Headscratchers / Star Trek: The Next Generation S1 E7 "Justice"

• Picard and the others openly discuss how the Federation/humans used to have a death penalty but no longer do. Surely debating and judging the foundations of the Edo legal system in front of the Edo is more damaging from a Prime Directive standpoint than merely snatching Wesley with the transporter, because it could influence them to change their culture. And it's not even clear that snatching Wesley even violates the PD. It's rather grandiose to suggest violating a law is "interfering" with the culture, since the law will continue to be a law on the planet even if the crew escape it. And it's inconsistent. Starfleet officers who observe cultures with a 21st century level of technology in disguise are probably routinely breaking local laws against impersonation and trespassing, for example.
  • This is in part a case of Early Instalment Weirdness. Given the pre-warp nature of the Edo, the way the Prime Directive would work later the Enterprise wouldn't even have made contact with them. The reason why there are inconsistencies with later episode, is because the rules haven't been established. That said, there's some text from the reference book "Star Trek: Federation - The First 150 Years " (written after this episode) which is actually pretty consistent with this episode. It breaks the Prime Directive down into two sections. The first deals with avoiding contact/identifying yourself to civilisations which aren't advanced. The second says, "If said species has achieved the commensurate level of technological and/or societal development as described in Appendix 1, or has been exposed to the concepts listed in section 1, no Starfleet crew person will engage with said society or species without first gathering extensive information on the specific traditions, laws, and culture of that species civilization. Then Starfleet crew will obey the following. a) If engaged with diplomatic relations with said culture, will stay within the confines of said culture's restrictions." So I'd say that's actually consistent with the behaviour in this episode.

• Picard spends half the episode worrying that the Edo deity will judge them by the Prime Directive. Did it not occur to him that just maybe out of eight zillion laws in the books that the deity wouldn’t have even noticed if he hadn’t continually drawn attention to it?
  • It's the "Prime Directive", also known as "Starfleet Command General Order 1" and the embodiment of Starfleet's most importance ethical principles. The aliens had scanned Data's mind and know everything about Starfleet, as well as countless past missions in which the Prime Directive would have come up frequently. The odds of them just "not noticing" if they didn't obey their most important rules are pretty low. There's also the practical matter that they needed to discuss the Prime Directive internally to work out whether they could break it, and they needed to discuss it with the Edo to explain why the Edo couldn't expect them to simply take Wesley by force. Trying to resolve the episode's chief problem without talking about it, and simultaneously communicating to the entire crew that they shouldn't talk about it (without talking about it), and just hoping the aliens didn't notice the big thing you weren't talking about, is unlikely to be practical.

• Why didn't anyone make the argument that Wesley did not intentionally go into the flowerbed? He fell into it accidentally. The closest anyone comes to this is "my son had no warning his act was criminal". Sure, if they had made the argument and the Edo had said "it doesn't matter if it was accidental or not, a crime is a crime", sure, the rest of the episode can proceed normally. But no one even attempted to make that argument.
  • Because the planet operates on the rules of Strict Liability, and it didn't matter. The crew already knew that, there was no need to rehash it.