“Angel One”
Written by Patrick Barry
Directed by Michael Rhodes
Season 1, Episode 14
Original air date: January 25, 1988
Star date: 41636.9
Mission summary
The Enterprise stumbles upon the remains of the Odin, a small freighter that collided with an asteroid seven years previous. While there are no life signs onboard, three escape pods are missing. The nearest class M planet where any survivors may have landed is Angel I, a matriarchal constitutional oligarchy with whom the Federation last had contact sixty-two years ago.
Riker, Data, Troi, and Yar beam down to the surface with Troi taking the lead out of respect for the “Elected One,” Mistress Beata. Beata and her council neither confirm nor deny the existence of survivors. She consults with her Fashion Club before revealing that four men, led by someone named Ramsey, survived and made it to their planet. They are fugitives on Angel I for being uppity and “causing trouble,” but as long as Troi promises to get them off this planet Beata is pleased with the idea of a manhunt. She’s also on a manhunt (rowr) of her own, intrigued by Riker’s masculinity, and sends him something a bit more comfortable to slip into. He heads to her private chambers and they begin to bring their cultures closer together with some mood lighting and an unfortunate softcore soundtrack.
Meanwhile, Data, Yar, and Troi locate the men hiding out in a cave. MacGuyver Ramsey refuses to return with them, though, explaining that the survivors have taken wives and some of them even have children: Angel I is now their home. When the away team reports this to Beata, the mistress is outraged. She orders the execution of Ramsey and his men, not leastwise because one of her own councilwomen, Ariel, is secretly married to Ramsey. Riker begs Ramsey to reconsider his choice to stay on the planet and face the death penalty, but the ex-freighter captain declines once more.
Meanwhile, everyone on the Enterprise is coming down with an incurable, untreatable flu. (As per usual, it’s Wesley’s fault.) The ship’s complement is bed-bound one-by-one, and command eventually goes to Dr. Crusher. Riker asks about beaming the whole Ramsey contingent up to the Enterprise against their will, but with this virus going around Crusher won’t allow it, so the away team is on their own. In a third and even less plausible plot, the Enterprise is needed at the Neutral Zone as a display of power towards the Romulans, so Data beams up to the ship to warp over there if a resolution isn’t reached.
With only 48 minutes left before the Enterprise must leave, Beata arranges for the execution of Ramsey via disintegration zapper. Luckily Riker is there to mansplain the whole men’s rights thing to her and in the end her womanly emotions are swayed. She releases Ramsey and orders them to exile instead. On the Enterprise, a cure for the flu is found and the recovering crew head to the Neutral Zone.
Analysis
Ah, the first of several Very Special Episodes has finally arrived.
This episode could have simply been a single scene: Riker walking out of the changing area wearing that ridiculous outfit while Troi and Yar laugh uncontrollably. It perfectly encapsulates “Angel One,” don’t you think? Where Riker thinks he’s being progressive and diplomatic by wearing the local attire, the episode as a whole has the same unearned smugness about rejecting sexism. (Sexism! It’s bad! This takes 48 minutes to explain!) The “mistresses” (because we’ve met so many men out there in the Alpha Quadrant who call themselves “masters”…) blow out their hair, are catty to one another, and wear high heels and shoulderpads, so there’s no confusion that this is slyly about that uppity woman down the hall from you at work.
What really bothers me here and with just about every woman-in-power plot we see in the Trek universe (and beyond) is the hypersexualization of women with any degree of authority. They’re never simply leaders–they’re always oversexed leaders. The Romulan Commander is, of course, vulnerable to Spock’s charms, and the worst offender is certainly the women of DS9’s mirror universe, who go from 0 to bisexual sadomasochist in the blink of an eye. Here Beata latches onto Riker almost instantly, as if the problem weren’t sexism itself (which is bad! don’t forget!) but that Beata just needed to find someone sufficiently masculine to mansplain it all to her. She doesn’t come to respect the men on her planet any more, and in fact remains hardened against their empowerment. Rather, she acknowledges that she’s a reactionary whose days will soon be over, but not on her watch. Your heroine, ladies and gentlemen!
Ultimately, what I find so galling is that this is a story about sexism that utterly fails to capture any of the realities of sexism. From what I can tell here sex discrimination mostly involves wearing a stupid costume and being a waiter. Luckily the men of Angel I don’t seem to ever contend with the less absurdly trivial: the fallout of a culture that objectifies one sex would more realistically include related issues of self esteem and depression, a culture of rape and the constant threat of violence (domestic or otherwise), and so on. No, all we see is Trent looking a little jealous when Riker horns in on his “mistress.” It reinforces the idea that sexism is the behavior of a few misguided relics, long since “cured” in our own world, and not a set of subtle, institutionalized power structures that legitimize behaviors that reinforce those privileges. And isn’t it cute that they think maybe feminism can one day go “too far”?
