“North Star”
Written by David A. Goodman
Directed by David Straiton
Season 3, Episode 9
Production episode 061
Original air date: November 12, 2003
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. We open in what looks like a stereotypical Western town from the late nineteenth century on Earth. A bunch of guys on horseback lynch someone whom they identify as a “Skag.” Only after the opening credits do we see anything familiar: Archer, T’Pol (wearing a head-scarf), and Tucker in appropriate outfits, noting the figure in the coffin, who apparently has weird things on his neck that weren’t clear in the night-time scene earlier. Scans have confirmed that these people are all humans, the horses are horses from Earth, and they somehow wound up in the Delphic Expanse.
Reed and Sato are scanning the planet from orbit, and they’ve found the wreckage of a spacecraft of some sort. Tucker and T’Pol barter for a horse, Tucker trading his harmonica for it, and also leaving his gun as collateral for when he’ll bring the horse back, as they only want to rent it. (Why there was a six-shooter on Enterprise for him to have is left as an exercise for the viewer.) T’Pol expresses dubiousness as to whether or not Tucker knows how to ride the thing, but Tucker insists that his many years of watching John Ford movies makes him qualified. A dubious T’Pol mounts the horse behind him, after which Tucker struggles to get the horse to move, but we cut away before we see any more.
Sheriff MacReady apologizes to the town teacher, Bethany, who seems to be the only one mourning the Skag who was lynched.
Archer goes to the saloon, because of course he does, claiming that he’s heading south to rustle cattle. He chats with the bartender, who claims to be descended from Cooper Smith, who is the one who liberated the humans from the Skags.
The guys who lynched the Skag enter the saloon—it turns out that they’re all deputy sheriffs. One of them, the alpha of the group, Bennings, starts tormenting the Skag who serves as a waiter. He even puts his gun down and gives the waiter a chance to shoot him. Archer interrupts and asks for a refill of his coffee. MacReady comes in and calms everyone down. He tells Archer to keep moving south and then tells Bennings to keep an eye on Archer.
Archer goes to talk to Bethany, and soon learns the truth, under the pretense of being from the north where there are no Skags—which, he learns, is short for Skagaran. The humans were kidnapped from Earth three centuries previous by the Skagarans as slave labor. But the aforementioned Smith led a revolt that overthrew the Skagarans, killing most of them, and leaving the rest to be second-class citizens. This is confirmed by Tucker and T’Pol, who investigate the wreckage and find some data chips. They bring the chips back to Enterprise, where Sato translates the data and confirms the history.
Bethany sneaks away at night to teach Skagaran children, which is illegal. Bethany brings Archer to one of these sessions. Unfortunately, Bennings was following MacReady’s orders and keeping an eye on Archer, so he’s discovered Bethany illegal school, and he arrests her.
Archer, ignoring the multiple instructions he’s been given to get out of town, breaks Bethany out of jail, socking Bennings in the jaw and locking him in the cell in her stead. Their escape is cut short by gunfire from the deputies that badly wounds Bethany, and Archer has no choice but to ask for an emergency transport to Enterprise.
Bennings is now convinced that Archer is a Skagaran spy and that he’s using their advanced technology. MacReady thinks that Bennings had too much to drink and is seeing things. Meanwhile, on Enterprise, Phlox is able to fix Bethany up, and he also reveals that she’s one-quarter Skagaran.
Archer comes down in a shuttlepod, alongside T’Pol, Reed, and two MACOs, everyone in their proper contemporary clothes. The locals are completely gobsmacked, and Archer speaks to MacReady privately. The sheriff had convinced himself that Earth was a myth, a story people told to ameliorate how miserable life was on this planet.
Bennings, however, refuses to accept this, still convinced that Archer is leading a new Skagaran rebellion, and he starts shooting. This leads to (sigh) a good old-fashioned shootout. Since it’s handguns against phase pistols and rifles, it’s pretty inevitable that our heroes will win. At one point, a deputy grabs T’Pol as a hostage, but Reed just shoots her (on the stun setting, obviously), and then the bad guy.
Enterprise couldn’t take all six thousand humans back to Earth even if they weren’t on a critical mission to save humanity, but they promise to send ships to do. Meantime, they share human history for the past three hundred years, which we see Bethany teaching to her students, human and Skagaran alike.
