Angel One by: Patrick Barry and directed by: Michael Rhodes

 

“Angel One” is written by Patrick Barry and is directed by: Michael Rhodes.  It was produced under production code 115, was the 14^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and was broadcast on January 25, 1988.

 

After three weeks of Star Trek: The Next Generation generally looking up in terms of direction and tone, “Angel One” is another episode to plummet everything back down.  The B-plot is probably the best place to start, mainly because it is a B-plot that could have been anything to pad out the episode and keep the away team on the planet Angel 1.  A better writer would have found a way to tie events on the Enterprise into the rest of the episode, something that could have been done by making the pathogen as it is a virus which strikes the crew down, could have come from the planet.  No, instead there is just a random virus that is slowly making its way through the crew, travelling through smell and presenting as a respiratory virus, and that’s literally all the B-plot is.  Okay, so Geordi La Forge has to take command and Dr. Crusher spends much of the episode looking for a cure, but scriptwriter Patrick Barry clearly doesn’t understand the point of a B-plot in an episode because there really isn’t any plot to be had.  Barry seems to have heard B-plot and thinks it just means something that the episode can cut back to that is completely different, oddly enough taking up approximately half of the episode itself.  There is barely 10 minutes of material for the B-plot, going so far as to even have a moment where it looks like Crusher has found a cure.  She feeds an ill Picard some liquid which will apparently help his symptoms and both Barry’s script and the way director Michael Rhodes shoots the scene makes it look like this is meant to be the cure.  It also feels as if the writers want to commit to a Crusher/Picard romance, except without actually ever having the pair address the romantic tension.  Picard is stuck being hoarse throughout the B-plot, barely being in the episode which would be fine if there was actually any focus on the other characters on the Enterprise.  Geordi being put into command should allow him to develop, Crusher looking for a cure should do the same, but they are both just relegated to having a function to perform.  That’s about it.  In Crusher’s case it’s probably worse because it was also her function in the equally weak “The Naked Now”, some of the dialogue being quite similar.

 

The rest of “Angel One” isn’t so much stretched, as an example of Star Trek: The Next Generation not understanding its own politics and the messages it is pushing.  “Angel One” as an episode wants to be about the apartheid in South Africa, setting up a fictional society run by authoritarian oligarchy against a group of people, subjugating and segregating them while working tirelessly to put them down.  This is a perfectly laudable idea for Star Trek: The Next Generation to do, something the original series often did with both good and bad results, and something that seems obvious to comment on in 1988.  If we take this episode purely as a commentary on apartheid, ignoring almost any other aspect of the episode itself, its ending something framed as the best possible left forward puts the people who are meant to represent those fighting back against the oppression being put into exile.  Riker even ends the episode with a smile on how great a situation this is, because the anti-apartheid inserts could have been executed by the authoritarian regime and were only saved in the end not through direct action but because Riker is good in bed (more on that later) and because one of the oppressors is in love with one of the oppressed.  Now, the idea of romance between oppressor and oppressed is a framework for storytelling that is a tricky needle to thread at the easiest of times, West Side Story is a story that is perhaps the most interesting way of making it work because of the gang violence framework.  This episode does not thread that needle, something that shouldn’t really be expressed because it’s treated as a twist, again about halfway through, and the supporting characters are not really fleshed out characters despite there literally being only four of them.

 

I’ve been dancing around the other aspect of the episode that makes an episode that has already largely fallen apart to fall apart and be on about the same level as “Code of Honor” in terms of how it doesn’t work.  Apartheid was based on race.  “Angel One” decides to draw the lines of the authoritarian regimes on lines of sex.  Angel 1 is a matriarchy, the men are the ones who are oppressed, being forced to wear sexually revealing episodes (by 1980s television standards).  Patrick Barry is clearly a man who knows how to write men, but hampering the episode is actually the guest cast in general.  None of the four can actually act, and for once it doesn’t seem to be Michael Rhodes’ poor direction, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, Marina Sirtis, and Denise Crosby are doing fine with the poor material even if they clearly are hating it.  The matriarchy of the episode is poorly defined, men are literal servants yet aren’t given any inner life or characterization.  The ‘sexism’ of the society is reduced to the simplest sexist talking points about how one sex basically needs to be providers and doing all the duties, the leader having to be taught that the right way is to share the duties.  It’s basic egalitarianism, I’d say feminism but the script feels more like what an online anti-SJW would argue for circa 2015/2016.  The episode is also really strict in exploring gender roles, to the point of coming across as subtly homophobic.  Riker puts on one of the men’s outfits for diplomacy’s sake and is ridiculed for it, the implication being that it makes him less of a man.  I say homophobic because the outfits are clearly meant to be coded as queer, and therefore lesser in what the episode is presenting.  At least Riker as a character is totally confident in wearing it, partially making it a shame that explicitly making the character bisexual would not happen (he could have been an icon).

 

Overall, I’m going to put as much effort into concluding this review as “Angel One” did in making it.  If it could go wrong, it did, and this is clearly the fault of a writer that like “Code of Honor” the cast tried stepping in to stop but failed utterly.  1/10.