I've been watching Enterprise off and on

[conuly]

I know, I know, but I never did see it all the way through. (And I'm not seeing it all the way through this time - I skip past a lot of episodes I remember not liking!)

Yesterday I landed on Cogenitor, and yup, I hate the ending just as much as I did the first time around. It's right up there with that episode with Tuvix for how much I hate it.

So, first of all, Trip barely speaks to any other human on board while having his little crisis of conscience, and I kinda feel like some of them might have had an opinion other than "Can't argue with culture!"

It also seems to me that somebody might've made the argument that such a technologically advanced civilization could try to do something to redress the gender imbalance in their society - because clearly, nature's "perfect balance" only works when you carefully set up society to work around it.

And then fucking Archer trying to blame Trip for this person's suicide at the end - no, it damn well isn't his fault. All he fucking did is give them a self-teaching pad so they could learn to read, and offer them asylum. Which they were richly entitled to, thanks. "It's not just that death, there's a child that won't be conceived now!" Oh, please. What if that poor hypothetical child were one of this third sex? What then? That's not an idle question - 3% of the population isn't even given a name, and people treat them with less consideration than they would the family dog or sourdough starter. How are they raised? What happens when they're born? For that matter, what happens when the cogenitor reaches the end of its useful period? Given that nobody bothers to give them fucking names I have my suspicions, and they're not pretty. What do we do with chickens that stop laying, or at least slow down?

These and other questions will never be answered, but I do feel like somebody might at least have asked them.

And I get that it's tricky because if this essential third sex only comprises 3% of the population, and if they, like humans, have only one child at a time then it seems that each of that third sex has to be part of at least 34 pregnancies in order to maintain a stable population. But, again - an advanced technological society ought to at least look for a solution other than heinous oppression. "Oh, what if one of your porters whom you force to work for you asked us for asylum!?" Well, if we were in the habit of oppressing them and enslaving them, I really hope that you'd take that request seriously. Was that supposed to be a gotcha?

The only way I'd like this episode is if we got a follow-up where they fixed their damn society and, btw, stopped blaming Trip for not accepting their shitty status quo just because they happened to be nice and smile a lot.

Edit: Upon reflection, I have questions about that suicide as well, not to mention the way they went out of the way to tell Enterprise about it. Are we supposed to take this at face value?

Comments

[moon_custafer]

Also, is it just me, or does it make no biological sense for a third sex to be absolutely necessary for reproduction, yet make up only 3% of the population? Did they kill off the majority of the congenitors a generation back, or something?

[conuly]

It doesn't make much biological sense, and that probably is THE cause of their oppression (and the weird refusal to see that oppression that we see from the other characters), but evolution doesn't really produce optimal results. It produces acceptable results. Clearly, at some point in the past their genetics got fucked through a bottleneck event or disease or something, and now they think that's the way it's supposed to be. Possibly this happened in their prehistory, or even earlier, before their ancestors were sapient.

(That they think these results are optimal after all is a sort of cultural blindspot we expect - notice that they still whine about having to wait so long to have a cogenitor assigned to them, and yet see no conflict between "this is biologically optimal" and "honestly, this sucks for people who want to have kids" - and don't even see how much the cogenitors are harmed by all this nonsense.)

[moon_custafer]

Also wouldn’t it be more efficient for the couples to come to the congenitors, like they’re an oracle or something? If they’re so rare and yet so necessary, why aren’t they treated like an honoured priesthood? You could still do an “edgy” story in which it turns out they’re basically serfs tied to the temple they work out of, but it would make more sense and be more morally complex, especially if some congenitors like their situation and are proud of their abilities while other ones wish they had the option of doing something else with their lives.

[conuly]

Seriously.

Or maybe there are different cultures (gasp! a species with more than one culture!?) where some of them arrange things thisaway and some of them another way... in which case, the obvious place for unhappy cogenitors to defect to is another culture on their homeworld, not some other species they've only just met.

Or maybe they're conscripted for a set number of years of babymaking - which, if they do it the temple method doesn't have to be very many at all to reach a population quota of, say, 40 or 50 pregnancies per cogenitor - and then they can go do something else if they like. It still sucks, but it sucks a lot less. (Seriously, what does happen if they get too old to be much use? For that matter, what happens if they push too hard against their society? I don't like this picture.)

But no, it's 'this is perfect biology despite the evidence against it, can't argue with culture'.

[sovay]

so rare and yet so necessary

It took some time for the penny to drop, but Enterprise had no business doing the worldbuilding of male/female/third-sex-which-facilitates-the-reproduction-of-the-other-two so badly in 2003, because Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy had been complete since 1989. I don't know if it's still the gold standard for three sexes in science fiction, but it's got to be up there. "Cogenitor" sounds like one of the writers heard the Oankali described once and thought "all right, what if that, but sloppily dystopian?"

