Justice

DVD, TNG S1 (Justice)

What begins as a vist to an embarrassingly decadent people turns into something a lot more worthwhile, becoming a Prime Directive story. It's easy to sympathise with Wesley (although I'm sure some viewers would have been shouting "hand him over for execution!"), and his crewmates because the Edo are a pathetic race that have ridiculous rules and not much sense. Look at their police force, the 'mediators', for example. Their culture is one in which everyone runs everywhere, yet they carry around a poison needle that gives instant death, in a pouch near their skin! You can just imagine the mortality rate for the job. Oh dear, we lost another mediator today... he happened to trip over on his jog to the gardens...

So in a way you feel like Picard and company have every right to trample on their stupid laws, but at the same time there's a lot of discussion about proving themselves worthy to the powerful beings above the planet, who are just as bad, seeing as they allow the Edo to consider them a god! The ending falls short of what you'd expect. You watch something like 'Voyager's 'Prime Factors' and see the back and forth struggle for what we want, versus what we should do, but it seems Picard just decides to go against the directive, and there are no consequences! Of course he wasn't going to let Wesley be sacrificed, but you sort of expect a clever way round it instead of blatantly defying the law.

I mention 'Voyager' for a reason, because a young Josh Clark, who later played Lieutenant Carey in the series, is seen on the bridge and credited as 'Conn'. It's nice to imagine that it was in fact Carey. On the whole, the episode is a downer, but there is some good moral cogitating, Crusher's reaction to events is very realistic, and the alien shape over the planet looked pretty, though the good parts don't save it.

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