good could ever come from interfering in the affairs of another nation, especially less developed ones, and that a more enlightened society would generally leave other civilizations alone.

[igncom]

I know the Hur'q invasion of Qronos probably took place during the Klingon medieval age or something, but I do like to imagine an 'Independence Day' style conflict as Klingon jetfighters duel'd with Hur'q spacecraft that tried to operate in the atmosphere.

That or I just would love to see a Klingon F-35.

[joshuawells]

The best example of Klingon interference on pre-warp worlds was in the TOS episode "A Private Little War, " in which on the planet Neural, the Klingons provided a village with flintlock muskets and set them on the Hill People.

[christopherg]

Something worth point out was that the prime directive can be suspended/has limitations:
- when they received a call for help (Pen Pals. Every single time they responded to a distress call)
- when a secret operation is sanctioned by the Federation Council or even just undertaken by a official secret agency of the Federation.
- stuff like the Omega directive
9:40 No mention of "Who Watches The Watchers"? Picard was willing to die to undo accidental interference.

[THATGuy]

They should have featured more examples of benevolently intended interference going wrong an early Trek. Like, a founding species of the Federation that did as much damage as the Klingons or the romulans while just trying to do good.

[DrFranklynAnderson]

I’d love to see a nerdy philosophical debate between Starfleet’s Prime Directive of non-interference and Spider-Man’s “with great power comes great responsibility.”

[davidjordan]

Apparently the very enlightened federation was never able to fine a happy medium between stopping planet wide apocalypses and subjecting people to brutal colonialism, despite being a post scarcity civilisation.

[GeekFilter]

There was also Kukulkan from TAS. Kukulan was the last of an ancient serpent species who visited Earth's distant past & was instrumental in the technological and architectural advances of the Egyptian, Mayan, Aztec and South Asian civilizations. He was identified with the lore of Quetzalcoatl, as well as the legend of the Chinese dragon. Today this feel very "Ancient Aliens" problematic implications and all, though it was written by a Native American.

[baskkev]

For me it's not set in stone. But it's more about leaders thinking about the actions

[KiltedCritic]

The Prime Directive prevents whatever the writers of that particular episode decide. TOS had the balance right, with Kirk technically breaking it when common sense demanded it, like with the Organians (before knowing their true nature) and the Yonada asteriod as two examples. Spock even regards those decisions ultimately, as "logical". From TNG onwards in the vast majority of instances, it was applied like dogmatic nonsense, always based on the flawed argument of "you can't know the consequences" if you do decide to break it.

[ChrissieBear]

Seeing STO footage is so surreal to me. Half the time it looks good, half the time it looks like Champions Online jank.

[Tenacitybrit]

Chuck Sonnenberg of SF debris has a great rant about the Prime directive at the end of his review of: The Masterpiece Society. Not only does he explain how its supposed to work, but he also chews out both the shows creators AND in show characters for screwing it up. Its so good to hear.

[obilesk]

Another great vid, Ric! You got me thinking of how rich in plot-lines a show about the unknown planets and civilizations in the beta quadrant would be.

[TheGuardianofAzarath]

That one episode of Voyager demonstrated perfectly what can happen to an alien civ that has any contact with a more advanced power before it's ready, it was that episode where they got trapped in orbit of a rapidly rotating planet, and the natives went from flitstones to First Contact in just a couple of days. While that would have been a perfect case of "The PD applies here" their situation meant they had no choice but to ignore it.

[rubaiyat]

I look at the Voyager episode Distant Origin for the answer of the rightness of the Prime Directive. If someone had helped the ancient Voth on Earth, humanity would never have evolved certainly not in the form they did, and they wouldn't have been able to uplift whatever species are working in Cetacean Ops. The universe would thus be emptier with just the Voth around. It can suck in the moment and the TNG episode Homeward just had a terrible premise in that letting the entire biosphere collapse serves no one, but the Prime Directive is there for a reason.

[completelyferrouschemist]

It's kinda weird how the Bajorans were never brought up in this video. They're basically the most prime example to why the Prime Directive exists.

[battlesheep]

I think it makes more sense to interpret the Prime Directive as "YOU should not interfere with primitive societies". I think we can all agree that interference has such profound consequences that it should not be left up to the discretion of individual captains. I can imagine the Federation has a panel of xenoanthropologists and ethicists for years deciding whether or not to aid a particular primitive society, based on whether such a thing would likely do more harm than good.

[edgarplummer]

The Prime Directive prevents Captains from being promoted to Admiral, but the Temporal Prime Directive (looking at you Janeway) gets you promoted to Admiral, especially if you violate it 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[TheEvilpossum]

My thought on this has been that we didn't really need a "backstory" for the Prime Directive outside the Enterprise prequel series, which definitely did a bad job in the episode that was supposed to address it. There were always two obvious scenarios for Case 0. One was that an accident or an idealistic intervention gave Federation weapons or tech to an undeveloped species that ended up destroying themselves. The other, in some ways more plausible, was that a warlike primitive culture got warp drive and became a threat to other planets and/ or the Federation itself. Which, when you get down to it, is as good an explanation as any for the Klingons.