“Who Watches the Watchers”
Written by Richard Manner & Hans Beimler
Directed by Robert Wierner
Season 3, Episode 4
Original air date: October 16, 1989
Star date: 43173.5
Mission summary
The Enterprise hurries to Mintaka III, where some Federation anthropologists secretly observing a proto-Vulcan race are in jeopardy. Their sooper sekrit compound blows up when the generator fails, exposing their little observation tower to the natives below–a girl named Oji and her father, Liko. The scientists and Liko are injured in the explosion, and Crusher decides to beam them onboard for medical treatment. Oji watches all this from a hiding place, wondering what the hell is going on…
When Picard finds out a Mintakan is onboard his ship, he flips out at Crusher, who’s tired of this plot:
CRUSHER: Before you start quoting me the Prime Directive, he’d already seen us. The damage was done. It was either bring him aboard or let him die.
PICARD: Then why didn’t you let him die?
CRUSHER: Because we were responsible for his injuries.
PICARD: I’m not sure that I concur with that reasoning, Doctor.
Your hero, ladies and gentlemen! He says the least they can do is mind-wipe the guy like they did with Sarjenka, but if that worked we wouldn’t have an episode. Crusher beams Liko back to the surface, assuming he’ll just think he was on a bender I guess, and Picard sends Troi and Riker–disguised as Mintakans–to the surface as well to find the last scientist who was injured but missing when they last looked.
Naturally the mind-wipe didn’t work, and so Liko goes back to his village telling stories of the great healing power of the supreme being who rescued him: The Picard. His daughter is a little skeptical, but they have no other explanation for what happened so this’ll do. Some men drag in Palmer, the missing scientist, and Liko gains a few new believers. Soon Riker and Troi show up to try and plant a seed of doubt, but the Mintakans are starting to really come around to this Picard. Because the away mission is for Palmer more than damage control, Troi creates a distraction and most of the Mintakans leave the unconscious Palmer passed out with Riker and a village elder. Riker gets one over on the old man guard pretty quickly (um, yay?) and fireman carries Palmer to… someplace else to beam out. For reasons I still don’t understand, having seen this many times.
He does manage to get away with Palmer, but Troi is stuck with the locals who are none too pleased about losing their leverage with The Picard. They threaten to punish her, hoping to please their god. The Picard doesn’t want to beam her out in the middle of a group, because that’d be sooooo much harder to explain than the fact that she mysteriously appeared with a guy who kidnapped an alien.
So The Picard has a new idea: he’s going to convince the leader, a woman named Nuria, that he’s not a god. His plan looks a little like this:
Step 1: Beam her to his spaceship.
Step 2: ????
Step 3: Understanding!
Poor Nuria is completely baffled by her experience. The Picard shows her space and her planet and explains using patronizing metaphors how backwards she is, and in the end she still thinks he’s a god, for some reason. Finally, to prove his impotence, The Picard lets her watch one of the scientists die in Sickbay. Rather than being a deeply traumatic experience and sending her into a whirlwind of despair about the inevitability of death across time and space, she politely accepts that The Picard is either the lamest supreme being ever, or just a dude, and vows to return and explain it all to her people.
Meanwhile, Liko has been going a little zealous on them all and threatening to kill Troi, who is for reasons unknown to this reviewer still on the planet. Nuria and The Picard arrive just in time to explain that The Picard is a powerless little man, but Liko decides to fire his arrow (because savages?) at The Picard to prove he’s immortal. His daughter deflects the shot just in time to only get The Picard in the arm. And as the Overseer once said long ago, “If it bleeds, we can kill it,” so The Picard must not be a god.
Later, the Mintakans feel kind of sheepish about the whole thing and offer Picard a tapestry so that he’ll remember them. If only we could forget…
Analysis
There are two ways to do this story: make it a farce, with a series of progressively more hilarious misunderstandings; or make it a serious contemplation of the nature of religion and scientific understanding. The episode chose the latter, and did it poorly enough that it feels like the former.
