Enterprise Flashback: Bound

Hot on the heels of a really bad classic Star Trek episode, let me talk about a pretty bad episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, "Bound."

When Captain Archer inadvertently purchases a trio of Orion slave women, he tries to impress upon them that they are free to do as they wish. But they're exactly where they want to be, and what they wish is to take over the Enterprise. The only chance at stopping them may be Trip and T'Pol, whose intense, unreconciled feelings for each other render them immune to the powerful Orion pheromones.

The fourth and final season of Enterprise dumped out the Star Trek toy box to play. Anything from the original series that might be worth re-visiting and expanding in a prequel was fair game. Here, the target was the "Orion slave women" of the original Star Trek pilot. And you can see what the idea was: to recontextualize the blatant sexism of the 1960s by showing us that Orion women are actually running the show, not the men. But this version of Star Trek "feminism" has aged only marginally better than the original. "Bound" is an episode full of men stopping just short of cartoonishly yelling "aa-oooooooga!" at beautiful women. That the women are "making" the men do it doesn't really make it any better.

Part of the problem is that the episode is so clearly trying to have its cake and eat it too. It wants credit for saying Orions are a female-dominated society, but it also wants to tantalize the viewing audience with a lengthy, sexualized dance. It makes the women smart by making the men exceptionally dumb, from Kelby's macho conflict with Trip, to Phlox abandoning his enlightened sense of sexuality to be bamboozled, to Mayweather and Reed working out together to get women off their mind. You have to wonder what a gay male character would have done for this story. It can't help but feel like it would boost the attempt to be feminist if the whole episode weren't so aggressively heteronormative.

For once, the Trip/T'Pol romantic subplot of this episode feels like the likable diversion in the episode, rather than the stretching of the melodramatic "will they / won't they" taffy. For one thing, the answer finally seems to be "they will"; the two actually reconcile in this episode, with Trip revealing he's transferred back to Enterprise permanently. And the subplot suits the story well too, with the mutual attraction between the two rendering them immune to the influence of the Orion women. 

Other observations:

• The viewscreen has dramatic sensibilities in this episode. Within the same communication, it switches between closeups and wide shots of the Orion bridge.

• It probably shouldn't even merit a mention anymore, but boy does Reed look stupid in this episode. Even allowing for "Orion pheromones" as an excuse, he easily gives up a bunch of sensitive information. 

• This "classic Trek"-inspired episode has a very "classic Trek"-inspired ending. T'Pol notes of the Orions that even the most disagreeable species have positive attributes -- their matriarchal society. All that's missing is the classic Star Trek playful music just before the end credits roll.

Because "Trip and T'Pol" really works here, I can't judge the entire episode too harshly. But for sure, that subplot is the only thing I found watchable here. I give "Bound" a C.