The other thing that I find with the Maquis is that I think the writers were leaning very hard on the historical oppression of Native Americans to make them seem sympathetic at all. Like the first time we learn anything about the situation in the Demilitarized Zone, it's in the context of a planet settled by Indigenous Americans whom Picard has been ordered to relocate, thus automatically articulating their struggle to the Trail of Tears and other real-life episodes of genocidal colonialism.
But like...the thing about the settlers on Dorvan V is that they're settlers (i.e., textually not indigenous). They're indigenous in an ethnic American sense only. And, what's more, the text of the episode is that they settled only recently, like 20 years ago (within the lifetimes of most people living on Dorvan), and against the advice of the Federation government, who told them that it was disputed territory with the Cardassians. Moreover, they're not really living under an expropriative capitalist and racist regime like the USA or the British Empire, but under what is, textually, a generally egalitarian post-scarcity society that is entirely willing to let them settle on another perfectly good planet somewhere else. So while the subtext of the episode may be that they're indigenous peoples being relocated by a remote and indifferent government, the literal text of the episode is that they're settler colonialists who are upset that their central government is unwilling to press a war against a rival power so that they're not temporarily inconvenienced. And okay; this is one of the few times that Star Trek acknowledges that how humans react to situations will continue to be informed by history even in the future, and i can definitely see how a people who have centuries of experience being lied to and exploited by various governments would be inclined to tell the Federation to go to hell when they say they have to move again, but this is (a) an extremely contrived situation (and don't even get me started on the Jamake Highwater "we must live here because this planet is sacred to us" bullshit) and (b) doesn't textually apply to any of the other planets in the DMZ.
Anyway, to me, the Maquis seem more like American settlers whining about being denied the right settle beyond the Appalachian Mountains by the Royal Proclamation of 1763 than they do like indigenous land protectors. I find them unsympathetic.
While Journey’s End leans heavily on themes of forced relocation, I think there’s a strong context that for the rest of the Maquis and a fair amount of Starfleet the main moral outrage is ceding territory to the Cardassians. I fully and completely understand and support the Federation on this but I also understand the bitterness of buying peace with territorial concessions to a polity that got caught cheating on the cease fire, uses torture, and has at least one conflict dubbed “the (planet name) massacre” to their name.
The Federation is exercising strategic patience. On its own a war with the Cardassians is far less than existential but it’s an extra problem it doesn’t need when added to the general pile of the Romulans, instability inside the Klingon Empire, the Borg, all sorts of lesser powers that enjoy raiding, and of course escalation risk: the Cardassians when backed into a corner have all sorts of deadly options available to warp capable civilizations and if you do pound the stuffing out of them, then what? What happens to all the loose military hardware you fail to account for? Does a humiliating peace radicalize the Cardassians?
But for the Maquis the Cardassians don’t have any greater moral claim to those planets and even less of one if you aren’t of a mind do a moral relativism and tend to assume it’s bad for pillagers and torturers to win territory from the Federation. On the other hand I fully agree they have no right to expect the many to buy trouble at wholesale volumes to defend strategically worthless territory and go against the Federation ethos that peace is always worth trying even if you have to tell the families of victims that you will not be perpetuating the cycle of vengeance on behalf of the slain.
TNG and DS9 sort of had a hazy memory of the US experience in Vietnam that a war against an opponent perceived to be materially weaker by far might nevertheless bog down and turn into abject misery and horror for no satisfying conclusion.
And that might be what they were hinting at with the frequently memory holed quote of “millions of lives lost” in the Cardassian War, but when it comes to setting up the moral dilemma of the Maquis, at the very least the Maquis themselves, if not the writers, can’t quite get outside of a very 1990s mindset where war against “backwards psychos” is now awesome and easy with no real consequences. A concept that wound up causing ego to vastly exceed means….
The writers were interested in the idea of “what if a super power had to swallow an offensive peace deal for the greater good?” but didn’t have enough perspective to understand it well enough to make the Federation’s case very well.
Petrov was on overnight duty in 1983 when computers indicated the U.S. had launched a nuclear strike against his country. He had only a few
RIP to a quiet hero.
A good reminder in these times that even when powerful men act with impunity to do evil, tossing out callous orders left and right, that at the end of the day those powerful men often depend on ordinary, low-level workers to push a button somewhere, to flip a switch, to pull a trigger… and that those ordinary individuals have the power to say “no.” You can refuse to push the button, and you might save countless lives in the process.
This is a guy I've referenced quite a bit over the years in my discussion about Trek. Because Trek is a place where people like Stanislav Petrov are the heroes. The people who are willing to take a chance on being wrong rather than start a cataclysm.
Every time Picard opts not to fire first, a thing that a segment of the fandom has always decried, this is the tradition that Picard is living inside of. This is the tradition that Trek honors. You can think twice. You should think twice.
I'm not sure I ever hated the first 20 minutes of an episode of Star Trek and loved the last 20.
But there's a first time for everything.
Note from the future, I found this in my Drafts and evidently decided not to put this into the universe at the time "Four and a Half Vulcans" aired. But it seems timely in the wake of SFA's cancellation, the announcement that SNW will end after a truncated fifth season, the all but official confirmation that the TOS reboot sequel to SNW is not happening, and also the manosphere was back in the forefront of everyone's minds for a hot minute thanks to the antics of some weirdo who apparently thinks working on yourself means violently altering your bone structure? I don't know man, please don't make me be more informed about this stuff than I already have to be as an elder millennial who works in education.
I really had to shut my technobabble brain off for "Four and a Half Vulcans" and just go with it, and that was hard.
I've always found the idea that Vulcans are extremely racist uncomfortable. And I suppose its a logical (no pun intended) extension of Spock's condescending behavior towards the other humans on the crew in TOS, although a more sophisticated analysis might have unpacked whether or not this was a response to the casual bullying of the rest of the crew, and as these things tend to work out, Spock's willingness to give it back actually resulted in him bonding with the crew and causing them to sometimes do a bit of self reflection.
But DS9 and onward saddled us with "Spock was constantly chirping on the humans in the crew, therefore all Vulcans are aggressively culturally chauvinistic and actually since Spock is only half Vulcan, he's actually the most culturally sensitive Vulcan alive and not massively overcompensating."
I don't love it, but I'm at peace with it in the same way I'm at peace with my low level tinnitus. Often I forget its there, but sometimes I can't not be aware of it and it infuriates me.
As the episode moved on though, I found more and more sophisticated commentary on lack of empathy as a major liability in interpersonal relationships and a fair amount of whimsy that I genuinely enjoyed.