We all laugh at “The Picard,” but Troi and Riker are ludicrously incompetent and should be the real targets of derision and shame. They claim to be cloth traders yet don’t seem to have any cloth; Troi’s “ruse” involves pointing vaguely and saying “Look! A distraction!”; Riker uses the good old “Does this rag smell like chloroform to you?” trick with the “Let me show you a real knot…” scene, only to stumble awkwardly through Vasquez Rocks carrying an unconscious guy for absolutely no reason to…what? Avoid detection? None of this makes any sense. The contamination is done, yet they let Troi’s life hang in the balance to have a contrived threat. Even the anthropologist can’t believe this stupid plan! Honestly, if they had cut that entire Troi/Riker/Palmer subplot I think this episode would have benefited enormously, and not just because we wouldn’t have to hear Riker muse not-at-all-hilariously on local mating habits.
But it made me wonder about a lot of “contamination” episodes in TOS. If Picard had found the Nazi planet, would he just say “Oh we can’t interfere,” despite the fact that interference is happening all around him? There’s no consistent vision here–no articulated argument for his application of the PD in this instance. I remain baffled at his choices and the main conflict. As far as I’m concerned, once they think you’re a god, you should go in, rescue your d00ds, and then discuss next steps for damage control. Why does he just abandon Troi to the we’re-totally-not-Native-Americans?
One of the real strengths of the conceit (in theory more than execution) is that given how wacky this all plays out, the conclusion that some powerful being is at work is, paradoxically, the most logical answer. And it’s absolutely correct in many ways, though of course wrong in the most essential one. But there is no serious examination of religion in this way. The Mintakans aren’t coming to a logical, but inaccurate and inadequate conclusion after much debate and analysis. They’re morons who en masse take up the banner of a long-dead mythological figure, and in just moments become a bunch of wildly emotional nativist stereotypes who break out the bow and arrow to pointlessly execute a stranger. I can absolutely believe that some “primitive” race out there would, upon seeing Picard, assume he was a god. In fact, I bet it happens all the time. But that doesn’t explain their mysterious de-evolution into babbling zealots. Since when does a post-Enlightenment Bronze age (whatever the hell that would be) equal monotheistic chauvinism? And as for the “religion,” we get some cheap, offensive shots at theists for being such foolish dupes and yet another pat on the back for the Federation. The show could have pulled off that idea with a lot more grace and thought than it did here.
I would have given this a Warp 2, but the ending where Picard essentially offers to die to prove he’s not a god ranks as one of the lowest TNG moments for me. I can’t think of any other time in which he feels like less of a leader. Maybe it’s supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek Christ inversion? Yeah, thought not.
Torie’s Rating: Warp 1 (on a scale of 1-6)
Thread Alert: If this band of merry men is supposed to be Bronze Age, I highly recommend a visit to the designer’s local library and/or internet. But seriously, this looks like a community theater production of Macbeth where the director said “make it look oldie-timey” and the designer looked around in a panic shouting “VESTS! VESTS! I CAN’T LOSE!”
Best Line: LIKO: I believe I have seen the Overseer. He is called the Picard.
RIKER: Uh oh.
Trivia/Other Notes: The Mintakan tapestry will live in Picard’s ready room from now on. Look for it.
Previous episode: Season 3, Episode 3 – “The Survivors.”
Next episode: Season 3, Episode 5 – “The Bonding”
I think we’re still doing scripts left over from last season. Maybe the worst thing about this episode is that it sets up the beginning of Insurrection. That alone should be enough to knock off at least one warp.
It’s a good thing these weren’t proto-Klingons. For them, “It bleeds, therefore we can can kill it,” would by no means preclude godhood.
And hey, Vasquez Rocks. It’s nice to see the old traditions being upheld. It is an interesting place to visit if you’re ever in the LA area (despite being the most common geological feature in the galaxy). Depending on how well you’re versed in old movies and TV shows, it can trigger a lot of memories.
The last time I saw this I enjoyed it more than it warranted, just by not taking it at all seriously. It’s clearly a bad episode all around but it’s bad in ways that get kind of funny. Having a God you call “The Picard” is amusing. And it’s kind of amusing that previously they referred to their diety as “The Overseer” given the connotations the title carries in our world. It’s like someone decided to diss religion and gave up any pretense at all to subtlety.
Were I religious, I’d probably have been offended by a lot of it but since I’m not I’m just sort of amused. Those wacky kids! It’s like watching TNG fan fiction put on by high school students. That’s bad, of course, but you get kind of used to that level of bad in the first couple of seasons. For me, it’s a matter of either laughing or crying, and I kind of like to laugh.
