The latest episode of Star Trek Makes Starfleet an Evil Organization That Abuses Children
By Chris Snellgrove | Published
The most recent Starfleet Academy episode made some surprising changes to two of the fandom’s favorite characters. When SAM begins to fall ill, the Doctor teams up with his people to find a surprising diagnosis. Namely, he can’t process trauma because his Makers didn’t implant memories of growing up.
In order to fix the holographic home, the Doctor makes the big decision to grow a rebooted version of SAM on his 17-year-old world. Doing so helps the Doctor recover from his emotional trauma (he’s still mourning the holographic daughter he lost over 800 years ago) while giving him the emotional resilience he’ll need to deal with the pain.
This is clearly meant to be a fun episode that establishes a father/daughter bond between two unlikely characters. Unfortunately, this episode accidentally makes Starfleet a villain because it confirms that they let a kid into their school and put him in various dangerous situations.
Life is a Glitch
When Starfleet Academy first time, SAM was the character that confused me the most. He had an eloquent, child-like personality that permeated his shows. Although she presented herself to the world as a young woman, she was recently edited. So, he came into the world with new eyes, often approaching things like a hyper-teenage version of Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
After the first episode of the show, my question was simple: “Wait, you’re going to let a kid into Starfleet Academy?” Although different races of aliens must mature at different rates, it seemed that you had to be at least 16 years old (like a young Wesley Crusher) to apply. So, it seemed strange that they would accept SAM, a person who was born (er, programmed) yesterday.
Collecting Adequate Data
Immediately, I relieved myself of the idea that 32nd century Starfleet probably saw SAM the same way 24th century Starfleet saw Data. In such an organization, a person’s actual age may be less important than their relative experience and maturity. Data knew more than anyone from the moment he was programmed, so it’s not like Starfleet would want him to wait an unreasonable 16 years before applying to school.
SAM, I thought, should be the same way: programmed with the knowledge needed to succeed at Starfleet Academy and eventually become a model officer. However, what I didn’t think of was that Data initially had no emotions that Starfleet was concerned about. Combined with his extensive knowledge, that made him a Vulcan. However, SAM’s emotions were front and center in “Life of the Stars,” an episode that accidentally exposes Starfleet as a villain.
Starfleet’s Sudden Heel Turn
In that episode, the SAM starts to come out, and things get so bad that the Doctor and Chancellor Ake take the hologram back to their homeland. Finally, they realize that he is still stuck in memories of a recent trauma that he cannot process. That’s because his Makers never gave him any memories of growing up, and without learning to endure, he wouldn’t be able to handle the flood of negative emotions from painful experiences.
Our heroes save the day by suggesting that the Doctor raise SAM until she is 17, giving her the rest of her childhood to develop the necessary emotional resilience. But I was intrigued by the revelation that SAM was programmed with no experience or memories of its own anywhere grace Sure, he had a lot of organized intelligence, but in everything else, he had the mind of a child.
The Dangers of Enrolling Real Children
In that way, the happy ending of this episode confirmed my initial suspicions that it was weird and specific it is dangerous for Starfleet Academy to accept a child into its ranks. He was someone who didn’t have the ability to truly understand much of what he experienced, and his attempts to process something as normal (at least, in Starfleet) as the trauma nearly killed him. Put another way, Starfleet almost killed this cadet because they didn’t screen him correctly during the application process!
Maybe there will finally be a stinging backstory to this; for example, we can get the revelation that, post-Burn, Starfleet accepts almost every application it receives. Back in the 24th century, applicants like Wesley Crusher had to pass a psychological test where they faced extreme fear and proved they had the emotional strength needed to become a Starfleet officer. In dropping tests like this and blindly accepting SAM’s request without knowing how it was planned, Starfleet put him and other cadets in danger.
Are Skeezy executives cutting corners to boost enrollment numbers? Perhaps Starfleet Academy is more like a modern university system than any of us ever imagined!