There's a lot of complicated meta dynamics to Una Chin Riley and Doug the Vulcan. AKA Rebecca Romijin makes puppy eyes at Patton Oswalt. Superficially, its a classic mismatch gag played for laughs but I do think there's something sophisticated there if people want to see it.
Patton Oswalt is not exactly a guy who reflects the Greek ideal of "the golden median." Rebecca Romijin was a cover girl in her youth and has, if I may be so bold, aged rather gracefully. This isn't the type of blog to speculate about nips, tucks, fillers, and skin care routines, so when I say aged gracefully, lets assume I'm talking about how she chooses to present herself.
In another era, I'd call this male nerd wish fulfillment. And maybe there's still a layer of that.
On the other hand, Oswalt out of character is generally speaking a classy guy. In an era where there are men constructing elaborate hierarchies of male desirability, Oswalt is a person who isn't "classically handsome" but presents as educated, affable, and with a well developed sense of humor. His character, Peter, is kind, respectful, and authentically interested in Riley as a complete person, not on aesthetics alone.
I'm not saying working on your personality and your manners such that it comes naturally, not as an affected lure, is a foolproof strategy for happiness. But what's the harm in trying? Also, this is not a strategy that makes you entitled to date a supermodel: find happiness in a relationship itself, in the dynamic you have with another person, and the experience of being with them.
Back to the "racist" Vulcans!
Peter and the Vulcan Commodore's willingness to reconsider Batel's character despite his seeming innate dislike for humans nicely complicated the otherwise rather concerning presentation of Vulcans in this episode.
I know that through a lot of oscillating hands the crew were actually distorted reflections of Spock's own broken relationship with being Vulcan, but it was also something I had to keep reminding myself of every time I caught myself grinding my teeth at one of the newly Vulcan crew members being over the top obnoxious.
I'm also aware that I was grousing about character arcs being the new shadow metaplot that replaces the galaxy ending crisis of the season, but I also was struck again by how Pelia doesn't really seem to be on any sort of journey this season. She's almost exclusively a comic relief character and it seems weird that the show would tap a veteran actress with quite a legacy to only be a half mad immortal hoarder with a lot of "archaic" habits and slang that just happen to almost perfectly align with that of the target audience.
I want to briefly revisit the topic of Vulcan chauvinism as its been depicted from DS9 onward.
I just rewatched TMP over the weekend. I'm on a bit of a TOS kick because I'm in the right head space to look at TOS and appreciate it for what it was trying to be and be very curious about it as a time capsule rather than being overly judgy and presentist - while still acknowledging that there are things that rightfully and properly give me the ick as a 2026 human in a WEIRD nation.
To that end, Spock's arc in TMP is incredibly relevant and interesting both as a companion piece to his characterization in Strange New Worlds and also as a reflection on Vulcans.
I've said this a lot but the Spock of SNW is actually quite consistent with how I read Spock in TOS and the TMP-era. The Spock who is violently ping ponging between cultures and whether to embrace his emotions and to what extent can very plausibly evolve into the steadier, aloof but not severely detached Spock of TOS and the Spock of the TMP era who is reserved and stoic but not uncaring or even all that chilly. He's exactly the kind of guy you want on a starship and in a crisis: he's cool as a cucumber but he's not so ultra rationalist that he can only find his morality in statistical calculations of the greatest good.
And its in TMP where Spock fails the kolinahr. I've actually mischaracterized this discussing it previously because I thought Spock consciously rejected it but actually he's about to be certified emotion free and he just sort of catches a vibe for V'Ger from interstellar distances. The Vulcan elders clock this right away and declare that kolinahr is not his path and he needs to find his answers elsewhere. That's it. That's how they frame it. He's not not a Vulcan, in their eyes he's not necessarily a failure although I use that word for simplicity, they pronounce that the path of purging all emotion is not the path for him.
And this nuance is one I think has been lost on all successive Trek writers who have handled Vulcan characters who aren't series regulars like Tuvok who intrinsically cannot be depicted as incredibly obnoxious about their culture and how they think everyone else is inferior, least the audience rightfully despise these characters. But every non-series regular Vulcan except Doug and T'Pol's dad? Including the members of the Enterprise who get Vulcanized via Spock? Insufferable cultural chauvinists. Downright racist even.
Heck, their entire story arc in Enterprise having to go from rather xenophobic to more open to other species seems based on this original sin of not realizing that Vulcans by and large were depicted as fairly non-judgmental in their original conception. I mean, wow, for all that the TNG - DS9 era really worked hard to flesh out the setting and add complexity, the Klingons became kind of dumb and the Vulcans got very racist.
To boldly bunny hop where no man has gone before I suppose....
I'm not sure I ever hated the first 20 minutes of an episode of Star Trek and loved the last 20.
But there's a first time for everything.
Note from the future, I found this in my Drafts and evidently decided not to put this into the universe at the time "Four and a Half Vulcans" aired. But it seems timely in the wake of SFA's cancellation, the announcement that SNW will end after a truncated fifth season, the all but official confirmation that the TOS reboot sequel to SNW is not happening, and also the manosphere was back in the forefront of everyone's minds for a hot minute thanks to the antics of some weirdo who apparently thinks working on yourself means violently altering your bone structure? I don't know man, please don't make me be more informed about this stuff than I already have to be as an elder millennial who works in education.
I really had to shut my technobabble brain off for "Four and a Half Vulcans" and just go with it, and that was hard.
I've always found the idea that Vulcans are extremely racist uncomfortable. And I suppose its a logical (no pun intended) extension of Spock's condescending behavior towards the other humans on the crew in TOS, although a more sophisticated analysis might have unpacked whether or not this was a response to the casual bullying of the rest of the crew, and as these things tend to work out, Spock's willingness to give it back actually resulted in him bonding with the crew and causing them to sometimes do a bit of self reflection.
But DS9 and onward saddled us with "Spock was constantly chirping on the humans in the crew, therefore all Vulcans are aggressively culturally chauvinistic and actually since Spock is only half Vulcan, he's actually the most culturally sensitive Vulcan alive and not massively overcompensating."
I don't love it, but I'm at peace with it in the same way I'm at peace with my low level tinnitus. Often I forget its there, but sometimes I can't not be aware of it and it infuriates me.
As the episode moved on though, I found more and more sophisticated commentary on lack of empathy as a major liability in interpersonal relationships and a fair amount of whimsy that I genuinely enjoyed.
There's a lot of complicated meta dynamics to Una Chin Riley and Doug the Vulcan. AKA Rebecca Romijin makes puppy eyes at Patton Oswalt. Superficially, its a classic mismatch gag played for laughs but I do think there's something sophisticated there if people want to see it.