The gazelle speech. Scott Bakula looks really good in cowboy regalia. The long coat and hat suit him something fierce.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. When T’Pol and Tucker are trying to obtain a horse, the stablemaster immediately asks them what happened to theirs—since they were obviously from out of town (the town is small enough that the stablemaster would know all the locals by sight), how’d they get there if not on horseback? While Tucker is stunned into silence because he didn’t think of that, T’Pol weaves a bullshit story about how their horses died in the heat. She does in that halting and hesitating manner that actors always use when they’re faking their way through a conversation. It’s never even remotely convincing, yet the person they’re talking to is almost always convinced by it.
I shouldn’t blame this scene for a trope that is a near-universal constant in performative fiction, but it has always annoyed me. Over-emphasizing the hesitating nature of it makes it blindingly obvious that the speaker is pulling the answer directly out of their asses, yet this rhetorical method rarely fails in the fictional setting. It works when played for laughs (to give one Trek example, the mechanical rice-picker bit from the original series’ “The City on the Edge of Forever”), but not in a serious situation. I much prefer it when the characters actually bluff their way through these conversations properly (to give another Trek example, when Dax was stuck in twenty-first-century San Francisco in DS9’s “Past Tense, Part I,” she referred to her combadge as a brooch and her Trill spots as tattoos without missing a beat).
Florida Man. Florida Man Thinks He Can Ride A Horse Due To Watching Westerns, Results Unclear.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox delivers the revelation that Bethany is one-quarter Skagaran, a revelation that proves to be completely irrelevant to the story.
Better get MACO. Two MACOs (played by two of the regular extras who played MACOs throughout the season) join the landing party and get into the firefight. It’s quite possibly the most useful the MACOs have been all season…
More on this later… One of Picard’s favorite maneuvers (ahem) in TNG was to bring a woman from a less technologically advanced culture to the Enterprise and let her look out a window. He did it with Rivan in “Justice,” with Nuria in “Who Watches the Watchers?” with Mirasta Yale in the episode “First Contact,” and with Lily Sloane in the movie First Contact, and now we get to see Archer do the same with Bethany two hundred years earlier.
I’ve got faith…
“Maybe you oughtta get your eyes checked, Bennings—Archer’s a human.”
“He’s working with them.”
“You don’t know that.”
“What was he doing out in Skagtown? Why’d he stick up for Draysik in the saloon yesterday?”
“’Cause you were being a horse’s ass.”
–Bennings failing to convince MacReady of his Skag conspiracy theory and MacReady reminding him that he was being a schmuck.
Welcome aboard. Trek veteran Glenn Morshower—in the midst of arguably his most well-known role as Secret Service Agent Pierce on 24—is back to play MacReady, having previously appeared in TNG’s “Peak Performance” and “Starship Down,” Generations, and Voyager’s “Resistance.”
James Parks, having previously played Vel in Voyager’s “The Chute,” plays Bennings, while the ever-delightful Emily Bergl plays Bethany.
Trivial matters: According to an interview in Star Trek Communicator in 2004, writer David A. Goodman was inspired by the episodes of the original series that took place in replicas of old Earth. His original notion was to have it be medieval times, but executive producer Brannon Braga (who wrote TNG’s “A Fistful of Datas”) suggested a Western instead.
Archer’s insistence to Bethany that humanity has outgrown racism and prejudice will be proven to be something of a lie in future episodes “Home” and the “Demons”/”Terra Prime” two-parter.
This is the only time the Skagarans are seen onscreen, and it’s never established one way or the other whether or not Archer made good on his promise to send a ship to bring any humans home who wanted to go.
Regular rewatch commenter Christopher L. Bennett established in his Lost Era novel The Buried Age that Guinan was involved with a group of anthropologists who discovered what the Skagarans were doing on Earth in the nineteenth century, and James Swallow had a Skagaran as part of the U.S.S. Titan’s crew in the novel Sight Unseen.
It’s been a long road… “Do you think I could get some more coffee before you shoot him?” From one of Enterprise’s best episodes last week, we modulate into one of its absolute worst.
One of the things I loved about “Twilight” was that it had a proper teaser that actually teased the episode. To go from that to this week’s disaster is disheartening, especially since it comes from the usually-more-reliable brain meats of scripter David A. Goodman (among other things, the writer of “Judgment,” another of Enterprise’s best). Seriously, it opens with guys on horseback, dressed in cowboy hats and long coats, riding through Standard Hollywood Western Set #17, lynching some other guy in a cowboy hat and a long coat.