[conuly]

Mmm, and LeGuin also handled "what if there was a ridiculous gender disparity and that caused oppression" about a million times better than nearly all competitors as well.

Don't try to do better than Butler and LeGuin at the same time. You can't - and if anybody could, it wouldn't be these folks. (Seriously, I find it telling that about the only humans who have any lines in this episode are white males. I'm convinced that either a. Hoshi or b. Travis would've had something interesting to say if anybody had asked their opinion.)

[sovay]

(Seriously, I find it telling that about the only humans who have any lines in this episode are white males. I'm convinced that either a. Hoshi or b. Travis would've had something interesting to say if anybody had asked their opinion.)

You are continuing to make me not regret my decision to tap out of Enterprise after maybe half a dozen episodes, tops.

[conuly]

There's a reason I'm not watching the show straight through, I'll agree. Just skip this ep or that ep I don't like....

[conuly]

(Randomly speaking of Travis, in a previous episode they're all spelunking for some reason, and Travis breaks his leg saving everybody from falling off a cliff, and then they have to leave him behind and he goes "It's not me I'm worried about!" and they all laugh but - I don't know if the writers understood it, but that's not bravado. Up until then he was literally the only one pulling his own weight, and everybody else's as well. LITERALLY everybody else's. And then... yup, right on schedule, the two white dudes got to rescue the scientists. If he'd left them behind on Enterprise and gone alone, he would've rescued them and all their equipment, and his leg would never have gotten broken, and the show does not adequately acknowledge this fact. That's not worth a whole post, but I am annoyed on his behalf.)

[offcntr]

Heck, even Alien Nation did it better in 1989. The binnaum were a revered part of Tenctonese society, necessary to catalyze every new reproduction.

[wpadmirer]

I'm with you on that one. Trip was the only one who treated Charlie as a person, and then he gets hit with this shit from Archer. Made me want to punch Archer really bad.

[conuly]

He said it - even Porthos has a name. And probably more than one meal a day. And also some species-appropriate intellectual stimulation - he's not kept in a crate all day with nothing to do.

"You have to think about the consequences of your actions!"

Yeah, Archer, you do, and if you'd offered this person asylum like you ought to have, then they would not have killed themself. Don't try to pin that on Trip.

[erinptah]

Ah, Enterprise. Sometimes they were good, sometimes they took a real big swing and hit entirely the wrong target.

It feels like the writers got ahold of some general Social Justice Morals -- "respect foreign cultures, even if they seem weird by your standards" is solid advice in a lot of contexts -- but their takeaway was "this is a universal principle that Good People apply in Every Situation, and if you try to talk yourself out of it, you're just a self-centered privileged person looking for excuses."

So the end of the episode was a hamhanded attempt to justify that being the moral. And nobody ever stepped back to consider that their storyline was also sending messages about other social-justice concepts, like oh say "slavery is bad."

[conuly]

That's one interpretation. I thought it was more "They figured out that morally gray is edgy and cool, but they failed in their execution - big time."

And honestly, if they'd even acknowledged that their society sucks but they haven't found a workaround for their messed up gender imbalance that respects everybody's rights I would've been happier. Not much happier, because, again, I don't think anybody even tried here, but a little happier.

[erinptah]

I think if morally-gray was their goal, they would've had that kind of depressing acknowledgment at the end. Instead we get this black-and-white lecture from Archer that sure feels like the writers holding up a big "Seriously, This Is The Moral" sign.

[conuly]

The era of Really Weirdly Strict Prime Directive Mandates From Hell.

It's a stupid moral, no matter what they were going for.

[erinptah]

Oh, absolutely.

[archangelbeth]

I thought it was a precursor to the Prime Directive – "when you start futzing around in other people's cultures, you will probably make things even worse while trying to make things better."

(Mind, my favorite faction in STO, I took a screenshot and labeled it, "We only bother with the Prime Directive because the Feddies make sad epohh eyes when they catch us ignoring it.")

Not saying Enterprise did it right, but there's the "Person A (Federation) needs to screw up something cultural without it looking like a completely daft thing to do" issue, script-wise.

(And instead, we get multiple screw-ups on different axes. -_- I think the earlier "...we found the descendants of a colony and now they're all low-tech agoraphobes..." episode did it better: where "...let's give them safer caves, I guess?" wound up being the answer, instead of, "Let's drag them back to Earth where they can... have a ton of culture shock and be miserable and agoraphobic?")

[conuly]

I thought it was a precursor to the Prime Directive – "when you start futzing around in other people's cultures, you will probably make things even worse while trying to make things better."

Some people's cultures need to be futzed around in.

[archangelbeth]

Well, yes. I mean, more useful for that plot point would've been the Enterprise spending some montage days trying to negotiate on behalf of their refugee's rights and suddenly the refugee up and dies because they actually need to be almost constantly breeding (which no one ever told the cogenitor, and no one ever mentioned to the humans) or they get some kind of terrible infection and croak. (See also fallopian tube infections in female cats who are allowed to heat-cycle without breeding for a long time.)

