Review

The crew enjoys some shore leave on yet another planet whose alien inhabitants look exactly like humans. Picard finds that detail oddly remarkable, but by now we have so many similar examples. The unimaginative blandness of the Edo is further compounded when it turns out they are mindless pleasure zombies exhibiting behavior so shallow it's hard not to spend half the episode groaning at that alone. But worry not, there is plenty else to groan about. Not the least of which is their asinine criminal justice system.

The idea that the Federation should be high-minded enough to respect the local laws and customs of the sovereign nations they visit is a good premise for a story, but it's explored in a mostly sloppy way here. For starters, just visiting the planet to begin with was a violation of the Prime Directive, since they were clearly not a spacefaring civilization. Despite that the Edo seemed oddly aware of the existence of other civilizations, or at least totally unsurprised to receive visitors from outer space.

But even leaving all that aside, the Edo's policy of randomly executing people for trivial and even accidental violations of law—but only sometimes when that law is deemed punishable today by the roll of the dice—is the stupidest idea for a criminal justice system ever. It lacks both consistency as well as justification for the lack of consistency. For any kind of enlightened system of criminal justice to make sense, there has to be equality under the law. And in cases where the law is applied unequally, there tends to be some kind of underlying societal motive, like systemic discrimination, or simply the arbitrary whims of a cruel ruler.

But such motivations are not present here. Instead, the Edo just seem uniformly idiotic. They can't figure out a way to enforce their laws uniformly, so they just do it randomly and don't see any problems with that whatsoever. Given that, it's no wonder Picard chose to violate the Prime Directive to be rid of these people. Their local laws and customs are so idiotic that they simply don't deserve to be respected. The Prime Directive was dreamed up by someone who never expected alien civilizations to be this stupid.

That said, watching Picard wrestle with the ethics was still pretty compelling. It would've been nice if such scenes were set to the backdrop of a more compelling moral dilemma, but they were still well executed all the same. And despite how overwhelmingly lame the Edo were as a concept, watching the crew make the most of the experience certainly resulted in a series of pretty amusing, if at times overly goofy scenes. So while most of this episode is pretty painful, it's somewhat offset by some good stuff here and there.