Biblioflyer

Right from the start, I do want to clarify that I am not going to be snooty about why people experience Obsession as a demonic possession story.

"Wish Nikki" behaves in such a way that one could quickly make assumptions that this is demonic. The rapid escalation from love bombing to feeding Bear his cat, to creating a shrine with the rest of the cat's remains, to the creepy walking, and the rest of her bizarre behavior creates confusion because this doesn't seem like how someone would behave if they love someone more than anyone else in the world. This just seems unnecessary, willfully cruel even.

Then when you throw in the phone call with customer support where Nikki is screaming as if in agony, it sure seems like she might be experiencing some sort of supernatural torture.

I get it! The idea that Nikki's body has been infested with a demon feels apt for the genre.

However, we have it directly from the director in multiple statements that this is not possession.

So then what is it?

If not possession, why possession shaped?

A more helpful reference point might be Dissociative Identity Disorder. Now contrary to the way its normally presented in pop culture, as its understood clinically* different personalities aren't always completely isolated, they can experience varying degrees of awareness of what is happening even if they aren't operating the meat mech right now.

What I propose is that at the moment Bear makes his wish, what happens is that a new personality emerges that is largely unaware of the original personality and is mostly in control of Nikki's body. Like DID, this is something that looks and acts a lot like possession but this isn't something you can fix with an old priest and a young priest.

Critically, this new personality seems to have Nikki's memories but doesn't seem to act as if it has experienced those memories first hand. It has an intellectual understanding of how to be a person but no real context for any of it to steer its behavior going forward. In some sense, this is a being who was "born" in the moment of Bear's wish, has some vague notes on being a person, an overriding compulsion to love Bear more than anyone in the world, and crucially: no real sense of self except in reference to Bear.

The increasingly "demonic" behavior I attribute to Wish Nikki's mental integrity rapidly breaking under the strain of violently needing to please Bear while not not having a clear understanding of what actually pleases him. Wish Nikki loves Bear more than anyone else in the universe, including herself, and also clearly needs for him to show love back. When he is put off by the duct taped door and enraged by the cat sandwich, these are devastating experiences for Wish Nikki because she's only days old with an extremely unsophisticated understanding of love and the only thing that matters to her is Bear being happy. If he's not happy, she's not fulfilling her purpose: to love Bear more than anyone else in the universe.

When Bear yells at her to be normal, Wish Nikki experiences a momentary break where she begins sobbing because she's failed again and Bear has asked her to do something she clearly does not understand how to do: be normal. Even when you have the average degree of socialization you ought to have as a person in your 20s, "be normal" is an ambiguous command. When you're days old and your only reference point for anything is whether it makes Bear happy, its practically cruel.

Which brings me to my grand theory of why Wish Nikki presents as demonic: she is ALSO suffering.

Her suffering is different from Nikki Prime** who is watching helplessly as her body is used to violate her will in increasingly disturbing ways, but Wish Nikki IS suffering. She is suffering because she is existing and trying to make do with a life that has one overriding purpose: love Bear. And it starts becoming more and more obvious that she is failing, the more she tries to fix things the worse it gets, and if she doesn't have Bear she quite literally has nothing. No purpose, no reason to live. Nothing matters except loving Bear.

And on some level, the firewall between Nikki Prime and Wish Nikki is not absolute. When she is watching Bear sleep, Wish Nikki comments that her dreams make her uncomfortable. Its implicit then that when she's asleep, Wish Nikki is confronted with thoughts and feelings she cannot reconcile with who she is as a person who is defined only by loving Bear: what if part of her, a VERY angry part of her does not love Bear? I think we pretty much get confirmation of this later on when Nikki Prime is able to speak when Wish Nikki is asleep.

I could be mistaken, but I think its also strongly implied that Wish Nikki is conscious when Nikki Prime is able to take control for brief moments and is terrified, if not by the sudden and inexplicable loss of control, then by the idea that something is causing her to take drastic actions that displease Bear - not even mistakes like cooking the cat, but full blown incidents that Wish Nikki is not responsible for.

