Transcript - Episode 23: We’re Always Only Ever Actually Talking About Ourselves
Hey, It’s Me
EPISODE # 23
Hosts: Mike Sakasegawa and Rachel Zucker
Transcript by: Shea Aguinaldo
Please note: transcripts are transcribed directly from recordings of live conversations; as a result, quotes and statements may be approximate and there may be unintended memory errors.
Mike Sakasegawa: Hey, it’s me. I, uh, was wondering if you might want to record this week. And if you did, I was thinking about the fact that you had told me recently that you had enjoyed Starfleet Academy. And I finished watching that this past week, and I also enjoyed it. And I thought maybe we could talk about that. We haven’t talked about stuff like that in kind of a long time. But also, you know, where that show goes and some of the stuff in it also seemed like it might be… It might lead us down some other, non-Star Trek-y, possibly more personal, uh, tangents. So, let me know what you think. I’ll talk to you soon.
[Music]
Mike Sakasegawa: I don't really know how to do this anymore.
Rachel Zucker: Me neither.
MS: So, okay, give me just a second. I'm going to take a sip of water and then I'm going to be in podcast mode.
RZ: It's not like it's your job. You're not the host. We're the co-host. I'm not doing anything either.
MS: No, I know. But it was my question this time or my topic this time. I do feel like it's supposed to.
RZ: Well, why don't I start and say something and then if you don't like what I'm saying, we can cut it out and we can start again. Okay?
MS: Okay. [laughs]
RZ: But seriously, like I know sometimes we say we're going to do that and then we don't do that. But we decided that for many reasons, we wanted to try doing an episode that was not all about my grief, our difficulties in our own lives, and also maybe like not processing all of our feelings with each other about other people all the time. We wanted an episode that was maybe a little more lighthearted and a little more fun and for our own sakes and maybe also for the listener or listeners as it may be. So we decided to, I had watched Star Trek Academy and really liked it and you had finally finished watching it and I rewatched it and we were like, "Oh, here's something outside of ourselves, but that's important to us that we can talk about." I think we might be having a little trouble right now because we haven't tried an episode like this for a long time. I will say for myself, I was going to try to not say this at all, but I'm having a very difficult day and few days and few weeks. So my hope is that once we start talking about Star Trek, I will be able to like make good on my intention, which is to not go into the hard feelings. But that's not usually my M.O. to avoid or whatever. I don't know exactly what's happening for you. If you feel like it's just out of practice, or if you want to talk about for a minute what's going on for you, I welcome it. But also if you want to just say like, okay, let's just see what happens. Let's go to Star Trek and let's fake it till we make it, which is not usually what we do.
MS: [laughs] Yeah. So there's a couple of things. The first thing is, I don't think that I had any expectation that we were going to be able to pull off lighthearted. I also, the way that you put that just now was faking it till we make it kind of thing, or avoiding the feelings. That wasn't really my intention either, is not to avoid the feelings. Rather, it has been my experience for myself, and maybe it doesn't work this way for you, that big changes in my life that I didn't want, that I experienced as a loss, and that I needed to grieve, that the thing that ends up keeping me from getting through that is if I'm trying to go backwards and that the only thing that actually helps is that after I've had my period of grieving, of more intense in-the-moment grieving and processing and stuff, is that I have to actually start building new routines and new habits, that the thing that I need is to be able to start putting down new patterns in order to allow the thing that I'm grieving to become a memory rather than the thing that I'm living in every single second. You may or may not be ready to do that. But for me, this was something that I just wanted to try. Not even completely, like partly for you, but mainly just for me. I think that knowing us, I had an expectation that when we talked about Star Trek, because we've talked about Star Trek on the show before, we're only ever actually talking about ourselves when we're talking about anything on this show. So everything that we're going through and everything that we're bringing in is going to color how we receive it when we're watching it. So it's going to color how we talk about it. But this would maybe be a little bit of an indirect thing. The other thing is that I don't know if the listeners know exactly how we record this. We're on a Zoom call right now. When I do Keep The Channel Open, if I do Zoom, I always turn the cameras off because I don't want to be able to see people. I don't want them to have to see me. But mostly because like a lot of people express a lot of anxiety about what they're going to look like on camera. But we can see each other, but we don't put the video into the podcast. But I can see you right now. As soon as the camera came on, I could see that you had a different energy from how you usually do when we first start. So my thing that was going through my head when I'm thinking, "Okay, how do I start this?" is like, "Should we even do this at all? Like, is this just a bad time?" Like, I don't know.
RZ: Because I don't look up for it because I look sad and tired and like I've been crying.
MS: Yeah.