And then Russell Watson starts crooning about long roads, and what the hell? There’s no sign of any of our familiar main characters, no sign of Enterprise or a shuttlepod, no sign of any familiar technology, nothing. I can imagine people watching this in November of 2003 and thinking that Enterprise had been preempted for some manner of Western show or other, and changed the channel…
Buy the Book
Dead Country
Those theoretical people were better off. Archer, T’Pol, and Tucker showing up in period dress wandering around Standard Hollywood Western Set #17 does nothing to make the episode any better. It’s a bog-standard Western story, with “Skags” filling in for “Injuns” to refer to Indigenous folks. But the episode doesn’t embrace any of the clichés for fun, it just dolefully checks them off as it meanders through the plot. Opportunities for fish-out-of-water humor are either ignored or instantly abandoned. I was really really really looking forward to watching Tucker and T’Pol utterly fail to ride a horse, but that they abandoned that right before it could get interesting was just one of a series of disappointments in this insipid storyline.
Oh, and this Western town was apparently populated only by white people, which made it unique for a town on the so-called frontier. And we’re supposed to believe that they were trapped in cultural and technological amber for three hundred years, keeping the same fashions, the same attitudes, the same currency, the same technology level that whole time? Especially given MacReady’s comment about how hard living was on this world, you expect me to believe that nobody thought to try to salvage and/or repurpose the Skagaran technology?
I will give the episode credit for two reliably good guest stars: Emily Bergl is never not charming (she apparently so impressed the producers that they tried to think of ways to make her a regular), and Glenn Morshower is perfectly cast as the laconic sheriff.
Goodman was inspired by the original series’ forays into this sort of thing (the Western planet! the ancient Rome planet! the Nazi planet!), but that was done for budgetary reasons, to save money by using existing costumes and sets. Of course, the opposite applied here. While a plurality of TV shows on the air and movies in the theatres in the late 1960s were Westerns, that percentage was significantly smaller at the turn of the millennium, so doing this dopey episode was probably more expensive than usual because of the need to create the costumes and sets.
And man, was it not worth it. It was especially not worth taking an inexplicable break from the ship’s time-sensitive mission to find the Xindi in order to play dress-up on an alien planet.
Warp factor rating: 1
Keith R.A. DeCandido is one of the guests of honor at Zenkaikon 2023 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania this coming weekend. He’ll have a table in the exhibit hall and will also be doing lots of programming. Check out his schedule here.
I thought this was a reasonably entertaining homage to TOS’s “historical Earth culture in space” episodes. A bit of a digression, sure, but I don’t share the opinion that every episode in a season has to be exclusively about the overall story arc. Real life is full of digressions and non sequiturs.
In Chapter 4 of Rise of the Federation: Uncertain Logic, when I mention that the Vulcans sent a followup expedition to the former Expanse to make diplomatic contact with the Xindi, I initially mentioned that Archer asked them to check up on the “North Star” colonists. I deleted the reference for brevity and clarity, though.
Hardly a surprise, since Trip had very little to do this episode, but I knew the “Florida Man” section was going to be “thinks watching John Ford movies means he knows how to ride a horse”. And, you’re right, it was bizarre they went absolutely nowhere with that bit.
And I will dispute that they spent more money on this one building sets. While Westerns are much less popular, the standing sets and back lots have survived to this day. This one was shot on the Universal Studios “Six Points Texas” lot, which has apparently been the location for more Westerns than any place else. There’s also the Melody Ranch Studio, where they shot Deadwood, Westworld (HBO), and a host of others.
It’s interesting to come back to this episode given John Jackson Miller’s recent SNW novel The High Country.
Definitely plays differently with some of the context Miller conjectured for the Skags’ backstory.
“The first Skagaran I ever saw was today, lying in that coffin. Seems I’d be more likely to get the truth from you than from the men that put him there.”
It’s a pretty grim episode for the most part, even if it does have an optimistic ending. It’s an interesting counterpoint to the Voyager episode ‘The 37s’, in which human slaves turned on and slaughtered their enslavers and then created a utopia. This one is far more cynical about what the result of a slave revolt would be, especially if the former oppressors and their descendants are still around to be oppressed in turn. The result is a world made up of moderately decent people who aren’t going to challenge a system that benefits them, and bigoted bullies delighting in the fact that the law protects them and not their victims. Archer and Bethany are pretty much the only lights in the darkness.
