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Season Two: A Private Little War

Kirk armed a peaceful, primitive race in order to maintain a strategic balance with the Klingons (which was, at the time, a not-so-subtle embrace of the principle of containment and the Vietnam War).

Does that make Captain Kirk "evil?" He obviously broke The Prime Directive in order to protect the greater strategic interests of The Federation. You could argue what he did in that one episode had greater moral implications than what Jack Bauer did in 8 seasons of 24, because he was making a choice to militarize an entire planet (granted, his hand was forced by the Klingons arming the villagers.

http://trekguide.com/padd/tos4...

When you try to tackle serious, dramatic topics with any sort of realism, your characters eventually will wind up in situations where they have to make pragmatic choices between the lesser of two evils. If they didn't, then there would be no realism to the story. In those cases, just like in the real world, moral absolutes aren't always viable options. Sometimes good characters have to do evil things (every single character in BSG did several awful things to survive). Similarly, in real life, sometime good people have to do the same. That's why moral absolutes are such a bitch.

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by: ecotect @ Sat May 09, 2009 at 14:09:10 PM CDT