Laurie's No-Nonsense Review

In brief: A mixed bag ... but certainly more provocative than some.

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"Stigma"
Enterprise Season 2, Episode 14
Written by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga
Directed by David Livingston
Brief summary: T'Pol becomes seriously ill with a disease
condemned by most parts of Vulcan society.
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"Stigma" is one of those episodes that needs to be looked at on
several levels. There's the question of how it works as drama within
"Enterprise", the question of how it fits into the broader Trek
universe, and, since this was billed very explicitly as the "AIDS
parable episode," how it works as a metaphor and as an analogy.
Let's take them in order.

In and of itself, the A-plot of "Stigma" works reasonably well. With
a season that seems to have spent all too much of its time
sleepwalking its way through stories, the energy level here was way
up. While I had concerns about T'Pol the Vulcan (more about that
later), I had no problems with T'Pol the Victim of Intolerance, except
for the convenient rewriting of history meant to put her into that mold.

For those who haven't seen the episode, T'Pol has apparently been
suffering from Penarr's Syndrome for a little under a year, and
Phlox's regular treatments have begun to lose their effectiveness. The
Vulcans might have more research which could help her, but it turns
out that they're reluctant to share it -- the syndrome, you see, can only
be contracted via mind-meld, and those Vulcans who meld are
considered deviant and abhorrent by the remainder of Vulcan society.
If the High Command even knew T'Pol had the disease, it's entirely
possible that she'd lose her commission and be recalled to Vulcan --
hence, she has no interest in asking for help from her own kind, and it
falls to Phlox to attempt to get information on his own.

There was more than a bit of predictability about the plot, but within
those constraints I was buying into much of the story pretty well.
Much of that is overwhelmingly due to John Billingsley, who as usual
gives Phlox a certain gravitas that's worth an extra look or two. When
the doctors confront him on Enterprise, suspecting that his original
request wasn't entirely honest, he stands by T'Pol with a calm fire one
doesn't often see. (McCoy certainly had the fire, for instance, but not
a calm one -- it always burned way too close to the surface for that.
Bashir managed it on occasion in later years.) Later, when Archer
hears the news and presses the pair for the truth, Billingsley again
does a good job of showing Phlox caught with nowhere to go: he
doesn't want to lie to Archer, but he also doesn't want to back down
from his previous actions, seeing them as both right and proper. I'm
impressed.

The predictability, however, was something of a problem -- enough so
that many aspects of the story could be called almost beat for beat.
With three doctors, it's perhaps a given that one of them will probably
be more sympathetic than the others -- but did we have to have the
Stodgy Elder Statesman, the Younger and Even Less Sympathetic
One, and the Sympathetic One Who Harbors His Own Secret? The
instant he paused after Archer's first meeting, Lisa said, "ah, so he's
sympathetic because he can mind meld too." I've no problem with
familiar, but it shouldn't be THAT predictable.

In terms of passion, I'd like to take the rare opportunity (rare for me,
anyway) to praise Jolene Blalock. She had a lot of the heavy lifting
for the episode, and basically pulled it off. You can question T'Pol's
decision to keep silent about how she got the disease, but it's a
decision that the character clearly felt strongly about and just as
clearly had every right to make. I've still got a lot of serious concerns
about how Vulcan T'Pol is or isn't, but this was one of the few times
I've really bought into her portrayal in any way. Kudos to her.

This is where some revisionist history comes in, though -- and it's
revisionist even within Enterprise, not just a diversion from the
"normal" Trek universe. Everyone encourages T'Pol to get treatment
for her condition, saying that the Vulcans will be more likely to help
her if she explains the circumstances, because she was coerced and
attacked, not entering into the mind-meld by choice.

Pardon me, but that's not correct, and T'Pol at least should know that.
I agree that the *continuation* of the meld was both forcible and
unwelcome, but back in "Fusion" she entered into the meld of her
own free will. One could certainly argue that she was manipulated
into it, but there was no coercion at the outset. When T'Pol told
Archer that he wasn't correct (about her needing to come clean), I
thought for a moment that that's where she was going to head with
things. I've no real objection to her making the Noble Cause In
Pursuit of Justice [TM], but it doesn't sit well when she's only in that
state due to writer fiat. (Let's point out that a season ago, mind-melds
were also *unknown*. Now apparently everyone knows about them
-- it's just that most Vulcans can't initiate them, and everyone
disapproves of those who can. Excuse me?)