Again, like “Ensigns of Command,” I had the recollection this episode aired later in the series. Both because of the lazy comfort with which the story wrestles with a central issue, a central conceit, of the STU, and because of its generally lame and preachy treatment of same.
The central conceit, as has already been noted, is how the Federation studies young cultures without interfering with them. One point in its favor, it dispenses with the easy (and somewhat ethically problematic) cheat of the mind wipe in order to probe directly into real issues of cultural contamination. Yet, the solutions are still made easy, still cheats, because the culture in question is “logical” and adaptive to new experience. How easy would this problem have been if the natives had not been miraculous?
I found Troi particularly preachy and annoying here; while I rather liked Crusher’s hard headed focus on saving lives. And Picard shines here by getting irritated at glibly offered half-measures and non-solutions (although it does stretch credulity that he has to lecture an anthropologist about cultural contamination).
…This episode reminds me of a little of a wacky old (original) Kung Fu episode in which Quai Chang Caine squares off against a powerful tong. If he loses, the tong continues its oppression of superstitious village folk, if he wins, the superstitious village folk will conclude it is because Caine has supernatural powers and their fear will merely be transferred. In the end, he’s shot through with an arrow (!) and survives, demonstrating his mortality.
Excellent point. It’s very analogous to the lame PD depictions from Season One, where a cockeyed and inept interpretation of that directive is the central driving drama. Compare it to “Return of the Archons,” the first (?) “contamination” episode of TOS, where Kirk’s first impulse is to rescue the crew.
…I don’t judge Picard’s solution quite as harshly as Torie: Demonstrates he is ready to die for the principles of his commission, and that’s at least something.
A low to at best medicore episode that falls utterly apart upon closer thought. Presumably there is a whole planet of the proto-elves (not Vulcan because Vulcan had a bloody and savage history before the logic came along and magically made everythign better.) All that has been contaminated is one tribe.When this tribe starts telling tales of Overseers all the other withh point and mock and laugh. Just beam your people out and things will settle back out.
Why couldn’t Riker go to one fo the other rooms that we could see to get his beam out on with Palmer?
Why couldn’t Troi at least ask to use a restroom and get her beam out on with herself?
So here we are barely three seasons in and we have seen the major variations of the Prime D,
1) We obey your laws — unless it means killing the Chrusher child.
2)We let destiny takes its intended course — unless it’s volcanoes, because those suckers are just evil,
3) We do not contaminate — except when we do, then we mix in a whole lot more because hey in for a penny in for a pound.
Yeah, this… I remembered this more fondly as a later-season episode. Mainly because I like the idea of being an anthropologist who can actually document cultural evolution in real-time from behind a duck-blind.
However, I think it does serve as another stone in the arch I’m building, which is labeled “Nothing in Star Trek makes any sense unless every planet really is populated by less than forty people.” Like Bob says, convincing a couple of families that there’s a god isn’t going to do very much to the culture when the very events being “witnessed” to the rest of the tribe are under considerable dispute. Everybody else will just assume Liko’s been hitting the stump water again. And it’s a pre-literate society (so far as we can tell), so anything these folks learn will be distorted into unrecognizable form within three generations.
That really skewers the part that I thought was so cool, the anthropological conceit: what exactly are these scientists going to be documenting without getting out and interacting with the people? They’re just going to sit there and hope that lots of culturally important events, ceremonies and trade and the like, take place in front of their one little cave?? And this one little tribe in this one corner is an accurate portrayal of all life on the planet??? Alien observers sitting around watching the Chumash in 1770 would not exactly have had a complete picture of the cultures and development of the whole planet (nor, of course, would they have a complete view if they were limited to North Carolina, or Boston or Beijing — documenting a sentient species in all its diversity takes a lot more scientists than will fit on the screen.)
This has the potential, as Torie said, to be a thoughtful exploration of the idea that when you have limited information about the natural world, a supernatural explanation often will be the most logical one. That would’ve been a good set-up for a humorous episode, with all attempts at explanation just leading to more accidental miracles and greater faith on the part of the Mintakans — which would also have been a nice exploration of all the little technological devices which the crew completely fails to recognize as such because they’re so mundane. I mean, things like stretchy synthetic fabrics, shoelaces, zippers, etc. would all seem exotic to the Mintakans; you don’t even need phasers and replicators to seem high-tech to people who can’t even smelt iron!
