Star Trek: Enterprise: North Star Rewatch

September 23, 2019 3:52 AM - Season 3, Episode 9

Archer attempts cowboy diplomacy.

Per Memory Alpha:

Background information:
> The writing of this episode began with influences from several installments of Star Trek: The Original Series. "North Star" writer David A. Goodman recalled, "I was the one who pitched the idea to [Executive Producers] Rick [Berman] and Brannon [Braga] […] In fact, this episode came from Brannon challenging me to come up with a 'parallel Earth' story like they had on TOS, but one that would fit Enterprise. My favorites of those TOS ones were 'A Piece of the Action', and 'Patterns of Force', since they didn't rely on impossible to explain things like 'Hodgkins Law of Parallel Planet Development.' So it was really inspired by those episodes […] For those who say 'why do a concept like this again?' I can only say that I tried to use an old concept to say something new, or at least relevant. I hope it comes through."
> David A. Goodman originally planned for this episode to be set during Medieval times. Remembered Brannon Braga, "I think I was the one who said, 'Make it the Old West, but with aliens in the midst.'" David A. Goodman continued to develop the episode from there. (Star Trek: Communicator issue 151, p. 30)
> Getting the tone of this episode right was important to the ENT writing staff. "We really wanted to make sure that it didn't play like TNG's 'A Fistful of Datas', which was a farce," Brannon Braga recalled. "We wanted to do it more like The Unforgiven, something that was more gritty and realistic." (Star Trek: Communicator issue 151, p. 30)
> David A. Goodman decided to take some character names in this outing from other filmed Westerns. "Since it's a Western setting," he commented, "I paid homage to 'Spectre of the Gun' by naming one of the aliens Cronin. Kit was not named after 'Miss Kitty' on Gunsmoke, but was named after Olivia DeHavilland's character in one of my favorite guilty pleasure westerns Santa Fe Trail."
> David A. Goodman enjoyed writing this ENT installment. "It was fun to get to write the one cowboy-planet episode of the sequel series," he recalled.
> The final draft of this episode's script was issued on 19 September 2003.
> Exteriors of the town were shot primarily at Western Town, Universal Studios in Universal City, California.
> A swipe-edit between a shot of Archer and Bethany leaving the jail, just after Bethany's jailbreak, and the immediately subsequent shot, in which Sheriff MacReady enters the jail, was a highly unusual editing choice for Star Trek: Enterprise.
> Like the Star Trek: Voyager episode "The 37's", the premise of this episode involves the discovery of a colony inhabited by Humans who were abducted by aliens. Also, like previous installments "Spectre of the Gun" from Star Trek: The Original Series and the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "A Fistful of Datas", this episode takes place in a Western-themed setting.
> The scene in which Archer is showing Bethany her planet from space recalls the actions of Jean-Luc Picard, who did the same for Rivan in "Justice", Nuria in "Who Watches The Watchers", and Lily Sloane in Star Trek: First Contact. In all of these cases, in order to prove a point, the captain of the Enterprise shows a female native of a pre-warp culture her own planet from space.
> Chronologically, this is the first time that a Starfleet officer asks for transport while specifying how many to beam up.
> Archer's claim that Humans had gone past intolerance and racism seems to have been premature, as the fourth season episodes "Home", "Demons" and "Terra Prime" show Humans on Earth can be just as racist and intolerant.
> The title "North Star" may have been a reference to the celestial signpost for slaves seeking to escape their condition in the antebellum south in the United States.
> This episode has inspired mixed responses. David A. Goodman said of the outing, "[It] has its fans and its detractors."
> Brannon Braga was definitely a fan of the episode, remarking, "[David A. Goodman] […] really did a great job with it […] And it had a poignant little metaphor for the Native American Indians, in this case being the aliens. It did feel like an original series episode, and I thought it really came across well." (Star Trek: Communicator issue 151, p. 30)
> Despite some fans accusing this episode of being too similar to sci-fi Western TV series Firefly, David A. Goodman responded, "Although I was a fan of Firefly, […] I did not set out to rip it off."