Patton Oswalt is not exactly a guy who reflects the Greek ideal of "the golden median." Rebecca Romijin was a cover girl in her youth and has, if I may be so bold, aged rather gracefully. This isn't the type of blog to speculate about nips, tucks, fillers, and skin care routines, so when I say aged gracefully, lets assume I'm talking about how she chooses to present herself.
In another era, I'd call this male nerd wish fulfillment. And maybe there's still a layer of that.
On the other hand, Oswalt out of character is generally speaking a classy guy. In an era where there are men constructing elaborate hierarchies of male desirability, Oswalt is a person who isn't "classically handsome" but presents as educated, affable, and with a well developed sense of humor. His character, Peter, is kind, respectful, and authentically interested in Riley as a complete person, not on aesthetics alone.
I'm not saying working on your personality and your manners such that it comes naturally, not as an affected lure, is a foolproof strategy for happiness. But what's the harm in trying? Also, this is not a strategy that makes you entitled to date a supermodel: find happiness in a relationship itself, in the dynamic you have with another person, and the experience of being with them.
Back to the "racist" Vulcans!
Peter and the Vulcan Commodore's willingness to reconsider Batel's character despite his seeming innate dislike for humans nicely complicated the otherwise rather concerning presentation of Vulcans in this episode.
I know that through a lot of oscillating hands the crew were actually distorted reflections of Spock's own broken relationship with being Vulcan, but it was also something I had to keep reminding myself of every time I caught myself grinding my teeth at one of the newly Vulcan crew members being over the top obnoxious.
I'm also aware that I was grousing about character arcs being the new shadow metaplot that replaces the galaxy ending crisis of the season, but I also was struck again by how Pelia doesn't really seem to be on any sort of journey this season. She's almost exclusively a comic relief character and it seems weird that the show would tap a veteran actress with quite a legacy to only be a half mad immortal hoarder with a lot of "archaic" habits and slang that just happen to almost perfectly align with that of the target audience.
Star Trek TOS, Gender, Apoliticism, Sexism, and "Scolding"
In the wake of Starfleet Academy's cancellation and Project Hail Mary author Andy Weir's comments about hating excessive politics and moralizing in Star Trek, its perhaps unsurprising fandom was on my mind when I put on some Star Trek TOS with the intention of having something that I wouldn't feel the need to over analyze while I exercised.
Turns out my brain got reps in despite my intent to give it a rest.
"Charlie X" grabbed my attention in a way I wasn't really expecting because of both how relevant it feels to the discourse over how blunt or nuanced Trek should be in its moralizing and as a time capsule.
Heads up, this is going to go to some dark places when it comes to male / female relations. I am going to try not to be vulgar or graphic, but I'm not not going to talk about some nasty stuff either. Its going to get real real real quick after the jump.
Subtle as a Brick to the Face
If you think "NuTrek" is a blunt object when it comes to theme and moralizing, in the third ever broadcast episode of Star Trek Kirk and Spock intervene to stop a sexual assault. I know The Discourse is notorious for hyperbole, but I'm 100% serious about this. I am not being hyperbolic to oversell a point.
Literally the only argument I can think of against this is the, in my opinion, far fetched argument that due to his isolated upbringing, Charlie doesn't actually know what his intent is and I don't consider that a plausible argument given the pains the rest of the episode goes to to illustrate that he has at least some knowledge of the birds and bees if only by virtue of his computerized education or instinct. Times being what they were when this originally was conceived, I seriously doubt Star Trek could come right out and say that Charlie was attempting a sexual assault, but they depicted every part of it they could get away with and the scene is deeply unsettling in its unexpectedness. This viewer at least was under the impression this wasn't the sort of show where these things are depicted.
"Charlie X" will not win any awards in 2026 for its gender politics. It does not pass the Bechdel Test but at least in this instance TOS is not as bad as you might think and there's probably good reason Grace Lee Whitney (Yeoman Rand) regards this as one of her favorites. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Charlie_X_(episode)#Reception
Some of the negative reviews from IMDB single out the depiction of Janice Rand as only existing in this episode as an object of desire and I feel that's an extremely shallow reading that underrates her own role in attempting to assert boundaries and deal appropriately with a troubled youth with a deeply unfortunate crush. At least in this episode, Janice Rand is not an infantalized, two dimensional, or "wanton" character.
She is gentle but firm with Charlie, the socially maladjusted orphan and sole survivor of a disaster, up until it becomes clear that "gentle" isn't going to do it. However inconsistent her other depictions may be, here she is never depicted as anything but a mature, professional woman. She draws some criticism of her impatience with Charlie from some other hostile IMDB reviews, but I think she was much more understanding and for longer of Charlie than modern audiences (especially women) would likely expect or even perhaps approve of. I want to emphasize I am not criticizing people who would feel no compulsion to be charitable to a skeevy youth, tragic backstory or not: patience in these circumstances is exceptional and praiseworthy, not an expectation.
Rand is a complicated character to interpret through modern eyes. Its hard to get beyond her limited screen time in a typical episode, the miniskirt, and the very unsound for spacesuit helmets beehive hairdo. Yet, as a non-woman, I don't really fault her conduct in this episode. She's responsible and savvy when it comes to Charlie's immaturity, clocking right away that it is very reasonable that Kirk should step in to handle Charlie as both her commanding officer and a masculine figure.
For one its not her job to socialize orphans who have never had contact with a woman before and for two the very fact he has had no contact with women puts her on uncertain ground as to whether Charlie would understand or respect her. Rand doesn't know if he's intrinsically misogynistic or not, and by trying to pass him off to the Captain, she's not judging him one way or the other so much as redirecting him to someone who might be better positioned to give Charlie the direct instruction on Federation norms that he evidently did not get from his computerized upbringing.
When she later tries to introduce Charlie to a younger Yeoman, I don't think its intrinsically necessary to read this as Rand trying to play match maker. When the Yeoman is offended by Evans "rejection" of her, I took it more as being personally offended by his conduct, not necessarily an expectation that he must take to her. Rand likely thought that Kirk's intervention would be more substantive rather than Kirk being awkward about the whole thing.
In light of "Charlie X" I am in favor of an approach to reading Yeoman Rand akin to Jamie Loftus' prescription for the novel "Lolita" in her "Lolita Podcast" which is to try to lean into the notion that the novel is is both a product of its time and also the product of an unreliable narrator. Yes, the unreliable narrator part is actually, empirically, demonstrable true which means that you absolutely should be side eying everyone who thinks Lolita is a love story because they are almost certainly illiterate or just watched one of many extremely textually inaccurate films.
