10 Times Star Trek Should Have Known Better

Trip helps an alien without status learn to read, form self-reliance, and even choose a name. The alien is then forced back into servitude, takes their own life, and Trip is held responsible. End of episode. 

The tone of Cogenitor is a wild swing for the fences and one that makes Captain Archer seem obstinate to the point of pigheadedness. The Vissians require a third participant to have children, with mothers and fathers engaging a Cogenitor to produce a baby. These Cogenitors are rare, but also have no status in society. They simply exist, moving from couple to couple, doing their job until they die. 

That is, until one Vissian ship encounters Enterprise. Then, after meeting Trip, the Cogenitor begins to want more from their life. They go so far as to choose a name - Charles - and eventually ask for asylum. The Vissian couple with whom they were paired are furious. From their point of view, they did everything correctly, and have now lost the ability to have a child until they can find another cogenitor. Rather than grant Charles asylum, however, Archer sends them back to their people. With no options left, they take their own life, and Trip is called to Archer’s ready room.

Archer berates him heavily, telling him not to interfere in the workings of other alien cultures. Trip is devastated, feeling personally responsible for Charles’s death, a notion that Archer does nothing to deny. It is a deeply unsettling episode, one that is not helped by the slightly forced reference to the Prime Directive thrown in as an easter egg toward the end. Playing around with suicide for shock value is something that rarely lands the way the writers intend and using it to send Trip into a guilt spiral is hardly any better.