FULL DISCUSSION - Star Trek TNG S3E4 - Who Watches the Watchers

Picard is just one person, which was entirely the point of this episode. It's totally okay if he thinks religion is dangerous. Some of us agree with that standpoint, some of us don't.

Note- There is only one truly, and they arent actually uncontacted. The people of Sentinelese Island off the coast of India. At one point, like a century or more ago, some of them were enslaved by British India and returned. There has been a collective memory of that and extreme hostility to the outside world, such that multiple attempts at contact (mostly illegal) have resulted in the people who attempted being killed. There are other groups, mostly in Papua New Guinae, a few deep in the Amazon and a few in Africa, who are listed as "uncontacted" but thats more so "extremely isolated" as opposed to "zero contact". They are aware of the outside world but not really connected to it and are left alone by legal mandate, often living in areas very remote and far away from civilization on national preserves.

well, according to trek, many aliens have visited Earth and influenced culture, including the greek gods who in trek canon are aliens who derived strength from worship. There are actually many examples, but a lot of them are spoilers. It's actually surprising how many aliens visited and influenced Earth pre first contact. Lets not forgey about the Preservers who rescued native americans and apparently are the reason there are so many humanoids. The "vulcan offshoot" people would be an example of this, it wasn't that vulcans settled on Mintaka or that they evolved by chance. This was subtly referenced many times on TOS.

I think part of the point is there will be "leekos" out there, and ke was the one who saw something by his reckoning, totally inexplicable

I think its more that the Federation would cause a secular culture to adopt a religion.

DS9 takes a much more balanced approach to religion

My thoughts about this episode's message on religion are best summed up by the episode of South Park where Cartman travels to the far future where 2 factions of Atheists are fighting a bloody war over what the name of their alliance should be. People will kill each other over the stupidest shit, religion ain't the first or last

Hmm. Maybe Picard was thinking "Oh, if he aims right he'll hit my artificial heart and I won't get hurt at all!"

I don't consider Star Trek in general to be a franchise with many B-plots. Some series are more likely to have them than others, but the one-story structure is usually how it goes.

I think Liko's overreaction would've worked better if they really established more that his wife's recent death really affected him. How here all he wants is to have her back. It would've been better to earlier show he was acting different, grieving, etc. And some misplaced religious beliefs can affect vulnerable people. If they had done that it would seem to have come out of nowhere.

Wow, what a preview! The actual climax of the episode.

Dr. Crusher said she was "familiar with Dr. Pulaski's technique" of erasing a memory. And then it didn't work. Guess we have proof now who is the superior doctor. LOL

Most cartoons higher women to voice boys, Bob's Burgers hired men to voice the mom and older daughter (and some other recurring female characters) and it works surprisingly well.

I think it gets looked over that maybe the reason Liko goes overboard in his immediate belief in “the Picard” is due to his desperation to get his dead wife back. Believing he witnessed resurrection on the enterprise would naturally make him frantic to have the same thing done for his wife.

I think Picard was more upset at the disruption of the Mintakins cultural development than at religion. Also, while not exactly true I do consider superstition and religion slightly different (you could probably have a whole episode questioning that lol) but its the more superstitious aspects he really calls out.

I always really liked this episode. But what got me was the Federation is so Prime Directive orientated and treats it as an absolute...but then puts themselves in a situation where an alien race could be aware of them by just a simple accident. This observation station should have had multiple redundancies to prevent happening what happened. I know it was a plot device but still very sloppy on the Federations part.

The interesting point here is the point that Picard made at the beginning with Crusher. In order to obey the Prime Directive, Crusher should have let Ray Wise die. If the Federation had been serious about this at all, they would ban Crusher from any interstellar mission in which there was any chance of encountering pre-warp travel people. And it most probably would have ended her career in Starfleet altogether.

Wooooooow, I don’t know about anyone else, but I am NOOOOOOOT particularly comfortable with the trailer calling this race “savages”. Holy shit. 😆

I feel Picard's harsh portrayal of religion was on point. The Mintakins were probably at greater risk of devolving into religious chaos than a more scientifically developed culture for one thing. But also religion is not a laughing matter in our present day. It is the very motive behind Iran and Israel throwing down right now. Judaism is the belief that Israel is god's chosen people and they have a right to their land, and a lot of other people disagree. Lots of other examples through modern history as well.