Like with “Code of Honor,” while I definitely remembered the primary catastrophic failure (sexism! it’s really really bad!), I had again totally forgotten all of the other huge failures. I didn’t remember the Ramsey plot at all, and the logical pretzels required for the Starfleet officers to believe they don’t have the authority to force Ramsey off the planet. Who cares if he’s in Starfleet? The Federation has an obligation to protect its own citizens. I can’t just move my family to Prince Edward Island without a passport and a visa, and my country has the right to repatriate me whether PEI turned out to be an unstable coven of moonsisters or not. I was also shocked that both times the Federation representatives try to convince the oppressed men to leave, Ramsey unilaterally declares that they won’t. What about what the other guys want? Shouldn’t they be able to make their own choices? And finally, how does a holoprogram create a real virus that incapacitates an entire ship, and why should we even care?
I’m going to use this opportunity to introduce the First Rule of TNG: if Futurama did it better, this is probably one of the worst ten episodes.
Torie’s Rating: Impulse Power (on a scale of 1-6)
Thread Alert: Was there ever any doubt? Riker’s “sexy” ensemble, open-chested and sparkly for maximum 70s effect, complete with pants-chains and crotch diaper, is obviously the fashion of the future.
Best Line: YAR: They’ve broken off transmission.
LAFORGE: Ever feel like you’re not really wanted?
Trivia/Other Notes: La Forge only gets command once more, in “The Arsenal of Freedom.”
Previous episode: Season 1, Episode 13 – “Datalore.”
Next episode: Season 1, Episode 15 – “11001001.”
Impulse is rather generous. I’d have said Dead in Space. There really aren’t any redeeming features here at all. It’s just… ooh, there aren’t words for it. This is probably in the bottom 10, if not the worst, period (making allowances for “Shades of Gray” because they were forced to do a clip show).
There’s also the whole oppressive matriarch swoons for a real man ™ (sensitive New Age guy version) thing. Why? Is it like ancient Greeks finding women acting like their intellectual equals a perverse turn-on? It makes no sense! Actually, I wonder if Patrick Barry (or whoever hacked his script into this abortion) had some dom/sub issues that needed to be worked out. GAAAHHHH!!
The other thing that sticks out to me is the costume design and hair. In a way, it’s almost retro. The look seems to me to be much more early-mid 80s. Totally out of style by 1988. It’s a little too Flashdance, feathered hair and borderline mullets. I thought that was over by then and we were moving toward the grunge 90s look. I could be wrong.
As for the flu, I don’t think it was caused by the holodeck so much as Picard caught a chill from the snowball and succumbed to some bug in his bloodstream. But Federation medicine borders on the magical and they can’t figure out a simple virus? How about just “There’s not a lot we can do, but the symptoms aren’t really that bad and it’s less stressful on your system to let the thing run its course.” That’s better than making Dr. Crusher look incompetent.
In my mind, the Riker thing never happens. Troi, Yar, and Crusher go planetside to deal with the women, while Riker stays on board the Enterprise to deal with everyone being sick. Perhaps there’s an early intro of Alyssa Ogawa if we need more fabulous medical staff. And if there’s any dalliance with Beata, give it to Yar or Troi. But then again, anything other than what aired makes this episode better…
On the note of failing to really encapsulate sexism — here’s a sexist society where Beata’s manservant is the guy who operates the execution device? At what point in 1950s America would ANY woman have been put in charge of throwing the switch on the electric chair? Even if its only function at that point was to vaporize your Pottery Barn seconds.
I also love how Beata tells Riker she will repay him “in kind” for the gift of the meditation sphere. If that’s true, she intends to… give him another meditation sphere! Because THAT IS WHAT IT MEANS TO REPAY IN KIND. Not trading the sexing for it.
Also I think this episode should have a “yay kyriarchy” tag…
It’s always sad how the Star Trek episodes about sexism only serve to underline that the people crafting the episode just don’t get it.
I have absolutely no memory of this episode, for which I am grateful to the US Navy. Not surprising it didn’t get a lot of syndication replay.