But as it is, the episode takes itself way too seriously, and in so doing loses both the joy and the message. This is not a concept that can avoid foundering on the shoals of ridiculous earnestness if it’s allowed to stray into serious waters.
I was also leaning towards a Warp 2, until Torie’s analysis got me all worked up about the rampant stupidity in this episode. We are constantly beat over the head with debates about the Prime Directive, and the understanding of religious fervor is a bit oversimplified. I got the sense that Picard was not so bothered by the fact that they had inadvertently rekindled interest in their old god, as he was by the fact that they had fixated on him. That probably wouldn’t have looked good in his report.
And hey, I wasn’t happy about their previous attempt to wipe someone’s memory to cover their mistakes, but I can certainly see the utility in that — but if it had worked, it also might have made them even lazier. “We don’t need a duck blind, we’ll just hang out with them for a little while and erase their memories when we’re done here.” Mostly it just seems foolish for Starfleet to have been there in the first place; the way to prevent cultural contamination is to just leave them alone for a while. What are they doing excavating into their mountains and spying on them?
One thing that has always stuck with me was Picard’s efforts to explain advanced technology to Nuria. It’s Clarke’s third law, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Torie thought it was condescending, but it wasn’t really–after all, she didn’t get it until she saw someone die. Of course, my first impulse would have been to assume that the god was either faking the death or punishing someone by refusing to bring him back to life. So the whole argument just doesn’t work until they want it to in order to get the story moving along. It’s very slow, and as Torie mentioned, it practically parody: I almost laughed when Riker grabbed that guy and just ran off into the distance.
I do like the fact that the tapestry continues to appear in Picard’s ready room though. That’s a nice touch, and one I’d never noticed before.
This episode is just a mess. Warp 1.
@DeepThought – In the universe of Star Trek is there a sentient species other than ours that has any diversity? Every Star Trek race I can think of comes from a planet with only one culture. There’s the warrior planet, the logical planet, the greedy businessmen planet, etc.
Given what we’ve seen about alien races in Star Trek I think one team studying one group would get the same information as dozens of teams spread out over an entire planet.
Another example of Everyone Else’s Religion Is Based On Something Concrete.
—man–you guys are brutal–i liked this episode–warp 4–but that doesn’t mean i don’t see problems–riker’s escape–and the entire concept of the “duck blind” failing, avoiding exposure is too important, there should be many more redundant systems–{i don’t believe that ufo’s crashed at roswell either–because if you can displace time and space–you should be able to control gravity too}—i am pleased to see vulcanoids in another form instead of just those pesky romulans—i flash back to “all our yesterdays”–when bones says to spock–“Think, man. What’s happening on your planet right now, this very moment? “–i know these are not barbarians–but it is interesting to see more primitive vulcanoids—seeing this episode–i also think of, well, kolinahr–this is no high achievement of logic–but with these folks–we go from epiphany to the insight of a greater awareness in no time –not a stretch for people with some of spock’s bloodlines–after all–if l. ron hubbard can come up with scientology in a dentist chair–these aliens can shrug off the ignorance of superstition in one episode— i am also charmed with the discovery that nuria is experiencing –jeeze i wish some intergalactic muckity muck would do that for us—-but what are you going to do captain?–the prime directive is a mess in this one–like dead polio virus in a vaccine–he risks even greater peril for this culture by getting involved–and indeed as he said to dr. barron– “But each of us, including Doctor Palmer took an oath that we would uphold the Prime Directive, if necessary, with our lives.” — for picard –the risk culminates in his decision to take the arrow—- and it worked.
The elements of the constant near misses of TNG are all there. I like the idea of living anthropology on alien worlds too. The idea of being able to study a primitive culture like that is pretty attractive.
I also like the notion that the simplest things can lead to an entire cultural shift, particularly when it comes to religion. It seems ridiculous to consider that Liko could have one experience that he (ir) rationalized away as divine intervention, but our human history is full of one guy coming along with a message that changed civilization for millennia.
It’s just that once again the writers had a bag full of interesting ideas and then fumbled each and every one of them.
The one thing I wish, perhaps more than anything else, was that Enterprise could have visited a world, had an impact, but only discovered it years later. Without the influence of relativity with light speed it couldn’t actually happen but man, it would have been fascinating for the crew to witness and be forced to deal with genuine repercussions on a large scale.