RZ: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, well, that's a whole other topic of because I never recorded Commonplace with the cameras off. I have trouble when I can't see somebody's expression that there's a lot of anxiety. The best for me is in person. The second best is with the cameras on. It's like a completely different experience where I can't see somebody's body. But we could try it with the cameras off. [laughs] I'm not saying you're asking for that right now.
MS: I'm not.
RZ: But that is an interesting thing we could talk about at some point, that different comfort level. I mean, I think we should just try it. I think we should just see what happens. Especially since, as you're saying, you weren't really expecting lightheartedness from me. I guess I'll say that I think I'm in between the period of time in which a year ago we found out that Abram was not in remission and was not going to live when he died. So August 26th was when we got the scans and October 23rd is when he died. I don't know what's going to happen after the 23rd, but I think that from now until then, it's just like, there's not going to be anything close to what you're describing about being able to put something a little more in the past. I know you weren't suggesting that to me, but I think it's just like I need to put my seatbelt on from now until the 23rd. So I don't know. I just say that more to be like not every day is probably going to be the same from now until October 23rd. But there's ups and downs within a day. I'm feeling more okay today than I was yesterday and more okay right now than I was a few hours ago. I did something I don't usually do, which is I like forced myself before we started on the Zoom to go down and go in the ocean, which I haven't been doing. I was just like, "See if you can just like pick yourself up and get distracted, like get engaged with Mike and get go in the ocean and wash the morning part away." So I don't know. I think we should do it. I think we should try. We don't even know what we want. I was going to say, if it's not what we want, we don't have to air it, but you know, we don't even know what we want. So I don't know.
MS: There's never any particular thing that I want. I just want to talk to you because you're my friend and I care about you and I like spending time with you even this kind of time, you know.
RZ: Well, it's good because it's all I got.
MS: I'm just saying. I'm just saying. The point isn't to try and have you be a particular way.
RZ: Yeah.
MS: If I'm thinking about talking about Star Trek, I think the thing that I'm thinking about is actually not so much thinking about the thing itself. Not so much having a talk about recapping the series or doing some kind of academic discussion of having a piece of film criticism or whatever. But really, I'm thinking about what is it because when I told you that I was watching Starfleet Academy, you told me, "Oh, I really liked that show, especially the last few episodes." It made me think, "Oh, well, that's interesting. Okay, one, here's something that Rachel is saying she liked that happened relatively recently. So that's interesting. I wonder what it was that she liked about it. Then particularly what the last few episodes were that brought this into you." So I'm thinking to myself, "What was it that Rachel liked about this? What was it that was something that the experience of watching it was enough for her to be able to tell me, even when things are kind of shitty in her life?" That was something I liked. Then the other thing I'm thinking about is as you've been doing your rewatch over the past week, because the message that I sent to you that we're going to use as the intro for this was last week, right? It was like towards the beginning of last week. You said, "Hey, can I rewatch the whole thing?" And I said, sure, no problem. As you've been doing the rewatch here and there, like every couple of days, you've been sending me texts saying what your responses were in the moment, having just watched the episode or maybe even being in the middle of the episode. So I'm thinking to myself what is the experience that you are having watching this television show? And all of that is not going to be separable from where you are in your life right now. Right?
RZ: Mm-hmm. Definitely not. Especially, based on the themes of the show and what I liked, yeah.
MS: Yeah. I'm not trying to get away from the talking about our feelings thing. I'm saying here's just like maybe a different context for us to be talking about. How did this land with you and why did it land with you?
RZ: Yeah. Just so I can remember, did you end up watching the show Paradise?
MS: No.
RZ: I might mention it, but, yeah. I can do it in a way that will be whatever. [laughs] Yeah.
MS: All right. Just for the listeners, we're not going to do a recap of the series, but we are going to be talking about the whole series. So anybody who cares about spoilers, watch it and then come back. One of the things that I thought was really interesting in the text messages that you were sending me, there was a couple of things. One is that you were talking about how the show is basically like a teen drama in space and it's ridiculous but it was something that you were liking and then another thing that you said I think this was when you were in the middle, like maybe the eighth episode, was there's so many dead children in this show. So can we talk about I mean, these are two things that I don't know if this is where we're going to go with it, but just did it land differently the second time when you were watching it?
