Although the Star Trek franchise is often praised for its progressive vision of the future, the very first Trek episode ever filmed, the 1964 pilot “The Cage,” did reference the idea that Orion “slave women” existed in a specific part of the galaxy, through a telepathic simulation where Captain Pike (Jeffrey Hunter) is in a kind of outer space bordello with an “Orion Slave Girl.” This problematic plot detail remained somewhat dormant until the 2005 Enterprise episode, “Bound,” in which we learned that the “enslaved” Orion women were just pretending, and were in fact, controlling the men with their pheromones. This attempt to “fix” the whole Orion thing was arguably, not much better. Instead of one group dominating another, in a sense, Enterprise merely inverted the sexism of TOS in the other direction.
