In the fourth episode of the third season of Enterprise, well, this turned out well for almost no one. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.Â
Trigger Warning: For discussion of stereotypes/tropes surrounding sex work, queerbaiting, consent, slavery
Oh, this was a lot. I’ll admit upfront that I was shocked by the continuity and serialization in “Rajiin,” which initially dealt with the ramifications from “Extinction” in a way that we have rarely seen in Trek. For an episode so self-contained, I expected that we’d not see the after-effects of Archer’s time after metamorphosing into another species. BUT NOPE. And with the inclusion of that Xindi council throughout this story, we’re given a tale with a much larger scope than I anticipated for Enterprise.
And that’s a good thing! I can’t deny how pleased I am that it appears that the Xindi/Expanse plot is going to take up a large part of season three. Yet “Rajiin” is marred by the kind of politics I have come to expect from Trek writers, and both of the major problems in this script are impossible to ignore. Seriously! You can’t take out either issue and have the same episode unfold, and thus, my thoughts on this are complicated. It’s bold of the writers to give us an entire episode where all the protagonist fail so spectacularly. That’s compelling! And the result of that decision is a horrifying new direction for the Xindi arc: the Xindi now have enough biological data on the humans to construct a “bio-weapon” that can wipe out all the humans.
How that data was acquired, however… lord, what a mess. Rajiin could have been an interesting character, a chance for Trek to explore sex work without relying on tired tropes, and yet? That’s exactly what they did. Rajiin is a sex worker who manipulates and tricks others, who violates the consent of every crew member she comes into contact with, and who does nothing redemptive or good. She is about ten tropes wrapped into one character! She seduces everyone, though never with genuine interest in them, first of all; she is a manipulator; she relies on tricking people to get what she wants. We never learn a single thing about who she is as a person; we never learn what her life was like as a sexual slave; she exists solely to push the Xindi storyline forward and nothing else.
It’s a bizarre choice because I can see the writers trying to make her a sympathetic person in the final few scenes of the episode, but they did none of the work to guarantee that. Instead, her brief moment with Archer prior to the Xindi boarding Enterprise provides him with very little information he didn’t already have. Then, she has that outburst in front of the Xindi council, which… okay? There’s more to humans? But let’s just kill them all? Granted, I didn’t expect her to defy the people who hired her immediately, but it’s still too little too late.
And then there’s the matter of both Hoshi and T’Pol. Yet again, the writers take us to the brink of an important revelation, then refuse to commit to it because… I don’t know? There is no valid reason why Hoshi or T’Pol can’t be bisexual or pan or anything other than straight, and Rajiin’s powers are never explained at all. Can she overpower a person’s sexual desire? Is she interest in women or is it just for work? Was there some hidden desire between Hoshi/T’Pol and Rajiin? Aside from Rajiin being a manipulative asshole, she also has NO LOGIC WHATSOEVER when it comes to sexualize. Is she more like a siren? WHY DON’T THEY ADDRESS THIS? Instead, we take a different route. The show invokes the titillation of having women interact with one another for the gaze of straight men. There’s no other option here! It’s not like they have any intention to address the implications of a woman seducing other women, and on top of it all, the entire thing is also a gross violation of consent. So the next closest thing we get to an actual non-straight relationship is sexual assault.
Ugh. Do better, Star Trek. Please.
The video for “Rajiin” can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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