How this applies to Trek and Rand is that as "Charlie X" demonstrates, within the limitations of 1960s social norms, TV genre conventions, and limited screen time there is a Yeoman Rand that is hiding in plain sight that has more going on and more agency overall than merely someone who delivers reports to and sometimes flirts with Kirk. Its been 60 years, so this discourse probably already exists and I don't know about it. I hope it does. I can't be the first person to wonder aloud if dismissing Rand as merely a sex object is just leaning into the ambient sexism of the 60s and ignoring whatever efforts were made to make the most of her limited role.
Charlie Evans is absolutely what we in modern parlance would call an "incel."
While there is no explicit analogy for the Manosphere here, Charlie has spent his formative years in a kind of isolation. He has had no actual peers, most of his formal education is unsupervised and undirected via a computer, and his only socialization takes the form of ephemeral beings who don't know much about humans and cannot physically touch him.Its only at the end when these beings come to reclaim him that Evans breaks down and reveals how deeply it has affected him that until he escaped, he had never been touched by another living being. In our time, we might look upon this as a metaphor for socially awkward, touch starved young men who have no strong role models turning to computers and social networks for information and comfort and receiving in return corrupted information and validation of their own darker impulses.
Additionally, we could extend the instant gratification aspects of this phenomena to Charlie's ability to wield his powers to satisfy every need he could conceive of except for the needs he cannot articulate because of his physically and socially stunted development. And indeed, like an Incel, but also like a convenience addict, its when Charlie encounters aspects of the world he cannot actually directly control like the hearts and minds of other people, he becomes frustrated and violent.
The tone of the episode very much is against what it understands as sexism even if it doesn't use that language and if what it understands as sexism is much more narrow and blunt than modern audiences would understand. And yet, with the Manosphere breaking containment and leaking toxic sludge into mainstream discourse even this narrow and blunt definition is a finger in the eye to the likes of Andrew Tate and co.
When it comes to the debate over whether Trek should refrain from being preachy or didactic, "Charlie X" the episode is itself pretty blunt but also very subtly and perhaps unintentionally criticizes the brand of masculinity practiced by Kirk and much of the male members of the crew. This is not an overtly "toxic" masculinity, but rather it is Kirk (and everyone else besides Janice Rand) being uncomfortable with explicitly teaching Charlie about what ethical conduct is that might have contributed to Charlie going off the rails in the way that he did.
Now I'm not here to say that I myself buy into the ideal of "we just need the right words to change hearts and minds instantly" but Kirk's inability to place his reprimand of Charlie for smacking Rand's rear into a broader moral framework besides "don't" is notable. Kirk offers Charlie simple rules for life, but no "why" to help him resolve ambiguity or to explain why he should follow what almost certainly from his perspective seemed like arbitrary rules. Kirk tells Charlie you don't strike a woman because you simply don't do it, not because other people are other people with their own minds, feelings, and a right to have their own unique preferences and be free from the impositions of others.
On reflection, I am extremely curious as to what the intention was with how this was written. Was Kirk's "failure" to provide Charlie with actual ethics instead of taboos intentional and a subtle critique of authoritarian "just do it" parenting or was it simply not that deep and Charlie blew off Kirk's warnings because he was a hotheaded child who had never before known any kind of correction and wasn't about to start responding to such now?
Trekgnosticism & Techgnosticism
This would be the first but far from the last episode interrogating another concept that I think is alienating to a particular kind of Star Trek fan. Namely that Humans aren't really capable of wielding virtually unlimited power without onboarding or natural consequences. Its not good for us to have no friction between us and our whims being fulfilled. It sure wasn't good for Charlie X.
So why might this be alienating?
Well for starters, I don't think fears over Humans spontaneously getting godlike powers with no guidance on how to use them properly is a realistic fear that Star Trek, the Twilight Zone, and their peers were actually concerned about. What I do think is its a useful metaphor for the rapid pace of technological change and the anxieties the writers were experiencing over things like mass media, worker displacement from technological changes, and the specter of nuclear war.
In some ways, the uplifting that Charlie experienced as a result of alien intervention to save his life is analogous to the sort of technological Rapture that hardcore techno-utopianists believe in. Whether its AI, intentionally addictive and echo chamber forming algorithms, or putting chips in people's brains: there's a lot of moving fast and breaking things under the assumption that any dilly dallying to moralize and study the real world impacts will unnecessarily delay the Singularity. Now I don't know if apoliltical technothriller fans like Andy Weir who hate it when Trek gets preachy are uniformly Techno-optimists or believers in the Singularity, but I bet there's a strong overlap.
And I've long thought this cadre that professes to love Star Trek nevertheless misunderstands it. Time and time again, Trek tries to remind us that technology did not save us from poverty, racism, superstition, authoritarianism, or any other bad-isms.
We used technology to save ourselves. In a conscious, mindful way. It didn't just happen.
We know this to be the case.
Because almost every other civilization in Star Trek that is not the Federation has largely failed to use technology to flatten artificial hierarchies, prioritize personal agency for all, and empower individual excellence by giving individuals social and material space to be excellent according to their own personal definitions rather than a narrow elite hoarding authority and resources and consciously dispensing small dollops of their godlike power to bind servants to them.
I don't know if this is true of Andy Weir specifically, but self professed Trek fans like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk definitely don't actually want to live in the Federation. On a good day, they maybe want to be Grand Naguses among the Ferengi. On a bad day, I'm pretty sure they just want to be Borg Kings or Q. Beholden to no one and at a universe as their playthings with no pesky morals to bind them.
"Charlie X" from the TOS first season is a fascinating episode to revisit in light of modern "Incel" discourse.
A couple other interesting connections: Uhura sings a whimsical tune about Spock while he accompanies on the Vulcan lute. He even smiles.
This really recontextualizes some of the choices made in Strange New Worlds. For one it establishes Uhura as a musically oriented person as not just an invention for the series but a callback (call forward?) to TOS. As a second, it also demonstrates that Spock emoting is likewise not just a SNW storyline, while its never explicitly stated, in this light we can infer that even in the TOS era Spock shifts affects from fully Vulcan utilitarianism to subtle expressions of emotion depending on context. In his downtime, at least "early" in TOS, Spock is still willing to be a little more Human after his experimentation with not suppressing emotions in SNW.
Its commonly assumed that by TOS, Spock is more fully resolved to only embrace his Vulcan side until he ultimately turns away from kolinahr to become the version of Spock we see from ST2 onwards: not especially demonstrative but still fairly warm and less begrudging of the emotions of others. "Charlie X" makes clear that Spock's back and forth with his emotions was ongoing.
Finally there's a gym scene where Kirk takes his shirt off. Kirk with no shirt on is not especially notable for TOS, but with SFA fresh in my mind, the difference in what a high level of physical fitness looks like on TV in the late 1960s vs 2026 is....interesting. I'll say it bluntly: at least two of the male leads among the cadet side of the cast make William Shatner in his prime look pretty puny.
