11001001
“11001001” is not a good episode. It fails on multiple levels. Its character work is counter-productive; we may learn more about Riker over the course of the story, but it’s hard to believe anyone ended up liking him more. The plot is riddled with contradictions in those places it hasn’t been shot through with holes – why does Minuet try to stop Riker from leaving the holodeck when the Bynars had kept him on the ship precisely to help out if needed? Who decided starships should be fitted with self-destruct devices with timing systems less flexible than the one I have on my microwave? How many starship combat seminars did Picard skip if he thinks two people using a turbolift as cover is less sensible than beaming into the middle of the bridge and hoping only one of them gets shot? Then there’s the multiple moments of infuriating ugliness, most obviously Riker’s skin-crawling PUA run at Minuet (and we’ll be coming back to that, naturally).
What’s really frustrating, though, is how close the episode comes to saying something worth defending. There’s an attractive vision of the future that almost arises from the assorted chaos. It never quite resolves, though. The lens through which we’re viewing it is too smeared with filth. “11001001” isn’t a virtue-free disaster. It’s something worse, a foul-smelling swamp that has drowned a genuinely good idea.
Obviously, this not going to be among my more positive posts. Given that, let’s at least start with the best part of the episode. Like a praise sandwich, only I could only scrounge up one piece of bread. Praise toast, if you will.
Let’s eat.
The Fallacy Of The Excluded Middle
The high point of “11001001” is unquestionably the Bynars. There are so many different things to like about them. Their design is great, for one – an obvious refutation of the idea that Trek only ever bothered with forehead prosthetics and oddly-shaped ears. The weird vertical mohawks on either side of their necks in particular is the kind of delightful flourish that makes a design memorable.
Their social set-up is just as interesting. A culture that constantly uploads/downloads information to each other via a gigantic central computer? That has bought into the advantages of digital information so totally, they’ve restructured their own language around it? I love it. It’s a massive shame this isn’t explored, and that we never see the Bynars again (I think they got a name check in Season 2 of Lower Decks?), but I’m willing to give the episode credit for the few fascinating glimpses we get of the idea.
But the best is still to come. The true genius of the Bynars as a concept stems from their total dedication to binary values, not just as a way of processing information, but as a structure for their reality. They’re so completely sold on the necessity of the digital that they don’t just travel everywhere in pairs, but the names they give each other in those pairs are complements of each other – Zero-One and One-Zero, One-One and Zero-Zero. Given that, it’s tremendously interesting that not only are the Bynar pairs not presented as one man and one woman, but Quineteros explicitly states that the Bynars don’t have genders in the way Riker conceives of them.
It’s worth thinking on that for a moment. This is a race in which everything that can possibly be reduced to a binary has been. And yet that explicitly doesn’t include gender. Which is simply delightful. The galaxy’s foremost authorities on binaries have spoken. Not only are the Bynars themselves presented as non-binary (by the perhaps crude device of hiring women to play them and then electronically deepening their voices). It’s that the species in the galaxy that would have the most reason to embrace the binary gender model if it had any value have clearly rejected it. The experts on digital systems have rejected gender as being an example of such.
(Nor is this an argument that ultimately science will render such distinctions meaningless. For all their skill at exchanging information, the entirety of the Bynars’ world-computer is comparatively simplistic enough for the Enterprise-D to upload and store. It’s clear the Federation is more technologically advanced than the Bynars. It’s on a completely different plane that they clearly have a lot of catching up to do.)
From here there’s a potential route to an actual redemptive reading of the episode. All it requires is believing all the romantic dialogue being spouted by Riker and Picard in this episode is meant to be toe-curling, corny dross. It’s an appealing idea – clearly Riker considers himself a smouldering sex-muffin, and Picard has convinced himself he’s a philosopher of romance, wise in the worldly ways of women, but that doesn’t require us to assume that the episode concurs.
We could even nod to the setting as further evidence. We’re watching Picard and Riker simulate a trip into the distant past, remember (and Riker wanting to visit a bar in 1958 is equivalent to us wanting to check out a tavern in the early eighteenth century). Perhaps this is supposed to underline what their treatment of Minuet already suggests, that both of them are stuck in a desperately and pathetically outdated approach.
And then along come the Bynars, a rejection of western assumptions around the nature of gender, and by extension, gender norms. While Riker has made a literal woman-object, and Picard is perfectly happy to play along if it allows him a sounding board for his mansplaining of romance, the newcomers are busy demonstrating the two men can’t even conceive of women properly, never mind understand him. We should note at this point that this quiet New Orleans bar isn’t just outdated from the characters’ perspective. It’s outdated from ours.
Unsurprisingly, this is a reading I find pretty tempting. The only problem is: none of it actually works. Riker is simply too unpleasant in too many directions here. It’s impossible to believe his treatment of Minuet was written to be intentionally distasteful so as to make a point; not when he’s a jerk to pretty much anyone who crosses his path.
Will To Win (AT SUCKING)
That’s not to say Riker isn’t at his worst here while on the holodeck. That’s impossible to deny. He specifies his preferences for Minuet like he’s being picky about his pizza toppings, and when his order arrives he compliments the Bynars on their programming skills like they’ve sent him a strip poker app. He concludes both that Minuet is incomparable and that her post-Bynar replacement a terrible letdown before either of them have even moved, much less said anything. Even his description of his musical instrument of choice as a “bone” irritates – it’s an established nickname for the trombone, but not one generally deployed without full understanding of the hilarious innuendo thereby tapped into. Forgive the bluntness of my phrasing, but this is all about Riker wanting to create a woman to order, so that he can impress her with his dick.