I’m puzzled though at why you’d consider Enterprise being called away for flag-showing purposes “less plausible.” It seems like the only sensible thing that happened in the entire episode.
Who would craft a policy like the Federation’s?
They have a policy, the HIGHEST principle, of non-interference with other cultures, but are powerless to remove a Federation citizen who is disrupting that society? And a citizen whose life is endangered because of that unwanted disruption? And who is endangering the lives of other Federation citizens and innocent citizens of that society in the process?
And all this, in place of a simple policy that would just remove Ramsey, and allow him to file his appeal through some court of appropriate jurisdiction.
It makes absolutely no sense. And the smug superiority with which such nonsense is dispensed is truly insufferable.
This is still one of the crap episodes before “The Best of Both Worlds” put TNG on track, which means I skipped it and still change channels when a non-collared uniform episode is on. So no comment on the episode from me.
But thank you, Torie, for the Futurama link. Which I decided to briefly check out. Forty minutes ago.
I dashed off my earlier comment, but following on: It seems half the episodes in this season explore what is, in fact, a contrivance and invention: “Drama” created by the consequences of a non-interference directive.
Yet while strutting around and making declarations about how this policy has been tried and tested, the crew also stumbles around like they’re reinventing the wheel every time it comes up.
How common is it, in a mapped and explored galaxy where starships are evidently common, that the “humanitarian armada” of Starfleet would happen across Federation citizens who had exceeded the scope of the noninterference directive? I’d say in the multi-century existence of the Federation, this situation would be quite common. In fact, the commonness of interference might be considered the very thing that created the directive and policy in the first place.
Look at it this way, if these Federation traders had crashed on some world and set up a slave trade or a drug trade, would there be any “question” in the captain’s mind about how these Federation citizens should be handled? No, they would be stopped. They would be removed. Depending on the circumstances, they might be proescuted. They might have avenue for appeal. It is only because Ramsey acts out of “love” and “family devotion” that there is any ambiguity about what should be done here. The entire “dilemma” operates around some arbitrary situational premise that, frankly, Federation policy should have already addressed scores of times. After all, that’s what makes it a **policy.**
Someone once cleverly described Playboy as “the magazine entirely about itself.” I’m inclined to think TNG is “the television series entirely about itself” and its own self-referential contrivances.
(as an aside, I’m surprised you don’t thematically link this ep with “Spock’s Brain” in your Featured Posts. If Angel One is not Eymorg, I don’t know what is: “Brain and brian! What is brain?!”)
Oh, Torie…Torie, you have my sympathy. You drew Angel One. That’s just mean. Now I’m going to go read it, but I wanted to express my condolences just from seeing your name in conjunction with this shitfest, one which makes me long for the halcyon feminist-friendly days of I, Mudd and The Turnabout Intruder.
Let’s just put this one in the same killing jar as “Code of Honor”. It’s perhaps not as wretched an episode as “The Outcast” but it’s up there.
Nope. Can’t add anything to what you wise people have said. It’s like an MRA (Mens’ Rights Advocate, the polite name for “guys who had bitter divorces and now really hate all women completely unless they’re hookers in which case they only hate them when they’re not actually having sex with them”) version of what a feminist society would be. It’s the nightmare of every overprivileged, super-entitled asshole ever: that the uppity $TARGETS_OF_BIGOTRY ever take over, they’ll massacre the formerly privileged, and treat them the same way the formerly privileged treated them. It’s like a big red flag waving, saying, “I’m a person who will oppress you in every way I can get away with, and I assume you would do the same to me, because I’d rather believe this is just ‘being human’ than that it means I’m a crapsack waste of good oxygen.”
Maybe there is sonething more to be said, not about this episode so much but about the storytelling method. It’s pure Rod Serling irony; the nearest analogy I can think of is the Twilight Zone episode in which a young woman, who looks ordinary to our eyes, is hideously deformed in the eyes of creatures (concealed until the third act) who are made up to look like distorted frog-men for the audience’s benefit. Supposedly this reversal of point of view is supposed to say something about prejudice and the subjective nature of beauty. Instead…it comes across like an attractive girl is being persecuted by frog people until she’s rescued by a comely young man. It just doesn’t work the way Serling intended. Did it ever work?
Same thing here, only it’s decades on and the plot device is even creakier. It doesn’t feel like a statement against sexism, it just feels horribly sexist. How could anyone have thought that the role-reversal fictional conceit, already shabby when Serling was doing it, would work in a modern teleplay?
