Timidly into the past
By Charles Shaar Murray and Mike Marqusee
Independent on Sunday, January 6 2002
When is Star Trek not Star Trek? When it’s Enterprise. The latest instalment of television’s 35-year-old science-fiction flagship – which begins tomorrow on Sky 1 – cannily hedges its bets by omitting the words “Star Trek” from its title, but that’s not all that’s missing. Under the captaincy of clean-cut Jonathan Archer (played by Scott Bakula), the new show doesn’t so much take us back to the future as forward to the past. Specifically – as the excruciating sub-Bryan Adams power ballad which accompanies the opening credits subliminally informs us – to that mix of belligerence and sentimentality which characterised official US culture during the Reagan Eighties.
Rather than extend the over-arching intergalactic narrative patiently elaborated through successive series, the Trek franchise holders have backtracked to set Enterprise in the 22nd century – more than 100 years before the birth of James T Kirk, well before there was a “United Federation of Planets”. “We wanted to go back to a time when space exploration was truly new,” explained executive producer Rick Berman, blithely transgressing the boundary between representation and reality. This recourse to the future’s past, with its suggestion that we’ve somehow reached the imaginative frontiers of space when we’ve scarcely got off the ground in real life, seems at odds with the bold ambitions that drove Trek progenitor Gene Roddenberry. The forthcoming movie Star Trek X: Nemesis, will be the last to feature Jean-Luc Picard and the Next Generation crew, representing – at least for the time being – our farewell to the 24th century.
In 1966, when James T Kirk’s Enterprise embarked on its historic mission to “seek out new life and new civilisations”, the US was emerging from the headiest years of the civil rights movement while plunging ever more deeply into its war in Vietnam. Spurred by contemporary events, Roddenberry insisted from the beginning that Star Trek would challenge prejudice and cheerlead for a positive vision of the future. The original series dared to imagine a world in which the Cold War had been transcended, in which poverty and bigotry had been abolished, in which humanity explored the stars in peaceful co-operation with other species.
The liberal humanism that inspired the original series remained at the core of successive Star Trek incarnations – from The Next Generation (1987- 94), through Deep Space Nine (1991-1998) to Voyager (1994-2001). Though questioned, tested and qualified, the optimistic belief in the universality of the values of tolerance and compassion continued to guide both characters and writers.
Enterprise has been launched in a US where this brand of liberal humanism seems a curious anachronism. This is not Roddenberry’s US – the US of explosive domestic conflict, locked into global ideological competition – but a US bestriding the unipolar world order of National Missile Defence, the WTO, and “the war against terrorism”. “Infinite diversity in infinite combinations” – the venerable Star Trek mantra – seems to belong to a different cosmos, a different America.
The calculated narrative regression is not the only respect in which the show has a decidedly retro feel. One Trek fan rejoiced on an internet news group that it was good to have a white male American back in charge – after, presumably, a Yurropean (Patrick Stewart’s Picard in The Next Generation), a black man (Avery Brooks’s Sisko in Deep Space Nine) and a woman (Kate Mulgrew’s Janeway in Voyager) had usurped white male America’s manifest destiny to lead not only the human race but whatever other species were boldly going.
Furthermore, the composition of the crew is depressingly homogenous by comparison with previous Treks. Enterprise’s roster includes three male humans (a white American engineer with a southern accent, an African-American pilot and a stock-British tactical officer), a self-doubting Asian-American female communications officer, an arrogant female Vulcan science officer and a “Denobulan” doctor with a keen interest in human mating habits.
Compare that to the original series’ crew – where the white male Americans at the helm and in sick bay were joined by a Scot, a Russian, a Japanese, a female African, and, of course, one illustrious Vulcan male. Or to DS9’s marvellous intergalactic menagerie, in which humans were heavily outnumbered by extraterrestrials, and the only Americans in sight were the assertively African-American Sisko and his son.
