Weekend Trek “North Star”

Actors, in my general experience, love to try on different costumes.  But when an actor gets onto a long-running series, well, their costumes tend to be more, well, static, especially when the show in question is something like Star Trek where the cast wears uniforms that look pretty similar to each other on a routine basis.  Trek has always found ways around that, whether it is theatrical performances on the ship, the occasional bit of shore leave or time travel, or in this case, a planet with people that look they come from another period of human history.

Then again, Scott Bakula might have gotten used to all kinds of costumes thanks to his time on Quantum Leap.  An episode that lets him dress like a cowboy might have been a special treat.

As it is, this episode has some potentially problematic politics if you stop to think about it too hard.  The Enterprise has found a planet where there are a few scattered settlements with a few thousand residents who look like they’re from the Wild West-era America.  Horses, six-shooters, saloons, the whole she-bang-bang.  There’s a good reason for that:  these people are descended from humans taken from the Wild West by another alien race, the Skagarans, as slave labor under the reasoning that the Skagrans needed cheap labor that could live and work in a desert environment.  However, at a certain point, the humans raised up and overthrew the Skagarans, but in the process, they turned the Skagrans into second-class citizens.  This is the environment that Archer, with Trip and T’Pol, get down to see and look into.

Now, the episode never says that it was right for the Skagrans to take humans for slaves.  What it does show is the many (though not all) of the humans hate the Skagrans and treat them like second-class citizens, but is there an equivalent in human history of a former group of slaves taking over their land in a long term sort of manner and then treating their former captors like second-class citizens?

Worth noting:  the Skagrans did have advanced tech, including interstellar travel, but this planet is not their homeworld.  Was there a reason the Skagrans, who look very human themselves, didn’t send reinforcements?

I suspect I am not supposed to think too hard about this one.  Archer is mostly there to tell the humans that they need to get better, that he knows what happened to them, but humanity has moved on, and so should they.  Standard Trek message, and not completely ignored.  The school teacher is already there, illegally teaching Skagran children on the sly, and the sheriff seems to understand the laws he’s upholding are wrong and isn’t too difficult to get onto Archer’s side.

By this point, Archer has revealed the truth:  he’s not a local, he has a starship, and humanity has moved on socially and technologically, but they can’t help now because he doesn’t have room for 6,000 passengers on his ship.  I’d wonder if the Prime Directive, which doesn’t exist in Archer’s time, would have had an issue with that since these are humans, even if these are humans who just don’t know things changed in the past 300 years.

That said, the episode is mostly just one that causes problems if you think about it for more than a minute.  There’s some really good stunt work, and the character development isn’t bad either.  Trip and T’Pol ride a horse, with T’Pol asking Trip if he ever has ridden a horse, and he says no, but he’s seen a lot of John Ford movies.  Archer wants to learn more, and he’s not being stupid about it.  OK, some of those stunts did a slow-motion thing for some reason, but they were good stunts, and Malcolm, during a firefight between Starfleet personnel and the sheriff’s racist deputies, one where yes, the military-trained guys with energy weapons should win, particularly when Malcolm can just stun T’Pol when a guy takes her hostage.

So, fun episode, but don’t think about it too hard.  Got it.