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.
I agree that I felt this was the weakest. This felt like actors writing an episode for actors about the healing power of ACTING! Just...calm down and see a real mental health professional.
Caleb and Tarima have negative chemistry, and I wish the writers would stop trying to make that happen, but here we are.
The stuff with SAM was great and should have been the A-plot.
Overall I'm still liking the show but this week was a slog.
I would find some sort of magical "mental health technology" not only unrealistic, but rather insulting.
Why?
That's the perfect scenario for science-fiction. It's theoretically possible to do so, trauma has a physiological footprint, it manifests in physical reality that can be altered by technologies. It's entirely plausible for some effects of trauma to be healed medically instead of solely through something like talk therapy, or in this case, theatre therapy.
*I had deleted my comment prior to your post, as it was intended for the poster one level up in the thread.
I don't agree at all - it sounds rather soulless to me, stripping the humanity from the story.
I think it's clear that, much like Nog in "It's Only A Paper Moon", the cadets (particularly Tarima) have not been receptive to conventional therapy, which is extremely predictive of whether said therapy will be effective.
Fair point. I'm sure my thoughts on this episode will soften over time (they always do), but I think my dislike of both the character of Tarima and the way she is played are making it hard for me to be invested in her story lines.
I didn't expect this one to be quite as divisive as it seems to be!
But yeah, I can see why it would clang if you're not feeling the characters involved. I'm sort of in the same space with Darem right now.
Tarima is messy, but it's a very familiar kind of messy to me. Zoe Steiner is definitely taking a unique approach to the character, but it's mostly working for me. I thought her scene with Caleb in the botanical lab was quite well done, and not an easy task.
Yeah, I think this one didn't come together as well as it could have. Should have focused on the Sam story more and done more to make it feel like she was in real danger. When she was dead I involuntarily yelled "yeah right!". Lo and behold a minute later it's resolved happily. The drama class and Caleb/Tarima story could have more easily been cut short without losing anything.
Probably one of the worst eps, but I'm happy to say that's actually a pretty high bar for this show so far and this is more meh than truly bad (here I'm flashing back to like 20 different Discovery episodes where the episode ended and I was tearing my hair out over how stupid they were - that's the real trauma here)
Also happy to speculate that, with two episodes left, the pendulum seems likely to swing back to excitement next week and I'm here for it.
Maybe it was because of Mary Wiseman, but for some reason this felt like a Discovery episode, and not in a good way. I liked Tilly on Discovery, but here she just annoyed me for some reason, felt very smug in all her dealings with the cadets.
It doesn't not sound old and grumpy...