1x07 Justice

[6.2/10] I don’t think you can break down Star Trek to a single animating principle or message. There’s been too many creative voices across too many decades of shows and films to withstand that level of reduction. But if you were to rank the abiding themes of the franchise, shortly behind “Compassion and dignity for all” and “Exploration is a noble, joyous pursuit,” would be “Sometimes you have to break the rules.”

Maybe it’s because those rules are being applied by a stuffy Starfleet admiral. Maybe it’s because a broad limitation doesn’t work with the intricacies of a particular situation. Maybe it’s just because morality demands it. Whatever the reason, captains from Kirk to Burnham have thrown out Starfleet protocol when their gut or conscience told them to.

Picard is no different, and the crux of “Justice” is the notion that sometimes being righteous means avoiding moral absolutes.. The captain is vexed, like so many officers before him, whether to do what’s in the rules or what he believes is ethically right, and whether violating one’s strictures when they’re inconvenient is immoral, or at least improper, in and of itself. But in the end he decides and, as he so often does, convinces a god-like being that sometimes achieving justice means acknowledging the exceptions and seeing the nuances of a situation.

The problem with the episode is that TNG sets up a pretty terrible scenario to test these warring principles. That starts with the laughable citizens of Edo, the planet of the week, who are some combination between the Aryan enclave in Midsommar and a softcore pornography film. The early portions of the episode spend so much time on the away team canoodling with these very “open” and “sensual” people on their cartoonish 1980s free love paradise planet, that it’s almost comical to see “Justice” use their society as the foundation of such a grave ethical and diplomatic dilemma.

There’s a darkside to this Skinemax commune though -- anyone who commits a crime, no matter how minor or trifling, is punished with death. Such crimes include trespassing in randomly designated restricted zones, which are changed up by the day. Naturally Wesley, ignorant of both the rules and the punishments of this open and seemingly Edenic society, accidentally crosses one of these barriers while playing with some local youth, prompting a diplomatic standoff between the Enterprise and the people of Edo.

That’s complicated by the presence of a god-like race of energy beings who occupy a phase-shifting space station high above the planet. These beings view the citizens of Edo as their children, and are technologically superior to the Federation, able to rumble the ship and thwart its technology seemingly with a thought. As Picard wrestles with whether to impose his unilateral will on the people of Edo, he must worry about these demigods unilaterally imposing their will on him.

I like that setup a lot, honestly. There’s a telescoping set of moral and practical considerations, which is neat structurally. Picard (and by extension, the audience) looks down on the Edo’s justice system as absurd and considers Starfleet’s more progressive, but he and his crew are also under the microscope of a force more technologically advanced than themselves, who looks upon humanity’s practices as strange and perhaps even barbarous. There’s a strong sense of perspective at play there.

Likewise, Picard considers violating Starfleet protocol because Wesley is in danger, something encouraged by Dr. Crusher given her natural motherly concern for her son, using whatever power or force is necessary. There’s an interesting parallel to the energy beings, who always refer to the people of Edo as their “children” and seem to be motivated by the same sentiments.

But the problem is that the ethical dilemma established in all of this doesn’t withstand the slightest bit of scrutiny. To the contrary, it’s built on sand. While TNG wants to play the moral relativism card, something well-worn in Star Trek both before and after this episode, the situation here doesn’t really merit it.

There’s room to quibble and debate what system of justice is best and how much we should tolerate different communities applying the rules that make sense to them. But it’s difficult, if not impossible, to imagine what possible justification there could be for killing a child who is: (1.) a visitor to your community, (2.) ignorant of the rule he broke (3.) unaware of the punishment that would be extracted, and (4.) whose transgression caused minimal, if any, harm.

The Edo’s system doesn’t pass the laugh test, let alone the smell test, which makes Picard’s internal debate over whether to let their justice system move forward and whether he has the right to impose his set of morals on them rings false.

Worse yet, we get an incredibly strange invocation of the Prime Directive here (which we’ve already seen in action in “Code of Honor”). I don’t want to fault the franchise for the fuzziness of the concept at this early stage (It was probably still “General Order 1” to most folks at this point), but I think of it mostly in terms of not introducing new technologies or otherwise directing the development of pre-warp societies.

It’s fine for that to be just one offshoot of a more general non-interventionist principle, but if we take the directive as it’s presented here, it proves too much. The Edo are less advanced, so Starfleet can’t interfere with them -- fine. So then why is it OK for Riker and company to beam down for what’s implied to be one big boning session with the locals? And how far does this non-intervention principle go? Would Starfleet really expect Picard to let a society murder a (mostly) civilian passenger on a Federation starship over nothing just because it’s required under the asinine rules of a pre-warp society?

The root of the dilemma here is just too ridiculous to work for the grandiose purpose TNG has for it. The show puts a lot of weight on whether the Energy Beings will judge the Federation just as barbarous if they ignore their own rules when they’re inconvenient, but the rule is either too vague or too absurd to really apply. The show does its best to scaffold the Edo’s system of laws here. There’s talk of how barbarous their world used to be, with the notion that these laws may seem extreme, but they were necessary to pull Edo out of that state of nature and create the paradise we see today. But it’s a meager balm to the implausibility of the situation or moral conundrum.

Worse yet, the episode is just boring for most of the way. There’s long stretches that feel like obvious thriller, where the show’s writers seemed to figure out that Wesley needed to violate the Edo code, and that eventually Picard needed to decide to rescue him and persuade the Energy Beings to let him to do so, but couldn’t come up with much, if anything, compelling to fill the space between.

Moreover, the acting here is pretty rough, with poor Gates McFadden in particular not quite being up to the emotional extremes necessary to convey the gravity of the situation. And Picard continues to be a total dick in the early going, not expressing an ounce of empathy to Dr. Crusher and even putting her off when she understandably wants to talk to him about her son being in mortal peril.

But some of those failures in craft could be excused if “Justice” lived up to its promise of exploring the ethics of interactions between civilizations at different stages of progress. The notion of putting our heroes in the middle of that chain -- threatening to dictate to a more primitive society while liable to have an even more advanced society dictate to them -- creates loads of potential for the episode that largely goes unrealized.

And yet, if there’s something to recommend this episode, it’s the recognition that almost any dictate, any stricture, any rule, moral or otherwise, needs to come with nuance and flexibility, otherwise it will result in patently unjust outcomes. Whether the ends justify violating protocols is an issue that will be with Star Trek for eternity (or at least until the series becomes unprofitable). Most of the time, Starfleet Captains choose to do what’s right over doing what’s technically required; but thankfully, in the future, the moral dilemmas will be less laughable, less absurd, and actually make sense.