S7 E22: Natural Law

A planetary shield surrounding a beautiful, practically untouched planet brings down a shuttle with Chakotay and Seven aboard it. They work with the indigenous inhabitants to find their shuttle wreckage, while Janeway discovers from a nearby civilization (the Ledosians) that the shield had been placed there in the distant past by a third culture, in order to protect the natives from the Ledosians' meddling. As soon as Seven brings down the shield, Ledosian away teams are surveying the surface for exploitable natural resources, and Voyager steps in to reestablish the field.

So, I'll defend the prime directive more than most people I know, but this episode is as strong an argument against it as I've heard. Most of the time, native peoples don't have magical force field protecting them. And for these guys, as soon as the field is down, you've got opportunists around to take advantage of the planet's resources. Sure, it's the nice thing to do to let people be, but in a universe as crowded as Trek's, that's practically a death sentence. As soon as the Federation moves on, hey, it's time for the Ferengi or the Klingons or somebody else. Isn't it the lesser evil for the noble people to interfere?

Even putting the shield there in the first place is interference - what happens when these people get to the technological level that they could engage in space flight, but can't breach the barrier? Enforced isolation is still interference - what happens when a natural disaster would wipe out the people there, and their opportunistic neighbors cannot save them? In that case, I'd bet they'd rather have the Ledosians as their neighbors than the Federation, given the results of Pen Pals - and that's the best of the bad prime directive episodes.

The natives are interesting; they're nonverbal, and my wife recognized some of their sign language as slightly altered parts of American Sign Language. That's cool, I like it when they throw some easter eggs like that in. At the same time, they are your basic "noble savage" guys, which is fine, but largely boring. They might've been more compelling if they weren't all model citizens, but I'm glad we didn't have to have long sequences wherein Chakotay earns their trust. Making them civil allowed for more of a chance for Chakotay to exercise his interest of the week, linguistics.

What really surprised me is that there was no hint even of Seven and Chakotay romancery. When they started the episode in a shuttle together, we groaned. Yeah, it's gonna crash and they're gonna have makeouts. Well, it crashed, but there were no makeouts. Props to the writers for taking it slow, though at this point they don't really have much time left.

There's also a subplot with Paris needing to take a pilot safety course after breaking one of the flight protocols, but it is best forgotten. It's inoffensive, but it only fills time. Not particularly funny, and without other substance.

Watchability: 3/5

Bottom Line: Well, even though this episode didn't exactly express the point that it meant to, it wasn't hard to watch, and gave an interesting starting point for a prime directive discussion without cramming a message down our throats.