Angel One (S1 ep 14)

So, I’d written this whole big thing, it was awesome. Maybe the best thing I’d ever done. And Blogger ate it. I’ve lost things on Blogger before, but nothing that stung so deep, or that has burned for so long.

In a way, I’ve lost everything. So this post, if it’s great, is a mere shadow of what it almost was. If it’s bad, well, Michelangelo couldn’t have painted the Sistine Chapel twice. Doing it once killed him.

But to pick up on the thread I started last week about my step-father and his love of shooting things… mostly people, I’ll pick up where I feel like I left off (without actually going back and checking).

A quick glance from behind the corner in the hallway laid out a grisly scene. I don’t remember seeing my step-father, I don’t know where he was standing, or sitting. I just remember seeing my mom, standing there, shaking her head at me – an indicator that now probably isn’t a good time to walk into the fray.

For me, just seeing her there was so much of a weight lifted from my chest that I could have broken down right then. To my left was his brother, lain prone on floor, blood splattered through the small trailer’s living room, and his brother’s girlfriend, screaming at the top of her lungs, shouting over and over again that he was dead.

I loosened my death-grip on the bat and tried to get a better view when my mother gave me her best ‘get the hell out of here’ look. I ducked back into the hallway and sat in the floor.

I heard my step-father’s voice again, this time on the telephone. He’d called the police. I swear this is his side of the conversation as best I can remember it:

“Hello, police? I have a man here at my house that refuses to leave. I’m gonna need you to come here and pick him up.”

Then there was the loud clang of a phone being slammed onto its receiver.

Funny how time changes things. This was before 911 was a thing, at least where we lived. If you wanted the police, you had to call the police station directly and report whatever emergency it was you were reporting. If it were a fire and you called the police department, well, they might have been able to punch you through to the appropriate folks, but I wouldn’t swear on it.

Caller ID wasn’t a thing then either, at least not that I was aware of, and it certainly wasn’t standard. I bring that up because after he hung up the phone I was acutely aware that he never gave a name, never gave an address, and the phone didn’t ring. Cops certainly didn’t show up at the house.

It was a small town. Think of Hazard County or something, where people named Cooter, or Skeeter, were pretty common. I’m not saying anything about what happened behind the scenes here was how things were across the country at the time, or were typical in any way to how something like this might have gone down otherwise… I’m just sharing my experience.

My mother, for all that was going on, acted in a way I’d never seen her before, or since. She finally got the girlfriend to stop screaming, something I’d not really noticed until she stopped. And she examined the brother.

The gun, it was a .22 revolver. Not exactly known for having the most stopping power in the history of weaponry. As was described to me later, both shots were fired from his hip, not aimed in what anyone would think of as in a meticulous manner. One of the shots hit the wall clean, without ever touching the brother. It punched a hole about five feet from the floor in the living room wall, punched out into the bathroom and exited through the ceiling.

The other bullet, well, it hit the brother square in the forehead.

But being a small caliber, and not especially at the best angle (from the hip, remember?) it broke the skin, rolled between the skin and skull for just a bit, and exited in a very bloody mess from the top of his head.

For all practical purposes, it was the messiest minor injury I’ve ever heard about.

At the time, of course, no one knew that. My mother rushed to inspect the injury, she put the brother’s girlfriend to work getting items necessary to clean up the mess on his head so they could get a better view and all round did a great job of making sure things didn’t get even worse. She treated him as well as she could for a few minutes until I heard him begin to talk.

In the end, a very drunk man walked out of our trailer, shot right in the forehead from a distance of no more than 6 feet, and never bothered to seek medical treatment.

He was fine.

And this was, not by a million miles, even close to the worst thing my step-father did. He stood right there and tried to kill a man, his own brother, and his best friend. And nothing more than luck kept him from murdering that man in cold blood.

So flash forward a few years to when I’m a senior in high school, the incident above was by no means forgotten, but a brief stint as an upright citizen afterward convinced my mother that the events of that night were an all-time low point for us all. My step-father had begun drinking rather heavily again soon after, but the will she had to leave him and raise a kid alone, again, probably made her decision for her.

