Review

This is a pretty painful episode to watch for a number of reasons. Once again the aliens shown here are yet another alien race that looks exactly like humans, complete this time with characters who have western names like Ariel and Trent. They were so indistinguishable in fact that when the Enterprise wanted to find the Odin survivors, they had to resort to searching for an element not natural to the Angel One world rather than just using the sensors to find non-human life signs. The distinction that they evolved in such a way that their women are bigger and stronger than their men due presumably to millions of years of matriarchy altering the dynamics of their natural selection process is a reasonably plausible and interesting story idea to explore in an alien civilization, but whatever story potential there was in exploring such a premise was undermined considerably by its sexist portrayal, not unlike what happened in Code of Honor.

Another issue was the muddled portrayal of the Prime Directive. It isn't clear why the Federation maintains any sort of contact with Angel One at all given that it doesn't appear to be a spacefaring civilization. It was stated that the planet's location was strategically important, so perhaps the Federation made an exception to the Prime Directive when establishing diplomatic relations 60+ years ago, similar to what might've gone on in TOS: Friday's Child. But that isn't the only Prime Directive complication here. In contrast to how previous episodes defined the Prime Directive, Data and Riker make a big point about how it apparently only applies to Starfleet personnel, and apparently not to individual Federation citizens. This is a completely nonsensical distinction. A law like that would be as idiotic as if the Indian government passed a law prohibiting contact with the uncontacted North Sentinelese tribe, but only applied the law to agents of the Indian government, excluding ordinary citizens for some reason, which is not the case for fairly obvious reasons.

These wrinkles do much to wreck what is otherwise a fairly fun episode. The virus B plot and the Romulan C plot were both fairly compelling. A better episode would've focused on that exclusively. Plus how can we not be charmed by Geordi in command and loving every minute of it?