If you doubted what I said about the racism and sexism that stained Enterprise episodes throughout the show's run, watch "Cold Station 12" and its follow-up "The Augments" through those filters and reconsider your doubt.
In "Cold Station 12", the Augments invade the Research Station where particularly virulent viruses are studied and stored, far away from Earth and its vulnerable inhabitants. Cold Station 12 also, by the way, keeps the 1800 or so eugenic embryos that Dr. Soong created on ice and it's those embryos that Soong and his "children" plan to liberate.
Why did the human race preserve these embryos, when they represented a significant threat to Earth's survival in the wake of a war that killed between 30 and 35-million people? Because, as Archer explains, Earth didn't know what to do with them after the Eugenics War came to an end. As they say on The Family Feud, "Good answer, good answer", just before the big X appears on screen.
As I discussed in my previous entry on "Borderland", the first episode in this three-part Augment trilogy, the creative team responsible for Enterprise in its fourth season made a choice (conscious or unconscious, it doesn't matter) to ensure that all lead roles in this drama, on all sides of the battle, are filled by apparently-white males.
Archer, Reid, Tucker, Admiral Forrest... all white males. T'Pol is there, sure, but she has been so hyper-sexualized in the past, and her scenes of strength are so interspersed with scenes of her fawning over Tucker, that I have a hard time counting her as anything more than a token, stereotyped female presence.
Soong and Malik... white males. Smike, the sympathetic outcast? White male. The only other Augments with significant lines and parts to play? White males. Yes, there are members of racialised communities among the Augments but they are shown in the background only, and, except for one remarkable moment in "The Augments", never allowed to speak. The guy who seems to be Malik's lieutenant, who supports him in his assault on the Klingon bird of prey in the first episode of the trilogy, stands by him as he traps and kills the former Augment leader, and takes active part in the assault on the Research Station, is never permitted to say a word on screen.
The only prominent female among the Augments, Persis, has the same status in the group as the Captain's Yeoman in the alternative universe of TOS' "Mirror Mirror" -- concubine, servant, dependent.
Even when Persis is given something active to do, she is presented as something less: while Malik and his male friend manage to beat up six Klingon warriors with seeming ease, Persis struggles to defeat just two human security guards; when Malik decides to lock up their "father", Persis cannot openly challenge him but must, instead, slink behind his back in order to help Soong escape, and even then the escape is so poorly designed that she is immediately exposed (women Augments, apparently, are not so brilliant as the male Augments); and, when she faces a life and death fight with Malik, she is easily dispatched.
And then there are the scientists taken hostage on Cold Station 12: I believe there might have been a woman or two among them but they are certainly not prominent. The chief scientist, Phlox's old friend Dr. Lucas, is a white male; the majority of the other scientists are while males as well.
I was actually surprised and pleased to see that there was a scientist (a male, of course) who presented as coming from a South Asian or Middle Eastern background. Then it became clear that he was on screen solely so that the creative team had a disposable human for Malik to sentence to a horrifying death as we watch. Sadly predictable. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Dr. Lucas would be willing to sit and watch this unnamed scientist from a racialized community, with whom Dr. Lucas had apparently worked closely for the past year or so, suffer through intense agony and then die a bloody death but then, when his pal Phlox is even threatened with the same fate, Dr. Lucas would cave like a baby.
Some people, after all, are expendable.
Defenders of Enterprise might argue that the Denobulan medical person whose ship the Augments steal at the start of the show is a female. Doesn't that count for something? I would agree that the presentation of a woman as a medical professional is positive (not ground breaking for a show filmed in 2004 but, still...). But the presentation of a female medical person as simply a helpless tool for the use of the Augments, as this particular female clearly is, is not positive at all. She is not presented as an intelligent, thinking, capable person; she is presented as an easy target and, at the end, as a damsel in distress whose rescue permits the Augments to escape once again.
What I find particularly galling about this sexist, racist presentation of future societies is that it takes place in the context of an onscreen philosophical debate about the morality of Soong's attempt to "perfect the species" through Eugenics. Archer is particularly verbose on this issue: in the third episode, he actually lectures a contrite Soong on how violence, cruelty and attempts at subjugation are the only logical results when you suggest that one group of humans is superior to another.
Sadly, all of this takes away from a series of episodes that actually tries to pay homage to some of TOS's best work. I don't need to tell anyone reading this that the Soong story line is drawn directly from the TOS episode "Space Seed" and the TOS movie The Wrath of Khan, which introduce the idea of the Eugenics Wars and the legendary Khan Noonian Singh.
Malik actually raises the story of the Botany Bay, the sleeper ship that escaped Earth in the aftermath of the Wars with Khan and his mates aboard. It's only a rumour, Soong argues. Well, we the viewer know it's not a rumour and we know that Khan will come back to haunt Star Fleet three different times over a variety of timelines ("Space Seed", The Wrath and finally in the very sad, ridiculous Into Darkness reboot film).
And, as I will discuss in my next post, the ending of "The Augments" is clearly based on the end of The Wrath, with the bad guy choosing to destroy his ship and his crew.
And, of course, we are also treated to the final scene where Soong, played so brilliantly and chillingly by Brent Spiner, ponders moving from improving the human race to creating an race of artificial life forms. And we all know where that leads...
A couple of small things before I go: how is it that Archer manages to give Malik a decent fight when six Klingon warriors could not? why is it Archer who climbs the crazy ladder after he has been pounded by Malik, rather than Reid, who is still untouched and in perfect physical condition? How is that Phlox, who worked on the Station for a couple of months, knows just how to shut off the air supply? How is that a battered Archer knows just how to isolate the lab?
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