Vox Sola
“Vox Sola” feels somewhat modest in its ambitions, especially after watching “Return Of The Archons”, which rewrote the book on what a Trek episode could do, and “Symbiosis”, which set itself in opposition to the bedrock economic philosophy of the country it was made in. This isn’t really a criticism. Not every story needs to swing for the fences. “Vox Sola” takes a simple but neat idea, and then bends itself to the task of executing it competently.
The cynical take would be to note that, at this point in Enterprise’s first year, it’s probably for the best there’s an acceptance that quiet confidence is currently the show’s upper ceiling. As with many cynical positions, this one isn’t completely divorced from the truth. Still, I don’t want to fall into the trap of criticising the show’s solid episodes for not being remarkable enough to compensate for disappointments elsewhere. It’s easy to imagine a variation of “Vox Sola” that appeared in early Deep Space Nine, or third-season TNG, which then gained the reputation of being a minor entry to the canon; one of those episodes you might skip on a rewatch or not, depending on your mood. It certainly wouldn’t be seen as an obvious cratering in quality.
“Would not have disgraced much better seasons of Trek” is some distance from being a ringing endorsement, I realise. Neither is it nothing, though. Let’s talk about how this story showed up and did its job, and in doing so became a late-season highlight for Enterprise season 1.
Occidentally Racist
The big idea of "Vox Sola” – well, medium idea, really – is to reject the standard model of Trek first contact, in favour of something more interesting. Something we might even hypothesise as more “realistic”, to the extent that word has any meaning in a galaxy suffering under the twin tyrannies of Einstein and Fermi. It’s not that void-dwelling colony animals that talk in integrals are necessarily more plausible than aliens who look just like us with pointier ears. It’s that contact with an intelligent alien life-form would be far more likely to require Arrival-like effort to figure out the very basics of how they communicate, or even if they do so at all in any way we can conceive of. We’re not going to be encountering upright bipeds with spoken languages we can feed into a computer and be talking to within the hour.
“Vox Sola” shows us it understands this by setting us up to think that’s precisely the story we’re getting. Another one of those Planet of Hats tales about an alien species defined in terms of a single trait, in this case whatever unusual taboo results in them taking offence in the Enterprise mess hall.
These kinds of stories aren’t necessarily bad, especially when the hats in question are chosen to reflect something worth examining in our own world. Ultimately, though, they can’t really avoid being problematic. Framing a culture – even a fictional one – entirely in terms of how it differs to us is a form of Orientalism. Even when the comparison is supposed to be favourable to the alien (as was intended with the Vulcans, for instance), it’s still about emphasising the difference between two cultures, rather than recognising the wealth of commonalities.
It’s been argued, indeed, that in this sense aliens in sci-fi are inherently an Orientalist idea, because they’re essentially always presented as a contrast to who and what we are. I don’t think I’d go that far. It rather shrinks the entire multi-dimensional spectrum of world-building to a single point, which I’m not sure I want to get on board with. I mean, even the term “Orientalism” in itself suggests the extent to which this is a problem based in the approaches and assumptions of the Western world, making any statements about it in relation to science-fiction as a global concern potential problems in themselves.
(That though then raises a new question: is space opera itself is irreducibly Western? If so, the accusation it’s fundamentally Orientalist in approach would land rather more successfully. We stray once more outside of my wheel-house, however.)
Even if we don’t want to go that far, though, there’s an obvious issue with centring stories on how our viewpoint characters’ lives have been made difficult by another culture. Especially when the issue is often less the strangeness itself of the alien culture, and more how completely unwilling that culture is to make allowances for our well-meaning heroes. It’s hard to make the case your franchise celebrates cooperation between peoples when you keep insisting your culture is the only one capable of being reasonable.
“Vox Sola” isn’t completely free of this problem. The Kreetassan freak-out over humans eating in company is obvious intended to be a parody of that sort of story, only there to compare to the much more interesting “first contact” story playing out instead. Even once we return to them as part of that plot, though, they remain unnecessarily unreasonable. I really like how Mayweather frames his apology – we didn’t have any idea a common habit among us would be offensive, but despite it obviously being impossible to have foreseen your reaction, we are still unreservedly sorry about the offence we caused. My problem here is how it clashes with the Keetassan’s own attitude, whereby they learn their lax approach to interstellar quarantine has endangered the lives of five people, and then respond by saying “It’s not our fault!”. Behave according to you own cultural mores on your own ship? We don’t like it; you’d best apologise. Risk people’s lives because you can’t be bothered checking your hull for potentially dangerous life forms? Shit happens, mate. What you gonna do?
Enhanced Interrogation Techniques
Of the two, “Vox Sola” is my clear favourite. It isn’t just that a slimy fractal life-form with abandonment issues is more interesting than a shape-changer who just happens to want to look like a willowy blonde. It’s that the character moments which blossom in its wake are so much more interesting than “Archer feels nebulously unfulfilled”. While Hoshi busting her hump all episode to master a language which sounds somewhere between a whale’s funeral dirge and two balloons rubbed together at speed is perhaps slightly funnier than was intended, it’s always nice when the show remembers a) she exists, and b) she has a job that’s not only essential, but one which no other iteration of the franchise has explored. The resulting detente with T’Pol works well, too. Alison Bechdel gets her due here, of course [1], but after almost a full season of Vulcans treating humanity as a kind of interstellar failson, having T’Pol be explicit about riding Hoshi hard because she knows she’s capable of greatness and won’t let her self-excuse herself into mediocrity is a nice subversion [2].