This Week In:
* Pointless STO Comparisons: A couple of antiquated guns do appear in the MMO, but no six-shooters. We have Zefram Cochrane's shotgun from the Mirror Universe, and the Holographic Tommy Gun from First Contact.
* Vulcans Are Superior: Skipped.
* Non-Catastrophic Equipment Failures: Skipped.
* Aliens Outclass Enterprise: Skipped.

Poster's Log:
Superficially, this has a lot going for it: the crew encounters a colony of humans performing a historical reenactment of dubious accuracy with a social problem. The crew tries to fix it but has to warp out and never return. ENT gets a lot of the beats right. There's a fun shootout with phasers vs. old timey guns, down to a guy falling out a window. They wisely skip any foreshadowing about 'some kind of directive' and go ahead and level with the humans at the end.

On the surface, this checks.

However, there are two aspects of this episode that bother me a great deal:

- Bethany's Skagaran heritage.
This is a smallish complaint, but making the character who is sympathetic to the Skagaran plight also part Skagaran dilutes the message of 'let's all get along' because she has a concealed ulterior motive. She would work better narratively as a human who has no additional motive beyond personal ethics.

- This is extremely offputting to me.
Per Memory Alpha, the Skagarans are supposed to be "a poignant little metaphor for the Native American Indians, in this case being the aliens."

That's bullshit. Heavy editorializing will follow, so I'm going to take that to the comments.

posted by mordax (13 comments total)

Okay, so if we're looking at US history, and we have a technologically superior force displacing an indigenous population to use as slave labor, the obvious parallel isn't Native Americans, it's white colonists, which makes the moral of this story pretty bad from my perspective.

Here's the key piece, IMO:

MACCREADY: The law was laid down a long time ago to protect men like you and me.
ARCHER: Protect us from what? Children?
MACCREADY: You really want those children to learn how to read, how to do their numbers, and then maybe they can learn about how they used to be in charge around here. How they had guns that could kill a man with a beam of light, and the human beings were nothing but their labour force, their property. Is that what you want those children to learn, Mister Archer?
ARCHER: You're judging them on something that happened over two hundred years ago.
MACCREADY: And it's my job to make sure it never happens again. Now, I'm not saying it's fair. It's just the way it's always been. I expect you to be out of town in an hour.

Speaking as a POC watching white people put their fantasies on the small screen, this exchange is horrifying. This story wants and tries to have a moral about 'overcome your prejudice,' but it's so blinkered and ignorant that it manages to forcibly demand, 'forgive the ancestors of slaveholders, they had nothing to do with it. It was a long time ago, the enlightened thing to do is move on.'

That is not a message I'm okay with hearing in the United States, pretty much ever, regardless of intention. Discussion of reparations and the intergenerational effects of wage theft via slavery in the U.S. are more than I really have time for right now (I started, and the truth is that talking about that is more 'full FPP that I will absolutely not be doing'), but... good goddamn do I not need to hear 'slavery happened a long time ago, let it go.'

I'm not surprised that this script came from David A. Goodman, aka 'the guy who signed his real name on Precious Cargo.'
posted by mordax at 3:58 AM on September 23, 2019 [2 favorites]

Agreed, its message is pretty awful. At first, it seems remarkable that they show humans being racist toward aliens, despite Archer's insistence that they're all past that now, even though it can be rationalized that they're essentially nineteenth-century humans with nineteenth-century problems. (As Memory Alpha notes, the fourth season will refute that notion with some pretty good episodes about human-supremacist movements.) But then we find out that the humans were the real victims, supposedly, even though they got to keep their culture perfectly preserved and the Skagarans' culture was completely wiped out, except for a derelict vessel. If there's supposed to be some message there about the formerly-enslaved having internalized their oppressors to some degree, the background and setting makes that very muddled; DS9 did a much better job of that in the early seasons, when you had some of the more extremist Bajorans mirroring the oppression of the Cardassians, even getting secret arms shipments from them, not to mention this episode in which Kira was accused of doing that.