For her part, I think Nikki Prime's primal scream when on the phone with Bear is perfectly explainable by means other than having been consigned to some sort of Hell where she is actively being tortured. Her present existence of having no control over her body and being witness to her body being used to do things she vehemently does not consent to IS the torture.

So I read this scene as Prime Nikki not having the bandwidth to speak to Bear. This experience is still fairly new and she is likely still very confused and very angry. By the time she is talking to Bear while Wish Nikki is asleep, Prime Nikki seems to understand what has happened in supernatural terms and that it can't be undone except through her death, but as of the phone call, it seems like Prime Nikki hasn't had anyone explain what has happened. Customer Service can have her "speak" to Bear, but hasn't really bothered to try talking to her it seems, or if they did, she wasn't in a receptive mood.

Later, Prime Nikki seems to have been quietly building her strength and working to understand what is happening and thus figures out she can speak to Bear when Wish Nikki is sleeping and is able to marshal some potency to break through and self harm at a moment when there are the most witnesses and thus the most consequences. I understand this as Prime Nikki having acclimated to her new reality up to a point, perhaps you could say she's moved through the stages of grief from anger to bargaining to a kind of acceptance that is actually more like a cold fury capable of some calculation rather than an uncontrolled rage.

And that's basically it. Not a capital P Possession, but a split personality where both are actually experiencing suffering, and the one you probably assume is being driven insane is actually slowly pulling herself back together to wage war for her body and the one you think is "stable" but evil is being driven insane by the impossibility of ever truly fulfilling her only and most important command: to love Bear more than anyone in the universe - and in every sense of the word.

In the end, Wish Nikki can't allow others to compete for his affection, and she must also love him more than anyone else as a verb, but also seems to have a deficit of reference points for what is "normal" and the more her behavior frightens and disgusts Bear, the more her sense of self crumbles. Its not active, conscious cruelty, its violent jealousy born of a profoundly insecure attachment style and an implicit interpretation that Bear can have no others before her.

*And even the clinical understanding of DID is a giant kettle of fish with a lot of consternation and accusations of misleading data and professional malpractice flying both ways across the proverbial battle line. However, this is not the essay for adjudicating between the different sides when it comes to the science and the pros and cons of encouraging or scolding self diagnosis. I do think its important that people know these conflicts exist though and engage with them thoughtfully and without unnecessary venom for whichever side you think is "wrong."

The Cardassians circa the armistice with the Federation were known imperialists: enslaving the Bajorans, using brutal tactics to try to maintain their control in the face of an insurgency, and looting the planet of its natural resources leaving it ecologically damaged and sabotaging as much infrastructure as possible once they finally decided to withdraw.

The Cardassians perpetuated multiple atrocities against the Federation, killing noncombatants in events like the infamous Setlik III massacre.

The Cardassian Union is openly and directly governed by an unelected military command and a spy agency that use all of the classic tactics associated with descriptions like Stalinist to ensure their rule is unchallenged.

The Federation and the Cardassians fought a war over an indeterminate period in which millions were stated to have been killed. Its a bit hard to imagine this happening without a fairly hefty number of attacks on civilians or large scale ground force operations or both. Millions equates to thousands of Galaxy-class starships at a time when the "meta" of the series was that there were fewer than six Galaxy-class starships and the loss of 40 ships at Wolf 359 was a military disaster that was staggering. The point is that this number is hard to explain with just Dominion War style starship walls crashing into each other.

Given all of this heinousness, why doesn't the Federation just "do something" about the Cardassians?

I don't know what real world reference points the writers had in mind for the Cardassians. Prior to the Global War on Terror, a lot of fans seemed to be thinking of Iraq but in a shallow way: emphasizing the seeming vast chasm of capability between the two parties, but not stopping to think through why the original Gulf War coalition stopped short of trying to occupy Iraq and replace its government or why they would even permit Iraq to retain at least some military power.

