Ignoring the stolen election of 2000, George W. Bush’s presidency had been lackluster and unremarkable for most of 2001. The baseball commissioner wannabe preferred clearing brush at his ranch to paying attention to daily briefings.
You know, like the one on August 6, 2001. After getting such a briefing, just about any prior president would have thought to ask at least a couple of follow-up questions. Such as “What could we do to prevent this?” and “How soon can we start doing that?”
Then, on September 11, 2001, terrorists used airplanes to destroy the World Trade Center, kind of how the briefing suggested Osama bin Laden and the Taliban wanted to do. The hijackers also crashed a plane into the Pentagon.
The White House was also targeted, but passengers prevented those hijackers from carrying out that part of the plan. And in any case, Bush was in Florida, reading My Pet Goat, demonstrating reading skills vastly superior to Trump’s.
On that day, Bush was transformed into a man of purpose. Unfortunately, that purpose was an ill-advised war in Iraq, squandering international goodwill for America. And some would argue the war in Afghanistan was also a bad idea.
Star Trek: Enterprise in its first season could also be said to be lackluster and unremarkable. The two-hour premiere first aired on September 26, 2001, but its script had obviously been written well before then, maybe the year prior.
The Suliban were inspired by the Taliban, but this was essentially a trivia tidbit as far as the general public was concerned. If anything in the series premiere spoke to the feeling of anxiety at that time, it would have been a coincidence.
The first obvious response to 9/11 on Enterprise came with the Season 2 finale cliffhanger, “The Expanse,” in which the Xindi attack Earth with a weapon that kills millions in a path from Florida to Venezuela.
That episode first aired on May 21, 2003, two months after the new war in Iraq started, with the fate of Osama bin Laden still a mystery.
Note that the swath from Florida to Venezuela includes a good bit of the Caribbean Sea. For the Xindi, attacking sea life is as important as attacking land life. It’s cute how the writers thought Florida will still exist as land in the year 2153.
Anyway, the Enterprise’s mission of peaceful exploration gets put on hold and the crew is dispatched to the Delphic Expanse to find out more about the Xindi and do what they can to prevent another attack against Earth.
And so Star Trek: Enterprise became a show of purpose. Showing the beginnings of the Federation was presumably not exciting enough for males 18 to 35. A fight for the very survival of humanity, now that’s a show, at least as far as studio executives are concerned.
But Enterprise was still, like the previous Star Trek series, a show about ideas. With the Xindi storyline, that came to include how a more evolved humanity deals with a horrific attack that makes us want vengeance.
The motivations for the Taliban were quite different from the motivations of the Xindi, of course. The Xindi think that for some reason Earth will attack them in the future, so they attack Earth first as a pre-emptive strike.
Nothing to do with Earthican imperialism. The choice of target for the Xindi weapon was probably dictated by which way the Earth happened to be facing when the weapon arrived, and the requirement to include both land and sea.
The primary target for the 9/11 hijackers, on the other hand, was the World Trade Center, a symbol of America’s economic imperialism. And the Pentagon is of course a symbol of America’s military power.
The impact of 9/11 on the Star Trek movies is a little more difficult to assess. Star Trek: Insurrection came out in 1998, and the rather forgettable Star Trek: Nemesis came out in 2002. Both were with the Next Generation crew.
I guesstimate that principal shooting for Nemesis took place in 2001, so that the script was most likely written well before August 6, 2001.
For some strange reason, Patrick Stewart (who plays Captain Picard) around that time seemed very concerned about Saddam Hussein. Maybe almost as much as Bush.
The next Star Trek movie, the first one with Chris Pine as Captain Kirk directed by J. J. Abrams, came out in 2009. Saddam Hussein had been captured and executed. Osama bin Laden was thought to be somewhere in the Afghan mountains, or maybe in Pakistan.
The next J. J.-verse Star Trek movie, Star Trek: Into Darkness, was a very exciting movie when I watched it the first time. But as I’ve thought about it more over the years, I find the plot makes almost no sense, and I’m not alone in that.
From the first viewing I understood Into Darkness as a 9/11 allegory touching on themes of terrorism and vengeance. That’s an aspect I still see in it, one of the few redeeming qualities in a movie not otherwise meant to be the subject of philosophical discussion.
When the terrible Enterprise series finale aired, the consensus among critics was that the franchise needed to lie fallow for a few years. There wasn’t another television series until Star Trek: Discovery premiered a couple of years ago.
