Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Is the Best and Most Important Star Trek of this Era

27 Feb Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Is the Best and Most Important Star Trek of this Era

When children are not given the tools and support they need to navigate the world, they fail to thrive. We live in a time of unimaginable horrors. The kids, as they say, are not okay. Society keeps failing them. Star Trek: Starfleet Academy holds up a mirror to their pain, their grief, and let’ them know, it’s not your fault.

Kids need stories that reflect their realities. I’m a Young Adult author who writes the stories adults don’t want to hear; the stories that acknowledge that for some youth, life is a horror movie from which it can feel like there is no escape. I write the stories I needed as a child. Stories that say, “I see you. You’re not broken. The adults in your life fucked up and failed you. Your pain and your feelings are more than understandable. And there is hope and you are loved.”

We live in a world where adults have a sea of stories from which to choose that reflects the full realities of life. We live in a world where children’s stories either gloss over the really painful parts or tells them they are broken and it’s hopeless and why bother.

Now we have Starfleet Academy that is filling a huge gap in the types of stories youth need; stories that reflect the realities of growing up in school shootings and friends dying from COVID and abuse and neglect and the power of adults intervening with a message that says, “I see you. You’re not broken. The way you are reacting is because society failed you. The reaction is normal. It’s not your fault.”

There’s been an episode about how neglect and a failure to see a child results in people-pleasing behaviour. There’s been an episode about the ramifications of trying to impose on someone what you think they need instead of listening to what they say they need. There’s been an episode about how a psyche will break down when faced with horror if a child isn’t brought up in a loving and caring environment; how having a homebase you can trust to come back to is so important. There’s been an episode about what happens when the safety of a classroom is violated.

It’s not a spoiler to talk about the how cadets had to fight for their lives in a classroom. It’s part of the episode description. That episode aired two days after Tumber Ridge. I still can’t think about it without having the air sucked out of body as I cry thinking about the pain the survivors are facing and the ways in which society failed a child to such a degree that it had such devastating results. In that same episode, we learned about a choice the Captain had to make. A day later, the premier of British Columbia David Eby told us the story about a teacher who had to make the same choice in Tumbler Ridge. And I can’t type these words without tears streaming down my face because it is so unimaginable and yet, I’m a parent who absolutely would have made the same choice and just knowing that makes it all so much worse.

In a world with adults who keep saying it’s too soon to talk about school shooting, and friends dying around you because people can’t be arsed to mask, and adults who don’t want to confront their responsibilities when children are abandoned and abused and are not seen and accepted, and publishers shying away from contemporary stories that explore all these horrors with truth and compassion, a show like Starfleet Academy that faces all of it head-on is absolutely the most important show of our time. It absolutely will save the lives of children as they are truly seen for the first time.

If you think otherwise, I suggest you do some self-examination to figure why you hate these stories being told and why you dislike a show children need now more than ever. Maybe fix your hearts, or die, as the great Gordon Cole (David Lynch) once said.