Angel One
Just when I thought I was out, etc.
“Nothing About Us Without Us”
I was hoping things could be different here. After a bunch of articles that have been fairly political or at least predominantly concerned with the morality of a given story, I was hoping I could get back here to talk about structure, or writing, or really anything that would give my audience a break. And no, “The Ambergris Element” doesn’t count. You can hardly call something a palette cleanser if it stinks like a long-dead shark that died from eating other, longer-dead sharks.
Alas, though, next on the docket it “Angel One”. How can I not talk about politics here? Not only is this story clearly determined to be political, it’s equally convinced it doesn’t need to bother being anything else.
This is almost always a bad idea. For all that I’ve been focusing on episodes’ politics recently, I’m fully aware that a story which exists for no other reason than to didactically deliver a political message is going to be a bad story, irrespective of what it’s been written to say. That said, as hollow as such exercises in preaching are, “Angel One” actually manages to be worse still, because no-one seems to be agreed on what the central message was actually supposed to be.
Presumably, this confusion is due to the episode’s infamously difficult conception. Production had to be halted on the show for a week because this script took so long to arrive in its finished form. Apparently at least some of the blame has to go to Roddenberry, who according to various sources saw a script involving a matriarchy, and just couldn’t resist forcing rewrites that would inject a hefty dose of terrible ideas about gender into the proceedings.’
That’s something we’ll come back to. In Roddenberry’s defence, though, it’s not like the story was an obvious winner before his meddling. Not when the original plan was to use Angel One’s matriarchy to comment on South African apartheid. With all due respect to the production team, it’s almost impossible to imagine how that idea wouldn’t produce a train-wreck. You don’t even need to recall the racist idiocy of “Code of Honor”, or the fact no black character on the show has a rank above lieutenant, to realise this isn't a programme you want pontificating on how race relations should work.
Even were all that not evident a priori, though, the idea that gender relations could be used as a metaphor for race relations is an immediate red flag. Treating sexism and racism as essentially equivalent isn’t just historically ignorant. It isn’t just a failure of intersectionality (because our gender and racial experiences are not independent of each other). It’s reactionary as well – see the long list of anti-trans activists who insist the idea of self-declared gender is akin to that of self-defined race, as a way of attempting to ridicule the former so as to deny trans women their identities. If nothing else, the idea that the best way to talk about the violence and injustice of systemic racism is to hire a bunch of white women should surely have caused someone to have a rethink.
And we’re not done finding problems yet. There’s also the not-so-small risk of the story coming across not as an attack on racism, but on feminism. Women dominating men, taking their jobs, reducing them to servants and sexual playthings? These are all recognisable as past (and even present) critiques of sexism. Even if the episode had been honestly focused on taking the right side in the struggle for equality across racial lines, then, it risked doing so while harming the struggle against a different kind of injustice.
None of which ultimately turned out to matter, of course. Because then Roddenberry happened. And suddenly, and episode intended to use a matriarchy as a vector for criticising racism became one that uses a matriarchy as a vector for criticising matriarchies.
“It’s Morning On Angel One”
Roddenberry had, to put it mildly, confused and conflicting ideas on gender, and the interaction between men and women. The troubled production of this very episode helped demonstrate this. The story of his brief meltdown during a production meeting for “Angel One” is fairly well-known, but if you haven’t come across it before here’s Herbert J. Wright’s recollection of the event:
We were talking about how women would react, and Gene was voicing all the right words again, saying, ‘Oh, yes, we’ve got to make sure that women are represented fairly, because, after all, women are probably the superior sex anyway, and it’s real important we don’t get letters from feminists, because we want to be fair and we don’t want to infer that women have to rule by force if they do rule, because men don’t have to rule by force.’ Very sensible stuff. All of a sudden something kicks in and he changes: ‘However, we also don’t want to infer that it would be a better society if women ruled.'” His voice becoming increasingly louder, Roddenberry continued that this was because women were untrustworthy, “vicious creatures,” which he angrily blurted out in a torrent of hateful verbiage. Concluded Wright, “Then he looks out the window, looks at the outline, and says, ‘Okay, on page eight…’ and continues like that didn’t even happen.
(Taken from The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years, as quoted at Memory Alpha.)
Wright blames Roddenberry for the resulting mess of an episode. And it certainly is a mess. There is an upside to the chaos, though, which is that with so many half-formed ideas being tossed out along so many different vectors, at least some of them end up going in the right direction. The costume designs, for example, are a real highlight. The men’s open-chested tunics and presumably mandatory (womandatory?) manscaping slyly plays on our society’s obsessions with both decolletage and shaving/waxing/plucking. The ubiquitous shoulder pads, meanwhile, make it clear that while the script only positions Angel One as being “mid 20th century” in terms of technology, they’re clearly meant to be a mirror version of then-contemporary America.
And it’s worth noting that, compared to the actual America in which it broadcast, Angel One doesn’t actually come out looking too badly. There’s nothing said or done on the planet that would suggest living under Beata [1] would be any worse than living under Reagan. Indeed, given her ultimate decision not to execute revolutionaries, it would be nearly impossible to argue that she wouldn’t have been a notable improvement. She might be prepared to exile her colleague, but she hasn’t invaded Grenada.
There are other nice touches here, too, such as Picard’s decision to put Troi in charge of the diplomatic overtures. It’s almost invariably a good idea to give Troi more to do in any case, but this kind of mission quite obviously plays to her strengths.
