Homeward

Again, original Star Trek was a plot driven "police in space" show. Star Trek the Next Generation emphasized character interaction with plots used as backdrops for character driven stories.

Homeward is still character driven but has an interesting premise of transplanting a group of people from one world to another. The practicalities aside of finding a habitable world with a compatible atmosphere, water and edible flora and fauna, not to mention a human "mating" with the natives, this episode explores the bridging of interpersonal gaps between cultures and foster brothers.

To be honest, it's still a chore to watch, but there's enough "alien intrigue" to mitigate The Next Generations typical slowness and soft peddled approach to story telling. George adds some plot hijinks trying to nurse both holodeck and engineering, and trying to sooth the brow of one of the guest characters adds some interest, but once again Star Trek the next Generation was designed for a broader and younger audience. Therefore any cross cultural is kept comparatively static.

It's interesting for what it is, and had more story energy than previous episodes I had seen, but again the show has a softer approach to just everything old classic fans like me enjoyed from Kirk and Spock.

Take that for what it is.

An exceptionally flawed episode. Captain Picard, Captain "creative solutions and differentiated analysis", of all people, now interpets the Prime Directive in the most dull way possible. Said directive is about avoiding interference in cultures - its purpose is to leave cultures as "original " as possible to avoid artificially induced unrest. However, if all members of a culture will die with a 100% certainly, it follows that this outcome is undoubtedly worse than any negative outcome an interference could possibly have. So it must follow that applying the Prime Directive here makes absolutely no sense at all. And let's not get started about how much Picard's behavior in this episode completely contradicts his personality and his moral values as laid out in the more than 100 episode before. Also Worf should have been totally on board with his step brothers actions since it's without a doubt the more honorable thing to rescue the villagers.

Paul Sorvino guest stars, playing Worf's dangerously careless brother, Nikolai (born of two human parents). He has embedded himself with a group of people whose planet is doomed. They have taken refuge underground, but their days are numbered. Because of the prime directive, Picard refuses Nikolai's request to save them. Brother decides to go it on his own, using the Holodeck as a holding place, causing these people to believe they have not left their planet. To get to the point, he forces Picard, et. al., to search for a planet that can sustain them. They will then be beamed down as they sleep. There is a slip up when one of them escapes the Holodeck and must be dealt with appropriately. This is such a hare-brained scheme to start with that it really pushes the limits of reality (even for science fiction).

Synopsis:

In this episode, Worf catch up his step-brother Nikolai, he is with an alien race who is gonna be extinct after some natural events who gonna erase the life of that entire planet.

But Nikolai do has another plan; transport all the people while they are sleeping into the holodeck and make them believe they are still on that planet, find another world were this race can live and simulate with the holodeck to just travel away from they town, into a uncharted place.

Important: This race is setted on dark ages, so they don't really know about space ships, or even Nikolai is an human, so he is an alien between them.

Review:

In the entire episode we see why save that people is complicated, but not impossible.

1) What if they find out that is a simulation? Imagine get out of your house and then finding out that is a holodeck and you are in an alien planet, imagine knowing you were."kidnapped" without even know about it.

2) Finding a similar planet is not that easy.

3) The holodeck has troubles to hold on the simulator for so long since the Enterprise was affected before leave the planet.

4) You can't really garantee their future, you cannot simple play as a god.

In this episode this things are discussed and in the worst of cases; we see the consecuences.

It's a matter of moral and ethical thing to do or not to do, the Prime Directive was already a topic in the series and they do it again, and that is what make this series so interesting, is not just spaceship fighting, is about resolve problems, know what to do in a future who we can be those "aliens who come in peace", not for nothing the diplomacy is important for interact with other races who already reach the space travel age.

The problem with this episode is that Picard clearly misinterprets what the Prime Directive is all about. The Prime Directive is about non-interference with a planetary society's culture. However, it says nothing about allowing an entire species to become extinct because of forces outside of that society's control (such as the natural disaster threatening to extinguish life from the surface of the planet in this episode). Essentially, his view would be that if a culture hasn't developed space flight capability on its own and a planetary disaster falls upon them, they should be allowed to die off.

Clearly, that view flies in the face of the Original Series episode "All Our Yesterdays" where the Enterprise tried to save some of the people of the planet Sarpeidon when its sun was going supernova. Star Fleet had ordered Kirk to rescue at least some of the people there, people who had not developed space flight capability.

So with the precedent already established in the Original Series, Picard's strained view simply doesn't hold any water especially since Worf's brother came up with a fairly ingenious way to transport the people without impacting their culture.