For the fans for whom the virtue ethics argument that abstaining from war in the face of abjection outside of their borders isn't a selling point for the Federation, lets think through why the Federation would swallow a bitter pill:

One of the things we don't truly know is what the limits are of Federation power if it was fully and completely mobilized. The complete destruction of the Cardassian military down to the last security trooper who won't throw down his phaser doesn't seem impossible to fans who wonder why the Federation doesn't do just this, but it isn't ever established beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Federation actually can muster the resources to do this.

Assuming it truly could, there is still a matter of material costs and moral risk.

Rip it out, root and stem

The most extreme scenario is the one I just described: the Federation extirpates the military, Obsidian Order, and anyone else who wants to point a phaser in the general direction of a gold shirt. The Federation takes over responsibility for the territorial defense of Cardassia against outside predation and for interior defense against looting, terrorism, and other crimes great and small until such time as indigenous security force and government can be established that the Federation feels like is 1. competent and 2. can be trusted. If the problem with the Cardassians is assumed to be innate to the Cardassians themselves, then this is the only solution available to the Federation: it will simply need to raise a generation or two of Cardassians who have never internalized the norms of the Union under the military and Obsidian Order and are fully assimilated to Federation values.

While the Federation is waiting for the Cardassians to assimilate to Federation habits of thought and behavior, every single day Federation security forces will be in situations where they will be making snap judgments about whether they need to protect themselves, who to believe in a petty dispute, and increasingly who to trust with responsibility and authority over their fellow citizens. And the Federation will morally and practically own the consequences of every decision. Make enough good decisions on balance and you end up with post World War 2 Japan and Germany in the end. Make enough bad decisions and you end up with Afghanistan and Iraq at the end of their respective occupations as part of the Global War on Terror.

Of course we want to believe that the morally enlightened and scientifically dominant Federation would make the best and most well informed choices. But what if this information dominance isn't enough? What if all that raw data when fed through Federation heuristics doesn't reliably spit out conclusions that fit neatly with Federation moral thinking? Or do it fast enough that a gold shirt manning a checkpoint knows whether that Cardassian approaching and ignoring orders to bring their hover craft to a complete stop is planning to ram the checkpoint or just drank too much kanar with a faulty universal translator?

Find a useful idiot to rule

Short of that extreme scenario above, there is the more common regime change option frequently exercised by great powers throughout history: kill everyone who doesn't agree that you are their suzerain and then find someone to personify a pretext of local rule. Then make that person responsible for implementing whatever reforms you desire. This is liable to fall well short of the moral preference of your average Trek fan. It doesn't feel good to replace one tyrant with another that's more amenable to your preferences while leaving literally everything else about the regime intact, at least for now.

I also don't see Federation citizens feeling like this was worth some portion of Starfleet waking up in a cold sweat reliving the moment they vaporized their first Cardassian trooper. A rather foundational experience that left deep scars on Miles O'Brien..who might also be, if I'm not mistaken, the first Starfleet character to profess to having been traumatized by killing in self defense.

Whether its ultimately selfish or not, I have begun to consider the possibility that at least one component of the Federation's preference for abstaining from wars of choice and trying to find an early off ramp when war comes to the Federation anyways, is that on some level, maybe even a very explicit level, it is understood that a familiarity with and comfort with the use of violence can erode utopia. Traumatized victims of violence from the predatory actions of neighbors and Starfleet officers who become conditioned to reflexively consider violence as a necessary tool before other options both represent a kind of social contagion that needs to be managed in a society that requires high levels of trust.

Prosperity in the context of Star Trek (as I think it does in our world) relies on a disinclination towards violence in order to ensure that more people can be trusted with Swiss army knife technologies that could easily be perverted into tools of destruction. Feeling safe and that peoples from wildly different cultural contexts reflexively prefer cooperation to "stranger danger" or zero sum competition. The end result is that the Federation quite obviously must protect its citizens and infrastructure from harm, but if it does so with unnecessary aggression it risks creating a culture where threat prevention and response get more and more loosely defined.

And as we've seen in the real world, sometimes you exchange one set of problems for a new set of much more disturbing and much more difficult to manage problems: such as exchanging a belligerent nation state ruled over by a brutal but fairly predictable tyrant for a hodgepodge of stateless militias willing to use suicide tactics and undertake ethnic cleansing.

