Today's Star Trek Heroine: Doctor Helen Noel

I know I said no more Trek posts for a while ... but I'm kind of wishing I was on another planet right now. So ...

This morning, I watched "Dagger of the Mind" -- a pretty damn good episode with a pretty terrific female guest star.

The episode opens with the Enterprise orbiting a penal colony (no puns about that, I promise), to which they beam down some supplies and from which they beam up a box sized suspiciously like it was intended to hold an escaping prisoner. With our intrepid transporter-room technician immersed in some sort of technical check that requires his full attention to be focused on the back wall, the lid of the box opens and out pops a sweaty, wild-eyed fellow who proceeds to sneak up on the tech, incapacitate him, and take his uniform. Long story short, it turns out this isn't a prisoner, but an assistant of the psychiatrist who runs the penal colony (still no puns, trust me). Once he's captured, communications with the psychiatrist, Dr. Adams, reveal that the assistant was experimenting with a mental therapy device and drove himself crazy.

Kirk and Dr. McCoy get in a bit of a tiff about whether there's something suspicious going on, with Kirk expressing complete faith in the famous Dr. Adams. But Bones pulls some bureaucratic shenanigans that force Kirk's hand, and the captain concedes that he's got to investigate. He asks McCoy to assign someone from the medical staff to help him, someone with psychiatric experience.

And now we return to the transporter room, where Kirk walks in with Spock and does a double-take upon seeing who it is that Bones has assigned him. "Oh, great," I'm thinking, "here's where it surprises Kirk that his requested psychiatrist is a woman. Gasp! A woman doctor? Thank you, 1966."

But the first words out of Dr. Helen Noel's mouth are, "Doctor Helen Noel, Captain. We've met. Don't you remember the science lab Christmas party?" And it quickly becomes obvious through the dialogue that not only is Kirk aware that women can be doctors, but that his double-take was one of dismay because he somehow embarrassed himself at that Christmas party. Score one for Helen Noel, who looks pleased with herself over the captain's discomfiture.

Once on the planet, Dr. Noel does a bit of sensitive-female-psychiatrist shilly-shallying along the lines of, "Surely, you don't think Dr. Adams could be doing anything troublesome, Captain." But Kirk himself had done the same thing in response to McCoy's suspicions, so she can hardly be blamed.

And then, of course, the shit starts to go down.

And when the shit goes down, the ever-capable Captain Kirk heroically ... gets himself semi-brainwashed and imprisoned. Still, before they take him for the full "neural neutraliser" treatment, he orders Helen into the air-conditioning ducts with a mission to find and disable the force field that keeps the Enterprise from beaming anyone down to help. Despite admittedly having no training in force-field electronics -- which Kirk assures her are absolutely deadly if you make one false move -- Dr. Noel gamely hops into the ducts, follows them to the maintenance area, and gets to work.

Naturally, a guard finds her and pulls her away from the machinery, throwing her to the ground where she appears helpless.

Except that the helplessness is an act, meant to lure the guard in close so that she can kick him with both feet into the power junction, frying both it and him. Then she grabs up his fallen phaser and high-tails it back into the vents with the obvious intention of finding and rescuing Kirk.

Objectifying, impractical miniskirt uniform or not, this woman kicks ass. Kirk comes up with the plan and has to endure Dr. Adams' mind-control torture machine, but Dr. Noel takes on all the physical danger and does all the heavy lifting, never once faltering or shrinking from her task. Several times, she debates Kirk as an equal, and in every scene reliant on male-female dynamics, she comes out on top rather than succumbing to Kirk's usual Casanova charm.

Oh, hell ... tee-hee! Penal colony!

Dammit.

Mudd's Women: One Last Star Trek Review (at least for now!)

I swear I'm not turning this into a Star Trek blog. Just one more Trek entry and I'll get back to other topics, promise.

When last we left our intrepid twenty-first century feminist, Ian Saul Whitcomb, he'd gone through five episodes of the original Star Trek and been dismayed by its paternalism toward women. Dauntingly, he knew the next episode he faced would be "Mudd's Women," a tale of mail-order brides gussied-up by a beauty-inducing drug and taken to a mining colony as goods of commerce. Would the show's woefully dated attitudes make this the most uncomfortable episode yet?

Surprisingly, and to my great relief, no. In fact, the episode stood in stark contrast to its predecessors as the first genuine example of Star Trek as morality play, commenting on the social order of its time and suggesting that things ought to change.

(At this point, I'll give an obligatory spoiler warning, in case you haven't ever in the last fifty years watched this episode ...)

Where previous installments of the series showed the male officers of the Enterprise occasionally comparing notes on the attractiveness of female crew members, the Venus Drug of "Mudd's Women" turns them into gawking idiots, rendered incompetent by their baser instincts. Captain Kirk largely resists -- by taking his awareness of the women's hypnotic effect and making a determined effort to treat them like people and maintain his professionalism. When one of the women, Eve McHuron, complains about the eyes of all the crewmen following her, Kirk apologizes, saying, "They're not usually like that."

So despite the archaic plot device of mail-order marriage (and numerous "ooh-la-la" musical cues as the women slink and sway around), the episode carries a clear anti-ogling message throughout.

