Episode 80: Borderland

With top-flight Star Trek alumni like Brent Spiner and J.G. Hertzler making appearances, how could "Borderland" go wrong?

Well...

Spiner is at his spinetingling best as Dr. Soong, the much ballyhooed geneticist who built on the products of the Eugenics Wars (remember Khan and his wrath?), and, if memory serves me, may just have played a role in the development of Data and Lore, the android wunderkinds of TNG. Hertzler makes yet another appearance as generic Klingon Captain, lending his prototype Klingon voice to another Star Trek series.

These two excellent actors make this episode well worth watching.

Unfortunately, little else about "Borderland" lives up to Spiner and Hertzler.

The show begins with Hertzler's bird of prey coming upon a small shuttle, adrift in space, with two human survivors on board. It's easy pickings for the experienced Klingon crew until the two human males overpower (and easily, I might add) their six Klingon guards and eventually take over the bird of prey.

Back on Earth, Archer and his crew are called into action to investigate. It seems the humans tossed all of the Klingons out the airlock and the Empire is upset, thinking Earth is behind the attack. It looks like war is finally at hand between the fledgling Star Fleet and the much more powerful Klingon armada.

Scans of the Klingon bodies find traces of genetically enhanced human DNA. These are Dr. Soong's creations, his "children", raised from a series of eugenic embryos that were supposed to be on ice on a space station far from Earth. Archer visits Dr. Soong in his prison cell and enlists him to help track his children and bring them back to Earth.

Aboard the Klingon ship, the leader of the augments is overthrown and killed by his smaller but smarter little brother, Malik, and the new crew heads off into deep space, bent on fulfilling their absent father's dreams.

Archer makes the dubious decision to take Soong along to the Borderland, an infamous area of space where the Klingon Empire meets Orion territory. Only the very brave, or the very stupid, dare to venture there.

No sooner does Enterprise arrive in the Borderland, at the coordinates where the attack on the bird of prey took place, than she is set upon by two Orion cruisers. In the ensuing battle, the Orions beam nine members of the Enterprise crew onto their ships, including T'Pol, and take off. With Soong's help, Archer tracks the Orions to a market planet where the Orions regularly auction off their slaves to the highest bidder.

Archer and Soong pay a visit to the market and set about rescuing the Star Fleet folk but, in the process, Soong briefly escapes, long enough to access a comms panel to send a call out to the his "children", now known as the Augments. Once Archer has Soong back in custody, Enterprise heads out at high warp, only to fall prey yet again to the Orion ships.

All seems lost (though, for some reason, no inappropriate beaming takes  place) until a Klingon bird of prey drops out of warp and fends off the Orions. You guessed it, it's the Augments and they quickly infiltrate Enterprise to save their father, Dr. Soong. In a moment of kindness, Soong tells his children to leave Enterprise and her crew unharmed since they suffered enough damage in the Orion attack that they cannot follow the bird of prey when it goes into warp.

Safely away, Soong and his children decide to return to the deep space facility to rescue the remainder of the eugenic embryos stored there. It's all part of their ultimate quest: to expand their family and their power to dominate the Universe.

It's a fairly exciting plot and Spiner and Hertzler make it worth watching. But, unfortunately, newcomer Ken LaZebnik's script suffers many of the flaws that marred earlier Enterprise episodes, including sloppy writing and a while-male-centred approach.


Think about it. In an episode that involves dozens of characters on screen, the only female with any screen time that is not spent in the role of a slave, a sexual object or an adoring mirror, reflecting the greatness of the men in her life, is T'Pol. And T'Pol has to endure numerous objectionable scenes to get to her single moment of empowerment -- when she kicks the auctioneer in the groin to escape him.


It's a pity that the new show runners can's seem to find a way to escape the misogynist morass that B&B left to them. In some ways, in fact, "Borderland" takes this man-centric, female-hating tendency to new depths.


Two new societies are presented in this episode: the Augment society and the Orion society. In both, men dominate and women are little more than sexual objects, owned by their male masters. While we might be able to accept (and I mean "might") that the Orion slave trade could be based on female sex slaves, there is no grounds to suggest that the supposedly super-intelligent Augments would also develop a society that is so regressive and misogynistic.


I also wonder how it comes to pass that the males who dominate the Augment society are all white. Yes, there are Augments from other racial backgrounds -- we see them on screen from time to time -- but NOT ONE OF THEM actually SPEAKS. They are non-entities in this episode.


The depiction of the Augment society as a white-male-dominated one is a choice of the writer and the rest of the creative team on Enterprise and it is indefensible.


And, if you are willing to buy that the Augments would go in that direction, how do you possibly accept the depiction of 22nd Century human society as being more sexist, more racially heterogeneous than our society of the early 21st Century?


As I've discussed before, the Enterprise bridge crew has the same racial make-up in Enterprise that it had in TOS: a bunch of white males, a Vulcan, an African American and an Asian person. As in TOS, which was written and filmed forty years early and had to fight network executives just to have such racial diversity among its lead cast, Enterprise's cast places the two members of racialised communities in support roles (as helmsman and communications officer). Yes the Vulcan character in Enterprise is female but she is so ridiculously over-sexualized and often stereotyped that the conversion of the character from the male (Spock) to the female (T'Pol) is actually a negative.


In "Borderland", every major guest character is male, and white at that. Star Fleet Command is dominated by white men. Dr. Soong appears white and male, despite his name. The two leaders of the Augments are both male and present as white.


Even the entire Klingon crew appears to be male, as are all of the Orion characters with any role (other than the hyper-sexed, scantily clad, unspeaking Orion woman who is auctioned off) and the majority of the buyers at the market.


I could go on and on.

It is disturbing that the fourth season show runners continued to portray the 22nd Century human culture (and every other culture the humans encounter) as being so ridiculously white and male dominated

With regard to plot problems, why would Archer bring Soong along with him at all? On the mission itself and then on the visit to the slave auction. The risk seems entirely too high.

Of course, it is possible that Archer knew exactly what would happen -- that Soong would somehow call the augments to him and that they would attempt to rescue him -- in effect using Soong as bait. But that would make him look pretty stupid with the way things turned out, wouldn't it?
And how did Malik and his silent buddy manage to steal the shuttle away from the rest of the Augment group in order to lay their trap for the Klingons? Where did the Augments get the shuttle in the first place?
Why would Enterprise allow the bird of prey to doc with her? Why would the Star Fleet crew not have gained, from the files and from Dr. Soong, a better understanding of what the Augments were capable of, in terms of resisting weapons fire and hand to hand combat, before interacting directly with them?
Who are these military MACO replacement dudes on Enterprise?
How is it that Orions are so powerful that they can easily defeat Earth's most powerful ship and yet have not made the apparently short trip to Earth to harvest as many slaves as they want?
What stops the Orions, on their second encounter with Enterprise, from beaming another bunch of slaves from Enterprise's decks?