Still, if we are doing a western, it’s kind of appropriate for Archer to be the stranger who wanders into town and sorts things out. Whenever he’s in a scene, we know he’s going to do the right thing. And I love the moment where he just goes “Screw this” and beams up an injured Bethany in front of his attackers. (About time someone remembered they can do that instead of constantly sneaking off to hidden shuttlepods! Mind you, it’s canny to make an impact by making a show of landing a shuttle in front of everyone.) Thankfully there’s none of the silliness of ‘The Communicator’ (or, more recently, Discovery’s ‘New Eden’) with a captain deciding to gaslight the natives instead of admitting the truth and pretend it’s for their own good: Once Archer’s made the decision to get involved, it’s full disclosure.
I’m not sure what the point is of the reveal that Bethany’s part-Skagaran, which is promptly never mentioned again: Are they suggesting you need Skagaran blood to treat them like people, or pointing out how absurd a caste-based system based on external appearances is? The episode doesn’t quite know what to do with the Skagaran waiter Draysik either: He only seems to exist to show us how Bennings treats Skagarans (the lynching wasn’t a big enough clue?), after which he hangs around threatening to be a part of the plot but not really managing it. And the ending is a bit pat: I can just about buy the sheriff who spent most of the episode determined to enforce unjust laws and shut down any attempt at reform becoming a kind of local Zefram Cochrane and having an epiphany on seeing the universe is bigger than he thought, but are all the rednecks who wanted to commit genocide a short while earlier really going to meekly accept the Skagarans as equals just because Archer and co beat them in a fight?
Aside from one line, there’s pretty much no connection to the Xindi arc: It mainly serves as an excuse as to why Enterprise can’t stick around and help, and I really hope Earth did send someone else eventually. I’d been wanting to use that “Character responds to bad guy using a hostage as a shield by just stunning the hostage” trick for ages and was disappointed that Reed got there first. (I think I finally used it last year…)
Channel 4 cut the pre-credits sequence down to almost nothing, to the point that I needed the subsequent scene to know what the heck just happened: They cut every shot that showed or implied a hanging, which is almost all of them. I think we just got a bunch of guys on horseback, Bad Guy Deputy sneering a line and maybe the shot into the air. So, it was possible for it to be worse.
To be fair, Tucker’s horse does seem to have started moving before we cut away. But otherwise, yeah. I was slightly bewildered when one of the comments last episode seemed to imply this was a series highlight, when I remember it as being not very good at all. (And that’s not just because of the ongoing storyline: I’m all for standalone episodes, but this would have been a humdrum episode at best in the first two seasons as well.) So I’m kind of relieved that Keith thought the same and I haven’t gone crazy!
Humanity has outgrown it’s racism and prejudice? What funny stuff has Archer been been smoking? 2 years ago (Enterprise time) Archer and Tucker were shining examples of Humanity’s racism and prejudice towards non Humans.
I couldn’t finish this one. And I love westerns. This visual style, though, that makes it look like watching TV through a dirty screen door just ain’t for me. At least the cheapo planet in “Spectre of the Gun” had color.
Maybe it’s because I’ve watched a lot of very average Westerns, but I thought this episode was alright, even though it had nothing to do with the overarching plot. As you say, Archer looks good as a cowboy, and I can’t help thinking that’s half the reason they made this. Anyway, I’m not saying it’s great TV, but it’s alright.
I had a bunch of problems with the worldbuilding. Not necessarily the same you had …
Numbers
6000 humans on that planet may be enough to avoid the worst of inbreeding, and it may explain a rather stagnant culture — if there had been an Edison or a Martin Luther King on that world, what are the odds that he would have spent his life watching the south end of a northbound mule?
But shouldn’t someone like the sheriff wonder about strangers with no references or common reference points? Some people on Earth play “seven degrees of separation” when they try to find a chain of acquaintances no more than six intermediaries long between them. On this world, shouldn’t it be one or two steps? “So, how is old Charlie doing?”
Is that population growing or shrinking? Call it six or seven generations, on a good planet they might have started with a few hundred.
Technology
How much of their tech could a typical Wild West town build and maintain, and how much was from the East Coast? Those revolvers, are they all relics (allowed by the alien slavers?) or do they have a steelworks somewhere?
I’m not surprised that Enterprise could fake revolvers, by the way. Put some billets of mild steel into that CNC machine, and there you go. Should be easier than faking the fabrics and leather.