@11 Toryx
They sort of did stories like that on TOS, as in “A Piece of the Action,” which also left the possibility open that they had further contaminated the planet, since they left a communicator behind. That’s actually a great example of how they managed the damage by getting even more involved.
I’ll give this episode some credit – it gets me thinking about three better things to watch.
If you want to see comedy resulting from cultural contamination, watch The Gods Must Me Crazy. ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080801/ for information ) Here we have a simple act, one which many people do everyday though not in this setting, that leads to upsetting the daily life of a small isolated village.
And, if you’d like to see the consequences of that simple act carried to a greater extreme, check out the Bolero segment of Bruno Bozzetto’s Allegro Non Troppo. (For information http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074121/?ref_=sr_1 )
And my third one is different. While this one is not about cultural contamination, it does deal with members of a non-advanced culture encountering advanced technology such as “The Queen’s Fish.” The basic setup of The Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095709/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2 ) is this – Men seeking relief from the Black Death, guided by a boy’s vision, dig a tunnel from 14th century England to 20th century New Zealand. (From the IMDB page.)
I had completely forgotten about this episode when I wrote that ‘The Picard and the Not Picard’ bit in my comments on Time Squared. I had lifted that bit from the movie The Spiderwick Chronicles. I really don’t have much to say about this episode. I like cultural contamination and fish out of water stories and both those themes have been done better elsewhere. For now, I’m going to watch Bolero when I’ve finished this on-line session.
I’m with Lane Arnold… I just didn’t think this episode was that bad, even though I see the problems everyone else has mentioned. I didn’t even think Picard was that patronizing when he explained the technology/magic thing, although I don’t think his bow/starship analogy necessarily applies. Why wouldn’t Nuria’s ancestor say “Can you show me how to make one of those?”
What mostly gripes me about this episode, and about Trek in general, is that with the exception of things like “Bread & Circuses”, the promotion of a general idea that mature people and societies are supposed to outgrow God and religion. I understand this came from Gene Himself and was partly due to the way he was raised. It’s short-sighted to think you can have spirituality or science and rational things, but not both, Some of the greatest rational thinkers in history have believed in God and an afterlife.
This really needed to be a two- or even three-parter. I would have liked to see this as a full-length movie, just to explore and develop the ideas more fully.
Eugene @ 12: Yeah, I was actually thinking about that episode as I was writing my post but what I had in mind was more along the lines of an episode where they went back to see what happened after they left the communicator. Or better yet, went back to check on Khan and his men (which, of course, does happen sorta in the movie, but still).
@ 4 Lemnoc
But his principles are stupid…
@ 14 Bluejay Young
You kind of got your wish with Insurrection.
@ All
Just FYI, we’ve been having some issues with our blog. It looks like there’s some kind of wordpress hack making its way across the internet after the most recent update. I have it patched, but I’m not 100% sure it’s fixed, so let me know if you get blocked from commenting or run into any other errors with the site. It may not be fixed for real until the next WP core build update, but I’m trying to keep it running as smoothly as possible in the meantime.
@ Torie
“Just FYI, we’ve been having some issues with our blog. It looks like there’s some kind of wordpress hack making its way across the internet after the most recent update. I have it patched, but I’m not 100% sure it’s fixed, so let me know if you get blocked from commenting or run into any other errors with the site. It may not be fixed for real until the next WP core build update, but I’m trying to keep it running as smoothly as possible in the meantime.”
Could being told that my comment was waiting for moderation be part of what you’re talking about here? That just happened when I commented on the “The Bonding” re-watch.
@ 17 Ludon
To a certain extent, yes, but I also just replaced some of our spam-filtering and security plugins so it sort of “reset” who is safe for commenting. A total nightmare…
@Torie Atkinson – Hah!, now I have to watch Insurrection.
Just re-watched this episode as well, and didn’t think it was as bad as some here did. I have been following the re-watch reviews here as I work through the third season, and saw this episode’s low rating before watching it; perhaps going in with low expectations helped.
There’s no doubt that there were scores of plot holes and other things that made no sense whatsoever, but don’t you sort of have to go into every episode expecting that?
I still have a sneaking fondness for this episode even though it takes a very predictable and cliched course, especially with the “behold the god who bleeds!” plot twist. There are numerous stories in various mythologies of gods being injured (or even killed) so I hardly think it’s necessarily true that getting shot with an arrow would have proved that Picard wasn’t divine.