North Sentinel Island is the main place that springs to mind. A cargo ship grounded on a reef and, if memory serves, in one of their Mayday calls the crew requested firearms, because the indigenous tribe were building boats whilst armed with spears and bows, clearly preparing to board the ship.

Thank you for the shoutout :) glad I could help. Love your channel guys.

The movie Green Inferno is basically a modern made Cannibal Holocaust

Josh and Alex- In reference to you guys wondering if its real or not, a missionary named John Chao was killed with arrows in 2018 by a group of indigenous isolated people, protected by a prime directive of sorts. There is a national geographic documentary that came out recently. Here's the link for the trailer: https://youtu.be/afg1V6WOM80?si=eeuK2TY6DviuBJD1

The closing joke was funny😂

Personally, I'm pretty anti-religious, anti-spirituality, but I see Picard here not so much as being against those things as being FOR rationality. The Mintakans had discovered that reason is the best tool for understanding the world (as our ancestors did during the Enlightenment), paving the way for them to come to a scientific understanding of the seasons, the weather, animal life, etc. Now they're about to throw away that approach in favor of old beliefs like "the Overseer caused the floods", "this person died because the Overseer was displeased with them", "we must appease the Overseer so that he will provide us with a good harvest". Whatever your opinion of religious thought in principle, it's hard not to see THOSE things as steps backward into a dark age. There's a big difference between spirituality in the sense of "maybe there is something out there beyond our ability to understand it" and in the sense of "there is a physical God who can do magic and who demands to be worshipped in specific ways."

Next time on Starrrr TREK thenextgeneration the universe EXPLODSE.

Picard was not angry about them being religious. He was upset that their interference would create a religion. Picard is not anti-religion. He is against the idea of forcing a culture to go through religious strife if they have already moved past religion.

Intent on resurrecting The Laura, Liko discovered The Bob!

You can't have everything. Sometimes, everything is normal in Engineering or Medical. Sometimes, Data correctly doesn't give a fuck.

I think, from the beginning, Star Trek's view of religion has been that there's nothing wrong with spirituality; there's nothing wrong with taking inspiration or deriving moral values from a shared collective mythos; there's nothing wrong with individual observance or traditional ritual. But when those belief systems and structures take precedence over rationality, when they inhibit the growth or development of a culture, or when they are used to justify cruelty or otherism, that's when you have a problem. Examples from TOS would be "The Apple" or "Who Mourns for Adonais." Or even "How Sharper Than A Serpent's Tooth" from TAS. The existence of the god-like figures wasn't the problem, it was the insistence that the culture be held in place, or even revert to an earlier stage, to satisfy the god-like being that caused the conflict. Picard wasn't upset about religiosity in general, he was upset that the scientist's original recommendation for addressing the cultural contamination was to play into it; to affirm that he was a deity and issue directives to the Mintakans, thereby encouraging them to put faith ahead of empirical reasoning when the culture was already moving beyond that. Anyway Star Trek will generally do better at modeling religious integration and tolerance moving forward. (Sorry for the wall of text. Paragraphs aren't easy when typing from my phone.)

I hate this goddamn episode more than I like scoring.

OK, credit to the teaser, it shows so much of the episode's key elements, but misrepresents them in a way that the actual episode won't be ruined. Also, a suggestion. Do you guys take notes at all while watching? Like scribbling down a little note of a character or plot point to talk about later? Could be useful to the post episode discussion.

OK so the memory erasing thing, specifically name-dropped as Pulaski's technique, didn't work this time. Maaaaaybe the crew will want to swing by Drema just to make sure Sarjenka wasn't burned at the stake or there's no Church of Data. Just a thought. They never actually verified it worked on her.

The thing that gets me about those teasers is the voice-over guy. He used to do those for ABC for shows like TJ Hooker, The Fall Guy and The Hardy Boys and I always thought the guy must have thought TNG was way more action-packed than it was.

Those teasers are whack and we who saw the show first run, saw them and got used to the fact that the teasers are the sensationalist version of the show.

Are you APES trying to say "men-TOK-in?" lol