this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2026
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Maybe I'm just getting too old and grumpy for this teeny drama emotional crap, but for me this was the worst episode yet. I get that this was effectively trauma therapy after the Miyazaki incident, but boy was it not entertaining. It's all just "oh, we are so damaged, nothing will ever be the same". There's nothing really at stake, no tension, no climax, just whining and speaking way too much in metaphors for my liking. I'm still watching Star Trek here after all and not some artsy independent movie.
It's disappointing worldbuilding that there is no advanced mental/medical health services everpresent already that people just use whenever. Why isn't trauma recovery a medical procedure? Why isn't there a holodeck for use as a therapeutic tool? The hologram 'experiencing a childhood' is literally a version of that already. 1k years in the future and people need theatre to teach them to manage their mental health...
But such things would require the showrunners to give a shit about the science fiction part of startrek and not abuse the IP for a modern day teen character drama set in a generic tech fiction setting. The technology and the world in this show is not treated as a meaningful character itself, the science and technology is written for the convenience of the plot and does not form a cohesive or consistent world. This lack of object storytelling is a modern writing issue that makes the stories lack grounding in shared reality. Each episode of this show might as well just be a dream one of the characters had.
The way it is done is very much Trek, though. Geordi didn't get his blindness "fixed", even though Pulaski gave him options to do so. In contrast to the genre of cyberpunk (which you brought up in a different comment), Trek is not about overcoming what it means to be human, but fully embracing the full human nature. Disabilities are not meant to be overcome or erased (but to what degree this is true could of course be debated), but accepted.
Likewise, I guess the process overcoming trauma is considered as the goal, because you learn something from it. Of course everybody could just take a happy pill every day, but likewise, they could create genetically enhanced superhumans that try to take over the universe. But this is not what Star Trek is about, and it never was.
But I agree that the psychological treatment is a bit subpar in this episode, and it is weird that they did not introduce a trained psychiatrist/counselor, but instead a Lieutenant who bears her own share of trauma. Definitely educational, but solely from a therapeutic perspective, probably lacking.
Ake did say the cadets had been attending counselling sessions, and that they weren't working (actually, I think she said that they "weren't enough").
Maybe they could have included a scene or a montage of those ineffective settings - IIRC, the most comparable "classic" episodes, "Family" and "It's Only A Paper Moon" showed them, however briefly.
Yeah, I remember she said something to that effect, but it is a bit hard for me to believe that trained specialists in trauma therapy did not achieve anything, but Tilly with the power of drama did.
I am also not one of these specialists, but some methods used by Tilly seem... Counterproductive? Like cornering a traumatized young adult emotionally seems like it could backfire heavily.
I won't pretend to be an expert, and I do hope that someone out there will get an actual therapist to guest on a podcast or soemthing to talk about the episode, but I do know that therapeutic confrontation is a real thing.