RZ: It did. Why don't I tell you that the thing that when I watched it the first time was just so moving to me and helpful to me. We've talked about this, I've always watched Star Trek almost like it's like a tarot card for me or like I know it wasn't made for me about me, obviously. But that's how I watch it. I'm like, "Okay, it will tell me what to do, or it will give me some insight into my own situation." So there's 10 episodes, I think it's the seventh episode where they have to take SAM back to Kasq. Basically, there's a photonic being, a holographic being, but she's not exactly holographic. I can't remember, but whatever. She gets sick. She gets damaged. Her programming gets damaged. She has been trying all this time to get the holographic doctor to basically be her mom or her dad and be her mentor. He's been resisting. He's cold and distant and objective. You don't really know if it's because he's the doctor and that's how doctors are supposed to be or if that's his personality. But she's going to die. The captain who the season starts off, I'm not trying to recap, but it's important to have this context of she has separated a mother from her son. It was this horrible thing that she does. Then you find out that she lives for a very long time. That's her species. Her son who died, she maybe could have saved him, but at the risk of so many other lives. She didn't. She didn't try to save him. That she's living with this grief and this guilt for her own biological son, but also for having separated this mother and son and sent the mother to prison and the son, she doesn't know what had happened to him. Then she finds him again. So she's like very protective of him. So she's there having had this experience almost of like losing two children with this student who is also her ward. Basically they realize that the only way to save SAM's life is to give her a childhood in real time. Because what has made her programming unfixable is that she basically suffered this trauma and saved her friends' lives and like had all these experiences. But she was only a few months old when she had had this experience, even though she looks like a teenager. What they say or find out or realize is that the reason to have a childhood is to prepare you for trauma. I'm simplifying. In this show Paradise, which I won't go into that much, but I watched it around the same time right after or right before I watched Starfleet Academy for the first time. It's basically, everything is a complete and utter fucking disaster. It's like this dystopian nightmare of a world. In part, it is that way because there is a woman whose son died and she cannot abide this loss. So she uses her extreme wealth to create a technology to save her son. You see this in a lot of sci-fi, like someone can't tolerate the loss of an individual and they basically create some sort of monstrous alternative reality or reality to turn back time or whatever. That doesn't go well. So here I was watching this show and I was like, I don't know, there's so much guilt no matter what I do. I think this is just part of having a child die. But there was so much feeling of like, why did I do all the things that I did for his whole life, for his 24 years, like if he was just going to end up dying? Why did I love him the way I did and parent him and set limits and not give him more ice cream or whatever it was, you know? If I knew it was going to end like that, why would I do it like that? And I think in that moment I just felt like the doctor has to make a very hard choice because he lost a child also and the reason he did not want to be the mentor of SAM is because he felt like he couldn't take another loss and another connection. And those two are the same. Like once you start loving someone, there's going to be loss involved. But I guess I started to think like all those things I did for Abram were not wasted. They were in a way to help him die, or I didn't know that, of course, you know, but like in order, yeah, I don't know. Also that this world, Star Trek, we've talked about that some of the series are more utopian and more dystopian than others. But ultimately, it's not a dystopian world, which I am really appreciating and needing a lot of the time. I think that part of that, again, this is oversimplified, but is that you have to make the choice for the greater good. You cannot choose your own child over billions of people. You can't. Even if you have the capacity to do it, you can't. But that in your individual lifetime and in your individual existence, you will prefer your child to anyone else, and you will carry that guilt and that grief and that loss, no matter how many years you live, no matter how many good things you do, and the show for me is showing us both of those, right? That the captain and the doctor and the mom who was originally separated from her son in the very beginning before the show really begins, that all of them are destroyed on some level by this individual loss and by their individual story, yet they're also still able, and this is like what Star Trek is fundamentally about, to work for the greater good and to still be part of Starfleet or a community or whatever without it turning into fascism, which is, of course, the danger of loving Hitler more than your child, just to give one example. Okay, so that's what I have to say.
MS: I think that you said this interesting thing in one of our messages where you were talking about how The Next Generation marked a sharp turn in Star Trek to the show being about the interpersonal relationships. I don't know if I 100% agree with that, but I think that it's an interesting thought. I think that this particular show, Starfleet Academy, it is a teen drama set in space with all of the sort of ridiculous teen stuff that there is. Although actually when I was looking this up, apparently Caleb is supposed to be 21, so he's not actually a teenager, but it still reads that way. But I think that this show, what it is doing is it's taking an aspect of Star Trek that has been present all the way through and making it sort of central, which is that I think this show is about trauma, like front and back. It's about trauma. Like it's about every single character, almost every single character, maybe not Reno, but...
RZ: I love Reno.