With the Cardassians for instance, its not hard to imagine a situation where Obsidian Order and military remnants, finding no role for themselves in a post war society and with a long list of people that have deadly grievances with them, may wind up opting not to surrender and continue to wage an increasingly desperate and increasingly amoral insurgency and especially focusing on civilian casualties to demonstrate Federation and Cardassian successor state inability or unwillingness to provide for the safety of noncombatants.

Just Because You Can, Doesn't Mean You Should

One of the friction points I've experienced in the Star Trek fandom over the years is over the foreign policy of the Federation, especially between The Undiscovered Country and the Dominion War. The Federation gets dinged heavily by some fans for its many and problematic peace deals with known bad actors.

The Cardassians in particular are a recurring theme in large part because the Klingons and Romulans are understood to be polities of such power that while the Federation might prevail in direct conflict, that victory would taste like ashes. With the Cardassians, this has never really been explicitly communicated. They exist in an awkward position where they are clearly powerful enough that the Federation takes them seriously but on almost every occasion we see them confronted with a first rate starship like the Enterprise or the Nebula-class USS Phoenix, the Cardassians get clobbered and it doesn't even seem particularly close. Later, we'll see the Defiant rip through what we are led to presume are the best of the best of the Cardassian navy.

It is popular to dismiss everything that is done to mop up the Empire and strengthen the New Republic after Endor as irrelevant and a failure because the First Order will wipe it all away.

There are aspects of this I agree with: resetting the Jedi back to one lone survivor with only perfunctory training and maybe destiny on their side is ghastly in its lack of imagination and total lack of respect for the character of Luke Skywalker. And this is coming from someone who actually does not consider the broken man of Episode 8 to be a complete character assassination nor has any particular literary issues with Rey's very rocket punk ability to pick up new skills.

But at the same time, while Luke's attempt to re-establish the Jedi ends in disaster and Leia is sidelined as a radical provocateur who can't accept the war is really over, the broader meta: that nothing matters because the First Order is going to sweep the table, that deserves unpacking.

First off, while the New Republic failing to anticipate the First Order threat is presented as an example of New Republic fecklessness, tie in media such as the Mandalorian itself has gone to great lengths to show that the First Order was careful not to tip its hand too early and highly valued secrecy, using the warlords as cat's paws and distractions.

I would also invite people to really and truly try to put themselves in the headspace of the people who, after World War 1 with its vast amount of suffering, saw the moves being made by Mussolini, Hitler etc. and tried very studiously to convince themselves this was all something very unexceptional that would burn itself out without the need for another vast and bloody conflict where armies of millions clashed abroad while millions starved at home.

The failure of any relief force to come to Leia's aid in Episode 8 is held up as an example that anti-Imperial sentiment was only ever skin deep. When push came to shove, the galaxy would not rise up. This cynical viewpoint is undermined in large part by the bizarre choice to emphasize the theme of isolation and defeat while setting the beginning of Episode 8 mere hours, at most days after the destruction of Starkiller Base. A handful of days after the lion's share of the New Republic's military was destroyed at anchor along with a lot of the civil and military administration.

A common complaint about the apparent collapse of the New Republic is that in the real world, most major governments have contingency plans wherein the chain of succession is mapped out to several dozen places.

And yet, up until a few months ago, this had never really been tested in the real world until the United States and Israel started assassinating Iranian military and governmental officials as part of an attempt to (depending on which narrative you believe) start a revolution by lobotomizing the state or cause a radical shift in domestic and foreign policy by killing everyone who wouldn't immediately acquiesce to the demands of the US and Israel.

The extensive preparations by Iran to fight a war without the benefit of a consistent, centralized command have gone about as well (for Iran) as can be expected: the situation Iran has found itself in is not ideal with a vast amount of experienced command staff and infrastructure lost, but the structure of its government is largely intact even if the specific personnel occupying particular posts has gone through some grisly turnover. The state that has come through this trial is still sufficiently menacing that the cost (in blood, weapons, and treasure) to actually achieve a more complete victory over it is now well understood and unpalatable to the only party who could conceivable attempt it: namely the United States.

