[ SECRET POST #4990 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4990 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.



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02. https://i.imgur.com/FUq4uPW.png
[Swamp Thing, linked for fanart porn]


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03.
[Ryu Hwayoung and her sister Hyoyoung]


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04.
[Enola Holmes]


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05.
[FFXIV]


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06.
[resized, not a repeat]


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07.























Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 11 secrets from Secret Submission Post #714.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

06. https://imgur.com/p8zydzm.png
[resized, not a repeat]

Transcript by OP

[fscom]

I find it absolutely fascinating the ways in which Star Trek and Doctor Who have dealt with the problem of aliens/technologically advanced humans interacting with societies that don't have that technology yet.

In Star Trek there's the Prime Directive.

In Doctor Who there's the Time Lord non-interference clause and later the Shadow Proclamation.

In Star Trek there's a constant tension because they'll want to break the Prime Directive for good reasons, but usually the episode will end with the Prime Directive being upheld as a flawed but ultimate good.

In Doctor Who, the Doctor pretty much ignores all that and ends up being right most of the time.

The secret? Even though I understand that Star Trek's Prime Directive was made to show that the Federation is the opposite of a colonizing/imperialist force and that the Doctor doing their own thing would be bad in real life, I MUCH prefer Doctor Who's answer to this situation.

After all, Star Trek is (or at least used to be) a utopia. Is it really so hard to imagine that we'd have figured out how to interact with other cultures by that point?

[feotakahari]

I’m with Speaker for the Dead on this one. Even a “primitive” society has ideas and inventions it can trade on an equal level with an “advanced” society, and to assume they need to be protected is a form of racism in and of itself.

[(Anonymous)]

I think there is some degree of difference where this is no longer the case. There is some point at which the gap is so massive that it's basically no longer possible to have egalitarian relationships between two societies. I just totally reject the idea that, for any two conceivable societies, it must be the case that they can trade on an equal level.

That's not to say that less advanced societies have nothing meaningful to offer, and it's not necessarily a defense of the particular line that ST draws with the Prime Directive, and obviously, it doesn't mean that a more complex or more powerful or more technologically developed society is necessarily better.

[(Anonymous)]

The Prime Directive is more a construct for coming up with interesting moral dilemmas than anything else, and I think it's mostly pretty good at that, even if the deeper logic of it is pretty confusing.

I think Doctor Who has a simpler task because Doctor Who doesn't usually frame the question in terms of relationships between different societies - the Doctor is usually meddling in societies on his own, not as a representative of the Time Lords - which is a much different question, and moreover, meddling in societies is one of the fundamental basic things the Doctor does so it's hard to object to it. Doctor Who gets into similar but more annoying territory for me when it tries to use altering history as a moral dilemma, which I think is really dumb and I always hate those episodes.

[akacat]

I think the Prime Directive is important, and a good Starfleet officer needs to know when to bend it. IE, don’t give the apex species transporter technology if they aren’t already playing around with it at least semi-successfully. But do transport them out of the way of an extinction event, when possible.

The Doctor really isn’t much different. They don’t tend to leapfrog civilizations past their own development milestones, even if a few dozen of their closest friends have a timely-whimey phone.

[(Anonymous)]

This is why TOS is the best and only Star Trek for me!

[(Anonymous)]

I am not an expert on every single episode of every series but I guess I disagree with the generalization that ST usually chose to stick with the PD. I feel like they would discuss the issues, often in terms of the spirit vs. the letter of the law, and then interfere at some level anyway.

I also disagree with the generalization that the Doctor's interference ends up being the right thing to do, especially in the long term.