As an elder millennial cis-het man living in 2026, I feel like its worth commenting on how idealized male body standards have gone from very challenging to attain while holding down a full time job to kind of absurd. This is by no means a character attack on Sandro Rosta or George Hawkins and, lets face it, even though he doesn't get any shirtless time, probably Karime Diane. The last thing I want to do is body shame guys for being too fit. If spending that much time working out fills you with joy, have at it! You don't need my blessing, but you've got it. I am not better than you for having an office job or blogging about Star Trek instead of jogging in place.
This is also where the body politics of SFA get really complex.
Because on one hand, I am uncomfortable with the message being sent where all of the series leads who are younger men are Adonises. Star Trek has been a franchise that traditionally has strong appeal to men who struggle to be exemplars of manliness when it comes to physicality and I worry that this feeds into the insecurity and self loathing of men who fail to live up those standards.
That two of the series leads are personally or are playing queer characters adds another layer of complexity. Because, while not queer myself, I'm not an ignoramus: I grew up in the toxic culture that conflated queerness with physical infirmity and even in 2026, maybe especially in 2026 with the Manosphere getting ever weirder and leaking ever more toxic sludge into the mainstream, it is good to have representations of queer men who are anything but meek.
Finally, I can't help but note that Kerrice Brooks' size is not acknowledged anywhere in the narrative of SFA nor is it ever a meaningful handicap. Which is good! It is good to have characters who do not present as traditionally "fit" not be a burden or comic relief as a result of their size. I quietly noticed approvingly that a lot of the SNW gals have impressive muscle tone and are more convincing for it in the show's depiction of boxing as a preferred activity for downtime and exercise.
We now have a wider (no pun intended) range of body types for women in Trek and that's wonderful! But it makes the brain get a little squirmy when all of the (younger) men look like they're on their way to a Marvel audition. At least the principals. Ironically the Military Academy guys look less jacked.
Again, not throwing torpedoes downrange at any actual human being's individual choices with how they spend their time or how their body responds to food and exercise - lord knows there's a lot more variation in the human population than the Manosphere guys like to admit. Its just...weird right? That the pro-social, inclusivity franchise simultaneously is trying to depict more cognitively, socially normal people who haven't been selectively bred for reason and cognitive superiority but are instead members of a culture trying to live up to a set of ideals but also the dudes are getting uniformly way beefier....
This is by intention, a blog of peace and meditation.
And I am full of anger.
I have need to rant. And rant I shall.
I was not the target audience for Starfleet Academy.
Save it anyway.
I am exhausted by the way every main character in modern Trek is working through some deep trauma or despair.
Save it anyway.
I am an elder millennial Trekker who was onboarded to TNG when I was only old enough to have my attention captured by aliens and space ships, not fully understanding the plots. My expectation of what Star Trek is was molded by the episodic, mature professionals solve a complex problem model rather than the model of season long arcs of broken people in over their heads treading water and crying it out periodically.
Save it anyway.
If we cannot allow Trek to contain multitudes, this franchise will die and be reanimated as something that will be unrecognizable and intolerable to the TOS Trekkies, the TNG Trekkers, the Disco era fans, the Lower Deckers, or the newest cadets brought onboard by SFA. We will be lucky if its only as disconnected from its cerebral and egalitarian core as JJ Abrams' irony poisoned audition tapes for Star Wars: which also onboarded new fans who came to see and love the very adamantly earnest and cerebral core that Abrams was allergic to!
I do not allow my tastes and judgment to be dictated by comment sections and performative reviews. I only form strong opinions on things I actually read or watch for myself.
Which presents a conundrum.
This media paradigm we are trapped in seems unlikely to go away. The monetization of hot takes and the way complexity and nuance struggle to break through is nothing that I need to explain to you if you've made it this far.
And Star Trek is at its best when its full of complexity and nuance.
It was an adjustment but once I was in the right head space, I could finally see what Starfleet Academy, and this era of Trek more broadly, has been trying to do. Namely water down the techno-optimism and determinism that underpins the setting and reframe the Federation as a society oriented around a set of values that individual people who are biologically identical to modern humans are attempting to interpret and live up to through numerous complex situations.
And sometimes they fail.
Burnham's arc throughout the first season of Discovery is about wrestling with how flawed logic led her to override her training and the moral code of Starfleet to lead a mutiny and attempt a first strike against the Klingons. The story of Discovery's first season more broadly is a series of trolley problems where morality is sold off a bit at a time to live another day in conditions of total war but culminating in a realization that a myopia had set in where the Federation couldn't see any options besides complete surrender or destroy Qonos.
Did I enjoy every creative decision or feel as if this was executed in a technically proficient way as far as writing and directing go? No. But I see what it was trying to do and I respect it. Same with Picard. I have innumerable nitpicks, but I am not outraged that someone would try to tell a story about the Federation retrenching and shirking on the duties its own values call it to.
I could latch onto and make any random complaint my entire personality and my entire reason for declaring this "not MY Star Trek." Instead I started this blog as my reaction to people who seemed irrationally "stuck" and incapable of engaging seriously with newer Trek. I had a lot of complicated feelings about Discovery and Picard and I wanted to explore them in a methodical way rather than a reactive way.
I have not encountered anyone who especially liked the Section 31 movie, but if I did, my reaction wouldn't be to scream at them that their opinions were wrong and they weren't a real fan, I'd ask them what they liked about it: because that to me is the Star Trek way. I might politely highlight any areas of disagreement and explain why I didn't particularly care for that aspect of the film. I might gently draw out how the film does not seem all that interested in interrogating whether an unaccountable spy agency recruiting disposable people who can do war crimes and be disavowed if caught or killed.
But I'm not going to shout at them.
And I'm not going to pull the "No True Scotsman" card unless we are in disagreement about whether the egalitarian core of Star Trek is actually its true core and "good, actually."
Similarly, I'm prepared to tolerate wide disagreement about aesthetics and themes, but not lazy, reflexive, and performative hostility. I know that's how the modern internet trains us to shape our opinions in order to maximize visibility and "engagement."
How it trains us to turn everything into a struggle for the soul of civilization.
And this pompous, navel gazing essay is perhaps no different in that I too am engaging in what I perceive as the struggle for the soul of civilization, but the hill I am choosing to die on is the one where true fans take Star Trek seriously, not literally and they pay attention to what they're watching.
As I said, I had serious misgivings about Star Trek Picard but I also had serious misgivings about the discourse around Star Trek Picard.
So I committed myself to rewatching it with a critical eye towards answering for myself, with receipts whether or not I personally agreed with some of the conclusions reached by the commentariat. I went looking for nuance so of course I found it!
Not everything I revisited was something I ended up changing my opinion on. Not every opinion I changed went from negative to positive.