However, and again this is perhaps a valid complaint about the New Republic's lack of vision, this sort of deep level preparation was done in the anticipation that there is a specific, known threat with fairly well understood capabilities that stakeholders are very certain is going to act. What the New Republic should have known and when it should have known it remains a contentious question with regards to the First Order.

In the wake of the Starkiller Base disaster, we might for instance imagine that the New Republic was struggling to sort out who was still alive and coordinate a response, creating the appearance that the galaxy was cowed.

The failure of regional and local governments to mount a counter offensive between Episode 8 and Episode 9 and throw off the yoke of the First Order certainly does not inspire an idealistic assessment of how deep anti-authoritarian sentiments had penetrated post-Endor, seemingly not deep enough to cause a larger, more capable Resistance to form. On the other hand, we know from their own statements that the First Order was increasingly worried about just that. The one adult in the room bemoaned the over reliance on Starkiller Base as the primary threat to keep order in the galaxy and the way it left the First Order with much less in the way of resources to actually consolidate their rule.

When given the opportunity to decisively roll back the First and Final Orders in one climatic battle and commit regicide along the way, the galaxy rose up and did just that. The New Republic may have been very fragile as a governmental system, but the fragility of formal institutions does not directly translate to a yearning for brutality. The Rebellion and later Din Djarin may ultimately have failed to establish a government that could anticipate a threat that could lobotomize it or reconstitute itself after said lobotomizing, but they succeeded in the sense that they helped nurture a general disdain for the Empire and its system.

The spirit of anti-authoritarianism was alive the whole time, it just lacked a theory of victory and an opportunity.

In communicating this, I will give The Rise of Skywalker its due. I don't have a lot of praise for the film otherwise, but I think its fair to say one thing it did do right is recognize that there is a difference between people and their government. Governments can fail and fall. This may be interpreted as being symptomatic of a broken people, or may just be that too many people who had specific knowledge and skills were killed off along with critical pieces of infrastructure and its going to take more than a few days for an occupier to realize how shallow their pacification actually is.

This isn't fully fleshed out, more of a ramble, but I was captivated by the overlap between the spoken attempts to rationalize the Backrooms by Clark and the later explorer and the conception of both the Underworld and God Machine "infrastructure" in the Chronicles of Darkness setting.

The Underworld is described in various game lines, especially Mage and Geist, as having a loose relationship with physical geography on the surface level but only insofar as its a kind of archeological layering of the ephemeral remnants of things that no longer exist in the living world. People, objects, and even knowledge all pass into the Underworld, adding "deposits" as they are lost in the mortal world. Which is an important distinction from the Astral where presumably, once an idea no longer is known by anyone in living reality, it is lost from the collective unconsciousness as well (which is how CofD presents the Astral.)

This actually does lean more towards The Backrooms being a kind of Astral Plane in the sense that its presented as a place that collects and attempts to reconstruct memory. Memory being a thing that anyone who has spent more than five minutes dwelling on it realizes is hardly an immutable and perfect recording. Aside from things we've made a concerted effort to remember with precision, a lot of our memories are just clutter that is compressed down to lower resolution impressions our minds decompress on command with plausible inventions where needed.

Why I lean more towards the Underworld though is both the subterranean, labyrinthine feel to it and the mix of insensate and "hungry" entities dwelling within the Backrooms. In CofD, ghosts are hungry. The Underworld acts on them to cause them to surrender their identity which in the Underworld is their "physical" existence. They are being dragged downwards to a point of no return, in the bleak cosmology of CofD, this is a cthonic ocean that absorbs Memory and Identity - essentially forcing the dead to become one with everything whether they like it or not. This being a personal horror setting, its worth pondering there is a sort of bias towards terror and dread, so if there is anything after that final plunge, any experience past that its fundamentally unknowable to the characters the player is intended to play: Wizards, Sin Eaters and other beings who have an interest in exploring the depths of the Underworld for fun, profit, or, rarely - this is a personal horror game after all, for nobler intentions like carefully managing and trying to minimize the suffering in this "ecosystem."

