Star Trek TNG Justice

Another bad episode.  It's hard to pick a starting point, so I'll just go with the obvious.

Star Trek TOS The Apple

Star Trek TNG Justice

Yes, another rehash of TOS.  Encountering a child-like race controlled by a god that is in fact some sort of machine or in this case a space station.  Right down to everyone having platinum blond hair and strapping, tanned bodies.

The instruments are also similar to a TOS episode, The Way To Eden,

but maybe not as much.

So, it's a free love, orgy planet.  Just what everyone wanted in the 60's when they made The Apple.  More of that teenage obsession with sex.  I like sex too; a lot even.  Maybe its just after growing up that these representations seems embarrassingly childish.  (And impractical... what do these people do all day?) Roddenberry wanted less clothes as well.  The designers couldn't make the clothes any skimpier without them falling off.  That's a fact I read when researching it.  But it all seems to fall in line with the ideas of utopia that they envisioned.

The writing followed suite by delving into the sexual practices of alien races like Klingons.  And though it was useful to point out that Klingon sex was more violent than regular sex, it was dialogue that was intended simply as humorous at the time.  It was delivered in a low-brow, immature fashion like the rest from this season.  Titillating for teenagers and perverts.  However, I need to point out two things about Worf in this episode.  First is a gaff that they didn't often make on this show and that was Worf asking where Rome was.  Later it is revealed that he was raised on Earth, but it goes to show you that they were still ignoring this character.  Just the muscle; not overly bright.  It resmebles racist pigeonholing of early cinema.  He's the token Klingon of the group.  He claims to require a Klingon woman for love which is distinguished from just plain sex, indicating that he "keeps to his own kind" as well.  I'm sure they didn't consciously intend this, but liberal racism is well documented, so it's always in the back of  liberal minds even though genuine racism is pretty much non existent now, as opposed to the racism liberals generate to divide the country.  At least they forgot that thing about needing a Klingon woman for love as well, since as you'll notice, Worf was never involved with a (100%) Klingon woman.
 And keeping with the theme of childishness, Wesley is front and center with a kindergartner's view on lying, which adds to the hatred of the character that I expanded on last week.  But therein is the difference between the two episodes.  In The Apple the Enterprise was just caught in a tractor beam, in this one the "god" machine has a more interactive role with the inhabitants, which leads to the heart of the storyline.

The episode is primarily an examination of the "Prime Directive" as are a lot of Star Trek episodes.  The Prime Directive is a multifaceted tool used in the show.  Sometimes the debate makes for good philosophical and political discussion. But, this episode was making a secondary point about religions and religious people being naive and underdeveloped races.  Like most first season episodes, it's touched on again later in a less simplistic form, but it's always portrayed as noble if the interference on the part of the Federation takes the form of them explaining to religious people that God isn't real.

PICARD: ... Why are they so certain it's a god?
DATA: Any sufficiently advanced life form would appear to others to be that, sir.

It's an early assault on religion in general and Christianity in particular... just take the obvious into account... Edo-Eden.  Even The Apple-Forbidden Fruit.
I never understand the need to attack Christianity and in this episode it doesn't even make sense.  The speech Picard makes at the end about laws not being absolute are actually an idea based in the Bible, but athiests don't want to believe that because they just assume that the Bible teaches that everyone is executed and/or going to Hell if they're not perfect and put even one toe out of line, as Wesley does in this episode.  It's just getting so old and tired.  And this isn't even the worst episode for this theme.
All of this aside, it's kind of uneven and confusing even if you're not pondering the religious implications.  I can't help but wonder what they were even doing on this planet.  They must have knowledge of space travel because they accept them as visitors to their world and yet, the woman seems surprised at being on a spaceship and everyone and everything in it to reiterate that she's part of a backwards culture that needs a God.  So, it's even a shaky episode for discussions over the Prime Directive as well. 
The only good thing I can articulate is at least the belief that God isn't real and if He is, He's just a machine or alien is consistent and eventually they relented from the these god-machines/aliens as always being portrayed as evil or irrational and this led to the wormhole aliens of DS9, where they actually took time to explore spirituality instead of condemning it outright.

Suck episode.  I'm adding the extra half star because it was a little better, at least, than The Naked Now.  At least they were trying to be serious in this one.