More importantly, in the climactic scenes, Eve McHuron chooses certain death over continuing to play the role society has foisted on her. She survives, demonstrating in the process a genuine character and intelligence that sets Kirk up to deliver the episode's crowning message: that there's only one kind of person -- "You either believe in yourself, or you don't."

Finally, six episodes in, I've found the Star Trek that forcefully helped make me the person I am today.

Ahead, warp factor one.

Tonight on Star Trek ...

Yikes!

So, I remembered thinking "The Enemy Within" was kind of dumb from the last time I watched it, probably a good 10 years ago or more. It's the one where they glued some fake horns on a Pomeranian to make an alien critter for a transporter accident that splits creatures into good and evil twins. (The transporter also later renders some thermal heating units useless by splitting them in two, which maybe explains why the units are both "thermal" and "heating," although the consequence that neither a good nor an evil thermal heating unit would be functional is beyond my comprehension.)

What I didn't remember was the super-creepy attempted rape of Yeoman Janice Rand by Evil Kirk. Though scene made me pretty darn uncomfortable right from its opening moments, I told myself it could be excused as an entirely logical consequence of the episode's concept, and handled correctly would constitute legitimate drama. And the scene itself did play out in a more or less appropriate fashion -- clearly portraying Evil Kirk's behavior as horrific and very traumatic for Yeoman Rand, though she escapes before Evil Kirk takes things very far.

But then ...

At the end of the episode ...

Mister Spock kids Yeoman Rand about it.

I shit you not.

Now, this too could be viewed as logical within the context of the show, given Spock's detached curiosity about human emotions and his calculated analysis that Kirk's hostile, aggressive side is intrinsically necessary for his success as a commander. But the logic goes out the window after that point, because instead of being hurt or appalled, Yeoman Rand responds to the joke as if it's just another of Spock's ironic "oh, you humans" jibes.

And yet, while my jaw absolutely dropped that anyone would consider that joke okay, I came away from the episode with a sense of the positive.

All too often, I look around at the world and think, Good lord. We're getting nowhere. In fact, if anything, things are getting worse and worse. But the fact of the matter is, fifty years ago, a television show could portray the near rape of a female character as an acceptable springboard for humor -- and still be the most forward-looking thing on TV.

We are getting somewhere. Maybe not as fast as we should maybe not at warp speed, but we're making progress.

Cross your fingers for me, though. The next episode in the sequence is "Mudd's Women," and I see great potential for it to go wildly awry in comparison to my childhood memories of it ...

Where No Man Had Gone Before

Watching the original Star Trek show as a 21st-century feminist provides a very weird experience.

I got the whole series on Blu-Ray a while back, watched a couple of episodes, then got busy doing other things. Eventually, nagged by guilt at abandoning this iconic part of my childhood, I got the discs back out and started up again.

Three episodes in, I find my head regularly shaking in disbelief.

Everybody who knows anything about Star Trek understands its position as a groundbreaking work of diversity. Even amidst the social upheaval of the 1960s, it blew people's minds to see women working alongside men as equals in an environment where individuals of all races mixed freely without comment. This just didn't happen prior to Trek. Lieutenant Uhura famously inspired people like Mae Jemison and Whoopi Goldberg to pursue their dreams as though there were no longer any boundaries. Personally, I'm 100% sure that my feelings about diversity benefited as much or more from watching Star Trek every day after school as from having parents who'd taken part in the civil rights marches.

But when you watch it ... what an amazingly paternalistic and objectifying show!

Now, to give credit where credit is due, Gene Roddenberry and his collaborators did their best in two different pilots to dress the female crew members in the same shirt-and-slacks uniform worn by the men. The miniskirts came in after that as a concession to the fashion sensibilities of the times.

Nonetheless, despite frequent talk about equality, women are a distinct minority aboard the Enterprise and occupy exclusively "soft" or subservient positions -- nurse, communications officer, psychiatrist, personal assistant to the captain. Command and technical positions remain exclusively the province of men. (Roddenberry tried to make the second-in-command female in the original pilot, but even then, the character was criticized by others as being cold and aloof -- something that never would have happened to a human male first officer.)

With despairing frequency, these "equal" Star Fleet officers wilt in the face of danger and must be consoled or comforted by the men. When they leave the room, it becomes fair game for their male crewmates (and commanding officers!) to raise eyebrows and discuss their looks. If Charlie X (brought up by aliens with no understanding of human society) behaves inappropriately toward Yeoman Janice Rand, she can go so far as to tell him he shouldn't do that -- but she has to demur on explaining why he shouldn't, referring Charlie to Captain Kirk rather than schooling the miscreant herself.

Little grade-school Ian may very well have been steered toward feminism at least in part by Charlie X getting lectured on the impropriety of a man slapping a lady's bottom. But grown-up Ian can only blink and mutter at the implication that it's not a woman's role to instruct a male on basic human decency.

Don't get me wrong ... I still love the show, for all its kitsch and melodrama. Its heart is certainly in the right place, and it attempted to make statements in territories where the later shows often played things far too safe. And without its brave explorations, we very likely wouldn't be as far along as we are today.

But yeowtch! You can certainly see, watching it, why sci-fi nerds of a certain age often think of themselves as non-sexist while railing against the ascendancy of female characters like Rey in the new Star Wars.

Their childhood heroes, their template for admirable diversity, just never went there.