3x13 Elaan of Troyius

[2.3/10] Once you’re within spitting distance of the end of the series, you think you’ve more or less seen the best and the worst that Star Trek can give you. You’ve seen “The Menagerie.” You’ve seen “Spock’s Brain”. Surely, everything else will fit roughly somewhere along that spectrum, right?

Then, an episode like Elaan of Troyius comes around, and you realize you have not scraped the depths of how unpleasant, backward, and frustrating the show can be. Take out your knives, boys and girls, because this is, barring some real cratering in the back half of this season, the Worst Episode Ever.

Where to begin. Let’s start with The Dohlman. I tend to think of Star Trek as being pretty inconsistent in its sexism. One episode it’ll have Kirk bedding the babe of the week and talking to her like she’s a babe in the woods, the next it’ll have a female guest character taking charge and having real agency and an inner life, and the one after that it’ll have some well-meaning outing for Uhura or Nurse Chapel where you can tell their intentions are good but the whole thing comes off patronizing. That’s the danger of inconsistency that comes from the show’s freelancing spirit.

But damn if “Elaan” doesn’t roll in every female stereotype into one frustrating package. The Dohlman is a brat. She is entitled. She is duplicitous. She is unreasonable. She is irrational. She just wants to be liked. She is unladylike. She uses her feminine wiles to interfere in real men’s business. She is bloodthirsty in that way that Star Trek seems to like its female characters to play Lady Macbeth from time to time. She is childish. She is rude. And she is, of course, dressed in a series of outfits that hardly even qualify as lingerie.

And maybe all of that could be okay. Maybe there’s a version of this show (most likely one with more women behind the scenes) where The Dohlman is a character who gets to be as flawed and difficult as your Don Drapers and Selina Meyers or, if we’re going a little more contemporary, your Bialystock and Blooms, and the show makes something of it. (A brief pitch for everyone to see Young Adult which is, in a weird way, the best version of what “Elaan” is going for.) But this is not that show, and instead, we get insulting outing after insulting out where Kirk basically goes extreme My Fair Lady on her, with insulting results.

And that’s before we even get to the racism! It’s less the episode’s focus, but make no mistake, there’s something terribly uncomfortable about Kirk calling a dark-skinned woman with braids from a foreign people a “savage” and trying to civilize her. As I say again and again in these write-ups, to some extent I try hard to set my 2017 preconceptions by the door and take a 1960s television program as I find it, but this stuff is beyond the pale.

Nevermind the fact that Kirk slaps The Dohlan to teach her some manners. Nevermind the fact that he threatens her with a spanking. Nevermind that he tells Spock that Vulcan is the only place in the universe where women are logical. Kirk’s interactions with The Dohlan are the worst kind of patronizing bullshit, the sort where the captain gets to play the beneficent and wise man of wisdom and good breeding who whips this sorry, tempestuous female into shape.

But it’s all okay, because you know what The Dohlan really wants? What she wants deep down? It’s just to be liked! Don’t you understand? All that women who dare to bristle at the minor inconvenience of essentially being sold to a foreign government as a mail-order bride is just for people to like them. Then, not only are all their problems and behavioral issues solved, but then they’ll love you, really love you.

What kills me is that there’s a really interesting story to be told here. The notion of a princess from one culture being signed up to be part of one of those diplomatic marriages to end the hostilities between warring peoples against her will raises some very interesting issues about the intersection of personal agency and notions of the greater good and the nigh-impossible task of balancing those values.

But “Elaan” isn’t really that. It’s a wily woman story, where the focus is on Kirk trying to teach her to be civil and then struggling between his duty as a Captain and his affection for her. Even if The Dohlan weren’t such a mangled, retrograde character here, “Elaan” is telling Kirk’s story more than it’s telling hers, and that’s nearly as much of a problem if this the type of story you’re telling.

In the meantime, the meat and potatoes Star Trek stuff going on in the background of all this is no great shakes either. It’s another “conspiring with the enemy” plot, where one of The Dohlan’s guards is colluding with the Klingons because he loves her and doesn’t want the marriage to happen, and of course the Klingons want the dilithium crystals that are conveniently located on the planet, and the spy transmission is coming from inside the ship. It’s all pretty standard stuff without much of a wrinkle.

There’s some minor checkmarks in the episode’s favor. The Troyian ambassador had a distinctiveness to him, both in design and demeanor. There’s some worthwhile interstellar strategizing as Kirk figures out how to fend off the Klingon ship when the Enterprise has a dwindling power supply. And the actually firefight between the two ships is reasonably cool (at least in the remastered version of the episode I saw.) But even then, the episode gets resolved on a cheesy “Captain, her necklace is made of dilithium crystals story beat.

Nevermind the fact that the entire time this is going on, The Dohlan plays the devil on Kirk’s shoulder, demanding that he give up his duties or blast the Klingons out of the sky or do whatever she demands of him because she wants him to only be devoted to her. And naturally, despite the fact that The Dohlan’s tears are supposed to make her magically (er...chemically) irresistable, Kirk ultimately proves himself immune, or at least sufficiently resistant to her charms, because he is a Great Man™ and his one true love is the ship.

Good god is the whole thing insipid. The Original Series has had it’s share of misguided episodes, or episodes with premises or values that seem backward to the modern eye. But never before has it provided an offering that so doubles down on all the retrograde perspectives, tired stereotypes, and all around shlock that “Elaan of Troyius” features. It’s a wasted opportunity, a dull forty minutes, and the absolute low point for an otherwise good show, that’s taken time out of its busy schedule to present its audience with a big hunk of crap that should have been blasted out the airlock in the first place.