Headscratchers / Star Trek: The Next Generation S3E4 "Who Watches the Watchers"

• The Mintakans are established to be a very reasonable and secular people who are much like the Vulcans. Picard also suggests that the people of the Federation, as a whole, do not believe in the supernatural. However, it's well established in the Stark Trek canon that the Vulcans themselves are highly religious.
  • It's established that the Vulcans have a relatively ceremonial culture but "highly religious" is stretching things considerably. While they obviously believe in the Katra, I don't know if that necessarily makes them religious (particularly in a setting where "transferring consciousness" is a demonstrated scientific process). They practice meditation but so do some secular humans. They engage in ancient rituals but again, so do some secular humans (any atheist with a Christmas tree). Importantly, they don't worship a deity nor believe in mythical creatures. Given the conflict of this episode was about the Mintakans being set back on the path to worshiping a deity and believing in things they'd stopped believing in, and given the Vulcans were held up as an example of a similar species and they don't do those things, I see no contradiction here.
    • In Star Trek: The Animated Series, Spock, disguised as his own cousin, does mention that he wanted to pay respects to the family's... shrine or temple, which implies some sort of spirituality. While we don't know what, exactly, is usually done with a Vulcan's k'atra (since dead bodies don't often come alive again), we do know they need both the body and the k'atra for it, so I'd at least doubt they put their k'atra in jars to line them up on a shrine (else, why use the body at all?).
    • In Star Trek: Voyager is mentioned that Tuvok's family paid the priest of a temple to pray for him, of course is never mentioned if the praying was for a god or gods, could be that Vulcans are like Buddhists, spiritual but non-theistic, however they do are religious by definition.
  • An inherent absurdity in Trek is the way the concept of the "supernatural" is generally treated. There are Sufficiently Advanced Aliens with literally godlike powers. It is documented that individuals and entire species can Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence. Psychic Powers are routinely utilized as a resource by Starfleet and many others. Bizarre coincidences happen with astonishing regularity. It really comes across as Arbitrary Skepticism when you consider that in Real Life all of these things would be considered as qualifying as "supernatural".
    • But the point is that all the things you named are not supernatural, there are rational explanations behind them which are mutually exclusive. Advance aliens are not gods, they're life forms very advance, psychic powers are not magic, and so on. Is not absurd in the same way how modern humans know what electro-magnetism is while for a primitive civilization the use we made would be "magic".
• It's established that the Mintakans are very similar physiologically to Vulcans. We also know that Vulcans have green blood. It's never established what color blood Mintakans have, though they all seem to instantly recognize Picard's red blood as blood.
  • Even if Mintakan blood isn't red, which was never established, the substance in question was leaking from Picard’s body out of the place where Picard had been shot with an arrow and started immediately after he was shot with that arrow. It was clearly one of his bodily fluids leaking out of him as a result of an injury which presumably meant it was important. None of the Mintakans actually said they thought it was blood, but whether they thought it was or not, they clearly had enough information to realise it was important and constituted an injury which was all the information they needed to react the way they did.
• Since this was an anthropological research project meant to study a "proto-Vulcan" species, why didn't the Federation send actual Vulcans to do it? Vulcans would not have needed the "duck blind" to conceal themselves while observing the Mintakans as they would have been able to move among them without attracting much attention given that they naturally resemble each other. The Vulcans could simply state quite openly that their people "live far away" and are curious about others like themselves which is why they wish to learn about Mintakan culture (none of which would require that they lie).
• How, exactly, is "explaining a whole village that there exists life on other planets, that space travel is possible, and showing one of them around on the ship" less interference than just beaming Riker, Troi and Falmer - or even just Troi, later on - out of it? There were only a few people around, even if one of them was the village's leader, beaming everyone out would've just led to maybe two dozen people talking about it. The Mintakan's are described as very rational, so most of them would probably assume that some people in that village were hallucinating - perhaps they'd found a strange new herb or mushroom that causes hallucinations - as that's far more rational than assuming they're speaking the truth.
  • The former is a broader version of something they are familiar with and can relate in rational ways, the latter is the rapture happening and liable to spark a religious revival. You don't risk a bunch of primitives who are still relatively new to rational thought thinking the rapture might be happening and sparking new religions all over the place. It could drive them backwards, away from rationality, doing that.
• What is often hastily assumed is that the Federation humans (we can't speak for other species such as Andorians or Tellarites) are all atheist as a sign of moving on from silly superstitions. This is not necessarily the case as in the episode with Apollo, Kirk merely points out that polytheism has been replaced with monotheism, hence Kirk's line "We have no need for gods. We find the one quite sufficient". And in yet another, the crew is delighted to learn at the end of the Roman planet adventure that contrary to their assumptions, the slaves who called themselves "children of the sun" were not talking about the "sun" but "The Son" as in Son of God. In Who Watches the Watchers, at one point, Riker refers to the Mintakans thinking that Picard is "God" in the proper noun sense, not just "a god". Also, recall that Bones whispers "Lord, forgive me." when he is forced to shoot what he still thinks is Nancy Crater but was actually the Salt Vampire. I don't think this was just Early-Installment Weirdness. And although the "God" of Sha-Ka-Ree was false in every way, everyone still pondered that God may still be out there (or within us).