And just eleven years before this aired Norman Lear’s short-lived and justly forgotten All That Glitters ran with it’s look at a world just like ours – except that women were the dominate gender. My memory insists that a few episodes ran (even though I don’t remember a thing about them) but IMDB seems to list only the pilot.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075658/
Now, about those costumes. They didn’t seem too far removed from the fantasy themed porn of that time. Back then, Cencom Cable had an adult entertainment pay-per-view channel on which the programming was all run on 3/4 inch video tape from tape decks in Master Control. We Master Control Operators shared the task of QCing (Quality Checking) everything that was to run off tape on all our tape fed channels. And before you make your comments, let me point out that most of it was boring crap and it was made worse by being “cut for cable” crap. You know the story – boy meets girl, Boy does girl. Boy meets other girl, boy does other girl. Girl meets other girl … Anyway. I remember commenting “I know how they came up with these costumes” when I watched this episode. One other thing. There was an ‘actor’ in some of those movies who (to me) looked so much like Jonathan Frakes that I thought it was him – from a few years earlier.
Not much else to say about this episode. Another one I’m looking forward to forgetting again.
And I just remembered that this isn’t the first time Roddenberry went to this well. Back in 1974 he took a second try at getting his concept of 20th century man awakens in a devastated future turned into a series. The first attempt was Genesis II and was OK. The second was Planet Earth, which starred John Saxon and had him encounter a vicious matriarchal society that enslaved and brutalized their men. It was awful. Lots of Trek actors in it: Ted Cassidy, Diana Muldaur, Majel Barrett. And much of it eventually became Andromeda. Dylan Hunt was the hero in both films, the idea of traveling to the future and trying to rebuild a ruined society.
Oh save me from over moralizing in fiction. It always damages the fiction and rarely reaches beyond those alreay in agreement. The story must come first, and any ‘lesson’ should be buried in the theme, not used like a whip to keep Dr. Moraeu’s beat men at bay.
There is nothing I can think of to reclaim or recommend this episode. Yes sexism is bad, I really don’t need an hour of tv to tell me that.
@bobsandiego, what makes it worse for those of us within a certain age range is that, when sci fi and fantasy was actually included in our reading and literature curricula, it was always the ham-fisted, message-peddling stuff. This, we were taught, was the purpose of speculative fiction: to deliver clunky and obvious allegories to contemporary social problems. Among other things I truthfully remember from grade-school anthologies were Ray Bradbury’s depressing and shallow “All Summer in a Day” (bullying is bad!) not to mention Fahrenheit 451 (burning books is bad!); print versions of “Twilight Zone” teleplays, particularly the laughable “The Monsters are Due on Main Street” (paranoia is bad!); Orwell’s worst book, “Animal Farm” (Stalin was bad!); and even Orson Welles’s radioplay for “War of the Worlds” (humans are ants!)
No wonder I liked Arthur Clarke for a time in high school even though he couldn’t write his way out of a damp brown bag; at least, in some of his stories, it was *fun* to be in space.
@etomlins re: heavy-handed didactic sff —
Yeah, I totally know what you mean, even if I’m of an age where we occasionally got to read Citizen of the Galaxy and A Wrinkle in Time and Bram Stoker. I mean, heaven forfend anything be on an English syllabus because it’s actually fun to read, right?
Re: Orwell, I don’t think 1984 was any better — can’t say I’ve read any of his spec fic that wasn’t overbearingly message-heavy. I think you’re oversimplifying Fahrenheit 451 though; to me it was about the willing embrace of triviality rather than simply that book-burning is bad. More of an Amused to Death thing than a reaction to literal book-burning censorship (and I say that as not at all a Bradbury fan)…
Yeah, you’re right, I’m being a bit unfair to Fahrenheit 451. Yes, it’s less about censorship and more about the kind of society that might demand it, although how Bradbury’s futuristic dystopia got to where it was doesn’t quite make sense. The ironies are too pat. Firefighters becoming bookburners? The head bookburner being a well-read, poetry-quoting man?
I suppose I should move this to the forums since it’s got nothing to do with “Angel One”, but you have to admit it’s an episode that begs to be distracted from.
Oh, something just occurred to me: I was never a big fan of Sliders but I just remembered they did a role-reversal plot something along these lines, in which John Rhys-Davies ends up being an unwilling male candidate for office in a society in which men are not trusted to make intelligent decisions, and I remember it being a lot better than this. I vaguely remember that the reasons the women in the episode gave for why men weren’t fit to make decisions actually seemed like at least a little thought had been put into the writing. To be fair, it was a few years later than “Angel One” and I don’t remember the episode that well anyway aside from the Ed Muskie plot twist at the end.
