I Don't Care If Captain Archer Invented the Prime Directive, That Was Just Silly

Still working on getting caught up on all the stuff I taped while I was gone last week. I just watched the most recent Enterprise episode, in which Archer and Malcolm are captured by the military while doing some sight-seeing on a pre-warp planet. And can I just say: sheesh? I mean, OK, these military guys -- oh, and I suppose this counts as a spoiler, so if you actually care, be warned -- have got the two of them, they've examined all their fancy Starfleet gadgets, and they've run medical tests on Our Heroes and noticed little things like the fact that, oh, their blood's the wrong color. Not being completely stupid, these guys put two and two together and come up with the obvious answer. Now, if I were Archer, I'd have been willing to admit at this point that the jig was up. OK, guys, you've got me. It's a fair cop. We're from outer space. Can we have our communicators back? We'd like to phone home. But, nope, not our brainy Starfleet boys! Instead, they spin some cockamamie story about how they're genetically engineered soliders with experimental prototype weapons. Oh, yeah! Way to avoid contaminating their culture, dudes! Make them think that their enemies have super energy weapons and military-application genetic engineering technology way beyond anything currently known on the planet! Right. By the way, did I mention the highly unstable political situation on this world? Yeah. Great. Now these guys are doubtless gonna go into paranoid first-strike mode and nuke their enemies into oblivion just as soon as they figure out how to split the atom. And it shouldn't have taken T'Pol to point this out (long after the rest of us figured it out and even longer after the point where it could have done any good). You know, it's really just not a good thing for a TV show when the writers are obviously going for a reaction of "Aww, they're willing to give their lives to protect this society from contamination! How noble!" and instead getting "God, what a pair of idiots! Maybe they should be hanged before they do any more damage to the galaxy!"

Sigh.