Also too, it's yet another example of an S3 episode that a) could have been done in any season on any show in the franchise, and b) doesn't advance the Xindi plot one whit. Did they even have a passing mention of the season arc that I may have missed? I don't want to sound like a broken record, it's that I'd previously thought "well, at least S3 had a season-long arc", and now I'm like, "...except when they totally didn't and just went ahead and did a Western episode because they didn't have to make new sets, props or costumes... except they sort of did for the Skagaran derelict and the data modules... aargh, I give up."

P.S. RIP Aron Eisenberg
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:27 PM on September 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

I get the feeling that they thought they were being Different and Edgy and Cool in this one, in various ways:

- The mysterious opening tease, and the reduced emphasis on the regulars in favor of the local uncontacted aliens
…which unfortunately we already saw in TNG: "First Contact," but that's forgivable;

- The gritty lighting, coloring, and camerawork
…which only slightly echoed Firefly, and regardless is a forgivable impulse—the cast and crew want to change things up sometimes, flex their skills, and bask in costumes whose cultural cachet they enjoy, a la Picard doing Shakespeare, Janeway doing Jane Austen, and Chakotay doing $NAME_OF_SOME_BOXER;

- The sci-fi twist on the racist oppression narrative, i.e., the victims are actually the middle-aged white guys with Southern accents
…which (and now I know we're echoing stuff we said in the VOY threads) is less forgivable because if you're not going to examine closely* the implications of your conflict's setup, and it involves subject matter like this, maybe don't even go there.

* = That's me being charitable and assuming that they did not intend the "just let it go" implication to map to real U.S. history. OTOH, how did the writers' room miss that, since they set the episode in "real U.S. history"?

Anyway, I concur that the gunplay was mildly fun, and the frank ending was interesting. But we didn't strictly need another Old West episode and we certainly didn't need another ignorant attempt at Serious Issues Commentary.

doesn't advance the Xindi plot one whit

Both times I watched this episode, I made the assumption that part of why this planet ended up the way it did was due to colony ships getting stuck in the Expanse. But that's basically fanon, and for that matter, it could have happened anywhere in any Trek series. Not to be too uncharitable, but I wonder if its inclusion in this season might signify some difficulty in filling out the whole Xindi storyline?
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 4:13 AM on September 24, 2019 [3 favorites]

P.S. RIP Aron Eisenberg

Before I say anything else: my bad for missing that. It really blindsided me. (Eisenberg did tons of voice work in Star Trek Online, including one of my very favorite missions in the entire game.) It is really weird and sad to think about him passing, especially so soon, and especially hearing his recorded dialogue routinely. :(

DS9 did a much better job of that in the early seasons, when you had some of the more extremist Bajorans mirroring the oppression of the Cardassians, even getting secret arms shipments from them, not to mention this episode in which Kira was accused of doing that.

Yeah. I think it helps that they had any idea what they wanted to say.

I don't want to sound like a broken record

That's becoming my internal tagline for these threads, honestly. I remembered S3 more fondly than this, but I believe it's because they've had some wins, and that made it easier to overlook these parts during a binge.

…which (and now I know we're echoing stuff we said in the VOY threads) is less forgivable because if you're not going to examine closely* the implications of your conflict's setup, and it involves subject matter like this, maybe don't even go there.

* = That's me being charitable and assuming that they did not intend the "just let it go" implication to map to real U.S. history. OTOH, how did the writers' room miss that, since they set the episode in "real U.S. history"?

I've been thinking about this since the episode, actually, and I think that I do have an answer:

People with a lot of privilege are typically insulated from unintended consequences, and so some of them expect to be judged purely on their intentions. I think we see a lot of it in the B&B era of Trek because they think that way: it doesn't really matter who's hurt by what someone does, as long as that person's heart is pure.