It’s not a question of an “equal opportunities” quota, but of the absence of the kind of challenging, inquisitive, off-beat voice added to the melange by the likes of Spock, Data, Worf, Quark, Seven of Nine or Voyager’s holographic Doctor. What’s missing is the constant jolt to preconceptions characteristic of the best science fiction. In the past, much of the fun in Star Trek derived from its impish conversion of topical controversies into deep space dilemmas, rediscovering the familiar among unfamiliar settings. In Enterprise, however, it seems we’re supposed to enjoy the shock of recognition by watching the writers fill in the backstory of the fictional cosmos imagined in the previous shows: how human beings first encountered the Klingons or learnt to use phaser and transporter technology, etc. The same fear-of-the-future syndrome is apparent in another current hit, Smallville, a prequel to Superman where the novelty derives from fresh origins for what we already know, rather than from attempting to anticipate an unpredictably unfolding storyline. What next? Buffy: the Kindergarten Years, in which a timely glimpse of a picket fence enables our heroine to figure out how to slay the vampires lurking in her sandpit?
Creepily, the villains in Enterprise have been named “the Suliban”, a genetically enhanced species manipulated by a force from the distant future engaged in an (as yet unexplained) “temporal Cold War”. That’s not the only feature of Enterprise – in the can months before 11 September – that seems eerily apposite to the current tenor of US public life.
Trek has long been viewed as an allegory for the “Americanisation of space”, and certainly from the beginning, its plot lines have self-consciously examined the quandaries facing America as it polices its earthly empire. But in Enterprise the interchangeability between the US and the human race is asserted less self-consciously than in the past, and with fewer qualms. In the new show, Starfleet is little more than a glorified US Air Force.
At first glance, Scott Bakula’s Captain Archer – originally forenamed “Jeffrey” before the producers realised that this would make it impossible for British viewers to take either show or character seriously – seems a throwback to William Shatner’s adventure-story hero. But this is not the ingenuous middle-American machismo of Captain Kirk. Where previous Trek captains wrestled endlessly with high-flown principles – their own and the Federation’s – Archer seems driven by a chip-on-the-shoulder need to establish the status of his species (or nation) in space. If Shatner’s Kirk evoked John F Kennedy, Bakula’s Archer, his facial expressions limited to a scowl and a smirk, brings to mind an elongated George W Bush. Meanwhile, his crew blunder around the galaxy like stereotyped Americans in 1950s Europe.
The first episode’s show-stopper is a hilariously gratuitous shower scene with Jolene Blalock, who plays T’Pol, the stern but voluptuous Vulcan. Of course, sexism isn’t exactly “alien” to the Star Trek package: Roddenberry was always happy to fill the screen with underclad young women. But, so far, the female presence in Enterprise seems a lurch backwards. Jeri Ryan may have been introduced into Voyager as the statuesque ex-Borg, Seven of Nine, in the search for bimbo appeal, but there were tensions in the conception – and skill in the actor – that made the character by turns poignant and comic, and always coolly dignified. It remains to be seen whether Blalock and the writers can repeat the trick with T’Pol. Berman has stated that there is to be more emphasis on action heroics and special effects, and a more informal feel to the dialogue. Already, however, one longs for the sometimes stately intellectualism and comic understatement of the previous shows. After all, for the homogenised, artificially idiomatic banter of bog-standard US space-opera, one hardly needs Star Trek.
Enterprise premiered on TV in the US two weeks after 11 September, to the best first-season viewing figures of any Star Trek series. In mid- November, the weekly episode was preceded by a direct-to-camera address from Scott Bakula in full Starfleet uniform (and baseball cap) to service personnel on board the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, then returning from active duty in the Arabian Sea. “From the Starship Enterprise to the aircraft carrier Enterprise,” Bakula declared, “welcome home.” As in so much mainstream US popular culture these days – from the White House to WWF – the approach to the distinction between fact and fiction seemed alarmingly casual.
Star Trek has always been a barometer of American social change. In a sense, that remains as true of Enterprise as of its forerunners, as it taps into the current gung-ho zeitgeist. However, it would be unfair to judge Enterprise on early episodes alone. After all, Next Generation, DS9 and Voyager all really only hit their strides in their fourth seasons. Enterprise may yet have some surprises in store, possibly showing how our primitive, hostile species took its first steps towards the more enlightened Kirk and Picard eras. But to stage the kinds of narrative coups that made previous Treks compulsive viewing, Berman et al will have to take risks and upend assumptions. They will have to challenge the empire from its heart – and in today’s Hollywood that may prove much more difficult than in Gene Roddenberry’s time.
