Star Trek and 9/11

Because of the pandemic and other reasons, I've spent a lot of time lately at home, watching TV. And because of the same reasons, when I watch TV, I crave what I call comfort viewing. For you, that might mean baking shows or true crime documentaries. For me, that means Star Trek.

By fall 2021. I thought I would be going to concerts and movies and hanging out with friends again, but no such luck. By now I have seen or rewatched pretty much all the episodes of the classic shows, and I am seriously considering subscribing to yet another streaming service to catch up with "Star Trek Discovery" and the other new material.

In the meantime, I decided to dig into "Enterprise," the prequel series which ran from 2001-2005. The show tells the story of the first Starship Enterprise, the NX-01, a century before the famous vessel piloted by Captain Kirk. This premise promised something new by dispensing with some of the familiar aspects of Star Trek universe. For instance, the NX-01 has transporters, but the crew is afraid of going through them; they use the devices mostly for cargo, and only use them on people as a last resort. The Federation of Planets hasn't been founded yet, and Starfleet is in its infancy. Much of the drama involves tension between humans, who want to explore the galaxy, and Vulcans, who think humans are too irrational to be trusted out there on their own. These were interesting writing choices, and they shook up a franchise that was starting to feel a little tired by the time "Star Trek: Voyager" ended its seven-year run, a few months before the "Enterprise" premiere. (For the first couple seasons, the show was called just "Enterprise." Later, it was changed to "Star Trek: Enterprise.")

It's been a long road

I watched part of its season when "Enterprise" began its original run, but I didn't get into it. The theme song didn't help. (Apparently, in an effort to set the series apart from the rest of the Star Trek franchise, the producers decided to skip the customary instrumental, orchestral theme and use a rock ballad instead. If you spend any time in Star Trek fan chatrooms, you'll find a lot of jokes about it.) I suppose a lot of other people felt the same as me, and the show was cancelled after four seasons.

An advantage of watching the show on Netflix all these years later: I can skip the opening credits and I don't have to hear the opening song. I find I still don't like the show as much as the other Star Trek iterations, but it has its moments. And, as it turns out, this summer has been an interesting time to revisit Enterprise.

Millennial tension

The recent talk about Britney Spears and an HBO documentary on Woodstock '99 have shone new light on the highly sexualized imagery of women in pop culture at the turn of the 21st century. Even without that conversation going on in the background, it's hard to miss all the sexualized imagery in "Enterprise" -- especially when compared to the other Star Trek shows. Sure, Captain Kirk famously met a new babe on every planet, but the "Enterprise" blatantly ogles Jolene Blalock, who plays the ship's Vulcan first officer T'Pol. The rest of the crew wear flight suits, and other Vulcans wear robes, but T'Pol wears tight, form-fitting body suits, and the show finds plenty of excuses to show her wearing less.

But there's another thing that makes Enterprise feel very much of its time: Many storylines are clearly inspired by the War on Terror. Enterprise debuted on Sept. 26, 2001, about two weeks after the attacks in New York and D.C. Given that timing, it's probably just coincidence that the big baddies of Season 1 are a cult-like alien species called the Suliban, which sounds like "Taliban." It's almost certainly a coincidence that the Season 1 storyline about humans feeling stifled by the cautious Vulcans parallels the Bush administration's view of "Old Europe" standing in the way of invading Iraq a couple years later. But by Season 3 of Enterprise, the parallels to post 9/11 America are clearly intentional.

Liberals in space

I've written before in this blog about the theory of Star Trek as "Liberals in Space," and how each iteration of Star Trek reflects something about American liberalism of its time. From the beginning, "Enterprise" backed away from that concept. The crew has a Vulcan first officer and a Denobulan doctor, but seemingly everyone else is human, and mostly American. Captain Archer likes to watch sports (it's water polo, but still) and insists on taking his dog into space. The chief engineer has a clipped Gulf Coast accent which isn't too far away from George W. Bush's.

American Starfleet.

Season 3 begins with a deadly attack on Earth by an alien force called the Xindi. Under the belief that humans will one day annihilate them if they don't destroy the humans first, the Xindi use a weapon that kills 7 million people on Earth. What's worse: This weapon appears to be a prototype for an even larger, more powerful device.

The humans and the Vulcans know almost nothing about the Xindi, except that they come from a far away, very unstable part of space known as the Expanse. The Enterprise is the fastest ship in Starfleet, and so it is dispatched to try to stop the Xindi from deploying the larger weapon and destroying Earth.

When Enterprise first set out, Captain Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula) had a mission of peaceful scientific exploration, but now he's on a military mission where the stakes could not be higher for his homeland and his species. When threatened with the annihilation of humanity, can his Star Fleet values hold up? How far will he go to protect Earth?

Early in the season, Archer is hoping for a diplomatic solution. At one point, he endangers his ship by trying to care for a hatchery full of insectoid Xindi eggs. By the end of the season, he's pirating another ship's warp coil (and endangering the friendly ship's crew) in order to save Enterprise's mission.

"Don't go in there!"

There was a lot of this kind of thing in our entertainment back then. Popular TV shows like "Homeland" and "24" were basically built around ethical questions like, "Oh, you're opposed to torture? Well, what if it's the only way to stop a deadly bombing?" You'll see allusions to the War on Terror even in sitcoms like "30 Rock" in its early seasons. It's a little odd to see this stuff today and recognize it as dated when it's supposed to be set 150 years in the future. It's similar to the feeling we all get when we see the 1960s view of the future in episodes of the original series, but with "Enterprise," it's more than a matter of the clothes and sets looking dated. I watch Archer face ethical quandaries that shouldn't even be a question -- No, of course you can't torture people, even when things get really bad -- and I think damn it, humans are supposed to be better than this in the future. That's what Star Trek has always told us.

Nearly 20 years after the show debuted, I watched the third season of "Enterprise" as the United States was finally pulling out of Afghanistan, which was once again under the full control of the Taliban. And so, as I watched Captain Archer cross lines of ethics and morality in his quest, I thought of how the United States had turned to torture at Abu Ghraib and "black sites," to invading Iraq, to extrajudicial imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay and more.

All these years later, it's hard to see how crossing those lines accomplished anything good, and that makes it frustrating to watch some of the same ethical questions played out in the science fiction stories of "Enterprise." Sometimes, watching these episodes, I wanted to scream at my Netflix screen: "No, don't do that, Archer! That's a mistake!"