The other objection I'd have dramatically is that the "oh, no -- T'Pol's
been recalled!" tease as a way to manufacture drama is getting hugely,
hugely old. More to the point, until and unless the powers that be
actually *do* it for a while and shake things up a bit, it's an empty
threat. You can't manufacture drama by suggesting something's
going to happen unless the viewer's got at least a little bit of
expectation that it could wind up happening. TNG pulled that sort of
thing off on occasion (with the original "The Best of Both Worlds"
cliffhanger being a case in point), and DS9 actually *did* move its
characters around enough to make subsequent threats of moving them
plausible. I've seen no evidence that the ENT powers that be are
willing to take anyone off the ship for any length of time at all, except
(as in "Shockwave") where the cliffhanger itself is how to get them
back. I hasten to point out that it's not a problem per se to leave all
the characters in place -- but it *is* a problem to leave them in place
and then set up the "gasp! X might leave!" gambit every half-dozen
episodes or so.

Acting-wise, things were fine apart from the continuing difficulty of
getting guest stars who can do convincing Vulcans. In many ways I
think that's due to a deliberate choice on the part of the writers,
however, which leads me nicely to part two of this review.

In the broader context of the Trek universe, I think the portrayal of the
Vulcans here has officially turned a corner into Who-The-Expletive-
Deleted-Are-These-People Land. A year and a half ago, when the
series premiered, the Vulcans were "villains" in that they were
essentially overprotective parents who felt humanity was too
impulsive and too irrational to be trusted in the larger galactic
community without some serious chaperoning. That, to me, was an
excellent way of making the Vulcans the bad guys -- as much as we
like 'em, they do tend to be holier-than-thou and they do tend to be
smug in their belief that their way is the most enlightened. Since then
we've had evidence that Vulcans tend to run covert espionage
operations ("The Andorian Incident"), don't mind it if innocent lives
get caught in crossfires ("Shadows of P'Jem"), and topple
governments they believe to be corrupt ("The Seventh"). The Earth-
Vulcan tension that formed part of the show's basis has now been
replaced with a willingness to use the Vulcans as fall guys for any
particular unpleasant trait we want to give them. They're not
characters any more -- for the most part, they're not even stereotypes.
They're straw men.

"Stigma" takes this to an extreme. Now they're not only convinced
that their way is right, but they're so convinced that emotion is evil that
anyone who shares *any* innermost thoughts in an intimate way is
someone so abhorrent that any self-respecting Vulcan should be
willing and even eager to let them die. Great. The Vulcans are no
longer somewhat paternalistic allies -- now they're a race of Bill
Dannemeyers. If you don't place the name, Dannemeyer was a
Congressman from California in the '80s and early '90s who
suggested, among other things, that homosexuals should all be exiled
to an island where they could die off naturally and not let decent God-
fearin' folk be infected by their horrible morals and filthy practices.
Sound familiar? Dr. Strom even borrowed a few of his core themes
in one of his final speeches here about melders being "genetic
aberrations" and T'Pol being willing to let them "spread their
infection."

To the series' credit, I do get the impression that this is deliberately
setting up for something. One thing about "Stigma," both in terms of
its mind-meld use and its characterization of the Vulcans, is that it
strongly suggests that we may be due for a substantial change in
Vulcan culture before the series has run its course. I'll give credit
where it's due for laying the groundwork for that change if it happens,
but at this point I'm starting to feel as if they've gone so far afield that
no change can be convincing. I mean, at this point we're only a little
over a decade away from the birth of Vulcans we know (such as
Sarek), and if there's that much upheaval on his world just as he was
born I'm going to have difficulty believing he'd never mention it.

The other concern I have about Vulcans, perhaps not surprisingly, is
the ongoing difficulty of portraying them. Even if this "they're every
bad thing we can think of and a few we're working on" portrayal is a
setup later for conscious change, it's been established time and time
again on *this* series that all the Vulcans are supposed to completely
reject and repress all emotion. Why, then, is it that three of the four
most emotional portrayals we had in "Stigma" came from the
Vulcans? T'Pol -- okay, fine, she's allegedly more emotional than
many others and has lived with humans for a year and a half. The
sympathetic doctor -- fine, he's different because he can meld. But
the other young one, the one who's the most callous and the most
uncaring? By the final speech, he's sounding about as unemotional as
your average political demagogue. Contempt is as real an emotion as
any other, and Jeffrey Hayenga did not exactly go out of his way to
avoid it.

In sum, I'm starting to think that I need to watch Enterprise as, not a
Trek prequel, but some sort of series that uses the same names and
tropes as older Trek while playing in a completely different universe.
It's fanfic, basically. I hope to be proven wrong.

On to part three -- "Stigma" as social commentary.

Longtime viewers may remember a TNG episode called "The
Outcast," which was supposed to be Trek's big "gay episode" and
plea for tolerance. Longtime readers of mine may recall that I didn't
find the analogy convincing, as sexual stereotypes were in abundance,
homosexuality was never mentioned, and the ending was so
ambiguous as to give those who wanted an anti-gay message more
than sufficient ammunition about how "curing" homosexuality would
be fine and dandy.

