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.
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.