3x04 Who Watches the Watchers

[6.5/10] “Who Watches the Watchers” works on a symbolic level. It works on a poetic level. It just doesn’t work on a common sense level. The story contends with time-tested Star Trek ideas like non-interference and humanism and rationality as a means for human advancement. In key places, those explorations are stirring, and even moving. But too often the episode veers into the didactic, and the situation and decisions at play fall apart the longer you think about them.

The story sees Starfleet spying on some Bronze Age Vulcan equivalents called the Mintakan, when a malfunction exposes them. In the ensuing injuries and rescue, the cusp-of-advancement locals mistake Picard for a god and begin reverting to old superstitions. The cultural contamination, coupled with a revolving door of human hostages, makes the captain’s path to remediating the situation uncertain at best.

On paper, it’s not a bad setup. Star Trek is almost always interesting when officers have to balance their commitment to the Prime Directive with the health and well-being of their fellow crewmen, not to mention the societies they’re honor-bound not to tamper with. A random anthropologist and eventually counselor Troi are in danger. These people are on the precipice of advancing as a society. How to save the former without disrupting the latter, especially after the Mintakans deify the captain.

Two scenes elevate the episode, showing Picard’s discomfort with that position and his commitment, not just as a member of Starfleet, but as a moral and philosophical imperative, to disabusing the locals of this notion. The first comes when one of the anthropologists tells him that he should simply pose as the god the Mintakans believe him to be and tell them what to do.

Picard forcefully rejects the suggestion, with a commanding and downright angry performance by Patrick Stewart. You can immediately tell how repulsed he is at the thought of sending these people back to the dark ages by confirming their superstitions. This is a story that doesn’t work on the level of pure common sense. You can see another captain choosing to indulge in this one bit of showmanship in order to save the lives of his crew. But it works emotionally. So deep is Picard’s commitment to the ideals, the prospect of the Minatakans discovering them on their own, that he refuses to take part in pulling the wool over their eyes any further, even if it means one of his own is at risk.

The second comes when he beams the Mintakans’ leader aboard the ship and shows her a glimpse of her planet from orbit, a gesture he made to one of the Edo back in season 1’s “Justice” and which he’ll pull again in First Contact. You can understand why he returns to that act so often. It puts things in perspective, to be able to see the place of your birth from a literal different vantage point.

But Jean-Luc doesn’t just use it to awe Nuria, the Mintakan leader deciding whether to return to religious fervor or proceed on her people’s scientific trajectory. He uses it as an opportunity to reach the conclusion on her own. Their scenes together are moving and sharp. She holds her hands tight to show that he is flesh and blood. He walks Nuria through how an ancient ancestry would see her as a god thanks to her comparatively modern tools, but that he too is just using tools of a different sort. He guides her rather than dictates to her, as a man trying to avoid godhood would.

The problem is that these scenes work in isolation, but don’t really justify the captain’s actions here. The needle that must be threaded in “Who Watches the Watchers” is how to rescue the crewman without doing any more damage to the Mintakans’ worldview. That justifies Picard’s hesitance to simply beam Troi back to the ship, since it would expose the locals to transporter technology, but he chooses to beam up Nuria later in the episode anyway! You could, perhaps, justify it on the grounds that only one Mintakan would witness the tech in action, rather than a crowd of them, but that seems like a pretty trifling distinction when Troi’s life is on the line.

Hell, one of the anthropologists makes a great point early on -- the cultural contamination has already happened. It’s one thing to allow someone to die for the Prime Directive to avoid exposing a native culture to your advanced influence -- already a little suspect as a principle -- but it’s something else entirely to let people die for it when the exposure has already happened. How to correct for the local’s misperceptions of who you are and what you’re capable of is a separate issue worth considering, but it seems like misplaced priorities, at best, that Picard is unwilling to use the technology at his disposal to save Federation lives once the tab’s already been pulled here.

The answer is, because the episode needs some tension, and I guess they figured they couldn't generate that from Picard merely considering the philosophical implications of being mistaken for a deity without a jumpy, pre-Twin Peaks Ray Wise threatening to kill Troi out of a misplaced sense that it will please the gods. There too lies the heavy-handedness that weakens the episode. It’s not enough for these people to be devolving back into superstition. It has to happen in hours, with them ready to kill to earn the gods’ favor.

I can excuse the lack of realism as a necessary product of delivering this fable in forty-five minutes, but it never carries the whiff of the plausible. All of the Mintakans speak in breathless declarations, with a wide-eyed, stagey quality that makes their comments seem more like over-exaggerated announcements than professions of the heart. The reactions and response of the locals are so quick and caricatured that it saps the episode’s themes of any force in execution. And it doesn’t help that the direction is flat and the score is overbearing to compensate here either.

In the end, Picard takes an arrow to the chest to prove his point, when simply telling the Mintakans that he is mortal is another choice he doesn’t want to make for some reason. It dramatizes his convictions here in serious terms, showing that he would willingly die if it meant keeping the Mintakans from reverting to their former superstitions in lieu of examination and rationality. But it’s also a choice that only works symbolically, just one of many that more or less fall apart when you step back and evaluate them.

From there, the episode tidily wraps things up, with Picard healed in a jiffy and sharing a friendly teach-in with the locals. It epitomizes the “aim big, but misfire often” quality. “Who Watches the Watchers” examines the importance of reason and understanding, and allowing other cultures to reach them on their own, even in the face of countervailing principles. It shows some great personal moments for Picard, the humility with which he sees himself and what his people have achieved, with a devotion to seeing other communities as equally worthy and capable of reaching those heights. But it misses the boat when trying to turn those noble ideas into a story and series of decision points, with both, all too often, turning into nonsense.