"Stigma" certainly did better than that, by a long shot, but it ran into
the problem many analogies like this tend to hit -- it's both too close
and not close enough to the message it's trying to convey.

For starters, there's the statement that T'Pol's illness is "unique to a
subculture [of Vulcan society] -- a small percentage of our population
[whose] behavior is neither tolerated nor sanctioned." The intent,
presumably, is to make "melders" stand in for gay people. All well
and good, except that it's about half a decade too late to be even
marginally outspoken. Perhaps living out my adult years in the Los
Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas has colored my perceptions,
but so far as I can tell homosexual behavior is no longer something
that most of America finds particularly horrific. We're not in the days
when showing two men in bed together on "thirtysomething" could
make advertisers yank ads from the show -- "Will and Grace" is one
of the more successful sitcoms out there, and there are any number of
shows, both popular and not, with regular gay characters who are
quite sympathetic and not there simply to be the token gay character.
It's old news.

This is not to say, mind you, that we don't have a lot of progress yet to
be made -- the upcoming Supreme Court case involving sodomy laws
being a case in point, not to mention the ongoing struggle to legalize
gay marriage, which is something that certainly could lead to the
makings of an interesting story if anyone on the Trek staff wanted to
write it. It's just that the specific points "Stigma" seemed to be
making were a bit tired.

(On the technical side, there's also the point that "melding" is a
specific activity, while AIDS can be spread any number of ways,
sexual contact only being one of them.)

Additionally, if this is the big message show about AIDS, what's the
message? "AIDS is bad?" Thanks, folks -- I think we were clear on
that. "More people should speak out?" AIDS is one of the most
public diseases out there at this point. "Don't blame everyone who
gets it?" Okay, anyone who needs *that* message probably isn't
watching the show. I can't help feeling that this is episode is less
something meant to talk about AIDS and much more about Trek
patting itself on the back for being so gosh-darn tolerant and
progressive. If this somehow has a positive effect, I'll be the first to
stand up and cheer -- but while I give it credit for good intentions, I'm
having trouble seeing why this episode's being made now. (Ten years
ago, yes -- now, no.)

Astute readers will have noticed by now that after much space, I still
haven't talked at all about the B-plot, starring dear old Trip and those
wacky Denobulan sexual practices. That's because I tried to blot it
out as much as I could. Even ignoring the fact that it had some of the
most blatantly godawful dialogue this side of ... well, anything, really
(the "insert the thick end into this opening" exchange about the
neutron microscope being high atop the list), and that the
technobabble-as-filler quotient was pretty unpleasant here, might I
respectfully point out that your AIDS parable is a really bad place to
put the subplot whose point is that it's only limited human morality
that doesn't accept randomly promiscuous sex as a wonderful thing?
Bad placement, folks.

After all that, I'm still leaning more positively about "Stigma" than I've
been about a chunk of the season. Why? Because, flawed though it
was and leading to big long-term concerns about the Vulcans, it is at
least something that got me thinking and did at least have a point.
That may not be grounds for Emmy material, but it's a step up from
being simply an hour's worth of filler. ("Precious Cargo," anyone?
"Marauders"? "A Night in Sickbay"?)

Other observations and comments:

-- The episode opened with a dedication: "In memory of the
Columbia crew ... you will always be an inspiration." Amen to that.

-- Travis, Hoshi, and Malcolm all got token scenes. I did rather like
Travis' injury -- seems the poor man's into rather extreme forms of
sports. It's an interesting character trait for a boomer.

-- Hoshi's practice joke on Trip isn't bad, either. It is nice when the
characters are allowed to be human.

That about does it, I think. Good thing, too, as this is one of the
longer reviews I've written lately. "Stigma" is certainly a step up from
a lot of this season's fluff pieces, but it's also flawed enough and
forced enough that I'm not at all sure where things are headed. Let's
hope for the best.

So, wrapping up:

Writing: Fine on intentions, iffy on execution -- and who are those
pointed-eared non-Vulcans?
Directing: Not a lot of standout moments, but certainly no
complaints.
Acting: Kudos to Billingsley and Blalock, and they were certainly the
key elements here.

OVERALL: Let's go for a 7 on this one, based in no small way on
good intentions.

NEXT WEEK:

February sweeps continue with the return of the Andorians.

Tim Lynch (Castilleja School, Science Department)
tlynch@alumni.caltech.edu <*>
"We share our thoughts differently. We shouldn't be punished for
it."
-- Dr. Yuris
--
Copyright 2003, Timothy W. Lynch. All rights reserved, but feel free to ask...
This article is explicitly prohibited from being used in any off-net
compilation without due attribution and *express written consent of the
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