Technically I never actually finished my first season rewatch, but I did enough of a rewatch that I felt relatively confident in how I felt about that first season and I felt prepared to actually discuss it seriously. More to the point, I felt like I had been respectful of a number of people who worked very hard to create something by giving it a closer examination rather than relying solely on first impressions.
I approached Starfleet Academy with this same mindset: wariness, but a willingness to take seriously what it was trying to do but not so seriously that I became rigid and inflexible. And in the end a show I didn't think I was going to like, I found much to love: not uncritically, but definitely much to love in the same way you love a young person who means well but doesn't always know the right or smart thing to do, and whose moodiness and impulsivity can be a little insufferable.
And I'm angry its canceled.
And while I think there is a lot of blame to be cast upon a merciless creative model that does not afford series the room and time to find their audience, refine their voice, and build;
I also have a burning hatred of the haters with the intensity of a thousand suns.
Not people who looked at the premise of the show, maybe watched a few episodes, decided it wasn't for them, and quietly disengaged. I fully expected to be that person.
No, my hatred is for the actual capital H Haters. The professionals who make money review bombing things they frequently are exposed to have not even watched themselves. Who make obvious mistakes or outright lie about the content of shows. Who twist themselves into ridiculous knots over superficial and petty bits of lore like Betazoid eye color. Not that canon doesn't matter at all, but when there are all of maybe half a dozen characters who all coincidentally happen to have a similar eye color: that's not "disrespecting canon," its just something people extrapolated based on an absurdly small sample size.
My hatred is also for the amateur comment section warriors who have made hatred and harassment a religious ritual they do just for the adrenaline rush of wasting the time of people they think are inferior to them. They who sit alone in their tree forts with "no girls allowed" signs posted for all the world to see, cradling their Technical Manuals and reciting trivia like it was a catechism.
As a lover of trivia myself, I nevertheless see fit to remind myself from time to time that trivia is short for triviality. My tree fort is not exclusive. It is open to any who are curious. Any whose fandom is joyous, even when they're frustrated.
The premise of this blog was and remains analysis and criticism from a place of love.
I am not an arsonist. I take no pleasure in seeing works that I perceive as flawed but are enjoyed by others go down in flames. Schadenfreude is an emotion I try not to nurture because I fear that it might be habit forming and that, like the Dark Side, I'll just start seeing everything through that paradigm.
I am not filled with hope, at least not in the short term. I do not trust the owners of this new behemoth that is taking shape. I do not trust them to have the sincerity or the financial interest to make big bets on painfully earnest, pro-social entertainment and to not cut it down before it even has a chance to finish its proverbial shakedown cruise.
But there is some hope out there. There is genuinely smart, high concept TV out there. Pluribus, For all Mankind, Silo, Severance, Andor - The Expanse hasn't been off the air all that long either. There is an audience for "smart" if you're willing to cast enough seeds into the air and actually allow them to bloom.
After taking on nearly a hundred billion in debt to buy Warner Bros. and being run by the sorts of people who are, to put it mildly, hostile to the idea of a gay Klingon in a skant and, frankly, to any properly told Star Trek story, I am appalled but not shocked SFA is getting canned after season 2.
As someone who wasn't onboard with the premise from jump but instead had the show win me over, I'm deeply frustrated.
After the mixed signals and pulled punches of S3 of Strange New Worlds, I'm already VERY uncomfortable with what stories Trek will be allowed to tell in Season 4 of SNW or S2 of SFA.
Red alert.
The franchise is not in safe hands.
If this is ultimately about money instead of politics, then its just another example of a show being strangled in the cradle for "failing to find an audience" in an era where audiences have been trained by capricious platforms not to engage with serialized shows if there aren't multiple seasons definitively promised or already existing. Its a death spiral where only the rarest of shows that lock in an audience right away can thrive and creative teams don't get the space and time they need to truly hone their craft and thrive.
Trek has always had capricious support from the owners of the franchise.
Paramount let it go dormant after TOS' season 3 cancellation. Aside from syndicated reruns, two seasons of TAS in the early seventies, and some tie in novels, officially nothing until almost a decade after the initial cancellation, with the promise of Phase II. We were teased with preproduction art and bts set photos.
Then the summer of 1977 happened, and every studio wanted a “space film”. Sets and models meant for video, were scrapped, and new ones built for the rigors of film resolution.
Which dovetailed on the rise of home video, because of the prohibitive prices of cassettes, the rental market grew as an industry. Until Wrath of Khan, which was one of the first films in the industry priced to own.
What followed was the syndication boom of the mid 1980s. Premade original content sold directly to local networks, freeing them to concentrate on just selling commercial time.
I feel like I don't need to discuss the double edged sword of the internet and the rise of streaming, probably one of the worst things to happen to the genre of visual media.
Not to be cynical; as a long time fan, I've appreciated all the official content that exists to this day, but the franchise has always been at the mercy of it's owners waiting for the latest opportunity for a cash grab.
But the true heart, the true life of Gene's creation has always been in the creativity of its fans; writers, makers and artists. There's a through line from 1966 to Ao3. Every costume or prop recreated, artblog, Tumblr, Instagram, artstation, or TikTok, all expressions of love for a show that told us;
“...we'll solve the problems of our home, and then we'll go and explore the world together and make friends along the way...”
As someone who was onboarded by TNG as a small child and around for the post-Enterprise death of Trek and its subsequent rebirth, well said. There's no franchise I love arguing about "what is the heart of the thing?" and "is this even any good?" more than Trek.
After taking on nearly a hundred billion in debt to buy Warner Bros. and being run by the sorts of people who are, to put it mildly, hostile to the idea of a gay Klingon in a skant and, frankly, to any properly told Star Trek story, I am appalled but not shocked SFA is getting canned after season 2.
As someone who wasn't onboard with the premise from jump but instead had the show win me over, I'm deeply frustrated.
After the mixed signals and pulled punches of S3 of Strange New Worlds, I'm already VERY uncomfortable with what stories Trek will be allowed to tell in Season 4 of SNW or S2 of SFA.
Red alert.
The franchise is not in safe hands.
If this is ultimately about money instead of politics, then its just another example of a show being strangled in the cradle for "failing to find an audience" in an era where audiences have been trained by capricious platforms not to engage with serialized shows if there aren't multiple seasons definitively promised or already existing. Its a death spiral where only the rarest of shows that lock in an audience right away can thrive and creative teams don't get the space and time they need to truly hone their craft and thrive.
Just to pour some salt in the wound, per Gizmodo after Season Two of SFA, there will be no more Trek series confirmed to be in production.