In this case:
- I think we're meant to take Archer at his word and believe the humans aboard the NX-01 are free of prejudice, even though it is blatantly untrue (witness a great deal of 9/11 style anti-Xindi sentiment, and routine disrespect for T'Pol's culture and preferences). All that's really supposed to matter is that they don't mean any harm.

- I don't think they ever stopped to consider how this episode would look to anybody else, or had anybody in their social circles who would call bullshit on it. (All they had to do to fix the metaphor was make this a colony ship that had crashed on a harmless Skagaran colony, then the Native American metaphor would've worked.) I think if called on it, they would protest 'we didn't mean it that way' and believe that's enough.

So... yeah. That's my take, having had a little time to mull this over.

(I also stand by my assessment of deep behind-the-scenes bigotry because I don't grade on a curve - as far as I'm concerned, harm that springs from laziness is maybe even more pernicious than the deliberate kind.)
posted by mordax at 6:05 PM on September 24, 2019 [3 favorites]

I'm torn between recommending no beer at all, or like 3 or 4 stellas because then at least in your impairment this episode would make sense and be less offensive.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 8:55 PM on September 24, 2019 [3 favorites]

People with a lot of privilege are typically insulated from unintended consequences, and so some of them expect to be judged purely on their intentions. [...] as far as I'm concerned, harm that springs from laziness is maybe even more pernicious than the deliberate kind.

I'm with you there, but also, this team has done stuff like this so often that you start to wonder if it might have actually been deliberate. I.e., maybe it was often deliberate, but deliberately subtle for the purpose of plausible deniability—not quite dogwhistling, mind you, but with the same motivation.

That might just be my 2019-"there-really-are-elaborate-racist-conspiracies" POV talking. If the simplest explanation is most often the correct one, then what's more likely is that not only were they prevented by their privilege from closely examining those intended consequences, but it didn't occur to them (due to ego based on success, time constraints, or yeah, very possibly laziness—not like we've never seen signs of THAT) that, as voices of a culturally-significant and supposedly-progressive franchise, they have a responsibility to ask that next question of themselves every time. Tl;dr, we've come to expect more of this franchise.

And it's somehow worse when it happens in ENT compared with VOY, at least so far. Not sure why that is, though in re-reading our "Broken Bow" discussion, maybe it's the disquieting combination of incompetent handling of sensitive cultural issues and the rah-rah cowboy stuff that's been a continual thread in this series even before this episode's literal cowboy stuff.

like 3 or 4 stellas

Stella, for an Old West episode? I think we can go more 'Murcan. Budweiser? Or maybe just Jack Daniels.
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 3:57 AM on September 25, 2019 [4 favorites]

I'm with you there, but also, this team has done stuff like this so often that you start to wonder if it might have actually been deliberate.

Heh. This is fair. In this case, based on reading of MA and other stuff that came down the pike after the fact, I think the team here were lazy. Like, here:

Speaking to AfterElton.com at a panel discussion, Brannon Braga said:

It was a shame for a lot of us that ... I’m talking about the Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and there was a constant back and forth about well how do we portray the spectrum of sexuality. There were people who felt very strongly that we should be showing casually, you know, just two guys together in the background in Ten Forward. At the time the decision was made not to do that and I think those same people would make a different decision now because I think, you know, that was 1989, well yeah about 89, 90, 91. I have no doubt that those same creative players wouldn’t feel so hesitant to have, you know, have been squeamish about a decision like that.

So looking at his words about this one aspect of the topic:
- No slurs about gays or other deliberate implications that the topic should be verboten.
- He chose not to directly state his own opinion at the time, indicating it's probably shameful (else he'd be using that to exonerate himself).
- He placed the responsibility for the choice on the group, rather than taking any on himself. Like, there's no 'I could've done better,' just 'we.'

