When I was a kid, my family used to have movie nights, most often at my Uncle’s house. He had turned his garage into a movie theatre, complete with gold eggshells lining the walls and a curtain in front of the screen. He had replicated the entire movie-going experience and I always looked forward to going there.
Uncle Bill was a classic movie buff so we saw all the old movies like ‘Gone with the Wind’ and ‘How the West was Won’, and all the Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin standards. Before the main movie he always screened ‘shorts’, half-an-hour to forty-five minute serial shows that he always showed before the main movie, and the one I remember best was ‘Star Trek’.
Star Trek was always a little more intelligent fare because the problems faced by the crew were invariably more than could be solved by sheer brute force or superior technology. Additionally, there were the ethical dilemmas demanding that choices were made, not purely to support the Federation, but to bring about elegant solutions that benefited everyone.
The Federation Moral Code, embodied in the Prime Directive, is as follows:
“The Directive states that members of Starfleet are not to interfere in the internal affairs of another species, especially the natural development of pre-warp civilizations, either by direct intervention, or technological revelation.”
