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Following on from the thread in Voyager, what would be the worst mistakes Picard made during his command - anyone remember the scene in Tapestry where he is confronted by all the people he 'killed'?

A couple off the top of my head :-

Not turning back to Federation Space when Q flung them across the Galaxy into Borg space, thus resulting in 18 people being killed.

Allowing Dr Crusher to remain at the site of a bombing in The High Ground, thus losing crewmembers in the ensuing hostage situation.

You can hardly blame Picard for the Borg incounter. He had no way of knowing what might happen.

Maybe not, but he was warned by Guinan.

It probably didn't matter what he did; because the event was organized by Q they would inevidably encountered the Borg.

Not getting married and having children?
Bam! I win.

Personally, I don't hold Picard in the same way I hold people like Janeway. Most of Picards mistakes were just accidents, and usually he put them right. Of course, he naturally has a few marks against him, but I think saving the Earth on several ocasions makes up for it.

I would contrast two decisions he made - namely "Homeward" and "Pen Pals". In the first, Picard was willing to let an entire civilisation die because of the prime directive. In the second, he saved an entire civilisation in defiance of the prime directive. And from what I can tell, the only real difference between the two cases was that in Pen Pals he actually heard one of the natives pleading for help.

I can see that you can argue that it's a Starfleet officer's job to uphold the prime directive at all costs. And I can see that you can argue that a moral person must occasionally violate the prime directive in order to be true to his own principles. But in doing one thing sometimes and another thing at other times, Picard becomes a hypocrite.

Personally, I hope Picard's views on the Prime Directive were changed after 'Pen Pals'. How anyone could stand by and let billions of innocent people die is beyond me.

I wouldn't call Picard's decision to let the Boraalans die hypocracy, given that he probably got a severe dressing-down for the "Pen Pals" incident. Boardering on genocide, yes, but that's the Prime Directive for you. What does come across as hypocracy is this:

Picard wrote:This is one of the times when we must face the ramifications of the Prime Directive... and honor the lives we cannot save.

The sheer arrogance of pretending that lives can't be saved, when the deaths are a direct result of his refusal to intervene, is staggering. If it was a case of the Enterprise busting a gut to gave the Boraalans and failing, fine, "honour the lives the cannot save". But they didn't. They abandoned them to die to uphold their precious law. If Picard hasn't got the spine to put the Boraalans lives above the Prime Directive, fine, but he should be hanging his head in shame, not bragging about it.

The idea that he got told off and so changed his views would work... except that in "A Matter of Time", which comes after Pen Pals, he specifically uses his violations of the prime directive to try and convince Rasmussen to violate the temporal version of the same. If he'd come to believe that you had to uphold such things, he'd still be a hypocrite.

GrahamKennedy wrote:The idea that he got told off and so changed his views would work... except that in "A Matter of Time", which comes after Pen Pals, he specifically uses his violations of the prime directive to try and convince Rasmussen to violate the temporal version of the same. If he'd come to believe that you had to uphold such things, he'd still by a hypocrite.

I wouldn't say he changed his views, simply that he'd lost whatever spine he had with regards to ignoring the Prime Directive. The incident with Rasmussen certainly counts as hypocracy since he is apparently no longer willing to violate the PD despite his past record.

Probably the worst incident involving Picard and the PD was his using it as an excuse for putting the desire of a bunch of selfish luddites to stay put above the prospect of vastly improved medical care for billions of Federation citizens. So much for "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few...or the one".

I don't blame him for not helping. It's nature at work. And I'm not talking about some wise demi god who decides what lives and dies but sometimes it is just their time to go.

Teaos wrote:I don't blame him for not helping. It's nature at work. And I'm not talking about some wise demi god who decides what lives and dies but sometimes it is just their time to go.

It's nature at work whenever there's a volcanic eruption, or an earthquake. Take the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004 - the Feds would have done nothing to help. Or Rwanda, or Kosovo, or Darfur for that matter.

Your point?

And those last three aren't really nature. Unless you say we are animals and apart of nature.

Indeed, just because something is caused by nature is no reason not to help those who are suffering or in danger.