I’m just going to come right out and say it for all the other fans of classic Star Trek: Kirk was not nearly as cavalier about the Prime Directive as he’s commonly accused of.
When it first debuted in 1966, Star Trek was a science fiction “Wagon Train.” The Enterprise represented Federation and the values of its civilization as it explored the frontier of space. As captain of the starship, Capt. Kirk (William Shatner) enjoyed a wide latitude in how he completed his mission, but he was also hedged by certain general orders that reflected the values of the Federation. Chief of these was General Order One, the Prime Directive, which essentially forbade interfering in the development of other civilizations.
This was mostly a means to create dramatic tension within episodes. Crew members captured on the planet? With a little superior technology like phasers and transporters, freeing prisoners would be child’s play. But that would mean revealing the existence of the technology, and interfering with the development of the civilization, and that meant finding a more complex and satisfying conclusion to the episode’s story.
In-universe, though, the Prime Directive expressed a humanistic moral value growing in the country at the time. By the 1960s the United States was involved in a war in Vietnam meant to contain communism there, and people were growing discontented not only with that war but with the scope of American involvement in regime changes in other countries, sometimes even overthrowing democratically elected governments, in the name of advancing American interests. To the younger viewers who tuned in to watch the Enterprise every week on Star Trek, such actions reeked of foul play, and a Prime Directive that called for letting other societies develop without American interference seemed ideal.
Yet if we accept the popular view of classic Star Trek, Kirk disregarded the Prime Directive on a consistent basis. In episodes like “The Apple” and “The Return of the Archons,” he destroys computerized overlords that govern entire planets; in “A Piece of the Action,” he represents the Federation as a new mob muscling in on the Ionian territory and forcing previous mob factions to fall in line under a Federation appointee; and in “This Side of Paradise,” he breaks up an idyllic Federation colony and compels it to relocate to another planet.
And on it goes. As a college acquaintance once described it, “Don’t interfere in another planet’s development, unless you want to.” Is Kirk keeping the Prime Directive, or ignoring it?
The wisdom of Kirk’s actions is debatable, and there are other views of the Prime Directive. By the time of Star Trek’s first major sequel, “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” Captain Picard is willing to let an entire civilization go extinct when its star becomes unstable, and becomes infuriated to discover that the brother of one of his officers has rescued survivors of a village where he has been doing anthropological work, by beaming them to the ship’s holodeck while they were asleep.
But far from being an act of defiance against Star Fleet regulations, Kirk’s actions generally are an aggressive application of the Prime Directive. Planets should be free to develop and to grow along their normal courses of growth, and nothing should be allowed to interfere.
“The Apple” is a second-season episode that finds the Enterprise visiting Gamma Trianguli VI, a planet whose populace exists to serve the world computer Vaal. Vaal controls the weather, makes crops grow and keeps the people young and healthy. In many ways it sounds like Paradise, but it’s a society that is static. There is no change, there is no emotional or physical intimacy, no industry, no science or math, and from what we can see, no art. The people bring food to Vaal when he is hungry and do whatever else he tells them, including plotting to catch the Enterprise landing party unawares and kill its members in their sleep. This is a society held in thrall and kept from advancing, its development interfered with not by Star Fleet or by Kirk, but by Vaal. The Prime Directive is intended for justice, and though Spock disagrees with him, Kirk ultimately concludes that Vaal is the oppressor interfering with the development of the society of humanoids on the planet, and he destroys it, freeing the people to begin advancing in freedom.
The same principle applies in “The Return of the Archons,” the first episode to mention the Prime Directive. Here the Enterprise visits Beta III, where it finds an entire planet under the control of a computer known as Landru. Lawbreakers and dissidents alike are “absorbed” into the body, where their negative impulses are suppressed and they become more expressively peaceful and “part of the body,” even though their actions do not always reflect their rhetoric. We know nothing about how Vaal came to be in charge of his world, but in the case of Beta III we learn that the Landru computer was created centuries before by a social reformer named Landru, who left the machine behind to continue his work. Kirk’s conclusion is the same as with Vaal: This is an interference with the natural order, and Landru has to go.
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