The Message
When I was watching the show, I was thinking of the Skags as a metaphor for African-Americans, not Native Americans. This line about it being forbidden to teach them certainly applies, and also having them do menial jobs in town.
Regarding your thought of where all the other human ethnic groups went, I wonder if they got lost in interbreeding during those generations. I think Pratchett once wrote that humans with different skin tones can get along nicely if they gang up on those who are green and pointy-eared (Orcs, not Vulcans). Certainly it would be difficult to maintain more than one language without developing into a creole.
The Inspiration
Was the writing contemporary with Firefly? Countless differences between the settings, but perhaps the time was ripe again for Space Westerns …
@8/o.m.: Firefly went off the air 11 months before this episode aired, so probably not contemporary. An influence is conceivable, but the writers acknowledged outright that their main influence was TOS’s Earth-culture-in-space episodes.
@@.-@. cap-mjb: As the commenter you’re almost certainly referring to, I’d like to point out that my original remarks were meant to indicate that I was very happy to see this episode on the schedule (since it is the first episode of ENTERPRISE I recall watching), that I was not certain it would be any good at all and that I would nonetheless retain a warm place in my heart for it anyway.
So I must admit that this is far from the best episode of ENTERPRISE, but I remain deeply fond of it anyway (mostly for sentimental reasons): on the other hand little things like Captain Archer in cowboy rig; Trip casually handing over his six gun for the loan of a horse, then assuming that he knew how to ride one; that magnificent shot of the Enterprise shuttlepod casually blowing the minds of everyone in the vicinity; Mr Reed casually tasering his superior officer with insouciant calm (I’m more and more convinced that one is a Dark Horse under all that professional reserve); our favourite schoolmarm being just done with prejudice and the local sheriff (I got the vague impression they might be related, a possibility that would explain a good deal), as well as Our Heroes leaving the world just a little better all make their own claims for a rating slightly above ‘1’ in my book.
On the other hand, to get my rating above ‘5’ the episode would have had to make the Skagarans more than living Mcguffins – and it wouldn’t hurt to see a follow up that makes this the jumping off point for better things to come, since this done in one feels a bit unfinished (The local version of the Reconstruction Era would undoubtedly be interesting and offer more room for the Skagarans to be actors in shaping their own destiny).
Some further points:-
– I got the impression that Archer was suggesting he was on the way to ranch cattle, rather than rustle them.
– It seems reasonable to infer that the very Old West status quo that we see was something the ex-slaves had clawed their way up to over three hundred years, rather than something they had been clinging to all this time (though with such a low population density and a founding population mostly pulled from unremarkable frontiersman, it’s unsurprising that they haven’t been able to reverse engineer any of the Skagaran technology).
– I must admit to rather liking that saloon owner on short acquaintance: his pride in a noble ancestry was a little bit amusing and a little bit charming (and his good sense in fetching the sheriff is not to be sniffed at).
It’s also interesting that, ancestor or no ancestor, he doesn’t seem inclined towards race-baiting the Skagarans.
– ‘Deputy Crook’ made a surprisingly good villain, for my money: memorably contemptible without being dull, for all his archetypical nature.
– I wonder if the ancestral Skagarans were part of their culture’s mainstream or if they were criminals by Skagaran standards? (The fact that nobody seems to have come looking for the colony in 300 odd years make me suspect more the latter than the former).
– It’s also reasonably clear why Captain Archer would take time out of his mission to investigate this particular planet: given the Xindi threat to Humanity (and the fact that Earthlings have only begun to spread out into the galaxy) finding a whole colony of humans deep in the expanse would not only be a truly startling curiosity, there would be a serious risk that this settlement might be either a potential target for a Xindi attack or the focus of some other unpleasant design by the same.
In either case it makes perfect sense for NX-01 to stop and take a look (though sticking around to deal with local issues may well be Pure Archer, bless him).
– Was it ever clarified whether there were 6000 humans and 1000 Skagarans on the planet? (Or were the Skagarans 1/6th of the total population instead?).
– Was anyone else left wondering what “bluehorns” and “sun vipers” actually look like? (I know that Space Opera animal species always summon up my curiosity: blame THE WILDLIFE OF STAR WARS!).
– Oh, and for what it’s worth I interpreted that ‘one-quarter Skagaran’ detail as a way of pointing out the hypocrisy of discrimination based on appearance.
