Podcast, Supplemental: John Billingsley Talks Phlox (And More) On All Access Star Trek

I really appreciate Laurie sharing the raw audio. Billingsley seems such and interesting and authentic person.

I’m afraid I would be an equally long answering interviewee if asked for a retrospective.

Here’s what leapt out at me.

9/11 had such a profound impact on the show just as it was about ‘grow its beard.’ I don’t think we can talk about the show’s success or not without taking that on directly.

It’s helpful that cast members like Billingsley are honest about that and discuss what that meant to them. It helps me see their perspective as artists trying to make sense of the trauma their society had experienced and the human rights violations undertaken in response to it.

It’s unfortunate though that they don’t see how off-putting that was for fans outside the United States or American fans looking for Trek to provide an aspirational, moral centre in the face of public focus on ‘‘extraordinary rendition’ and ‘enhanced interrogation.”

Billingsley clearly has an activist moral centre, but it seems he still doesn’t have the distance to see how the broader audience would have viewed that.

Enterprise could have made TOS’ choice to present moral allegories where the hero captain promotes human rights during a time of social conflict. Instead the EPs tried to make sense of their ‘exceptional’ aspirational country society making patently immoral choices. It’s as if Kirk were shown supporting discrimination during the civil rights movement.

As context, my spouse and I effectively stopped watching new American dramas for about a half decade. My spouse has an absolute red line on any entertainment that attempts to justify or condone torture. They hold fast to the belief that torture isn’t an effective way to gain actionable intelligence, and will not give views or dollars to any entertainment that implicitly accepts otherwise. (Whether to allow our now teen kids to watch Enterprise has been a debate as parents.)

We’d hoped Enterprise would be an exception. We were disappointed.

Instead of Enterprise providing a counterpoint, it was just another American drama struggling to make sense of heroic leaders making immoral choices under duress.

For those of us who already largely disliked Archer as a captain (whether the performance, direction or his performance) there was no way he could bring us along into his moral dilemmas the way Sisko did in DS9. Perhaps with a different actor and different writing in a show where we were already deeply invested, those of us outside US society might have been brought along. Instead, it was a reason to turn off the television.

All to say that, when one talks about Enterprise being underrated, one has to take into account how divisive were the creative decisions to explore the moral questions raised by the US response to 9/11 and put a hero captain on the wrong side of them.

It’s also fair to say that, with the 2010s popularity of grimdark 40K stories, it’s fairly easy to see why Trek struggled as a franchise and why it’s just seems to be hitting its aspirational stride again now.