MS: Maybe even her too. Every character has some trauma they're carrying forward. Also that just the job of being in Starfleet is a traumatic one. That is one that in a show like The Next Generation, these are all adults who they know what they signed up for. They've already been through the Academy. So if their ship gets attacked and they have to see people die, they're used to it. But they don't really talk a whole lot in The Next Generation about how fucking traumatic it is to have to go through experiences like that. I mean, you have somebody like a character like Captain Picard gets turned into a Borg and kills millions of people. They just float past that. He gets scanned by an alien probe and lives an entire lifetime and then has to watch his whole civilization that he's come to love and his family. They'd all die. He wakes up and realizes it was basically just a dream. He just moves on from that. They don't really talk about that in the series. How does he move on from those things? It's just something that he does.
RZ: Well, I think the way that he does, sorry to interrupt you, is because at that point, Starfleet is good. It's so good. It's not that they don't make mistakes, but the history of humankind was on the verge of collapse. Then so he's part of this ultimately good thing. But here Starfleet is bad, which can't not be saying something about the United States, obviously. But yeah. Okay, sorry, I interrupted you. Go ahead.
MS: I mean, even though, like in the movies and in certainly in the Picard series, they come back to some of these things and we realize what he actually hasn't really worked through those traumas.
RZ: Right. And he doesn't have any children, which is a huge difference.
MS: But in this show, even in the very first episode, you see that Athena gets attacked by Venari Ral. You get to see not the main cadets, but you get to see extras who are freaking out and who are kind of broken by the experience. You see one of the characters, I think this is in episode six, who's been an antagonist cadet, he heroically sacrifices himself to save other people. The whole rest of the series is dealing with that, the trauma of that really intense experience that they have. But you're talking here specifically about three of the characters, about Anisha Mir, about Captain Nahla Ake, and about the Doctor. All of them have their own traumas too. You mentioned the Doctor, him having had his holographic family in that one episode of Voyager and how that was something he didn't want to return to. I actually just watched through Voyager for the first time last year.
RZ: Oh, wow.
MS: But in this series, you actually sent me a quote of his. You sent me, let me get it here, that he says, "The only thing that lets me bear my infinity is not having to love anyone." Here's the character. We know him to be a thousand years old at this point, right? That all of his stuff on Voyager, which he doesn't really reference that much, just a couple times in this series, all of that stuff is stuff that happened like a thousand years ago at this point. There's a scene where he's referencing this to a little bit, just making it a bleak reference to this. I think this is at the beginning of episode eight, which is the one where they go to Kasq, where he's standing and watching the sun come up and talking about how many times he's seen that happen and how it's everybody, all the organics think of the sunrise as the beginning of something new, but he realizes because he's awake the whole night, that's not actually true. It's just an illusion. This whole thing of him having to deal with not just the loss of his holographic family from that episode, but also of all of the friends that he made while he was on Voyager and presumably the hundreds and hundreds and thousands of people that he's known over that thousand years. It wasn't something that I put together until just now. But Captain Ake also is, I think she's supposed to be like 400 years old or something like that. She's also had to deal with that kind of thing too. Both of them have suffered this loss and they respond in really different ways to that. That he responds by withdrawing and trying not to connect with anyone ever again until this episode finally shows him that maybe that's something that he needs to actually do, maybe not for himself, but for someone else. She responds to it by after this incident at the beginning of the show where she separates this mother from her child, she goes and she becomes a teacher. Then through the whole course of the show is trying to atone for that by helping as many children as she can. But you also get the sense that she's dealing with the loss of her own son by trying to connect with as many children as she can. It's the same problem. It's the same thing that they're both dealing with, this long life and loss and all of these things. But they deal with it in really different ways. I think that there's something about that. I mean, I think here maybe it's just showing you something about the characters. But if you want to take the show as a tarot reading or whatever, or showing you what your options are for yourself, it is showing you two really different approaches and what does and doesn't work about. Because there are things about each of those that work for them. There are things that really don't work for them, both of them. There are things that the Doctor isolates himself and that does protect him, but it also leaves him isolated, which you can tell is something that he is cutting a part of himself off in order to do that. Ake decides to turn more outward in how she deals with this loss. That does something for her by bringing her connection and bringing her a sense of purpose. But it really doesn't address the loss that she experienced. It doesn't actually make her feel better about these things.
