YMMV / Star Trek: The Next Generation S5E13 "The Masterpiece Society"

• Accidental Aesop:
  • It's easy to see Geordi's bristling at the idea of him being aborted for being blind as an anti-abortion message, but showrunner Michael Piller has stated that it was not their intention, admitting that few people on the production staff would have agreed to work on an anti-choice episode, and that it was actually meant to be speaking out about eugenics rather than abortion.
  • Indeed, the fact opposite effect happened for some viewers that the fact such a choice is mandatory by the society makes it more akin to A Nazi by Any Other Name.
  • Some people also saw the moral of that part as "don't treat disabled people as inferior", since later Geordi uses his visor as part of the save-the-day plan.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • It might have helped the story if the genome colony were depicted to be superior to the Federation in at least one way, thus raising the stakes for maintaining their way of life. Instead, they are consistently shown to lag behind the Federation in pretty much every way, and their people have very little personal freedom since they are obliged to perform the jobs they were bred for, mate with who they are told to and have to live inside of a single enclosed city on an otherwise uninhabitable planet. Those colonists who wish to leave are blatantly shown to be right for wanting to doing so. This makes Picard's moral dilemma seem rather hollow, since really it is more about preserving the society as a kind of museum piece, rather than protecting a culture that has unique merits over the Federation.
  • Furthermore, the crew meets this genetically manipulated society and no one even whispers how it smacks of the creation of Khan Noonien Singh and the Eugenics Wars in Earth's past.
  • Indeed, it is a totalitarian isolationist Cult Colony that accepts no deviation from the norm. One would probably struggle to find a more antithetical culture to Federation values.
  • They also specifically mention that everyone in the colony is bred to enjoy and feel at home in the role they were designed for. Whether or not this is even true (we only really interact with the higher echelons of this society, who would naturally say that), there's a big question of how ethical it is to program a person designed for menial, degrading labor to enjoy menial, degrading labor. For as much as the show discusses how little self-determination and free will the citizens of the colony have, this is one aspect of it they never examine further.
• Wangst: While he may have been speaking metaphorically, Picard's assertion that the Enterprise crew's presence was as damaging as the stellar fragment just comes across as ridiculous, considering that it was made pretty clear that had they not gotten involved, the fragment would have destroyed the colony (and if the Enterprise hadn't been there, nobody would've even known that the colony existed at all). It ends up uncomfortably prefiguring the stance taken in some latter episodes of this series (and then Star Trek: Voyager) that it's better to stand by and let alien societies be destroyed rather than interfere with their natural development to even the slightest degree.