The fact that this is almost certainly Riker’s nadir shouldn’t prevent us from noting how bad he is elsewhere, however. There’s barely a single interaction he has with anyone not a white human male in which he doesn’t come off badly. He can’t tell when Worf is joking about taking a friendly sports game ludicrously seriously. He’s dismissive of Data’s early attempts at self-expression through art. He makes a joke about his blind subordinate trying to help someone paint, a comment Geordi clearly doesn’t appreciate.
(This gets especially interesting when you consider this is a deliberate choice on Levar Burton’s. Rather than grin widely and make it clear this is the kind of interstellar ribbing Geordi is entirely happy with, Burton plays him as unimpressed. Which a) is clearly the right decision given what we see in the rest of the episode, b) further damages Riker by making clear how happy he is to punch downwards, and c) means even one of his own co-stars couldn’t see their way to helping Frakes boost his impact on the show through this self-evident turkey.)
And then there’s the Bynars. By the Holy Rings of Betazed, Riker’s attitude to and behaviour with the Bynars stinks. When first meeting them he insists on addressing his questions about them to Commander Quinteros [1], rather than the Bynars themselves. He’s openly suspicious of them whilst they work on the bridge, despite Wesley – entirely correctly – pointing out he might just be reacting to nothing more than cross-species variances in behaviour. Perhaps worst of all, at least from the position of trying to frame this as an intentional take on the limitations of the gender binary, Riker is explicitly told by Quinteros that the Bynars “aren’t gentlemen”, and yet still insists on referring to them that way, even while praising them. It almost goes without saying, but no episode in which a main character chooses to misgender another character without challenge or consequence can easily be framed as endorsing a rethink on gender roles.
Names, Numbers, And Nonsense
One could argue that “11001001” doesn’t completely let Riker off the hook. Certainly, one of the episode’s unambiguously triumphal moments comes when Picard, with Riker stood beside him, ask the Bynars why they didn’t just ask the Federation for assistance, and they simply reply: “You might/have said no”.
And obviously, they’re right. Their entire species was at stake, after all. Why should they ask for help humanity (and no matter how diverse the Federation is claimed to be in theory, it still represents humanity for any and all allegorical purposes) and just hope we’re in a good mood that day? Humanity, to put it mildly, does not have an encouraging track record when it comes to helping out those who are different. This is a pretty strong point to make in general, but it takes on even more weight when directed against Riker (and Picard, who is professionally responsible for his first officer’s conduct). I mean, how completely unsurprising it is that the guy who couldn’t even be bothered to get the Bynars’ pronouns can’t grasp why they weren’t sure they could trust him to help save their world. Of course Riker and Picard struggle to grasp the concept that not everyone who meets them considers them their heroes.
And since I’ve brought up the topic pronouns, let’s take a quick look at the proper nouns, too. I briefly mentioned the Bynars’ names already, but let’s consider them in a little more detail. It’s not just the fact they form complementary pairs that’s interesting. Between them, they also represent all four combination of two binary digits. Our standard decimal system gives us a hundred two digit numbers – if we write zero as 00 and, say, seven as 07 – but in binary, four is all you get. This example demonstrates a more general truth; there are always fewer binary numbers of any specific length than decimal numbers of that same length. The number seven billion, for instance – the rough number of human beings on Earth right now – is expressed in decimal as 7 000 000 000. In binary, it’s 11 010 000 100 111 011 100 001 100 000 000. You’d need binary numbers of thirty-two digits in order to give every person on our planet their own unique numerical code.
All of which is to say, 10, 01, 11 and 00 can’t possibly be the Bynar engineers’ actual names. They’re fulfilling some other purpose. This becomes important in the final act, when Picard and Riker are desperately searching for a specific file that can save the day. Picard notes the file’s name should be obvious – the Bynars want it to be found. Data meanwhile points out they should be looking for an eight- or sixteen-digit binary number. The absolutely obvious conclusion is that it’s going to be some combination of the four names the Bynars have used to express themselves. That’s twenty-four combinations at most.
So what does Riker do? He just starts running through every one of the 256 eight-digit binary numbers until he stumbles on the correct one. This is the equivalent of wanting to send your colleague Muhammad an email, and searching every iteration of the name in the company address book because you never learned how they personally spell it. It’s racism expressed through permutation.
As nice as this implicit criticism might be to see, however, it remains just that: implicit. Riker is left to drift on oblivious (though I’m pretty sure the Bynars deleted Minuet because they realised he was a jackass who didn’t deserve her). It’s not enough to save the episode, then. We still can’t even assemble a praise sandwich, though it might be possible to sprinkle our toast with breadcrumbs.
Ultimately, we’ve been here before. This isn’t the first story that grasps at something worthwhile, only to sink beneath the surface, weighted down by its own failures. It’s true that this is still a genuine improvement on some of what we saw earlier in the season, but that says much more about how bad the fertiliser smelled than how green these early shoots of promise are.
We’ve waited long enough. It’s time for a real sign of progress. And lucky us, on Tuesday we’ll get one.
Ordering
3. 11001001
[1] “Quinteros”, because he’s the fifth person involved. Get it?