“Justice”
Written by Ralph Willis and Worley Thorne
Directed by James L. Conway
Season 1, Episode 7
Production episode 40271-109
Original air date: November 9, 1987
Stardate: 41255.6
Captain’s log. The Enterprise stumbles across an inhabited Class-M planet occupied by humanoids. Crusher has been agitating for the crew to take shore leave, and the planet seems well suited to it.
The locals, the Edo, are all blond and tanned and fit and scantily clad—it’s like being in Los Angeles, basically. The welcoming committee asks if they want to go to the council chambers, or have sex first.
Meanwhile, the Enterprise keeps finding an odd sensor shadow. Data tries the direct approach of hailing it and asking it to identify itself, and it appears—sort of. Both sensors and La Forge’s VISOR show it as partly in and out of reality. It sends a probe, which shows up on the bridge and asks what the Enterprise is doing there. After they explain themselves, the probe warns them not to interfere with its children, then communes with Data.
Back on the planet, the Edo either play really silly games, or smooch a lot. The away team gets nervous when they realize they’ve lost contact with the ship—and get more nervous when it’s revealed how the Edo maintain peace. There are “punishment zones”—if one violates the zone, one is condemned to death. One such zone is over new plants, which Wes falls into while playing ball with some of the kids, blissfully unaware that he’s just committed a capital crime.
The away team stands off with the Edo Mediators, who are prepared to kill Wes, which Riker refuses to allow, punctuated by Worf and Yar’s phasers. The Enterprise finally regains communication, and Picard beams down to negotiate.
The Edo agree to await carrying out Wes’s sentence until sundown, and even suggest the Enterprise free Wes by force, which Picard refuses to do. He takes Rivan, one of the Edo, onto the ship to identify the thing in orbit, which the Edo refer to as God. God then threatens the ship until they return Rivan to the planet. (At no point does anyone ask what God needs with a starship….)
Data explains to Picard that God is a collective being that exists in several dimensions, and it has set itself up as a caretaker to the Edo. Picard agonizes over the decision he must make—unwilling to sacrifice Wes (or any crewmember), but needing to respect the power of the Edo’s caretaker, which will take a dim view of Picard breaking the Prime Directive. The Edo themselves plead with Picard to obey their laws.
The caretaker refuses to allow them to beam out, and Picard finds himself pleading as well. There can be no justice, he says, when laws are absolute, that life is a study in exceptions. That does the trick, and the away team beams up and leaves orbit. One hopes they dropped a few interdiction beacons on their way out .
Thank you, Counsellor Obvious. “Sharing orbit with God is no small experience.” Yup.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The Enterprise crew is amusingly incapable of determining the nature of the Edo’s caretaker, leading to a frustrated Picard asking, “Why has everything become a ‘something’ or a ‘whatever’?”
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. For a planet filled with people who “play at love,” their actual interactions are more akin to high school students in the back of a sedan.
The boy!? Wes violates local laws, is condemned to death, and intones “I’m with Starfleet—we don’t lie” in what may be the worst line delivery of Wil Wheaton’s entire career. He also justifiably calls Picard out when he tries to tell the boy that he’s not involved in the decision about his own execution.
If I only had a brain Data is rather shocked to discover that he babbles.
There is no honor in being pummeled. Worf explains that recreational sex is a bad idea with human women, as they are too fragile. WOO HOO!
Welcome aboard. For all that “Code of Honor” was decried as racist, the description applies much more to this episode, where the planet of pretty people is entirely populated by blond-haired, blue-eyed white folks, starting with Brenda Bakke and Jay Louden as Rivan and Liator.
Also the relief tactical officer is played Josh Clark, who would go on to the recurring role of Assistant Chief Engineer Joe Carey on Star Trek: Voyager.
I believe I said that.
“And they make love at the drop of a hat.”
“Any hat.”
-La Forge and Yar enthusiastically describing the Edo.
Trivial matters: This is the first of three occasions where Picard brings a woman from a primitive planet to the ship and impresses the crap out of her by letting her look out a window—the next two coming in “Who Watches the Watchers?” and Star Trek: First Contact.
Make it so. An episode that has occasional moments—Picard and Data’s philosophical discussion of matters with immediate practical consequences, Worf’s deadpan reactions to the Edo (“Nice planet”), Picard’s frustration with the Enterprise‘s inability to determine specifics about the caretaker—but collapses under the weight of its own ridiculousness. The Edo are caricatures, and Eurocentrically offensive ones at that, the Edo’s deity is simplistic and underdeveloped, and way too much time is spent standing around talking. Wes being the one to accidentally break a law was so predictable that Worf went ahead and predicted it in the script.
And then in the end, Picard saves the day by speechifying. It isn’t even all that much of a speech, and its brevity just makes it even more unconvincing. A very anticlimactic end to an endlessly long buildup.
Having said all that, I will say that I absolutely and unreservedly loved Picard’s response to Data’s query as to whether or not he’d sacrifice one life to save a thousand: “I refuse to let arithmetic decide questions like that.” That line helped cement Jean-Luc Picard as a great character.
(Added bonus: Check out Wil Wheaton’s recent recap of “Justice” at the Phoenix Comic-Con.)