Finally, may I please ask if the STRANGE NEW WORLDS novel mentioned is set on the ‘North Star’ world throughout? (I would prefer to avoid spoilers, but if it is then I’m going to have to read it, no matter how good it actually is).
I’ve always skipped over this episode, perhaps just viewed the teaser and the first act to be generous. Whenever I see Star Trek doing a Western episode it inspires dread in me (although I did like the surrealism of “Spectre of the Gun”) because it’s just an excuse for actors to play dress up and the producers to save money by using existing backlot sets. And I’ve never been a big fan of Westerns (exceptions of course to films like Dances With Wolves and Unforgiven, and some initial enjoyment of the Westworld reboot). And I didn’t want a detour from the Xindi arc/mission for this. I do like Emily Bergl though. I’ve only seen her otherwise on a show called Southland and she was so good at playing an annoying and just awful person (she became worse and worse as the series progressed).
Ah, the extraterrestrial period piece. I’ll note that while the obvious and primary inspiration here is doubtless, as noted, TOS episodes in the same mold, Stargate SG-1 made “remnant of Earth culture maintained after kidnapping by aliens to serve as labor,” the lynchpin of its world-building. (I don’t recall whether they ever did an Old West episode, though).
@10. “Finally, may I please ask if the STRANGE NEW WORLDS novel mentioned is set on the ‘North Star’ world throughout?”
It is not, but certainly I had cause to study the episode and think through its ramifications. Just as ROGUE ELEMENTS was a chance for me to elaborate on Trek’s cultural contamination stories (as in “A Piece of the Action”), I wanted to do the same for the transplanted-populace stories such as this and “New Eden,” among others.
Our job isn’t to explain everything the shows didn’t elaborate on, but I do like casting things in a new light to see what happens.
Re the six shooters… One would hope that any competent Enterprise era starship engineer could knock up a couple of Colt replicas in a few hours. They aren’t exactly complicated and Tucker should have a pretty capable machinists workshop to make parts for the ship.
My question would be, “Where did the locals get their guns from?” because what is easy for a 2 170 naval engineer or 1970 hobbyist engineer is a lot more difficult for an 1880 one.
@6/Dingo Wholly agree. I actually hate the practice of using ugly camera filters as a visual shorthand for particular historical eras or their fantasy counterparts (the grey filter for all shows set in the middle ages is the one that annoys me the most). Give me all of that historical colour!
It’s so funny—I knew KRAD was going to mention the highly questionable rice-picker fib that Kirk tells in City on the Edge of Foreever. Definitely one of those “really, Star Trek?” moments.
I was bedridden when I saw this episode, so I couldn’t escape. But the pain of watching the episode made me forget the pain of my illness for an hour.
@8. o.m.
> Was the writing contemporary with Firefly? Countless differences between the settings, but perhaps the time was ripe again for Space Westerns …
This was approximately a year after Firefly has been cancelled.
You really have to judge Star Trek by itself and pretend the world hasn’t moved on and that other shows haven’t done it better already (and even then DS9 probably did it better too). This episode was not great but it wasn’t utterly terrible either. Sure this episode was disappointing and underwhelming, a not worthwhile diversion from the Xindi, but it wasn’t 1 out of 10 “Precious Cargo” or “Dear Doctor” bad.
@8 – The tech sort of baffles me as well. Over the course of 3 centuries, how are you going to maintain the sort of tech level that allows you to have revolvers and shotguns? Where they would be made? They can’t all be legacy pieces.
In the era the humans are kidnapped from, any firearms would have been manufactured in the East. Colt, Smith & Wesson, and Winchester were all founded in the 1850s, in Connecticut and Massachusetts.
In the absence of a steelworks operating at at least a late 18th century/early 19th century level, the highest metallurgical tech level available probably would be blacksmithing.
They should be carrying around swords, unless some surviving Skagarans were “persuaded” to impart the required tech knowledge in exchange for their lives.
I do remember stumbling across this one and having a friend mistake it for Deadwood, although that didn’t start until a year later.
The problems folks are mentioning about maintaining the weaponry over three centuries is another reason why it’s ridiculous that they didn’t salvage the Skagaran ship for stuff….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I remember very little about this episode, other than
A. My general annoyance that, once more, the aliens visiting Earth just happened to land in the USA of all possible places (a trope that not only Star Trek is guilty of).