RZ: No, and she, I don't know if you remember when they're in their final battle and Caleb's mom, Anisha Mir, says to Captain Ake, "If anything happens to my son, I'm going to kill you." Captain Ake says, "If anything happens to your son, you'd be doing me a favor." I mean, which is interesting because something is going to happen to Caleb. He's going to die before she does because she just lives a very, very long time. She outlives his species, not his species, but his lifespan. So she does. Yeah, you're right. She keeps like opening herself up to connection, to helping, to these roles of like trying to save children in lots of different ways. But it's not like she's able to do that because she's developed like a Vulcan logic around it where she's just like she's saying like, "I can't stand. I won't be okay if something happens to Caleb." But like, chances are something's going to happen to Caleb. [laughs]
MS: Yeah. Yeah. There's another show. So there's a show that you've watched that I didn't watch that you referenced. [laughs] I'm going to do the same thing back to you now. There's an anime that I started watching last year. They've had two seasons. It's called Frieren: Beyond Journey's End. The premise of this show is that there is the main character of the show, arguably the main character of the show, the central character of the show, whose name is Frieren, is an elf who in this universe elves basically live forever unless they get killed. Before the action of this series starts, she was part of a party of heroes that went out and saved the world. This is all set, it starts maybe 50 years after that when all of the rest of her party or at least the human members of her party have gotten old and died and it's saying like, "Well, what happens to this character after the journey is over and how does this character deal with the fact that she's going to outlive everything?" Like it doesn't even seem like a long time to her. She forgets. Like to her 50 years has just passed and she was like, "Oh, that wasn't very long." She has to deal with the fact that these other people that she formed this relationship with have gotten old and died. Another part of it is that she has taken on these two young companions to go redo this journey and they're traveling together to see what happened in this place after the demon king that they killed, after he died, like is there something they still need to do or something like that? But a lot of it has to do with, for this character, how does she... Frieren, I think, all the characters have these German names that basically say exactly what they are. I think that Frieren is something like "frozen" or something like that. She's very cold and aloof for most of it. She's got this almost autistic hyper focus on collecting spells that don't do anything just to add to her collection, but it is sort of about her. Here's the character who is just bound to outlive everybody she ever connects with and she doesn't want to connect with people anymore and these young people that she brings along on this new thing, she does become something of a mentor to them. She does hold them aloof for a little bit, but also in the process of going through this thing, this journey with them, she does become connected to them. She does become their mentor. She also reconnects with the feelings that she didn't really realize she had about the people that were her companions before. I don't know, there's something about this series, this Starfleet Academy series, and having just recently watched Frieren, and also going through changes in my own life, that I've been thinking a lot about loss and how, to some degree, every change in your life is a loss that you can and maybe should grieve. That even when something new is starting, it's something that you're losing the thing that you used to have. I remember before my youngest was born, the night before she was born, I wrote a blog post where I was saying, and it was kind of a letter to her. I knew that she was—because she was born by a scheduled C-section, so I knew she was coming the next day. I was writing to her saying, "I'm a little sad that you're coming. Because I don't know who you are yet. I don't have that connection with you yet. Someday I will. Someday I won't. I will barely even be able to remember what it was like before you were born." But right now I have this family that feels really perfect to me, that I've got this boy, this girl, everything feels balanced. I love what I've got right now. I'm a little sad that I'm not going to have that anymore. I remember feeling that way before her sister was born and before her brother was born, that even though there was this, thing that I was excited to be having, that it meant that I was going to be losing the thing that I already had. That was bittersweet. It was something that felt like I had to grieve it a little bit. It's in the same way that this relationship that I have now is something that I'm very happy about and I want, and it's a good one. It also means that there's things about my life as it existed before that I don't have anymore and I won't ever again, and there is something sad about that.
RZ: Sure.
