It's a good premise that the Klingons are arming one group and the Kirk must decide what to do about it but the execution was extremely poor.
The writers presumably wanted to illustrate a proxy war but the situation that they created didn't reflect that. The armed group was simply raiding the other for fun and materials. They were only a gang of thugs. There was no power struggle for a limited resource and there was no benefit for the Klingons except as a recreational pet project but that idea wasn't developed. We only briefly see one Klingon. [Today, we know that Klingons love to fight, so we could have seen the Klingon asking the villagers to tell their war stories and getting great satisfaction and vicariously living through them. However, today we know that honor is important, so slaughtering the pacifists who will not fight would not provide any good stories. Even that falls flat.]
Kirk quickly decides that the only way to resolve the situation is to arm the pacifists. Ridiculous! Kirk didn't attempt any other resolution!
Kirk found that many of the tools and materials used by the armed villagers could not have been made by them. Therefore, they were not self-sufficient! So the primary solution is to remove all of their materials and stop the Klingons from giving them more. How to stop the Klingons is, of course, a daunting task, but one that must be attempted before deciding to arm the pacifists, changing their entire way of life and condemning the planet to a perpetual war.
I'm not sure how the Enterprise can actually hide from the Klingons but the writers clearly wanted to take out the ability for the ship to beam people here and there, but then they didn't give Kirk a good plot.
Clearly, the better solution would be for Kirk to talk to the village leaders, explain that the Klingons are using them as pawns, and that if he arms the pacifists, then everyone will suffer. If the writers want the result to be the Enterprise arming the pacifists, then that effort would have to fail but to not attempt it, in favor of the silly plot of the power-hungry woman, was a poor choice.
Why did the woman not use the phaser? That made no sense to me. We see her fumble with it, but there's only two buttons. Press them! This made the climatic scene fall flat.
Another option was for her to steal the phaser much earlier, use it, and then have the villagers report back to the Klingons about this new weapon that made people vanish. Then the Klingons must escalate...
I fell that almost any alternative plot would have been better than what we saw in this episode.
The writers presumably wanted to illustrate a proxy war but the situation that they created didn't reflect that. The armed group was simply raiding the other for fun and materials. They were only a gang of thugs. There was no power struggle for a limited resource and there was no benefit for the Klingons except as a recreational pet project but that idea wasn't developed. We only briefly see one Klingon. [Today, we know that Klingons love to fight, so we could have seen the Klingon asking the villagers to tell their war stories and getting great satisfaction and vicariously living through them. However, today we know that honor is important, so slaughtering the pacifists who will not fight would not provide any good stories. Even that falls flat.]
Kirk quickly decides that the only way to resolve the situation is to arm the pacifists. Ridiculous! Kirk didn't attempt any other resolution!
Kirk found that many of the tools and materials used by the armed villagers could not have been made by them. Therefore, they were not self-sufficient! So the primary solution is to remove all of their materials and stop the Klingons from giving them more. How to stop the Klingons is, of course, a daunting task, but one that must be attempted before deciding to arm the pacifists, changing their entire way of life and condemning the planet to a perpetual war.
I'm not sure how the Enterprise can actually hide from the Klingons but the writers clearly wanted to take out the ability for the ship to beam people here and there, but then they didn't give Kirk a good plot.
Clearly, the better solution would be for Kirk to talk to the village leaders, explain that the Klingons are using them as pawns, and that if he arms the pacifists, then everyone will suffer. If the writers want the result to be the Enterprise arming the pacifists, then that effort would have to fail but to not attempt it, in favor of the silly plot of the power-hungry woman, was a poor choice.
Why did the woman not use the phaser? That made no sense to me. We see her fumble with it, but there's only two buttons. Press them! This made the climatic scene fall flat.
Another option was for her to steal the phaser much earlier, use it, and then have the villagers report back to the Klingons about this new weapon that made people vanish. Then the Klingons must escalate...
I fell that almost any alternative plot would have been better than what we saw in this episode.