It’s also nice, as a mathematician, both to see maths being considered as an essential component in learning a non-verbal language, and to watch the humanities and hard sciences working together on a problem neither alone would have any hope of cracking. It reminds me more than a little of Ted Chiang’s 1998 tale “Story Of Your Life”, which ultimately became Arrival. Enterprise replaces Jeremy Renner replaced by Jolene Blalock, of course, which is a substitution at least worth considering in essentially all cases.
Meanwhile, the possibility that five crewmembers are about to die leads to Reed and Phlox butting heads in one of the episode’s best scenes. The gung-ho security officer clashing with the humanitarian doctor isn’t exactly uncharted territory, sure. In the early years of this century, though, it held more than a little relevance. As discomforting as it is to remember, in the months (and even years) following 9/11, the question as to when torture was tactically justifiable was horrifyingly prominent in American culture. Suddenly every armchair general and flag-nuzzling politician wanted to compete over who could most quickly contradict fifty years of international agreement that deliberately harming your prisoners was the sort of thing that marked you as the villains.
And no national conversation stays off the small screen for very long. The fight for America’s soul took place on more channels than just C-SPAN. Plenty of American TV both reflected this moral collapse, and helped to perpetuate it, with shows like 24 and Battlestar Galactica pushing the line that torture was like emergency surgery – sometimes the only way to save a life is by spilling a little blood. Elaborate fantasies were constructed, to come up with ways in which torture could theoretically be necessary, which somehow meant the practice could no longer be condemned in general – “Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?” is literally something a US Supreme Court Justice said, albeit five years after this episode aired.
In this feverish context, I’m honestly not sure “what if we needed to expose an alien pseudopod to radiation to save Scott Bakula” comes close to being most ludicrous scenario presented. In fact, in many ways Reed is being allowed to present the idea in one of its most sympathetic forms. Five people might well be about to die, all communication with their attacker has failed, and all he wants to do is figure out what sensory input the intruder dislikes, so they can create a non-lethal way of getting it to back off.
And Phlox is having none of it. As far as he’s concerned, the alien is just trying to be what it is in unusual circumstances, and torturing even a piece of it in order to save time isn’t something he’s willing to countenance. His sickbay, his rules, and high among them is that “do no harm” isn’t just a pretty idea, to be discarded when the going gets tough.
It’s probably my favourite Phlox moment to date, and at least a small step in returning his character to viability after the moral obscenity of “Dear Doctor”. We know that eventually Enterprise fell prey to the same sickness as 24, with season two ending with a 9/11 metaphor so obvious it could literally be seen from space. That’s not something we can blame on “Vox Sola”, though. Here and now, Trek holds the line.
The end result of all this is an Enterprise episode that feels unusually successful in remembering what it is that made the post-TOS franchise work in the first place. A refusal to give the worse angels of our nature a hearing. Mayweather’s apology, Hoshi and T’Pol bridging their interpersonal and interspecies gaps, and Phlox taking a critical moral stand give the story a moral weight that’s as surprising as it is delightful, given it happens in the context of a tale about invasive alien goo [3]. Even Reed is allowed to redeem himself somewhat – once he agrees to follow Phlox’s lead [4] he contributes one of the three pieces of what ends up being the episode’s solution.
And sure, we can pick holes here again – is it really feasible that so alien a creature would have the same approach to mapping points on a planet’s surface as we do, and communicate that via a translator that can barely get across the concept of “hello”? Really, though, in an episode that works so hard to remind us of the virtues of mutual understanding and cooperation, and to reflect that by giving everyone in the main cast something to do, trying to unravel the specifics of how that’s done feels like a weak angle, or even a mean one.
“Vox Sola” knows what Trek is supposed to be, and it knows it wants to be that too. Let’s recognise that for the win it is.
Ordering
1. Symbiosis
2. (The Storyteller)
4. Vox Sola
5. (Ex Post Facto)
6. (The Infinite Vulcan)
Series Ordering
1. Deep Space Nine
2. The Original Series
3. Voyager
4. The Next Generation
5. The Animated Series
6. Enterprise
[1] I wonder if the alien has any concept of gender, mainly because I also wonder whether the Bechdel test holds if conducted in a fictional language. Not that it matters here, given how much time T’Pol and Hoshi spend together. Except, if the alien goo is male, does that mean all the time spent discussing it means the episode doesn’t pass the test at all? Space-gender: just as complicated as Earth-gender.
[2] Though even here, Vulcan paternalism rears its head. It’s essentially impossible to believe that Vulcans don’t have universal translators which are far superior to the 22nd Starfleet models. Once it became clear the Enterprise was launching despite their reservations, why not hand some over? Did High Command really think helping the Enterprise avoid colossal diplomatic catastrophes was a less desirable outcome than allowing them to happen, so they could say “I told you so” when the ship gets detonated by the Jaradans?
[3] Maybe movie night should have featured “The Blob”, rather than “Wages Of Fear”? I keep trying to figure out a way the latter reference fits in to the episode, but the best I can come up with is that the fact Reed has no interest in a film from another country until he learns it includes explosions maybe foreshadows the sickbay stand-off.
[4] Which itself is something the post-9/11 glut of torture porn TV shows would never allow, because it isn’t Gritty and Mature and Real enough. If Reed were really interested in saving lives, he would have defied the bleeding-heart out-of-touch liberal doctor, and just gone to work on the sinister alien appendage with a broken bottle and a blowtorch.
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