SNW S5 is in post production and there are two shows that have been pitched (Year One and a Tawney Newsom helmed comedy project) but not confirmed and a supposed movie that will apparently exist in its own continuity if it actually goes forward. Which I'm not opposed to, but this incarnation of Trek that began with Discovery has always deserved more time and fewer constraints to find itself. Many of my criticisms, especially of Discovery and Picard, would have been addressed with more polish on the scripts which is either a matter of experience or a more relaxed production schedule.
Differences in opinion about the voice of Trek or its foundational assumptions or the types of stories told I'm prepared to politely tolerate, sloppiness is more irksome.
After taking on nearly a hundred billion in debt to buy Warner Bros. and being run by the sorts of people who are, to put it mildly, hostile to the idea of a gay Klingon in a skant and, frankly, to any properly told Star Trek story, I am appalled but not shocked SFA is getting canned after season 2.
As someone who wasn't onboard with the premise from jump but instead had the show win me over, I'm deeply frustrated.
After the mixed signals and pulled punches of S3 of Strange New Worlds, I'm already VERY uncomfortable with what stories Trek will be allowed to tell in Season 4 of SNW or S2 of SFA.
Red alert.
The franchise is not in safe hands.
If this is ultimately about money instead of politics, then its just another example of a show being strangled in the cradle for "failing to find an audience" in an era where audiences have been trained by capricious platforms not to engage with serialized shows if there aren't multiple seasons definitively promised or already existing. Its a death spiral where only the rarest of shows that lock in an audience right away can thrive and creative teams don't get the space and time they need to truly hone their craft and thrive.
I'm thinking a lot today about how the Federation adopted a posture of strategic patience with the Cardassians and even tolerated a fair amount of obscene violence in order to avoid a larger conflict where the Federation may have had a decisive advantage militarily but no viable options for changing the character of the Cardassian Union itself. Then when there seemed to be a potential for some sort of meaningful internal shift, the Klingons decided to wreck the place and thoroughly radicalize the Cardassian people to the point the Dominion looked like benevolent saviors.
I actually don't have anything particularly profound to say.
It was an acceptable finale. Honestly, by the standards of the streaming era, I'd actually rate it a solid B+ In large part because its not a capstone to a season long build up that doesn't really pay off in a satisfying way.
I'm being grouchy, I did like it.
I will say though that even though they killed off one of the side characters at the mid point to make it seem like there are real stakes in this show, I didn't really feel a lot of dramatic tension. And for once, I'm actually fine with that. Really.
From the first episode of Discovery, this era of Trek's strength has not been its world building or its ability to set up exciting adventure stories. I would argue that throughout Discovery and much of Picard, the creatives were just sort of showcasing the emotional range of their casts and the world building largely was just a vehicle to get them to the next heart felt confession, the next traumatic outburst, the break up, the reconciliation etc.
I don't think this is necessarily an unforgivable way to run a show, after all TNG was very much a problem of the week show and any character development mostly accidental. A model I still sort of yearn for, as to quote Mr. Terrific "I'm not really into other people's emotions." But if you do run a show that makes the characters rather than the situation the primary focus, if the situations and the world building around the characters is not particularly well constructed, its a rather thin meal for fans of the "moral dilemma / technothriller of the week" model.
Starting out SFA, I thought there was a real risk that this was going to be another "character relationships first, world building second" show and I was going to feel dissatisfied because I wasn't going to be particularly invested in the characters or the interstitial material that pushes the characters around to their next big emotional beat. At the time, feeling a little bruised from SNW S3 and the S31 movie, I was a little reluctant to get my hopes up.
I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly the characters won me over. The interesting mix of the elder cast and the student cast gave me permission to see the students through the eyes of Ake, Reno, The Doctor etc. and to tsk tsk their flaws as if I were part of that older cohort rather than experience their inane love affairs and inability to deal with their interpersonal drama in a healthy way purely as an audience member. That gave me a surprising buy in, in that I very much was interested in watching them grow as people and pleasantly surprised at how well they were shown to internalize life lessons and become more "real" and less and less YA caricatures.
Is the world building in Starfleet Academy all that great? No, not really. It is better thought out in some ways than it was in Discovery or Picard. I think the writers have a much firmer and internally consistent idea of how they feel about the minutiae: how big the Federation is, how things work, how the 32nd century is different. But at the same time, we're kept on short rations. What even IS the Venari Ral? How powerful are they really? Is this a true competitor state to the Federation like the Emerald Chain was or the Breen or are they opportunists who were able to rapidly gain power at the expense of the Emerald Chain? Why is Nus Braka their leader?
As someone pointed out in the Daystrom Institute subreddit, the incredible speed of 32nd century warp means that the old 23rd/24th century concept of the Federation and its peers as contiguous nation states with clearly defined borders doesn't really make a lot of sense anymore.
And as I said, despite one fatality early on, I just didn't get the sense that any of the main cast were in danger but that's fine. That wasn't ever the case in TNG and it was fine because the problems were interesting. Was the core problem all that interesting this time? Sort of? The isolation of the Federation and its manner definitely provoke questions that I don't really expect interesting answers to come down the pipeline, although the ability to stabilize Omega particles may be something that could have some profound consequences.
But Reno taking command and having to rely on the cadets to save the day was actually quite interesting. Sometimes the way the crew comes together to solve a problem can be the thing that's more interesting than the problem itself.
I share frustrations with how the Federation's attitudes about justice are depicted and the lack of imagination there. Also with Ake striking a prisoner in custody and there being no consequences for that. SFA tends to bunny hop that way. Its much less cynical overall than Discovery or Picard, but for every two things I find to praise it for, it does find some way of annoying me. That being said, I'm willing to set aside my grumpiness and accept that the Federation is not intended to be a fully consistent moral exemplar that the audience should take every lesson from.
There is an interesting symmetry with Discovery - in a good way - in that the first season's premiere and finale deal with a character atoning for a grievous error they felt they had made previously. For Discovery it was Burnham extolling the higher minded values of Starfleet and the Federation and repudiating the over reliance on logic that caused her to mutiny.
For SFA, I did read Ake as genuinely feeling bad about "just following orders" and wishing she'd been more clever or rebellious in the moment but at the same time, she's not about to give Caleb's mom a pass for throwing in with gangsters robbing a ship at gunpoint and trying to duck any culpability for the consequences of such. I don't know that it really sticks the landing here between only Caleb and his mother seeming to have an issue with the Federation doing child separation and Ake punching restrained prisoners, but an effort was made and it was much less of a mess of random things thrown against a wall that some of the season finales have been in other series.