My own personal interpretation of the interactions between Clark and Pirate Clark is that on the surface level, Pirate Clark is a distillation of all of Clark's memories that have been distorted by his perpetual stewing, the cycle of remembering, of getting angry, of blaming someone else, feeling embittered etc. has created this putrid creature that is simultaneously pitifully moaning, perhaps even sobbing but whose actions are relentlessly violent.

At the same time, I like reading Pirate Clark as having a more primal, instinctual core that is perhaps related to the nature of The Backrooms as a container for warped memories: that is to say that Pirate Clark on an instinctive level yearns to be more alive. He is perhaps fighting against the same sort of decay and corrosion that the more docile, less sensate entities seem to have been afflicted by. On some level I do wonder if Pirate Clark is trying to add more substance to himself, to make himself more resilient, in the way that CofD ghosts use Memory as currency in more civilized areas of the Underworld or will hunt one another and try to devour one another to stave off their decay.

Again, this is all existing on a symbolic level, not a level of conscious thought. Pirate Clark is not a reliable actor, he's a crude Egregore so his actions are only rational according to how he perceives the world, which definitely seems to be through a blinding haze of anger and fear. Like I said, I mostly just got caught up on the idea of a being of Memory ultimately consuming its progenitor, and in a fundamental way: itself.

As for the God Machine, the short version if you're not familiar with the setting is that there is a kind of arcane "machine" that is woven throughout reality acting according to long term and inscrutable plans. There are many, many suggestions that aspects of it may be breaking down and working at cross purposes or no longer fulfilling their original functions. Its a kind of inscrutable cosmic horror take on the concept of the demiurge where the archetypal being is using nonsensical "technology" to shape reality. The setting hems and haws about whether or not its actually technology in the way we would understand it, but tends to lean more towards its magic that is using technology as a set of symbols of intent rather than actual, honest to god Clarketech: but then of course, if it were Clarketech that appeared to be magic then we puny mortals wouldn't know the difference.....

The relationship to The Backrooms is less metaphorical here than with the Underworld, its mostly that many story seeds using the God Machine involve accidentally stumbling upon impossible spaces, literal warehouses, staging areas, machine rooms, and other aesthetically industrial but probably occult in nature places.

These are described as infrastructure. Places and systems that have been set up to serve the God Machine's Lovecraftian agenda. Places that suggest that our world is actually more of a showroom floor or stage and there is an invisible realm that exists all around where we play out our mortal dramas where work vital to existence as we understand it takes place but we are not meant to experience or tinker with and are poorly equipped to comprehend or survive it. The metaphysical equivalent of not understanding any of the hazard symbols on the access hatches to the uranium fuel rods of a nuclear reactor and wandering in like Mr. Magoo.

Which is just another way of saying that the God Machine Chronicle leaned heavily on the idea of liminal spaces with a "techgnostic" aesthetic layered onto it. Probably mining some of the same inspirations as The Backrooms draws from or at least an earlier form of the subculture and set of ideas, circa 2013.

On a more whimsical note, we can perhaps also interpret The Backrooms as serving a similar function to The Void at the End of Time in Marvel. A garbage dump of sorts for abandoned timelines, ideas, objects etc. Mary and Clark exist in a kind of "Sacred Timeline" although perhaps in the universe of the Backrooms, what it actually is is a bit like the cosmological equivalent of our planet Earth. Our universe is the one where everything is "just right" to have given rise to beings that could label a universe "just right" whereas the Backrooms contains the realities that are "close enough" to be marginally habitable but are still quite "wrong."

Of course as I write this, I realize I'm laundering more Chronicles of Darkness into The Backrooms because what I've just described is essentially the Abyss of Mage the Awakening, the irrational antimony realm that cuts Humanity off from Source thanks to the hubris of ancient and overly ambitious Mages and makes drawing down "true magic" from the Source rather perilous even for people connected to it.

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.

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 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.

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.