Still Trekkin'

Continuing our Star Trekking with Enterprise has got me thinking about the general landscape of media in the 2000s. It is a show that was unfortunately timed, going into production in early 2001 and premiering in September that year, just a couple of weeks after 9/11. It just wasn't the time for naive exploration, mishaps and making galactic friends and allies with some friction and enemies along the way. The 'noughties' became a gravely toned decade for US television in response to attacks on their soil, and related themes and issues such as torture, internment, collateral damage, weapons of mass destruction, distrust, paranoia, large-scale warfare, razed cityscapes, and learning that not all baddies are baddies that are familiar in more directly relevant shows such as 24. These begin filtering through Enterprise around halfway through season 1 as the writing caught up with current events and are all-encompassing by season 3 which first aired in 2003/4. In addition to that, watching it for the first time twenty years on, to me it evokes a regression in attitudes towards women, queerness, disability and racial diversity from a firmly centralized straight, white, non-disabled male point of view representing and speaking for all of humanity. Although every series until then had work to do (I haven't seen Discovery, plus Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks and Prodigy are all to look forward to), they pressed at the boundaries as much as conservative watchdogs would allow and were often met with complaints for episodes that edged towards pro-choice attitudes or entertained same-sex relationships, even in alien species. While there is some African-American and Asian-American representation in Enterprise's main cast, Travis Mayweather (Anthony Montgomery) and Hoshi Sato (Linda Park) are more often than not glorified background actors only occasionally having more to do than saying 'aye, sir' or 'no response', particularly in the 'war on terror'-themed season 3 (mind you, I'm yet to see the mirror universe episode which looks promising). 

The show recentres the white male captain, and unlike the cultured French-but-English Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula) is an all-American sports-loving action hero who feeds his dog cheese even though he knows he shouldn't (although, Picard's pretty kick-ass at times, and more ripped than you'd expect). Archer's attitude towards the Vulcans, while based in frustration, are xenophobic, and his gruffness with T'Pol (Jolene Blalock) at first troublingly smacks of men's violence towards women. I want to like Archer but I'm too deprogrammed from that noise nowadays.

There's some redemption here and there such as in the Risa episode where Ensign Sato unexpectedly makes a pleasant connection while learning other languages and enacts sexual agency with no adverse consequence, meanwhile the lads who go looking for sexual gratification on the pleasure planet wind up robbed and humiliated (however, this storyline could be read now as transphobic as the beautiful Risan women they chase turn out to be males of a shapeshifting species). While there are other flashes of sexual agency, and even nods to screwball romantic comedy, women are still often portrayed in tired femme fatale or helpless maiden tropes. As the Vulcan science officer, T'Pol is treated as a nag and her advice grounded in logic and experience is never taken even though she's often right. Yet she becomes increasingly loyal to Archer, and I can't help seeing the shades of an abusive relationship under heavy masking of establishing the occasional special bond that forms between a rogue Vulcan and a human seen before but happening chronologically later in Spock and Kirk (Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner) and Tuvok and Janeway (Tim Russ and Kate Mulgrew). 

Then there's the obligatory and punishing catsuit. I have come to love Star Trek immensely, but I'm tired of seeing women struggling to breathe and having to maintain being the smallest they can make themselves to entice the core viewership of young heterosexual men. We've seen it with Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) in The Next Generation, Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor) in Deep Space Nine, Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) in Voyager, and now T'Pol as a sexualized female Vulcan in Enterprise. I hope actual women of the future get to be comfortable in their work gear.

I don't know if the initial showrunners Rick Berman and Brannon Braga thought that because it's set around 100 years before Kirk's captaincy of the Enterprise that that excuses regressions, but I'd like to believe, even as bad as things might feel in 2021, that by 2151 we'd be more accepting of and respectful towards ourselves and others. I can't help wondering what a different show Enterprise would be if it were being made now. But, then, Discovery, I imagine, is doing that work. And some license must be given to Enterprise as it's supposed to cover the blunders that would have led to the founding of the United Federation of Planets and the Prime Directive. It seems to have been overcome by real-world events during its production and didn't survive the process, being cancelled after four seasons, three short of its intended run. 

I don't think I'm alone in suspecting that the focus on Bakula's action credentials was part of Enterprise's lack of traction. He's great and all, and sometimes it's tricky not to see Sam Beckett from Quantum Leap poking through, but Trek has always promoted the merits of teamwork with the ensemble bringing specific skills and character traits which combined are formidible. It is healthy and more interesting to have episodes taking turns to focus on a different main character or relationship/friendship/frienemyship amongst or amidst 'monster-of-the-week' episodes. These are much more occasional in Enterprise with Archer being the solitary hero almost every time (although it was fun seeing Trip Tucker (Connor Trinneer) save the day in his undies that one time). I am enjoying Archer's slow-drip bromance with Andorian Commander Shran (Jeffrey Combs), though; there's far too little bromance in Enterprise for my liking, and even Harry Kim and Tom Paris (Garrett Wang and Robert Duncan McNeill) in Voyager weren't a patch on Miles O'Brien and Julian Bashir (Colm Meaney and Alexander Siddig) in DS9. 

Regardless of these criticisms, I am enjoying Enterprise. It includes some excellent episodes of television with a lot of writing and production credits for names familiar to me from The X-Files and 24. There are some moments of great comedy, and I love the Denobulan Dr Phlox (John Billingsley) through whom polyamory and medical ethics are explored. The hopeless romantic in me is enjoying T'Pol and Tucker's burgeoning relationship. Tucker gets an unfounded bad rap early on as a womanizer but he proves himself to be consistently sweet and unassuming, if easily rubbed up the wrong way - an emotional response to headstrong women he encounters that sees him getting more attention in space than on Earth as an object of sexual desire to the women of various other species (including being impregnated by an act he is not informed is sexual). He even advocates for the rights of a sexless/genderless member of another species who was essentially a slave to the males and females, only to be severely reprimanded for interfering. Of course there will be tragedy to come, and dressed-up badassery in the mirror universe to look forward to (or as I like to think of it, Star Trek BDSM), and all there is to it is to enjoy the voyages as they come.