Starfleet General Order One—better known as the Prime Directive, the rule that Federation members cannot interfere with the development of pre-warp civilizations in a way that would expose them to the galaxy of societies beyond their worlds—is one of the most defining rules of Star Trek, metatextually or otherwise. But, more often than not, Star Trek‘s heroes treat this purportedly most sacred of all rules as less of a guiding point and more of a pesky roadblock. And according to the franchise’s first captain, that’s kind of the point of the whole thing.
“Was the Prime Directive violated? By who? The Directive was infinitely malleable,” William Shatner recently opined at the ST: CHI convention in Chicago (via TrekMovie), when asked by a fan about the ethical dilemma at the heart of the original series episode “The Apple,” which sees Captain Kirk, against Spock’s advice and Starfleet orders, interfere to free the denizens of Gamma Trianguli VI from the rule of the sinister supercomputer Vaal.
“If you didn’t improve—I think one of them was: you can’t interfere with a civilization. Sorry, no show. That was the plot! You’ve got to go down there and kick somebody’s ass. That was the show! You are worshiping a rock? Are you crazy. Blow the rock up.”
“Of course we interfered with the Prime Directive. How do you spell Prime Directive?” Shatner’s amusing rant continued, comparing it to the Christian commandment against taking a person’s life. “I mean it was a beautiful—’Thou shalt not kill.’ Except in warfare. Except when you are angry. Except when you can’t control yourself. Except in self-defense. I mean, you can go on, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ The worst thing, to kill someone, take somebody’s life? Yeah! Self-defense!”
The jokiness of it all aside, there’s something wonderfully apt about Shatner and Kirk himself being more aligned on this subject than most Starfleet officers after his time ever were. Moral quandaries about how to get around the Prime Directive, or work with it in abstract, or even to put aside your moral grievances and follow it even in regret, have long been dilemmas at the heart of many a classic Star Trek story, the push and pull between doing what you feel is right in the moment versus doing something that ultimately benefits the greater good. But in the original Star Trek, and definitely in Kirk’s own attitude, not giving a damn about the Prime Directive, consequences be damned, was the way of things more often than not.
One of the best and most enduring things about Captain Kirk as a character is his own recognition that he, and humanity in general, was a work in progress. He might have helmed the flagship of a utopian society, but Kirk was still flesh and blood, flawed and carrying a legacy that human civilization had striven to rise above for hundreds upon hundreds of years before him and would continue to do so for hundreds and hundreds of years after. He got mad, he was aggressive, and he didn’t play by the rules, but he accepted that part of himself was there, rather than denying that his position and humanity’s place in the galaxy at large meant that base part of him had been erased. And then he tried to be better anyway.
It didn’t always work, of course—no one can deny that Kirk behaves very differently from many of the captains that would come after him in Star Trek, and Trek itself has recognized that at times, with characters looking back and talking about the days of cowboy diplomacy defined by that golden age of Federation exploration.
We often remember Kirk’s braggadocio before we remember that part about him, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there beneath the surface (and at the surface right alongside that charming playfulness, too). And it’s clearly something that’s a part of Shatner all these years later, too.
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