MS: My eldest just went off to college and he's only a 25-minute drive away. We're still in the same city and I try not to text him every day. But I'm really, really sad about that. I'm happy for him and I'm really, really sad about it. Because he's never going to live in my house again. I'm never going to just wake up knowing that he's in my house and it's not just because he's visiting. There is a thing that... All of this stuff was going to go into my newsletter, [laughs] but I never finished writing it. We just, a couple of weeks ago, went through a period where there were a whole bunch of celebrity deaths that really rocked everybody, at least in my social media circles. Dolly Parton died, and then Tim Curry died. This one was maybe a little less widespread, but there was a voice actor named Peter Cullen, who was the voice of Optimus Prime, the Transformer, and he died. It was the same week, all three of them. I just remember seeing all this outpouring of grief from everybody. Celebrity deaths don't usually bother me that much because it's like, "Oh, I didn't know that person." But especially Dolly Parton and Peter Cullen, there was something about the way that they showed up in the world and the things that they said that really felt like these are people that are trying to make the world better. So even if I didn't know them, and in Dolly Parton's case, I wasn't even that big of a fan of her music, but it's very apparent this is a person who's trying to make the world better, and she's not in it anymore. That feels bad. It feels like the world is a little bit worse now. She's not ever coming back. We can all do things that are like try to carry her legacy forward by us trying to make the world more joyful, more kind, more beautiful. But that still sucks. I remember I saw this little thread of videos that, do you know who Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom is? She's a professor and she's a columnist with the New York Times. I think she works at UNC or something, but she's a prominent African-American social and political thinker. When Dolly died, she posted this series of things to her Instagram story that I saw. Mostly what she was talking about was this way in which why she's more sad about this one than usual. That was an interesting thing because she was talking about she doesn't feel like we have this social infrastructure now that would produce somebody like Dolly again. That's so it's even worse. But she said this thing at the beginning of her thing, which was that as you get older, you lose people. It's just a natural part of life. You lose people. When you lose them in their natural time, that's sad. But it is just expected. Then she went on to talk about why this one was a little different for her. But that idea that as you get older, you lose people really, really stuck with me. Because I'm 47. The first people that I can remember losing started when I was in elementary school. Over the years, I've lost a lot of people in my life in one way or another. A lot of people who have died and some people who have just left my life in one way or another. But when somebody disappears from your life in that way, it leaves a little hole in your life. Leaving a hole in your life, when you put that another way, it's leaving a little hole in yourself. I remember thinking about this a lot when one of my best friends from college died. God, I can't even remember. It was at least 10 years ago. I don't even remember when it was anymore. It was a while ago now. How you get this feeling where you keep losing people and losing people and losing people and it feels like the ground is coming out from underneath you and you don't even know where you're going to have a place to stand anymore. And the only thing that ends up happening is that if you keep living, you have to move where you are, find someplace else to stand. It's not that the holes in your life get smaller. It's just that your life gets bigger, or at least the circle of your life moves to someplace else so that the holes don't take up as much of it anymore. That's a really hard process. But...
RZ: Sorry, go ahead.
MS: Yeah. No, go ahead.
RZ: Gloria Steinem died yesterday. I'm not usually very affected by celebrity deaths and I don't feel like so, so sad, but I do feel like the joke I keep making is it's the end of an ERA. [laughs] Thank you for laughing. I'm not on social media, so I don't know if everybody's making that joke, but I made it.
MS: It's the first time I've seen it.
RZ: Awesome. But anyway, The New Yorker published what I guess is her final speech. It's very short, but there's a line in there and she says, "When you're lucky to have lived a long life as I have done, your role as an older person is to remind us how far we have come." And, you know, I don't know necessarily that that's as positive and optimistic as I first read it as "Oh, it's the older person's job to say 'Oh, we've come so far,' instead of 'Oh, you guys are fucked. You know, we're fucked.'" Because how far we've come includes how far we came if it wasn't that far, you know. [laughs] But I was thinking about that as you were speaking, right? We've been talking about how older people or beings that outlive other people, other loved ones, how they grieve and protect themselves or make themselves vulnerable and find meaning, and what that looks like and how for all of us, whatever that we're all experiencing, small and large losses all the time. Not just deaths, change and your family changing, even if they're good changes, it's a loss. I don't know, I was just thinking like, sometimes it makes me feel really good to think about outliving Abram, surviving all of these changes and losses and changes and gains and the difficulty of that, that there's a responsibility that comes with that and to remind other people how far we've come or whatever way you want to say, "I have lived through something, I have survived something, I have gained through my suffering, through my experience, something of value to other individuals or to the culture or to someone else who's also suffering or to people who don't have a big enough perspective because they can't," right? And other times I feel like it's too much. It's too much to ask me to suffer like this and have responsibility, you know? And that is like, I want to be like all the Buddhists and I want to be like Gloria Steinem, but it has to do with just how acute I think the pain is at any particular moment. You know you have to, it's like the whole put on your oxygen mask before helping someone else. If you can't breathe, you can't help somebody else. Anyway, I was thinking of that piece of it, too, of the real pleasure and strength of feeling that you are helping and that your suffering has meaning and purpose and enables you to... that's why Captain Ake was asked to be the head of Starfleet Academy, not because she had this experience including the losses that she had. That's what makes her good at that job. Not just at times she's also a liability because she's too attached, you know?
MS: It's interesting that we were saying that that show is a teen drama in space. I feel like the focus of the show really is mainly on the students and particularly on Caleb. But the ones that we're talking about the most are the parent figures. [laughs]
RZ: Yeah.
MS: These kids that are in this show are dealing with their own trauma too. There's one of the episodes that another one that you sent me a message about was, I think this is also in the eighth episode where Lieutenant Tilly comes back to teach them theater. [laughs] It's silly, but also it's very much about how they are and are not dealing with their trauma. I feel like the show really goes out of its way in ways that previous shows hadn't to try and show the process of dealing with these things and how it's messy and how it's messy for the kids. It's also messy for the adults. I don't know. I don't know if I have a point there, but... [laughs]
RZ: I think they could have gone farther even than they did, but I agree with you. I think that that is really interesting in that it starts with trauma. It's really all about like trauma therapy and integration. But what is her name? The beautiful one with the cork in her neck?