But the use of Troi here is also where we run into problems. The scene where she tries to restrain giggles at Riker’s “native attire” (along with Yar) might have had potential as a script-flipped comment on unwanted sexualisation. Instead it completely fails to land, because of how clearly Troi’s own attire has been designed with the male gaze in mind. You can’t pretend to be making a point about how weird it would be to sexualise men the way they sexualise women whilst you’re sexualising a woman.
Of course, that's no more a criticism of Troi's plot this episode, than it is Riker's. The first of many, actually. So, like a horny alien premier with a hankering for some Alaskan white salmon, let's get right onto the Enterprise's first officer.
**** The ‘Splain Away
We'll stick for now with the issue of Riker’s wardrobe change. Let’s stipulate first that he actually has an entirely sensible point about how he habitually dresses according to local custom for the sake of basic politeness. Immediately afterward, though, he slides off the high ground in a stream of his own smugness, implying Troi and Yar are only objecting because of how hot Beata is.
Just consider that for a second. A superior officer is asking two women under his command if they don’t want him to get sexified for another woman because they’re jealous. As unprofessional conduct goes, that’s right up there with… well, with sleeping with the head of a government you’re negotiating with, AKA Riker's afternoon schedule.
In both cases, we might argue that these are faults that lie with Riker himself, rather than with the scripts. For sure, if you don’t think Riker’s the kind of guy to risk a diplomatic mission because he’s taking orders from Captain Dickard, then we might just be watching two different shows. Then there’s his tart response to Beata asking whether rescue missions are the best use of a ship of Enterprise’s power. Riker comes off here as a classic example of a man who’s convinced they respect women, but only actually means those women who play by the rules he’s internalised as acceptable. You know the kind of thing: “I love women, it’s just crazy bitches I can’t stand”.
From this perspective, the episode does further damage to his character, but in honesty early-period Riker is so uninteresting to me that I don’t particularly care. What I do care about is the fact that, despite how compromised he is at this point, the episode is happy using Riker as its salesman, advertising the benefits of a society with gender equality. At the best of times watching a man lecture a woman about how gender equality really works would be annoying. When it’s someone with as obvious an issue with women as Riker has, it becomes actively obnoxious.
With the show still this young and still this in thrall to Roddenberry, there was probably no way for it to totally nail a critique of contemporary gender relations. That said, it would have had a far better chance of getting close had the conversations on the topic happened between, say, Beata and Troi instead. Especially as that way we might have avoided the suggestion that all powerful women really want is for a man to show up to tell them what’s what, first in the bedroom, and then at their job.
The Sexual Revolution
And we’re still not done with the problems with Riker. Let’s (mercifully) drag ourselves to the conclusion of the episode, where the men Enterprise came to rescue are about to be executed along with their “followers” for the crime of being revolutionaries. On the surface, the resolution seems broadly positive. Riker doesn’t strong-arm Beata into a position. He simply makes his point and leaves her to decide. The Prime Directive says nothing about putting forward a case.
Look a little harder, though, and it all falls apart. Even before we get to the content of Riker’s little speech, there’s the fact he only bothers to show up and give it once he knows he can beam out the prisoners should they be sentenced to death. Turns out it’s only worth attempting to persuade someone out of a decision once you know you can invalidate it in any case. You only need engage with a woman when it doesn’t matter what she actually says.
On the other hand, it’s perhaps for the best that Riker secured some back-up, considering how totally his smug speech misfires. I’m appalled by the suggestion that one can make a distinction between societal revolution and evolution, with the latter a natural development in a culture’s progression and the other somehow not. This is the worst sort of teleological approach to societal progress, where everything that happened is good and natural, and everything that didn’t failed to catch on because it was something artificial.
I’m not saying the Suffragettes would have argued with the idea that gender equality was inevitable. I’m saying they’d be shocked by the idea that what they were demanding wasn’t a revolution. For sure, they were told over and over by others that what they wanted wasn’t “natural”, let alone inevitable. Entirely correctly, they decided not to give a damn. You don’t, and you obviously can’t, wait for a post-revolutionary society to tell you that they agreed with your revolution.
In fact, this episode takes a terrible approach to revolution in general. Beyond Riker’s monologue, there’s the implicit idea that revolutions are caused by outside agents (the Odin’s crew in this case, which given his status as both a god of knowledge and an all-round jerk further underlines the confusion inherent in the episode). Compare this with the virus subplot. On its own terms, it’s ridiculous – how can learning a virus is transmitted by smell help when it’s mutating every twenty minutes? How does that fact not just confirm the virus is airborne, something already demonstrably true? Combine the two stories, though, and the
immediate inference is that a parallel is being drawn between a disease and a revolution.
Which, actually, I pretty much agree with (good ideas spread too), just not in the way it’s meant here – a dangerous infectious agent that can kill everyone if not identified and eliminated in time. Even the fun fact that after weeks of building up Wesley as an unstoppable wunderkind he almost gets the entire crew killed with his laissez-faire attitude to hygiene isn’t enough to save matters here.
And that’s all I got. “Angel One” became a tug of war between two conceptions of the story, both of which very much needed to lose. Ultimately, the best that can be said is that nobody managed to win completely. The opposing forces balanced out just enough for not everything here to be terrible.
But that still leaves enough that’s terrible. Of that there can be no doubt. There's at least something to chew on here, putting "Angel One" above the level of the seaweed nothing-burger of "The Ambergris Element". But chewy, as we learn once again here, is most certainly not the same thing as tasty.
Ordering
2. Angel One
[1] A rather fun choice of name, which cheekily nods to both the way the locals have both inverted beauty standards and the gender considered to be the “alpha” within their society.
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