Usually for these Star Trek open threads I ask for circumspection regarding Star Trek: Discovery. However, for this open thread topic, it is essential to discuss Discovery, so far the only Star Trek series entirely produced in the post-9/11 era.
So spoiler-phobes who are planning to see Discovery for the first time, be forewarned that some of the comments on this open thread may contain “spoilers” for the first three seasons.
On weeknights and on Sunday nights, the Heroes & Icons (H & I) digital TV channel airs five Star Trek episodes, one from each of the previous series except for the animated series. Perhaps none of the episodes slated for tonight have any connection to this open thread topic.
For the original series, “The Changeling”; Next Generation, “Identity Crisis”; Deep Space Nine, "Nor the Battle to the Strong”; Voyager, “Survival Instinct”; and Part 2 of the Enterprise pilot, “Broken Bow”, which introduced the Suliban.
On Wednesdays, H & I airs nine episodes of JAG, a show that, like Star Trek: Enterprise, started production before 9/11. Both shows ended in 2005. Today’s JAG episodes all aired in the last three months of 2001, and I think they were all written before September, for the most part.
However, the JAG episode reran at noon, “Guilt,” showed some awareness of 9/11 because the producers made sure to clarify that the fictional story takes place on August 2001. Without that clarification, viewers might have thought the episode was inspired by 9/11. This also goes for a few of the later episodes.
The main plot concerns Marine lawyer Lt. Colonel Sarah MacKenzie (Catherine Bell) going to Indonesia to deal with a Marine who allegedly raped a local girl. The people protest at the gates of the American consulate (identified by an onscreen title as the “American consolate”).
MacKenzie gives up her wedding ring as bail for the alleged rapist and brings him back to the consulate and confronts him with evidence of his guilt. Soon after that, the people overrun the consulate and the Marines call for a helo extraction.
The stateside plot concerns the defense of Lt. Commander Keegan (Christopher Birt), who killed a man aboard a plane in flight. The defense argues the dead man was trying to crash the plane, and so, by killing one man, Keegan saved 139 lives.
The prosecution argues Keegan was drunk and looking for a fight. That this JAG episode had to do with a prevented plane crash was probably as much a coincidence as the Suliban on Enterprise being named after the Taliban.
The World Trade Center is explicitly mentioned in “Redemption,” a JAG episode that first aired October 30, 2001, but it was a fleeting mention; it could have been a quick rewrite before or during shooting. JAG probably had a shorter lead time than Star Trek: Enterprise.
Some see Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as prescient of 9/11. For example, Dominic Nardi writing for Pop Matters:
By the time Star Trek: Enterprise attempted to address post-9/11 issues, such as terrorism and torture, the show's ratings had plummeted and the franchise seemed headed for a hiatus.
In a sense, however, we did get a post-9/11 Star Trek; it just happened to air long before 11 September 2001. As blogger Darren Mooney states on TheM0vieblog, "Deep Space Nine arguably speaks perfectly to the War on Terror and post-9/11 anxieties." The show proved eerily prescient about terrorism, religious extremism, and domestic surveillance.
The overall arc of Deep Space Nine is about Bajor having overthrown Cardassian oppression worrying about trading that for Federation oppression.
The viewers know that the Federation means well, but that doesn’t shield Starfleet and the Bajoran provisional government from terrorist attacks.
One episode that really makes people comment on the show’s prescience of 9/11 is “Paradise Lost.” Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) is put in charge of Starfleet Security on Earth.
Worried that changelings, like Odo (Rene Auberjonois) but better at taking humanoid form, could impersonate Starfleet officers or their relatives, Sisko institutes a policy of blood screenings.
The captain’s son, Jake (Cirroc Lofton), goes along with it, but his father, Joseph (Brock Peters) refuses. Joseph accidentally cuts himself with a kitchen knife, and Benjamin stares intently at the blood on the knife.
Joseph says that the changelings have gotten Ben so mixed up and paranoid that Ben sees changelings everywhere. Furthermore, a changeling could kill a human, extract blood and store it, ready to provide it at the next screening.
Some existing measures could have helped prevent 9/11. But some of the measures taken after 9/11 seem silly and pointless, giving fodder for late night comedians. Hopefully the post-9/11 measures have been effective, but maybe some of them are as easily defeated as the blood screenings on Deep Space Nine.
The main question for this open thread is: How did 9/11 change Star Trek? And to a lesser extent, how did 9/11 change our perception of Star Trek episodes and movies produced prior to 9/11?