MS: Tarima.
RZ: Tarima. Yeah. You know, she's a Betazoid. Do you say Betazoid or Betazed?
MS: Betazed is the name of the planet.
RZ: Thank you.
MS: Betazoid is the species.
RZ: She is Betazoid. But she's like a super Betazoid. So she has to have this implant. [laughs] Otherwise what she, I mean, this is a great little side detail, which is that she just got so mad when she was even younger that she made her father death forever. [laughs] I just loved that. But anyway, she saves the day. Each one of them, it's like they have their rite of passage, at least one, in which they choose the group over the individual and in different ways. Or they choose another over themselves, over there. They put themselves at risk. She does this. Basically just the same way SAM's programming just kind of fails, gets overloaded, her brain gets like fried from this and she has to basically go into rehab and some sort of Betazoid equivalent of like a psychiatric inpatient situation. I wish personally that they'd, the only thing that we really know about it is that she went away and that Caleb was not really a good boyfriend while she was away. [laughs] I wanted to see her treatment. I wanted to see more about that. Because I think you're right that in some ways, the other series are more like somebody gets messed up, Spock, this happens to Spock, and then they have to go get help and they have to go to Risa or whatever and take the waters and then they come back and whatever. But yeah, like I wanted even more. I was like, "Well, what did they do for Tarima? Because I want that therapy."
MS: Yeah, but even that when she comes back in that episode, or she's still very closed off and it takes this little half production of Our Town to be able to draw her back out.
RZ: Right. And I liked, see, this I took as a tarot card for me. Like she was in the War College. What's the other thing called?
MS: Starfleet Academy.
RZ: Not, yes, okay. So just like the good guys, the less war people, the peacekeepers, you know? She was in the War College. She had chosen the War College and then she comes back and they're like, "No, you gotta start over again with the peacekeepers, with those softies," because even with your rehabilitation and even with your new fancy cork in your neck, it's too much. The War College is too much for you. That's not good for you. I'm translating it to like, there's some things your nervous system just can't fucking take. Don't go to the war college. Don't sign up for the war college. There's been a lot of things in the past few weeks, well, since I rewatched the show in the past few days where I'm like, "Are you signing up? Are you trying to sign up for the War College right now? [laughs] Because that's not available to you anymore." And that's kind of helpful. I was like, "Oh, yeah, even with all their fancy machines and their counselors and their blah blah blah, they're like, 'Nope, can't do the War College anymore.'"
MS: Yeah. The other thing that I was thinking about is how the main antagonist of the series is played by Paul Giamatti. His character's name is Nus Braka. It's a great Star Trek name. Even he is an example of trauma and how this, when it's unprocessed, leads you to be acting out in other ways. But what comes out in the last one or two episodes where they're doing this trial thing is he gives the story of his childhood and of the destruction of his space colony, his mining colony where he grew up, and he blames it all on Starfleet. And this is why he is the way that he is, is because of the trauma of all of that. And then it turns out that actually, no, it wasn't Starfleet that did it. It couldn't have been based on the way you're telling the story. It must have been your dad that actually screwed everything up and did this to you. He can't face that, so he just has a fit about it.
RZ: And Nahla Ake says to him, "You are seeing this through the eyes of a child," which is exactly what happens with childhood trauma because this guy is like a fucking mad genius. He should have been able to figure out like, oh, it was red fire and not blue and green fire. For him to have pulled off what he pulled off, he could have figured that shit out, except the only reason he couldn't was because he was stuck in his childhood trauma and stuck in his child mind. He was so sure that his dad was good. It wasn't that the dad was bad, but he made a very big mistake. He had this villain that was not his father. So I thought that was really, really interesting, psychologically astute description of how childhood trauma often makes you basically an idiot at moments as an adult because you're not able to draw on your adult experience and think from an adult perspective.
MS: Yeah. I guess that goes back to the thing about needing your childhood in order to develop some kind of resilience.
RZ: Yes.
MS: It would be really easy, I think, for a lot of us to just fall into that stuck place and to just stay in the anger and resentment and hate and all of that, you know, and try to resolve it by making everybody else pay for it. In our not best moments, it is a very attractive path, but at least in...
RZ: I have a question. We start, we decided to do this in part because you were like, "Oh, I finally finished Starfleet Academy and I really liked it." What did you like about it?