@ 1 DemetriosX
The Real Man Riker thing implies all these women need is good hard you-know-what. But I can’t get over that Riker is the prime example of grade-A manliness available. He’s truly the poor man’s James T. Kirk. I cannot put my finger on why Riker comes across as a sleazy jerk every time sex is involved. They’re obviously trying to put him into the Kirk role and it’s just never ever going to work.
@ 2 Catherine E. Tobler
I have the feeling we’re going to be using our imaginations a lot more in the next season and a half.
@ 3 DeepThought
You obviously aren’t allowing yourself to conceive how truly appalling a society would be if feminism went too far! Men would be executing their own, cats and dogs would be living together…
@ 4 Toryx
Well they understood that it’s bad. That’s all there is, right?
@ 5 S. Hutson Blount
I just can’t imagine the Enterprise would ever get anything done if its primary task as the flagship was to show up for dick-waving contests at the Neutral Zone. It’s especially ridiculous considering the entire crew is incapacitated. I mean what good would it do if it actually came down to a show of force?
@ 6 Lemnoc
This is actually the first time we see the Prime Directive in its modern incarnation, where it applies to all civilizations and not just pre-warp ones. And it’s idiotic.
@ 7 sps49
I love that Futurama episode. But I love most of Futurama.
@ 8 Lemnoc
It just doesn’t make sense, and continues to make less and less sense as the series goes on and they wind up doing such non-interfering things as being involved in the Klingon civil war and the reunification of Romulus and Vulcan. It’s for the best when they eventually ditch this notion.
I did that Featured Posts thing now. I had a really busy few days and forgot!
@ 12 CaitieCat
Like I said to Demetrios, the message is clear. What these women need is a good hard…
Thanks, TNG!
@ 13 etomlins
I like that Twilight Zone episode, but maybe it gets more of a pass from being over twenty years older than this. Here it’s 1988 and yet it could have easily been written by a MRA crank on usenet.
@ 14 Ludon
I still think the outfits look kind of power suit-y, but I confess that I have no knowledge of early ’80s porn and defer to you.
@ all regarding didactic fiction
I actually don’t have a problem with moralizing, as long as there’s an interesting story in there. This fails to qualify.
Not to be overly simplistic about this, but all I can say about this episode is; “Ick”.
I was planning on re-watching this episode to be able to comment but I just can’t do it. Life is too short to waste time on this episode. Ick is right. Probably in my top 5 worst of TNG.
From my hazy memory of this steaming pile I give a…full stop. Or reverse. Or self-destruct. Yea self-destruct.
Sorry to sound off so late on this one, but it’s been a really busy week for me. I also might have been a little afraid to share my opinion, given the direction it’s going…
I had such low expectations for this episode going back into it, I was actually surprised that it wasn’t as bad as I remembered it. It still isn’t good, but it’s not without some redeeming elements. On the surface, each of the three plot threads is kind of interesting, however poorly they are handled and integrated with each other.
It feels like they had the A plot worked out, but couldn’t figure out what to do with it; rather than have the conversations that we’ve been having here, and handle the material as respectfully as possible, they decided to take it to the obvious places. Like Riker and the others, the matriarchy on Angel I is treated like a joke. Oh, how backwards they are! Let’s try to show them a better way, but without violating the Prime Directive–except we’re totally going to violate the Prime Directive by forcing them to keep this rebellion alive and planting the seeds of change.
One of the things writers learn is that plots need complications, but they went a bit overboard here. The crew is thwarted every step of the way, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but given how simple the solution should be, it just gets ridiculous. Especially when your complication relies on coincidence, like a mysterious outbreak on the ship at exactly the wrong moment. Although this subplot sticks out like a sore thumb because it doesn’t really fit with the rest of the show, it plays off better than any of “The Naked Now,” and I can’t help but think they squandered an intriguing premise–an infection that spreads because of its pleasing scent–on a crap episode.
The third complication, the posturing on the Federation side of the Neutral Zone, works best for me, particularly because it shows that writers were actually planning ahead and laying groundwork for the series. This minor plot point pays off in the season finale, “The Neutral Zone,” for some interpretations of “pays off.” I was surprised that they had introduced this arc so early, and it impressed me. It was just about the only thing that did in “Angel One.”
Even so, I started out ranking this one as a more middling episode and steadily knocked my assessment down as I read all your comments. I’m giving this one a tentative Warp 1.