Newsgroup: it.fan.startrek
Titolo: enterprise-stigma SPOILER!!!

recensione (non mia) dell'episodio stigma :-))
spoilerissimo
ovviamente
per
quanto
riguarda
enterprise
SPOILER
SPOILER
"Stigma"
Summary: T'Pol gets a disease from a mind-meld. Archer gets
self-righteous. Trip copes with sexual harassment in the workplace.
And we learn that the Vulcans are a really evil bunch of people in
comparison to the enlightened and noble humans.
Anyone who has ever had to sit through a well-meaning but disastrous
Star Trek episode like "Let This Be Your Last Battlefield," "Angel
One" or "Critical Care" knows that the quality of an episode does not
necessarily correlate with the seriousness of the political issue it
tries to address. In this case Rick Berman and Brannon Braga have
produced a sequel to the embarrassing "Fusion" that goes where 21 Jump
Street and Touched by an Angel have gone before.
Social relevance has always been part of Star Trek's legacy, but it's
hard for Star Trek fans to deny that the emphasis tends to be on the
'been' as explicit social commentary is something that is mostly in
Star Trek's past. "Stigma" will do little to change that perception as
it is neither ground-breaking or relevant, but a case of Enterprise
tackling an issue that was tackled by TV shows that wanted to be
'edgy' in the 80's and 90's. Such an episode might have been timely
had TNG shot Gerrold's AIDS script; today Enterprise is just the last
guest at a wedding and has nothing to add that an afterschool special
on the same subject wouldn't have said. Indeed the only way for
"Stigma" to be as important and ground-breaking as Berman, Braga and
the UPN promo department seem to think it is would require building a
time machine and going back two decades.
Where the Original Series tackled controversial issues in new ways,
Enterprise spools out a by-the-numbers episode without a trace of
subtlety that includes every possible cliche and is dated to anyone
who's watched a few episodes of ER, let alone anything more
substantial. And in a time when the real challenge of AIDS is now
focused on a global effort to fight AIDS in impoverished nations,
"Stigma" is still stuck in a time warp addressing issues that even
Touched by an Angel tackled years before. And when an issue has
already become fodder for Touched by an Angel, it's pretty obvious
that "Stigma" is a day late and a dollar short insofar as TV shows
tackling AIDS and intolerance towards homosexuality are concerned. It
is more reminiscent of celebrities holding fundraisers for key issues
that have more to do with promoting their image than with solving the
issue. "Stigma" smacks of that same self-congratulatory air that
suggests that it's more about having the producers and the audience
feel good about how enlightened they are, than about saying something
vital and meaningful about a disease that's killing millions of people
around the world.
None of this, though, is really the problem. "Stigma" may be a dull
and not particularly entertaining or interesting viewing but it is in
its continuing assault on continuity as it goes further into turning
the Vulcans into despicable and evil characters than any Enterprise
episode up until now has done, that it commits its real offense. When
Berman and Braga decided to set the next Star Trek spinoff in the past
for a Birth of the Federation scenario they decided that they would
need antagonists for their hero and flying in the face of everything
that made Star Trek work, the Vulcans were slotted to fill that role.
But if anyone had expected that the Vulcans would present obstacles
through a clash of ideas, Berman and Braga have repeatedly made the
Vulcans villainous and despicable people who act out of character and
behave in ways that decades of Star Trek tell us is entirely contrary.
Aside from T'Pol, Archer's Vulcan antagonists don't merely disagree
with him. They sink to new lows to oppose him in ways that make Archer
seem noble and the Vulcans like Ambassador Soval in "Shockwave 2," the
Vulcan elders in the Andorian Incident and now the Vulcan Doctors in
"Stigma" seem to be petty, manipulative and despicable people. Anyone
who doubts how extreme this state of affairs has become only needs to
consider that on Enterprise the Klingons have come off a lot better
than the Vulcans. That alone says it all. On Enterprise the Vulcans
are actually worse people than the Klingons.
Enterprise was supposed to showcase a raw and more undeveloped
humanity in transition to becoming the centerpiece of the Federation.
Instead the humans have become noble heroes and the Vulcans have
become spiteful villains who lie, blackmail and threaten; who are
bigots, imperialists and the villains of nearly every episode that
focuses on them. When Archer proclaims to the Vulcans that their
criticisms of humanity are not only wrong but that humans are better
people than Vulcans, you can almost hear Gene Roddenberry spinning in
his grave. When he insists that humans have gotten rid of bigotry, you
tend to wonder how they did it. With some sort of bigotry vacuum
cleaner that just sucked up all the bigotry from the planet, or maybe
some piece of technobabble molecular 'de-bigotrizing' ray?
Enterprise offers no clues in that regard or even any supporting
evidence. Indeed, by now we know a lot more about Enterprise-era
Vulcan culture than we know about its human culture, which
demonstrates yet again that Enterprise has forgotten its mandate in
favor of sweeping questions about human development under the rug.
Because it's so much easier to just put a villainous Vulcan on the
screen for the audience to hiss and boo at than to question the
morality of our heroes. And this makes Archer's claim that humans had
long abandoned bigotry all the more ironic, considering his constant
outbursts of bigotry directed at Vulcans and aliens in general. But
then "Stigma" is dedicated to the premise that the best way to come
out against gay bashing is by bashing Vulcans.
"Stigma" is a case study of an episode that demonstrates why stories
about social issues should be written by the people who actually care
about them and why Star Trek should be written by people who don't
think IDIC is the abbreviation for the name of their local phone
company. It takes a plot derivative of DS9's "Equilibrium," which also
featured a female alien crew member in danger of dying because of a
dirty secret kept by her species' doctors, grafts it onto their
perception of a socially-relevant issue gained from reruns of better
TV shows and turns it into a follow-up to the awful "Fusion;" another
Berman and Braga product. Instead of having the characters say what
they feel, they rely on having the characters deliver flat and
artificial issue-oriented dialogue that is as stylized and hollow as
any ad jingle. By the end, what's left is another episode in which
Archer gets to sanctimoniously lord it over the Vulcans who are
revealed as being more despicable than ever. Oh and there's a not
particularly amusing B-Plot involving Trip being stalked by one of
Doctor Phlox's wives who like any TV male from the 50's hasn't the
faintest idea what to do about a sexually aggressive woman.

recensione (non mia) dell'episodio stigma :-))
[cut]
un capolavoro, insomma... uno dei 10 film da portare sull'isola
deserta... :-/
E' da un po' ormai che non guardo piů ENT, ma in definitiva resta
sempre tutto come prima, trame vecchie, noiose, inutili, scontate,
copiate e mal realizzate e un vero autentico _dispetto_ della
continuity. Avanti cosě alla faccia di chi continua a sperare che poi
"tanto migliora come tutte le serie". 
-- 
                    Morgan Chane, Lupo dei Cieli
    "Tenutario" IFST official site 
http://digilander.libero.it/ifst
            "Let your concepts flow unconstrained!" ŽZC
No matter what the future holds, no matter how far we travel, a part of
        us, a very important part, will always remain here...

voy è migliorato e nessuno mi dice niente?! 8(
Certo... è finito! :-))))))
-- 
                    Morgan Chane, Lupo dei Cieli
    "Tenutario" IFST official site 
http://digilander.libero.it/ifst
            "Let your concepts flow unconstrained!" ®ZC
