“Blogging the Next Generation” returns today after a one-week TIFF 2012 break, and now moves weekly, posting on Tuesdays, for the remainder of the series. At the advice of my brother, I’m also now incorporating a new feature: Enterprise ratings! See below.
“On Kabatris I had to wear furs to meet with the leadership council… and on Armus Nine I wore feathers.”
This godawful travesty of an episode was laughable in 1988, and has aged even worse than you’d expect — the ill-conceived tale of a world where women are in charge and men are subservient. I must of course acknowledge that for American television in the mid-1980s, similar against-the-norm thinking resulted in the creation of the Enterprise’s female doctor, in a time when doctors on TV were almost uniformly male; and since Dr. Crusher went on to become my favourite character on Star Trek: The Next Generation, I owe this line of thinking a debt. (She is, for those keeping score, my favourite character due to a precise matrix of her actual kickassness as a hero lead in the Enterprise ensemble, and the gargantuan whopping crush I had on her when I was thirteen years old, as only thirteen-year-olds can. That she was the mother of my theoretical surrogate figure on the Enterprise bridge, Wesley Crusher, inevitably created a faint, but presently disconcerting, feedback loop of subtle quasi-incestuous subtext between Wes and Beverly, which twenty-five years of “growing up” have not entirely scrubbed clean of my synapses.)
But back to the matter at hand. “Angel One” owes an even larger debt to the kind of “up is down, black is white!” hyper-allegorizing for which the original Star Trek was legendary, never more so than in the literal “black is white” episode — where Frank Gorshin played the guy whose face was half white and half black, at lifelong war with another fellow whose face was the same, but with the colours inverted. There are few episodes in Star Trek: The Next Generation (“Code of Honor” is another one) that remind one so smartly of the fact that the world had moved on from the kind of hokey dramatic shenanigans that played in the 1960s than “Angel One,” which was filmed and aired in 1988. It is an almost appallingly wrongheaded effort, so naively proud of its “well, check this out!” opposition to its (patriarchal, condescending) conception of “the normal” that it comprehensively fails to notice how stupid it’s being.
As a result, the episode has far less to say about any relevant contemporary issue than it does as an unintentional thermometer of the actual state of the nation on male/female relations, particularly in America and particular in the workplace, in the 1980s. Rather than tilting into the conceit with some particularly arch writing — of the type at which Deep Space Nine would later excel — “Angel One” leans away, inventing a ludicrous revolutionary menace from the Federation refugee males hidden on the planet, and sending Riker to bed with Mistress Beatta – dressed, as I will never be able to forget, in a blue smock and pink tights.
If the episode has a single redeeming feature, it’s Geordi’s first sojourn into the Captain’s chair — a detour that is unfortunately brought about by the loopy-doopy “smell virus” subplot. (Not just a smell virus… a smell virus created by the holodeck. Fuckin’ holodecks.) But Burton plays the hell out of Geordi’s open-hearted embrace of the gravity of command, and has a few nice beats with Worf, of a type rarely given to Worf after the first season.
Oh: one other redeeming feature: the traditional Angel One male earring is a clear precursor to the best piece of jewelry in Star Trek history, the Bajoran earring. I love those things.
My brother recommended I start assigning these episodes some kind of a star/point rating, so I’ve chosen Enterprises, and have awarded “Angel One” one Enterprise out of five. I guess now I should go back and rate the others, to give this meaningless enterprise (get it?) meaning.
Blogging The Next Generation is like my first Geocities site back in 1997. With nothing better to do with it, I wrote miscellaneously about Star Trek — now I’m doing that for every single episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
This series runs every Tuesday and will do so for the entire release of TNG on blu-ray. Season 2 has been announced for December 4, 2012.