B. My general delight that at the end there were enough reasonable people in the town that accepted Archer’s story. I hate it when everyone in such stories are portrayed as shortsighted.
My annoyance with this episode stems from its advertising/coming attractions, all of which referred to the setting as a “parallel world”. I was set up for an old fashioned Hodgkins law of parallel planet development romp in the TOS style — perhaps the first in the timeline — instead I got an involuntary Earth colony. Frankly, I felt robbed. Darn cheating cheaters who cheat…
@23/rocketjay: I don’t know if I was aware of that promo, but if so, I was probably relieved that it wasn’t a “Hodgkins’ Law” parallel, one of TOS’s silliest concepts, and instead had a relatively reasonable explanation.
Sometimes I think that, if Roddenberry was determined to create a science fiction show that had parallel Earth societies built into its premise as a way to make it affordable on a TV budget, maybe he should’ve created a premise like Sliders, about exploring alternate timelines. It would’ve been a better fit for that than for a space-exploration show.
I wouldn’t place North Star on the same level of originality as the likes of A Fistful of Datas, but a 1? It’s an inoffensive western with some nice themes and an uplifting ending. Hardly that bad. And after 8 consecutive episodes dealing primarily with finding the Xindi weapon, I’d say the show’s earned one unrelated adventure of the week. This is a very conscious attempt at emulating classic TOS. And David Goodman was the best qualified TOS fan to do this one. It’s not trying to break new ground. It’s just a reminder that we’re still on a show that has to fill 24 episodes per season.
Could it have embraced more of the clichés? Absolutely. Also a reminder this is still Rick Berman-era Star Trek trying to straddle the line between what he considers to be proper Trek and what writers like Goodman wished they could accomplish. But I’d say what we get here is worth the effort. It gives the cast an opportunity to stretch outside of their usual roles. We have a pretty decent guest character in the form of Bethany. And it has one of the better Jay Chattaway scores in a while – a reminder that if anything else, that Trek was finally delivering some of the best music in years!
And the classroom ending? Worth every second. Trek’s always been about inspiring humanity to ascend to the stars and to better ourselves. Put this one up against say TNG’s First Contact (the episode, not the movie), and it serves as a nice counterpoint of hope.
@25/Eduardo: “TNG’s First Contact (the episode, not the movie)”
The standard way to differentiate them is that episode titles go in quotation marks (“First Contact”) while movie titles are in italics (First Contact). Generally, italics are used for the titles of complete works like books, movies, series, magazines, newspapers, etc. while quotation marks are used for shorter works or subdivisions like individual episodes, chapters, short stories, comic issues, articles, or the like.
@26/Christopher: I didn’t realize that before. It’s good to know. Thanks.
#15. Exactly. I’m sure there can be a sci-fi explanation for the look in this case, but it’s odd that in some westerns, particularly in the modern era, the filmmakers insist on having everything look so gosh darn drab. They had dyes back then. Not everything was a shade of dirt.
I didn’t like this episode – I found it uncreative and boring – but rating it a 1 seems unusually harsh to me. Something like Precious Cargo from Season 2 is demonstrably worse in every way to this. Hell, I’m not even sure I’d say this is the nadir of Season 3 (I found the present-day Carpenter Street – which we will get to in two weeks, far harder to watch than this warmed-over dreck).
This where I remind everyone that the warp factor rating is the least important part of any rewatch entry. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
There’s a Doylist explanation for all the white people only which plays into a probably unintentional Watsonian one.
The Doylist explanation is a story written, edited and cast by white people, who grew up a white people colony with very built-in white colonial fears… and yes, that does affect the stories we tell.
The Watsonian explanation reflects that Doylist one. Textually, the Skagarars were themselves colonists, who grabbed themselves a bunch of slave labour for their colony… who also happened to be colonists in the middle of an actual colonization effort. The reversal of fortune after the uprising? The active oppression of the Skagarans? That is (and has long been) a very real fear of those opposed to equal civil rights.
Which means that if the Skagarans focused their kidnap efforts on one or two western towns, the odds are that they did primarily grab white people, and anyone Black or Indigenous also caught in the sweep probably wouldn’t last long after the revolt on the grounds of “we don’t want them getting any funny ideas”.