"We are stranded in a cruel, anarchic world but we are still Starfleet. And we still live and die by Starfleet law. No matter how heinous your crimes." - Saru, to Voq/Tyler
Discovery can be all over the map, but that also means sometimes when its good, its really good. Michelle Yeoh, Sonequa Martin-Green, Shazad Latiff, Jason Isaacs, Doug Jones: this show has some really great actors when properly written, directed, and they get the big payoffs right.
Burnham sending Voq to his "death" and then Saru confronting him in Discovery's transporter room is fantastic. The way the characters put on and drop their "Mirror" universe masks is also a credit to casting. I don't think there's actually a bad actor in the whole ensemble, just people who are sometimes abused (SMG and the S3 wall to wall crying scenes for instance.)
Anthony Rapp also gets to show a lot of range and just generally has a lot to do in this season. I really felt like he got sidelined in S5 to the show's detriment.
Anyway, I hope Starfleet Academy is good, because after a year that brought us both Section 31 and "Four and a Half Vulcans", Star Trek really, really needs a win.
In a recent conversation with my friend about SFA, I listed my reasons for being extremely concerned - and I would add to the usual pile that I also just generally don't like YA stuff. I've been that way since I was the target demo. Its just not for me and the usual basket of themes that come along with the genre weren't what I signed up for back in the day when I saw my first episode of TNG. But Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations and all that jazz.
So I'm not rooting for it to suck, and if other people whose opinions I respect seem to like it but I can't find an entry point into it, I will be really bummed out not judgmental of them.
I also remember how I felt when I first learned that one of the Rick and Morty guys had been given a Trek cartoon. A show I'd only really experienced under the influence and never revisited. Even moderately intoxicated, I found it bewildering.
Yet I love Lower Decks. Love, love, love it. I will sing its praises to anyone who even remotely brings up Star Trek.
You just never know how these things are going to go.
Update: I’m really glad I tried to approach SFA with an open mind. Not every aspect of it is my cup of tea, but it’s delivered some strikingly meaty stories and provoked some genuine emotional beats that I just didn’t think this era was capable of outside of Lower Decks.
Petrov was on overnight duty in 1983 when computers indicated the U.S. had launched a nuclear strike against his country. He had only a few
RIP to a quiet hero.
A good reminder in these times that even when powerful men act with impunity to do evil, tossing out callous orders left and right, that at the end of the day those powerful men often depend on ordinary, low-level workers to push a button somewhere, to flip a switch, to pull a trigger… and that those ordinary individuals have the power to say “no.” You can refuse to push the button, and you might save countless lives in the process.
This is a guy I've referenced quite a bit over the years in my discussion about Trek. Because Trek is a place where people like Stanislav Petrov are the heroes. The people who are willing to take a chance on being wrong rather than start a cataclysm.
Every time Picard opts not to fire first, a thing that a segment of the fandom has always decried, this is the tradition that Picard is living inside of. This is the tradition that Trek honors. You can think twice. You should think twice.
Earlier today I was wondering if Star Trek had passed me by. If I was just too allergic to attempts to modernize the storytelling structures and motifs of Trek. That my intrinsic dislike of YA themes made this just not my thing.
Maybe there's too much Picard in me, snarling at the idea of a child on my bridge.
But I'm a little bit of a hypocrite.
I have a soft spot for practical jokes and the setting and its themes were leveraged really well for hijinks. I clocked Tawney Newsome's credit in the opening and I feel like I can smell her influence in this episode in the best of ways in that it straddled the line between mirth and earnestness without ever becoming too implausibly silly or engaging in too much self indulgent moralizing.
The cherry on top is that there was some much needed character growth for the jock - bully coded bro who was going to be way too insufferable if it took more than 3 episodes for him to mature. Also our renegade orphan of destiny is leaning in. Predictable? Yes. Welcome? Also yes.
I really do want to give kudos to whoever is writing the teachers because not only do I like them as characters, I enjoy the way their philosophies play off one another.
I'm genuinely surprised and more importantly delighted at the extent to which SFA has won me over. What I worried might be "must skip TV" is now appointment viewing.
My curmugeonly reflexes have been disarmed and I've found my way into being invested via the teachers primarily. The way the show writes the "adults in the room" mostly reflects what I think is the appropriate mix of empathy and hard knocks that this particular batch of cadets calls for and their care and concern has become my care and concern.
The cadets quickly moved from being archetypes to people I want to see flourish and am irritated with when they do stupid stuff. Curiously, unlike some of the other streaming era shows, in an entirely unexpected way I'm more forgiving of the cadets when they screw up whilst a lot of the time in Discovery, Picard, and SNW sometimes the bad decisions feel earned: the characters are genuinely acting on bad information or their heads are in a bad place, but as much or more often it just feels like they've been made to hold the idiot ball to move the plot forward.
The three episode arc about learning from failure and tragedy in particular is a supremely good use of the characters' status as students rather than hardened elites within an already elite institution. Which is not to say that other Trek shows haven't done this: Picard recovering from assimilation and reconciling with his brother, Nog losing his leg, Burnham deconstructing the assumptions that led her to mutiny etc. but usually the inciting event is more grandiose...with the exception of Nog, which was profoundly intimate.
SFA is also carrying on one of the more tragic traditions of Trek storytelling: the way in which people who expect to be excellent in all respects push themselves beyond their limits and are reluctant to seek or accept help: often at great personal risk and cost.
This is another metatextual element of Trek: were it truly a documentary of the future, then we would expect people who are Starfleet material to be self aware enough to never need to be coerced or tricked into accepting help or admitting weakness, they would just do it. But that isn't how it works in the real world too often and as a setting that exists to guide us towards better decision making, thus our characters must be shown to need prodding to accept help and in some cases, experience extreme consequences for not dealing with their unexamined issues in a healthy way.
Put more succintly, I came in expecting 90210 but in space - I'm sorry Gen Z/Alpha, I don't have a more current reference point - its not you, I just don't care for teen dramas and didn't even when I was a teen. What I've gotten was a series that has made me care for its characters as if they were young people I was reponsible for. Sometimes that means I want to hug them. Sometimes that means I want to smack them upside the head and call them a dumbass.
This might be the most intellectual, unapologetically dweeby episode of "NuTrek." Its certainly the first time I can recall it being explicitly literary, unafraid of alienating its audience by weaving in the Humanities.
This was an episode for the fans who get really, really into literary analysis and the metatextual elements of Trek. An episode that wraps a Freshman Theater Appreciation syllabus and thwacks you over the head with it mercilessly.
It was glorious.
And kudos for delivering on some truly beautiful character beats. My main gripe with Discovery is that it desperately wanted you to feel something about the big moments between characters...and it just never did enough laying the ground work for those tearful moments to feel earned. Maybe its my susceptibility to some of the themes as an elder millennial working in education, but man this one found the frequency in my cynicism fields and hit me with everything it had.
