Synopsis: While resetting the Enterprise’s scanners, Lt. Commander Data receives a distress signal from a young female humanoid.
In “Pen Pals” it is Lt. Commander Data, the completely Logos-driven android officer who requires the other crew members to live up to human Eros-driven emotions.
Data here on the surface appears to be violating the Prime Directive and forcing the rest of the crew of the Enterprise to do so as well. This is because the general order forbids interference with the cultures of other planets, presumably even in the case here when the inhabitants of this world are in danger from a natural disaster. The senior officers debate what to do; but seem to forget that the message from the planet Drema IV is a distress signal.
And while it is Dr. Katherine Pulaski who states that her emotions are involved when discussing whether or not to rescue the population of a planet, Lt. Worf, the Klingon officer states that the “Prime Directive is absolute.” As remarked later in the episode in a conversation between Ensign Wesley Crusher and Commander William Riker, Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s command style is to listen to all opinions and then make his own decision, and once made the decision is not questioned. Riker and Crusher both seem to believe this is the ideal, and perhaps from a depth psychological perspective it is; if we analogize the Enterprise vessel as the human psyche, and Picard, the captain, as the conscious ego of that psyche. In that case, the more information that Picard, in the role of the ego, takes in from other aspects of the psyche, and particularly the bits of material from the unconscious, then the more whole the psyche becomes. This in fact is the goal of depth psychology.
Original post created 9 July 2021
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