I'm not a fan of the lengths that some of the Star Trek series have gone to justify sending their crews into Earth's past (or some representation of Earth's past).
TOS did some of the best of these episodes, however, offering several justifications:
- "Patterns of Force", in which a planet that, as a result of contamination, has taken on a Nazi-like society;
- "A Piece of the Action", in which a planet that, as a result of contamination, has taken on the gang-land society of Chicago of the 1920s;
- "Tomorrow is Yesterday", a time-travel episode that takes Enterprise (accidentally) back in time to the 1960s;
- "Assignment: Earth", another time-travel episode that takes Enterprise (on purpose) back in time to the 1960s;
- "City on the Edge of Forever", a third time-travel episode that introduces us to the Guardian of Forever and sends members of the crew back to the 1940s;
- "Bread and Circuses", a parallel development episode in which the crew discovers a planet where Rome never fell; and
- "Spectre of the Gun", the original Star Trek western, in which an uber-powerful race re-creates the O.K. Corral as a punishment for Kirk's decision to ignore a warning.
Fortunately, I was wrong. David A. Goodman has penned a strong episode and director David Straiton does a great job bringing it to life.
Enterprise discovers a planet with a tiny population of humans, still living a 19th-Century Wild West lifestyle. When they investigate, however, they discover that the 6,000 humans are descendants of a group kidnapped from 19th-Century America as slave labour by a race called Scagarans, who transport them into the Delphic Expanse to help develop the planet. The humans eventually overthrew the small contingent of Scagaran slave-masters and took over the planet. Problem is, the humans have never learned to forgive their former masters and treat the small population of remaining Scagarans like second-class citizens.
It's a well-paced, intense story with some excellent moments. It even includes a very believable scene where Archer and his crew get the chance to land a shuttlepod in the middle of a primitive community and present themselves as near-gods, something I understand many of the earlier Star Trek crews wish they had been allowed to do.
Sure, it's somewhat unbelievable that the human community would not have developed at all in the 200+ years, even despite their well-justified distrust of technology. Human nature what it is, we would have expected that they would have made some progress, at least in taming the world upon which they found themselves and, perhaps, in terms of transport and weaponry.
That being said, if you accept that it is a stagnant, wild-west community, the episode works in many ways.
I'm not sure I buy that Archer could take a shot gun blast to the shoulder and still win a fist-fight with the bad guy but I really do like the fact that Reid, without hesitation and with just a shrug, would choose to rescue T'Pol from a bad-guy's gun by shooting her.
And I like the fact that it is a female army dude who proves most effective in the inevitable gun fight at the episode's climax.
The DVD collection includes a Commentary by First Assistant Producer, Michael DeMerrit, which is excellent. Find it and listen to it. It's great.
The episode is intended as an investigation into the moral and philosophical implications of a history of slavery. I think it is pretty clear that it is meant to consider America's slave history. In this case, however, the slave race overcame the slave masters and subjugated them instead.
I have to wonder, however, how effective the episode was or even what its intended message is. It seems to me that at least one of the messages of "North Star" is that a formerly enslaved race should just "get over it" and move on. That might be true in a situation where the enslaved overthrew the enslavers but I'm not sure it went over well with the African American community in the 21st Century U.S.
In fact, if that is the message, it is remarkably offensive.
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