Enterprise came on with a clear objective to both do something distinctly new, and get back to the basics of Trek. After the lacklustre final years of Deep Space Nine and the (with all due respect to friends and family who enjoy it) horrifically pointles Voyager, Paramount needed to revive the Star Trek 'franchise' (as they so lovingly call it), and for a little while, it seemed to work.
The first season was genuinely interesting. It didn't look and feel like standard Trek. The show was just called Enterprise, without the Star Trek part. The theme wasn't a stirring bit of orchestral music, and though the theme they did choose sucks so bad I want to gauge my ears out when I hear it, I do respect that they were just trying to do something new. The show itself tried to get away from the lazy-writer-syndrome of earlier Trek shows. There were no transporters, no shields, no universal translator, and Star Fleet was not the big boy on the block when it came to military might. In one of the first-season episodes, a small team ends up experiencing paranoid visions because of a hullicinagenic plant that's on the surface of the planet. They were constantly stymied by the (for Trek) mundane dangers of space travel. Season 2 trundled along without much fanfare or, to be honest, originality, and the flag-waving circle-jerk that was Season 3 was just offensive.
Then, we were told the show was going to be cancelled, and there was much rejoicing. I was still watching, still nominally enjoying it, but the dissappointed fans were already in full attack mode, much as they have been for both Star Wars and The Martrix since their prequels and sequels (repsectively).
The fourth season has been, ironically, one of their best. They've found a middle-ground between the season-long plot threads that have become the norm in even sit coms, and the more traditional isolated episodes. Somewhat like old Dr. Who storylines, a single narrative went on for four shows, so you got the sense of serialised fiction, complete with Sunday matinée-style cliffhangers, without having to keep watching for the whole damn year. They also started making contact with the touch-stones of Trek's backstory. Some of their efforts were less well-recieved than others, but for long-time fans, linking the Eugenics Wars to Khan's 'augments' to an ancestor of Dr. Nunian Sung, the guy who built Data, was really cool. It showed how the whole Trek history is intermingled, instead of just being a series of isolated incidents... hey, just like the format of the season itself! Nifty that, no?
The most recent four-episode 'arc' is all about that wacky Mirror universe that we saw way back in the original series and in Deep Space Nine. That was all a long preamble to get to my point. In this version of the Mirror universe, the Terran Empire having defeated and enslaved the Vulcans (and stolen their technology!) is on its rise to power. We encounter the evil version of the Enterprise crew and, hey look!, all the women are wearing cleavage- and belly-revealing uniforms.
Now, far be it for me to complain about seeing Linda Park and Jolene Blalock with less clothing on. In fact, I'm quite distinctly not complaining, but the representation is really interesting. Not only are the characters wearing less clothes, but Hoshi (Park's character) basically sleeps her way to a position of power on the ship, and this perfectly parallels the fact that the Mirror versions of the women of DS9 were not only hyper-sexualised versions of their 'real' selves, but seemed to be universally bisexual.
Kira Nurese encounters her dark double, and it's very clear, in a particularly good two-shot, that the double is more turned on by the idea of doing herself than she has ever been in her life. The point of the moment is that Dark Kira is a total narcisist, of course, but we can't deny the 'fan service' of the moment. Trek fans are notoriously undersexed, and often develop crushes on the characters.
My point, and I do have one, is that I find fascinating the fact that the 'evil' versions of these women seem to have, as a matter of course, hyped-up sex drives. The obvious representation is that only evil, decadent, imperial, tyrannical women actually like sex, the whores. American media has always had a love-hate relationship with sex. It sells movies, but we're not supposed to show it, but we can show it if we represent it as sinful. That's why the old dime-store novels from the 50s always involve sex-hungry men and women who inevitably get killed in car crashes or end up begging on the street. It's fine to display whatever kind of sexual depravity you want, as long as those who take part in it are punished in the end. The exact same thing was true of mobster movies back in the 30s and 40s (check out the original Scarface if you don't believe me).
Although I have a deep, almost genetic, love of Star Trek in general, one of the things I love about it is how sappily rebelious it tries to be. Sure, it screws up a lot, but the original show and TNG had some (ridiculous, blindingly-obvious, over-the-top) moments of social commentary, and they usually pointed to something that was greviously wrong with the present day that the people in the Trek universe had solved, and even found laughable and bizarre that we still struggled with it. To have Enterprise, which I also quite like, revert to exactly what Gene Roddenberry didn't want it to be, a flag-waving, status quo-supporting, bit of mindless sex and violence, actually really hurts. I feel betrayed. Ironically, I'm just as happy that it's cancelled and that there will be no new Trek for a while. It's time a take a break, regroup, and remember what the point of this whole thing was: one lovable old drunk's vision of a better future.
Posted by orion at April 29, 2005 2:41 PM