No they weren’t. Janeway really stretched the Prime Directive to fit what she wanted to do.
She reasoned that the ferengi were stuck in the delta quandrant during negotiations facilited by the Federation, so therefore the Federation had caused the cultural contamination, so therefore going down to the planet to clean it up was actually following the Prime Directive.
Zorque@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Weren’t they working against the prime directive? Otherwise they wouldn’t have beamed them back down after beaming them up. They had to trick the ferengi into leaving of their own accord… well the accord of the mob burning them in a pyre, but still.
setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The whole plan was to convince the Ferengi to go along with leaving in a way that fulfilled a local prophecy and supposedly did the least lasting cultural damage.
In the minds of the Voyager crew they were upholding the Prime Directive by minimizing/reversing the cultural damage which Janeway reasoned could be traced back to the Federation’s fault.