I mean, that would explain the "3% is optimal" nonsense, allow species-necessary multiple pregnancy facilitations, and provide some teeth to "if you go into a situation without knowing all the aspects, you will probably screw things up."

The aspects of treating the cogenitors badly would still be a thing that should be addressed (just because they need to be breeding every month or two doesn't mean they shouldn't be educated!), but the episode could have had a lesson about humans jumping into things before they discover if they have, in fact, exchanged one bad situation for another, or even for a worse one.

(Truly exploring all the myriad ways humans can screw things up would probably take a book, and include riffing off CIA meddling in other people's governments. >_> )

[conuly]

I think we've already put considerably more thought into this than the writers.

[archangelbeth]

Very likely.

[sovay]

I think we've already put considerably more thought into this than the writers.

It's so difficult not to when the writers have obviously put so little.

[conuly]

The really annoying thing about all this is it's stuff like this that drives me to discussion and fanfic. If I have nothing to complain about I can hardly be engaged in the topic, but this episode is infuriatingly lazy.

[sovay]

The really annoying thing about all this is it's stuff like this that drives me to discussion and fanfic.

It's the grit that makes the pearl. It's just sometimes so gritty.

[conuly]

And sometimes the frustration : enjoyment ratio is whack.

[austin_dern]

Enterprise was really agonizing because they tried doing a couple of Prime Directive episodes, even though they were set in a time when there was no such thing as the non-interference directive. It's a time when other shows even explicitly said there was no directive to not interfere with non-spacefaring cultures. And yet Archer, and the show, go on acting like of course it's so incredibly obvious that they mustn't interfere with other peoples' ways that anything to the contrary, however slight or even good in context [1], is unforgivable. The setting would have justified Archer, or anyone else, not thinking about noninterference issues any more than ``will it get us killed?''. And the show was made in an era where they could easily come back and do a follow-up episode where their scheming made things worse, and show why the Prime Directive becomes so freaking important. And it doesn't. It takes a bunch of fine setups and piddles every one of them down its leg.

[1] I refer here to ``The Communicator'', an episode that reaches an utterly depraved and deeply immoral conclusion even by the standards of ``The Prime Directive means sometimes you have to be the jerk'' stories.

[sovay]

And then fucking Archer trying to blame Trip for this person's suicide at the end - no, it damn well isn't his fault. All he fucking did is give them a self-teaching pad so they could learn to read, and offer them asylum. Which they were richly entitled to, thanks.

I bounced completely off Enterprise for ethical reasons, so I'm not surprised the episode failed its premise (and central character) this hard, but I'm still not happy to hear it.

[conuly]

Like, there was a small amount of room here for a complex, morally gray story but they just... dodged it.

Edit: Also, they didn't quite saaaay it, but it's sorta implied that this person (who names themself Charles midway through the ep) should get basic rights as a sapient because they're exactly as smart and capable as everybody else in their species... which, I mean, the converse of that is awful. Again, as Trip noted at the start of this episode, people treat their dogs better, and it's not because dogs can learn to read advanced texts in one day of self-teaching.

[sovay]

should get basic rights as a sapient because they're exactly as smart and capable as everybody else in their species...

Yeah, that argument is flawed.

[conuly]

Of course, ST has always had a bad problem with idolizing intelligence and so called rationality. (The opposite of "emotional" is not "logical", Spock! It's "unemotional", and you can be plenty unemotional AND ALSO illogical as heck.)

[sovay]

Of course, ST has always had a bad problem with idolizing intelligence and so called rationality.

I don't think I agree with that: Roddenberry didn't idolize Vulcan logic so much as he saw it as an opportunity for angst and later writers have read it strictly as repression and my intermittent and incomplete experience of Star Trek suggests that in common with most science fiction it could parallax everywhere from "we'll have solved all these problems in the future" to "people who think too much will kill us all." What you're describing with the implied expectation that Charles has to earn or otherwise demonstrate their right to be treated as a sentient being sounds to me much more like a direct, unexamined transfer of pernicious ideas about civil rights. Do they behave well enough by our standards to deserve being treated as people? Are they asking for their rights in a manner we deem appropriate? Do they contribute to society on a scale whose value we set? And so forth. It doesn't matter what the coin is; it's a rigged game to demand the buy-in at all.

[conuly]

It doesn't matter what the coin is; it's a rigged game to demand the buy-in at all.

Heck yes.

[dewline]

And this one was a Berman+Braga script. And Coto - now known more infamously for his own politics - cited this as a story he enjoyed before being brought in for season four.

I wonder about Burton's recollections at this point in his role as director...

[conuly]

And Coto - now known more infamously for his own politics

Let's imagine I have no idea what those are.