u/pierzstyx

The book is a worldwide bestseller that is just absolutely full of intelligent science and science-fiction. The movie was also well written, intelligent, more science heavy than most major motion pictures, and a worldwide box office success as one of the top selling movies of the year. The characters in both are intelligent, competent, funny, and flawed And it's optimistic! Not just on a personal level, as in Grace's personal character arc, but also in the way that a human would handle first contact with a completely alien species and in the ability of humans to use their intelligence to save and improve the world. Or is everything that the best Star Trek was and everything NuTrek claims to be, but isn't.

To me, the success of both the book and the movie suggests to me that there is a desire for this kind of optimistic and intelligent science-fiction in the mass market. No series could be better poised to deliver that kind of storytelling than Star Trek. Yet, here we are with the IP floundering and people talking about letting out die being the best thing for it because of how stupid and shallow the show has become in the last decade.

Honestly, I wish they would just back a dump truck full of money up to Andy Weir's house and start pouring it out on his front lawn in order to get him on board as the showrunner of a new series. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be better than any NuTrek by a huge margin.

This is, ultimately, just a TOS episode. Except, instead of a god turning out to be an alien, it is the Devil who is an alien imposter. The episode is fine, at best, but as I was recently rewatchibg it I couldn't escape the idea of what would be different if the alien imposter masquerading as the devilish Ardra wasn't actually an imposter? What if this was the actual Ardra who had made a deal a thousand years before with the ancestors of these people and what if she actually, probably had interfered in their history in ways that benefited them and brought them prosperity?

Suddenly the surety gets much more interesting. You don't have to make her an actual god-like being. She doesn't need to be a Q, for example. She could just be like the Squire, an alien with technology so advanced that in her relative relationship to the people she interacts with she might as well be a goddess. Even if the Enterprise can prove that she isn't the Devil, does it matter if she actually is who she claims and did what she said she would do?

Now, instead of a TOS rehash, we have an episode about the Prime Directive. And we could explore a little explore idea. So often, when an advanced species gives a less technologically advanced species technology it goes poorly. Here you could have it go perfectly well for everyone. Now, you can explore whether or not the Prime Directive is always a valid way of handling contact. You can also explore the idea that if the contract is valid, does Picard have a right to invalidate it simply because she isn't the actual Devil itself? How much do you get to change another culture "for its own good," even when you're factually right about all your claims?

All of these ideas and more are much more interesting to me than Ardra simply being an imposter. It seems like they're was a lot of potential here that the writers didn't capitalize on that they could have to make a much more memorable episode.