Original – The Enterprise goes to a planet having a civil war. They’re delivering supplies but they can’t get involved because of the prime directive. There’s a lot of things in Star Trek that change from episode of episode as the plot demands, the Prime Directive is one of those things. It means you can’t contact pre-warp civilizations for sure. Everything else depends on the writer.
A bomb goes off and some people grab Crusher in the chaos. There’s some scenes that show you that both sides are bad because they’re doing normal stuff you’d do when you’re at war. One side has SUPER transporters that also rip you apart inside. One of the super transporter people says they’ll decapitate Crusher if the Enterprise doesn’t force a peace treaty with their mighty photon cannons. This makes very little sense to me.
The Enterprise finds the base of the Supertransporter people and they tell the authorities and they shoot all the bad people. Riker is mad. He thought they were just going to arrest them. Picard convinces a kid not to shoot someone.
The end. Yet another episode were nothing really happens. I’ve seen the entire series at least three times and until I started this dumb thing I never realized how often an episode really has no point.
Devinoni Ral version – Devinoni Ral can find the super transporters with mind powers so that cuts out all that stuff. But they found them anyway so that doesn’t change much. He would know that the non-super transporters were planning on killing everyone so he could tell Riker about that “double-cross”. I guess the enterprise would just go and get them back themselves and stun everyone instead of killing them. Which doesn’t change much either. Even Devanani Ral can’t save this episode.
One thing that surprises me about Star Trek is even in the non-canonical expanded universe they never follow up on any of these things. I would like to know what happened to the Gamemasters of Triskelion after Kirk left. What ever happened to the mob planet? Or the nazi planet? How did the civil war on his planet go? What were they even fighting about? Super transporters seem like something people would be pretty interested in.
None of the guest stars in this episode did anything of interest.
