One of the better Enterprise episodes so far. Even though I'm still not a fan of the doctor. Compared to EMH from Voyager or Bashir from DS9, this doctor is quite boring and also very annoying. The strange grin, the way he emphasizes his words and especially those ugly shirts. Couldn't they give him a proper uniform? However, there is a ray of hope: While the other doctors simply ran blinking tech gadgets 10 cm over the skin and healed both flesh wounds and complete broken bones, this doctor at least applies ointments or the like and carries out actual treatments on the body.
First of all, to the criticism of many commentators: NO, this is not about genocide and the crew of the Enterprise is certainly not committing genocide! Genocide is the deliberate killing of large numbers of people of a particular nation or ethnic group. Intentionally, actively and with the aim of extinguishing these people. What the crew is doing here is simply not interfering with a normal biological process of development or degeneration of a species. Enterprise, Starfleet and later the United Federation of Planets are not the Salvation Army of the Galaxy. Their goal is not and never has been to help every species from the outside and, so to speak, to shape them and pave the way for them.
This episode is basically the starting point of the Prime Directive. The basic guidelines that we will encounter again and again in Star Trek. If you don't approve of this episode, you should avoid Star Trek, because Star Trek is basically all about when and whether one civilization should interfere in the fortunes of another civilization. And Star Trek has always raised the warning finger that no good deed goes unpunished. The message has always been that a species, a culture, a civilization must develop itself and chart its own path into the future and must also make mistakes in order to learn and develop morally.