Who Watches the Watchers

This episode puts the history of humanity into perspective. Religion, superstition, ignorance, desperation; these are all topics expressed in this episode, with masterful writing and directing. This episode does not hold your hand, it forces you to come to your own conclusions and find your own solutions. Just as some episodes of TNG show humanity to be extremely primitive (even in the 2300s), this episode displays them as supreme beings, gods even. It puts the history of our species into perspective. Perhaps our gods are just aliens that didn't follow the prime directive.

This is one of the best episode of Star Trek that involves the seriousness of the Prime Directive. It handles it really well, that's all I can say without spoiling it. You realize by watching this episode how important the Prime Directive is and how difficult it is to decide what to do when it may have been accidentally violated. It's a fun episode from start to finish.

It gets me right in the feels. My favorite episode after The Inner Light.

Up until the end of this season and beginning of the next, this episode stood out to me as the best of TNG. It does a great job of examining the Prime Directive and has a great performance from Patrick Stewart.

Futuristic anthropologists get to observe a culture in development by means of a camouflaged station. As anyone who took Anthropology one can tell you any contact with any culture will contribute to the development of same. It's the reason for the prime directive, leave relatively primitive cultures alone to develop.

Star Fleet's prime directive goes awry here when the station camouflage is down and a father and daughter from a cousin race to the Vulcans. One is beamed up to the Enterprise at Dr. Crusher's orders because her prime directive involves saving lives. The patient under sedation sees enough to convince him he's up among the gods of which Captain Picard is Jupiter.

Not wanting these people to develop some kind of religion around worship of the Picard Deity is Patrick Stewart's problem. He takes a potentially dangerous solution to solve it and to save Marina Sirtis's life when she is held hostage by the natives.

An anthropologist's episode if there ever was one.