Star Trek: Enterprise Rewatch: “The Expanse”

An unexpected, violent, brutal attack on Earth leads to Enterprise coming home, getting a major refit, and heading off into a dangerous region of space to find the people responsible. It’s an embarrassingly clumsy 9/11 analogy that has aged really badly in the two decades since. The Enterprise Rewatch heads into “The Expanse.”

An excerpt:

Watching this episode was incredibly painful, as it was a reminder of just how unbearably stupid we as a country were in the first few years of the millennium.

I live in New York City, and I still remember the events of the 11th of September 2001 with awful clarity: sitting on the couch in my living room, Channel 5 on the TV, observing the events unfold, hoping that my then-girlfriend would make it home from her midtown office to our apartment in the Bronx.

But I also remember the subsequent weeks, months, years, as we embraced the most imbecilic macho idiocy, as air travel became a ridiculous circus that did precisely nothing to make anyone safer, as draconian laws were passed that served to curtail personal liberties to no good end, and as this country stupidly embraced torture as a (wholly ineffective) interrogation tool to be used against terrorists, a tactic that provided very little by way of useful intelligence. I remember the mindless patriotism, the fetishizing of the American flag, and how, in the 2002, 2003, and 2004 elections, any candidate who didn’t wave the flag and declare themselves to be patriotic and tough on terror had a hard time winning votes.

And I remember how so much of the pop culture of the time embraced this idiocy.

Even if I didn’t remember it, though, watching “The Expanse” brought it all back.