Basically, he sounds like a kid protesting, 'everybody was doing it.' So I tend to think of Braga as immature and lazy. I also tend to think his opinions about race were probably the same in the absence of evidence to the contrary: in my admittedly anecdotal experience, how people treat one out-group is usually a pretty good indicator of their attitudes about it overall.

That said: this is also why I don't really distinguish between the two kinds of behavior.

If someone does something questionable once, or rarely, I figure we're all only human and give them the benefit of the doubt.

If someone has a pattern of bigoted acts, two things are true:
- I can't ever 'really' know what's in their head.
- The external consequences for the people around them are the same: marginalized people are hurt and bigots are emboldened.

So I figure a sufficiently advanced cluelessness is indistinguishable from deliberate evil, and that I don't really owe anybody with a pattern of bad behavior any sort of benefit of the doubt.

And it's somehow worse when it happens in ENT compared with VOY, at least so far. Not sure why that is, though in re-reading our "Broken Bow" discussion, maybe it's the disquieting combination of incompetent handling of sensitive cultural issues and the rah-rah cowboy stuff that's been a continual thread in this series even before this episode's literal cowboy stuff.

I maintain it's down the hiring practices. We've seen, time and again, that actors had a decent amount of pull in Trek: Nana Visitor prevented a Kira/Dukat romance, Kate Mulgrew refused to let them put Janeway in a dumb romance, etc.

On ENT, we also saw Bakula push back against at least one redshirt death (Novokovich, Strange New World), so we know that was a dynamic here too... but we also know they hired as as many white guys as possible, limiting the scope of reality checks they could get from the cast. (That may have been a whiplash reaction to VOY in retrospect, which managed to put forth some reasonably feminist content every so often.)

*shrugs*

But yeah. I can see wondering if all the freaking dogwhistles are on purpose, given how many of them there were.
posted by mordax at 10:46 AM on September 25, 2019 [4 favorites]

This video, "Is Star Trek Actually Less Progressive Than You Think?" popped up on Ten Forward today and is relevant.
(I have the hat that dude is wearing.)
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 2:51 PM on September 25, 2019 [2 favorites]

Stella, for an Old West episode? I think we can go more 'Murcan. Budweiser? Or maybe just Jack Daniels.

True, but then I'd have to drink Bud or Jack and I'm kinder to my liver then that.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 10:23 AM on September 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

This video, "Is Star Trek Actually Less Progressive Than You Think?" popped up on Ten Forward today and is relevant.

Finally had a chance to watch that all the way through. Thanks for sharing!

I liked it a lot - he seems like a good guy, and I agree with the things he said. In particular, I like that he's pushing the message that criticism of the things we love doesn't mean we can't love them, and that we need to use these things as opportunities to learn.

Good show.

I do think he missed one thing though: beyond unconscious bias, forgivable human imperfection and the like, there's just hiring practices. I think a lot of the reason these things happen is not having enough writers who are women or POC. I don't think people really get better via bootstraps, but by listening to people who are not like them. It's the biggest help I've ever had.

(I'm a big believer in critical mass theory over 'get better via trying harder.')
posted by mordax at 1:26 PM on September 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

Me watching the entire 42 minutes of this episode.
posted by General Malaise at 8:14 PM on October 2, 2019 [2 favorites]

That was way more elegant than my response. Hahaha. :)
posted by mordax at 8:54 PM on October 2, 2019 [1 favorite]

I 'love' how at the end, when it's finally legal to teach Skagarans in school, what we peek in and see is the teacher teaching the Skagarans Earth history. Not a single shit is ever given about Skagaran culture and returning them to their planet, not that the whole idea of "returning" people to the place they were taken from 300 years ago. It's all complex and does raise a lot of questions that could have some good discussions but Enterprise doesn't really want there to be problems it wants things to have been solved in ways that are still legible and comfortable for the audience...
posted by fleacircus at 4:49 AM on November 7, 2019