Warp factor rating: 2
Keith R.A. DeCandido‘s most recent Star Trek work includes the Captain’s Log comic featuring Edward Jellico, the novel A Singular Destiny, and stories in Seven Deadly Sins and Mirror Universe: Shards and Shadows. Follow him online at his blog or on Facebook or Twitter under the username KRADeC.
I agree completely about the “arithmetic” line — one of my favorite Picardisms. And “There can be no justice so long as laws are absolute” is another. There were some good ideas here, but they were buried under the kitsch.
I remember reading an article back around ’87 in which John D. F. Black, the former TOS story editor who wrote the story that got turned into this episode (and who used the pseudonym Ralph Willis here), talked about his original version, which was a lot darker and more thought-pr0voking than this turned out to be. Unfortunately I no longer seem to have the article. But this was quite a wasted opportunity. Something truer to the original version, less diluted with Roddenberry’s fixations on sex and judgmental godlike aliens, would’ve been so much better.
One thing that’s strange about this episode’s setup is that they seem to have forgotten about the Prime Directive at this early stage of the series. The Enterprise crew blithely goes down and makes first contact with a relatively primitive people who have no spaceflight capability, and nobody seems to think there’s anything wrong with that. Given how fanatically strict these characters became about the Prime Directive later on, it’s hard to reconcile this one with the rest of the series.
The episode also illustrates how hard it was to deal with sexual subject matters on a syndicated show that had to be safe for timeslots watched by younger viewers. They had the same problems with Risa later on.
I hated this episode as a young teen. It was so…embarrassing.
But now I share Wheaton’s opinion: Of all the bad episodes from the earliest years of TNG, this one is very nearly the most fun.
Even if the Edo outfits strike adult me as being creepy.
Christopher: What’s especially hilarious is that the entire back half of the episode hinges on the Prime Directive and obeying it by respecting the Edo’s local laws. But it’s forgotten in the first half when they beam down in the first place, as you say.
Disagree about the “absolute” line, as it comes across as hokey, even though it’s absolutely true.
As for the sex, they might have been better off by implying things, and not actually showing the Edo frolicking, which just came across as goofy.
And I just want to repeat what you said about “Roddenberry’s fixations on sex and judgmental godlike aliens.” Talk about tiresome tropes….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
people join Starfleet because everyone else dresses goofy.
Okay, so they remembered there was a Prime Directive, but weren’t clear on what it meant. Which is understandable, since TOS was a little vague about that sometimes. Did it just mean not imposing your will on other worlds, or did it mean not even revealing your existence to them? TOS often went with the former, looser interpretation — for instance, in “A Private Little War,” Kirk told Tyree that he was from another world, but when the Klingons gave the villagers firearms, that was considered a Prime Directive violation that had to be combatted. But it sometimes suggested a stricter view, like in “Bread and Circuses” — the one time the PD was actually quoted onscreen, and “No references to space, other worlds, or advanced civilizations” was included. At least, it seemed the gag rule existed but could be suspended if the situation warranted it.
But at least for this episode, the “no contact with pre-warp civilizations” rule was nowhere to be seen, and the Directive was defined only in terms of interference, not contact. Which is actually more sensible than the rather fanatical extreme they took it to later on, the sociologically inept assumption that “primitive” cultures would be too fragile to survive exposure to more advanced knowledge and thus needed to be kept in the dark altogether. But they’re just so careless about the first contact here — a carelessness that’s directly responsible for the episode’s core crisis — that it errs too far toward the other extreme.
Oh, Gack. I do forget how bad these early episodes were. The costuming is really, really awful – I know they’re supposed to be titillating, but the hankie-briefs on the men seem like they are in the process of ever-so-softly castrating them, and the women look like they’ve decked themselves out in kleenex. I know that’s half the point (that they be half-nekkid!)but… did anyone watching this find them exciting or sexually interesting? I found them embarrassing. I know I shouldn’t have, but even in high school I was half-hoping that the Eloi… oops, the Edo, would just off Wesley for the good of the series. I do think that Gates McFadden did a nice job here, playing the angst/terror riddled mother, but then again, I wonder what the hell she’s thinking (and always did wonder, for that matter) letting her boy genius nerd son gallivant away on foreign planets. Oh, and her dark maroon-red hair? So 80’s.! However, I fell in love with Jean-Luc Picard right here and now for that arithmetic line… and it’s been unrequited love ever since. Jean-Luc, call me!
This episode shows how the Prime Directive was perverted by TNG. Yes, it was straight up violated at the beginning, but then it is used to justify Plot Stupidity. If a planet’s society is advanced enough (and unfriendly enough) to place the ship in danger, how does the Prime Directive apply?
This is a fairly weak episode from the fairly weak first season. I agree
with the warp factor rating of 2 (though I have to wonder if the rating
of 1 is being saved for some particularly horrible episode).
However, thanks to the bonus link Keith included, I think I now must rate “Justice, as told by Wil Wheaton” as my favorite TNG episode EVER.
uh wesley knows “baseball” and worf does not know ROME?!
So as I said a few posts before, I was so upset about The Naked Now when it first aired that I decided not to watch anymore TNG. A few weeks later I started thinking that maybe I was being too judgemental. It’s a new show after all, still finding its footing. So I decided to give it another shot.
This is the episode that was playing. Which led to me avoiding the show entirely for the next several years.
Edit: Tor, stop messing up my formatting!