It seems that science fiction is always raising questions that have no easy answers. Often, sci-fi is almost prophetic in critiquing the way things are by presenting alternative futures. Sci-fi has a long history of social critique.<br /><br />This episode of ST:TNG is particularly troubling in two ways: the questions and issues it initially raises, and the ease with which it evades actually probing or answering those issues. The beginning point is a question of justice: how can we regard as just any system in which the legal consequence of every crime is the same, or in this case death? This is troubling for some of the metaphysical questions it raises, especially if you are a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew (and not just a Jew in the cultural or ethnic sense): is God just in setting eternal consequences for our actions? Is God just in setting the same eternal consequence for every bad deed or lack of good deed? Is God just in judging all people by the same standard? Beyond that, there is also the question of whether humanity itself (presumably Western civilizations in particular) now saddles itself with unjust laws and punishments which do not "fit the crime." If this episode had chosen to actually deal with those questions (or for that matter raised them in a less simplistic scenario) it could have been one of the best episodes of the entire series. Instead, we have a speech and Picard and crew pretty much do what we've known they could do all along. It was sad, easy, and anticlimactic.