Beam Us Back, Scotty! (Page 2)

The moral center of this roiling race opera is Capt. Jonathan Archer, who hates Vulcans because they prevented his astronaut father from perfecting the first big human ship with warp drive. "I've been listening to you Vulcans telling us what not to do my entire life," he shouts at T'Pol. "I watched my father work his ass off while your scientists held back just enough information to keep him from succeeding." There's a heavily Freudian element in all this: His father's failed big ship is referred to in most episodes, and we get frequent flashbacks of little-boy Jonathan playing with a remote-controlled toy rocket with his father, literally trying to get it up. In the show's iconography, T'Pol represents a castrating woman as well as a scheming racial inferior, and when he talks to her, Archer often sounds like the hero of a 1950s movie beating back the heart-freezing bitch who's trying to crush his vitals: "You don't know how much I'm restraining myself from knocking you on your ass."

Did I mention that he uses the word "ass" a lot? It's sort of like the way George Bush Senior boasted that he had "kicked a little ass" in the debate with Geraldine Ferraro. This is the first Star Trek really interested in punishing women. And the first Trek that makes women really punishable: A typical scene has T'Pol talking up how stupid and crude the crew are, telling them that they'll never be able to accomplish their mission, while trying to eat a breadstick by cutting it with a knife and fork. T'Pol is a sort of Kryptonite, wielding a wilting female discipline against their freewheeling male joy: She can't enjoy food, can't enjoy sex, can't enjoy violence. And this Trek, as though someone had joined together Gene Roddenberry and the WWF, wants to cheer on men for sticking it to her on every planet the crew visits. It apparently works: The show has achieved astronomical ratings with male viewers.

The treatment of T'Pol isn't the worst part. If women aren't harridans like her, they're sexy, exotic alien wenches, completely inhuman, who only, only, only aim to please. I thought I was in some different science-fiction universe altogether when, in the Enterprise pilot episode, two male crew members spent lots of time watching scantily clad alien dancing girls with three-foot long tongues flicking at insects and each other. "Which one would you prefer?" the manager asked the men. In my recollection, this is the first Trek on which Starfleet officers have ever considered buying women. The women were like insects themselves, fuckable insects, and in the time we spent mentally fondling their soulless, bouncy bodies I felt, for the first time, that Star Trek didn't consider me a person.

Oh, I forgot, there's one other possible role for women on the show. Hoshi, the one human woman on the ship, is an Asian who's supposed to be great with languages, but she spends most of her time as a sort of secretary who relays messages from other ships. And, surprise, she's as sweet and smiling as Uhura, the black woman in the original series, who was also supposed to be a highly trained officer but only ever got to get Starfleet on the phone. Now, this is allegedly set 150 years in the future, but somehow Hoshi hasn't been trained in self-defense, even though Starfleet is partly a military operation. In one episode enemies are chasing the crew, and the captain has to call two officers to "get Hoshi" inside. It's clear that she could never save herself.

Vulcans know how to do a very cool self-defense maneuver that involves making people unconscious by pinching their necks from behind, but T'Pol somehow never gets to do it. (She never gets to do the very cool Vulcan mind-meld, either.) And Vulcans have, in every incarnation of Star Trek until now, been supersmart. They aren't anymore. Every Vulcan on the show has been dumb as a rock.

Why the gods of Star Trek have seen fit to radically change the show's politics is a question I'd love to be able to answer. Enterprise was birthed before September 11, but it seems tailor-made for this time of alien-hating and macho heroism. The show actually has its mouthpiece characters say outright that Americans are better than other people, which even the first Star Trek had the taste to avoid. (At this rate, Star Trek won't admit the existence of gays and lesbians until 2150.)

I can only think that this Star Trek was set in the past--uh, I mean 150 years into the future--so as to give it a convenient excuse for turning back the galactic clock on race and gender. But given the place Trek holds in so many people's imaginations, the shift of the Trek world to the right makes it feel as though the future has suddenly been foreshortened.

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