A change of culture in who got kidnapped (which would require a change in writers, possibly) and instead of the oppressed naturally becoming opressors, you have them telling their former slavers to simply f- off, thank you very much, or even move farther into integrating the two societies. Even the violent uprising was not inevitable… but to go back to the Doylist, those were (and generally aren’t) the stories being told in Western mainstream media.
In terms of worlbuilding though? Even if unintentional, it’s one of the few cases where “everybody’s white” actually has a logical explanation.
I just wish they’d actually executed a storyline that lived up to that, that examined better the toxicity in a retaliatory oppression in better detail. Instead it was just a Big Damn Heroes set-up for the main cast and absolution for the humans without actually having to face up to their sins. Nope, just one bad apple (Bennings)… certainly no sociocultural structures that enabled him.
The truly sad thing is not only would it have been a better story, it would have been truer to Trek. At its best, Trek challenges us to examine our preconceptions and find a way to make things better, not blindly confirm our prejudices and nurse our insecurities. There was an opportunity here, and it was utterly wasted.
“Still, if we are doing a western, it’s kind of appropriate for Archer to be the stranger who wanders into town and sorts things out. Whenever he’s in a scene, we know he’s going to do the right thing. “
Indeed, Archer here fulfills the Western trope of the noble hero who rides into town and solves an ongoing problem, something pictured in every western television show from The Lone Ranger to Kung Fu.
As for the cold open, there existed a proposed but unmade episode of “Star Trek: The Original Series” which opened with the NBC Peacock, then immediately with Pa Cartwright and his three adult sons on horseback, followed by the burning map of the Pondarosa and the Bonanza theme, at which time the p.o.v. pulls back and we see the Enterprise bridge crew watching it on the main viewer as they again have gone back in time to the 1960s for historical research. If original Star Trek had lasted onto a fourth season, this was thought to be a great “gotcha” moment for the producers to trick the viewers.
@29: Really? I remember that one being quite good, and even better in retrospect once we get the backstory to it, with the only black mark being some of Archer’s…more problematic behaviour.
If I’m going to be honest, I prefer Trek stories which show an isolated colony of humans where everyone is white than an isolated colony of humans where somehow there are still a few people of color peppered in. Though the preferable solution is an isolated colony of humans where everyone is multiracial.
Small founding groups result in everyone mixing Any taboos against interracial marriage pretty quickly fall to the wayside (unless they develop a racialized caste system or something). So after a few centuries, everyone should pretty much look around the same.
@33/David: You’re misremembering about the Bonanza scene. Here’s how it was actually presented in the first draft script of “Assignment: Earth,” as summarized by David Eversole in the Unseen Elements site:
http://www.orionpressfanzines.com/articles/assignmentearth.htm
The teaser is longer, owing to a little humorous bit that was cut. After Kirk’s opening log explains why they have traveled back in time to 1968, we cut to the bridge of the Enterprise. Sulu, Chekov and Uhura are staring in awe at the off screen viewscreen. We hear the sound of hoofbeats.
Kirk enters the bridge, sees that his crew is watching an episode of the television series Bonanza. Not realizing what it is, Kirk remarks that Sulu must have overshot and taken them back to 1868 instead of 1968. Uhura tells Kirk it is a television broadcast and the chagrined Sulu explains:
SULU
. . .it seemed rather, ah,
educational, sir. . .
CHEKOV
(nods)
. . . a story of hardy Russian
pioneers, Captain. . .
SULU
(to Chekov)
It was a Western drama. . .
CHEKOV
(to Sulu)
We invented the Western!
The rest of the Teaser is basically the same as the aired version, save that Gary Seven’s cat Isis does not appear in this draft.
The only thought I have on this episode are that I struggle to find a reason for it to exist. The best I can come up with is to keep Goodman on by giving him an episode to do what he wanted, and/or to simply to fill an open timeslot in between “good” episodes.
It seemed odd to me that the sheriff of the town could unilaterally cancel all the miscegenation and segregation laws that apparently existed in North Star, and that he would feel moved to do so simply by the arrival of Archer and his crew. But I guess the producers wanted a happy ending.
krad, you said of Emily Bergl “she apparently so impressed the producers that they tried to think of ways to make her a regular”. How hard did they try? Because it seems obvious that they could have written it so that her character’s consorting with the Skagarans made life in North Star too dangerous for her, so Enterprise had to adopt her for her own protection. Why wouldn’t that have worked?
terracinque: It may not have been for lack of story reason but rather an inability to get Bergl to commit to the show for whatever reason…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido