I will always stand by "Angel One" because it did something that later Trek couldn't: take a realistic look at the fight for equal rights for both sexes.
I appreciate it for what it wants to do, but it's not without its share of stumbles and clunky moments...
It's imperfect, but - if engaging enough - it will make the audience think in different and new perspectives. If it falls flat, then you'll have YT reviews like from Lorerunner making other observations, and they wouldn't necessarily be wrong either. The real trick is to get viewers to put themselves in the place of the side they're not on and induce empathy, which can be done just as easily as creating a fictional environment as it does any contemporary soap opera. Well, the former takes more genuine talent for sci-fi when other planets and humanoid species are involved, but it's definitely not insurmountable. Regardless, it always boils down to
show vs tell. I've seen other sci-fi work far better for
show vs tell. Some British sitcoms from the 1990s do a far better job of showing issues. "Angel One" is toward the "tell vs show" side of the scale, but it's not entirely awful. Just clunky. It's also the same story that treats the sexism issue as glossed-over and vague as how the magical infection started, but individual scenes and set-pieces do sell the concept well enough.
But I digress.
The plight of Ramsey and his crew, as told by Ramsey, goes right back to the vague glossing over of so much potential. Instead of paraphrasing, I'll just borrow from the transcript:
RAMSEY: Five months in a rescue pod no bigger than this room is an eternity I hope none of you will ever have to face. When we finally made it here, we thought we'd died and gone to heaven. You've seen the women of the planet. They're tall and strong and lovely. But after the newness wore off, we started to see how the men were treated. There's no votes. There's no opinions. There's no respect.
That's virtually no different than meeting your future abusive ex from a dating website, save for changing one or two words if/as needed. (Never mind, the episode starts out with a long overdue visit - the seven year thing is a bit unusual, and for the claim of 20th century flapdoodle their disintegration machine is nothing of the sort anyone came up with in the 20th century - except for sci-fi plot trappings, but I digress.)
Add to that:
Captain's log, supplemental. Our away team has beamed down to an unusual matriarchal society where the female is as aggressively dominant as the male gender was on Earth hundreds of years ago. Here, the female is the hunter, the soldier, larger and stronger than the male. An arrangement considered most sensible and natural.
Tell vs show.
The episode doesn't fail due to trying, but it definitely is clunky - and told at a 5th grade level, at best, mand ost 5th graders aren't going to have any more of a clue about that than they might for basic Calculus. Not just because of "unusual" implying a rather small total quantity. (also note: "Lonely Among Us" goes after vegetarians vs meat eaters, with no real point apart from having someone from each side how each side says the other is barbaric... except we get the Antican and Human griping over that, not the Selay - which would have elevated the point, much less begin to show one with some depth to it. Oh, the end of the episode is a bizarre ha-ha moment where it's revealed an Antican ate one of the Selay.)
Especially when they didn't show how men in their "arrangement" under the conditions that Ramsey was claiming, leading to hiding in some rocks where Mistress Beatta knew, right on cue, where to find the lot of them and without the means of the technically-advanced
Enterprise. Now, we see the end result with them there in their clean and polished glory, sure, but not the in between stuff that would add the needed weight to the story's cause. It's storytelling by numbers. At least that not-a-20th-century-thingy death chamber plot device is painless and apparently merciful. The episode glosses over so much. Among other questions, just how many men break the law just to get a nice painless easy death? The story is still clunkier than a Model-T that's a century behind its oil change.
In the end, superficially told or otherwise, the episode still engenders thought and isn't in the "total stinker" pile, though "Justice" also has some similar "cool idea let down by a bad rewrite and production" and it's definitely lower on most viewers' lists than "Angel One" is. The story is definitely trying, but it easily could have been a lot more effective.
Never mind the Data subplot - with adds some zest to his calculating how much time Dr Crusher had but, right on cue, she finds the solution in just the nick of time, now cue end credits. This plot rushing wouldn't have been as much a quibble, had the time the script spent on the main issues came across with more deftness, poignancy and piquancy.
That said, I've rewatched "Angel One" far more times than season five examples such as "Ethics", where they do sell the plight of Worf's condition from both sides but then get far more glib than any season one story could ever have begun to have dreamt of. So it's not
that bad.
(P.S. Barclay at least didn't run off when he got the same treatment, and y'all know that Barclay was pretty much expressing what everyone else was... season 3 rocks. In terms of characterization and plotting, not for the use of rocks during battle scenes and thankfully nobody got bebopped on the head by one...)