So, as a senior, with my step-father out, and me, all alone in our haunted house (well, in a house next to the haunted cemetery) was watching Star Trek late at night when Angel One came on.

I remember this show so well for a couple of reasons. First, I had quite the crush on the actress that starred as the head of the planet the Enterprise visited that week. And second, my teenage memory of this episode was that it was a planet where women ruled and men were subservient. That is, until Riker showed up and made sweet love to the government official so well that they were ready to abandon their beliefs and accept men as their equals.

Turns out, upon my most recent rewatch, that my plot synopsis was off, albeit not by that much.

To run through this quickly (Because blogger ate my rant I’d already prepared), the Enterprise is hot on the trail of a vessel that crashed into an asteroid 7 years prior and may have had some survivors make it to the planet of Amazonian women and mousy men. Riker beams down with the away team and is incensed that he’s not respected just because he’s a man.

So he decides to dress like a man-whore and seduce this world’s leader while the Enterprise gets a disease of the week (a virus that come from nowhere but smells a lot like Klingons?) and helps find the surviving members of wrecked space vessel.

Turns out those survivors don’t want to leave, they’ve found that being a manly man on a world of mousy men makes them pretty hot. They’ve got women galore and don’t plan on going anywhere. Through some ridiculous interpretation of the Prime Directive, Riker might be court-martialed if he doesn’t let the men (who are officially being hunted by the government as criminals for demanding men’s rights) stay on the planet.

Sigh. I mean, they’re not allowed to interfere in the politics of primitive worlds, but if a Federation citizen goes to a primitive world and wreaks havoc with the internal politics there the Prime Directive says that the Federation can’t remove their own citizens from that world if they don’t want to go.

Add to that that if caught they all face the death penalty, and you’ve got a recipe for an extremely sexist, stupid, and illogical story.

Some thoughts:

• My original lost was pretty long, but since blogger ate it, and I’m reconstructing this from memory, and not my notes, I’ve got a real opportunity to get things wrong. And also to be very short.
• Riker really dresses like a man-whore, not a real gigolo or anything, but like… well, just look at the pictures.
• I had a hard time figuring out initially why I thought this episode was so sexist, so I tried to

  

  No way a woman can resist? Am I right?

  replay the plot with the genders reversed and it felt equally sexist. I still have a hard time articulating exactly why it’s so bad, but it is. Riker’s whoring alone is bad enough, but throw in the ‘we don’t meddle but we won’t help either’ thing they try to pass off as being some sort of enlightened worldview is beyond stupid… dammit, I need another word… Imbecilic?
• I’m not sure about this, but it’s either the holodeck that makes everyone sick, or it’s that throwaway line about kids of a fieldtrip that started it all. Either way, it doesn’t seem that serious of an illness. Basically, that disease was stupid, and since I’ve been watching so many episodes (I’m well into season 2 at this point) I’ve noticed that mystery illnesses pop up a lot. It’s stupid. I wish they’d quit doing these. Or at least hire someone that has a high school level of understanding about how infectious diseases work. Because this is pretty awful. 
• That said, I don’t know how diseases work very well either. But I bet my bullshit can at least sound slightly better coming out of someone’s mouth.
• How stupid was the disease thing? EVERY member of the crew came down with it... EXCEPT for Dr Crusher. Clearly, the person most exposed to the virus can't get ill because if she got sick then no one could cure the disease as soon as the away team needed to get their storyline wrapped up.
• I'm really bummed about losing my previous version of this post, as it had tons of notes I'd made. Stupid Blogger.

So, I was watching this documentary on the season 2 blu-ray release of TNG and, while it was a bit vague, it was strongly implied that Gates McFadden was asked to leave the show at the end of season one. She'd apparently complained about how sexist some of the scripts were and was shown the door. In an interview with her she pointed out this particular episode and mentioned that she'd complained about it to the point that Patrick Stewart called the producers and convinced them to change some of the dialog. 

My takeaway... that means that I saw the de-sexistized version of this episode. Holy Jeebus! It must have been about women in bondage or something before. Because I was offended.

My rating?

0 out of 5