MS: I feel like it was the first series out of the new Treks that I watched that really felt like Star Trek-y to me. I think in part because there is something partly in the format of the show and the way that it did feel a little more episodic than some of the other more recent Trek shows. But also a lot of, I think especially the post-Burn Discovery series, because you're in this more dystopian world, it's not that it doesn't feel Star Trek-y, because it is trying to figure out how to keep your ideals in a world that feels bad or a world that is bad, how to still live by that. That is a throughline that goes with this show as well. But there is just something that felt a little more optimistic about this show. Even as things are going so horribly so often in this show, there is something just about the fact that they are young people has this innocence to it, even though they're young people who are dealing with really fucked up stuff, either currently because fucked up stuff is happening to them or in the past because they were separated from their mother because of a justice system that wasn't sufficiently compassionate or because they were abandoned by their parents for wanting to have a different life, or they never had a childhood because they were born literally yesterday, or because they had a parent that they feel like they can never live up to, or any of these things. They are all dealing with these things, and that informs everything about their character and their arc through the show. But at the same time, because they have that youthful energy and the promise of growth and learning, it feels optimistic. It feels optimistic in a way that Discovery didn't, that Strange New Worlds sometimes does, but Picard definitely didn't.
RZ: No.
MS: That's just something that I needed. Then on top of that, the fact that it was so clear from just a few episodes in that this was going to be a season of Star Trek that was about processing trauma and how to do that, how to fail to do that, what the consequences of failing to do it are, and all of these things, but that time and again, you have, and I think a lot of it does come down to the adults in the series, particularly Ake, the Doctor, Tilly, and Reno, that they are showing these kids how to do that. They are showing these kids how to be a good person. There is something just so hopeful about that, that I really latched onto because the world is really terrible now. I try really hard to teach my kids how to be a good person and how not to just sink into despair, how to find their resilience. Sometimes it doesn't feel like enough, but I think in this show, it does wind up being enough and that is something that I needed.
RZ: Here's another little thing, and this might be the last smart thing I have in me for today. It is optimistic, which is, again, what I really need from Star Trek, even though I really appreciated Discovery and I really liked Strange New Worlds. But as I think about it, the best teachers, the most balanced and really the best of them are the ones without children like Reno and Tilly and who's Reno's beloved?
MS: Lura Thok.
RZ: Yes. I was just thinking about, for the two of us who are in the situation, Judah goes back to college tomorrow, your son is in college now in his first year, this is Judah's second year, there's so much trust that we are putting in the world and on these teachers, and I don't just mean their actual teachers, but on other adults to give them something that parents can't give, because we're too close to them, because we love them so much, because we can't stand to see them suffer, because we're going to lay down our lives for them, but that doesn't help them come into adulthood in ways that they also need to come into adulthood, that maybe there's something that can give us, I'm struggling with this because I miss having the oversight and the connection and the control that I used to have over my kids' lives. But also I can see with my kids that they are finding the adults that they need and they're finding the teachers and in loco parentis figures and I just keep thinking of Reno in the captain's chair, and she's teaching these kids, really, to do these impossible things. She's saying to them, "Look, if you do it right, we're going to live. If you do it wrong, we're all going to die," [laughs] and you know, a parent can't do that, I don't know. So I'm saying the same thing over and over again, but I hadn't even thought about that, but maybe this is a good show to watch when you're sending your children to college, you know, or out into the world. [laughs]
MS: Yeah. It's funny when my son, I went to the new student and family convocation school. That was just three days after I moved him into his dorm. Mostly convocations are just repetitive and boring and long-winded where you get like 10 speakers that are all saying the same thing. But I remember one of the speakers was talking about exactly the thing that you're saying. I remember he was, I don't remember what his position at the school was, but he was talking about how he just recently transitioned his daughter from preschool to kindergarten and how the convocation was hitting a little different for him now because his daughter is of an age now where he's not like picking her up in the middle of the day to go home. He's not as involved in the minutia of her daily life. That there is this extraordinary amount of trust that he has to put into his child's school and teacher to take care of her during the day. That he was talking about how he recognized that for all the parents in the audience, we have to put that trust into them, into the people that are working at that school to care for our kids. I was thinking about that, and I was thinking about going back to the thing I was saying about having holes in your life and how that's the same as saying holes in yourself and how the way that those holes stop being the main part of your life is either by making the circle of your life bigger so that the holes take up relatively less or moving the circle of your life so that the holes aren't inside it anymore. But that hurts because what you're doing is you're changing who you are. There's no alternative to that. If you're going to keep living, you have to keep changing. There will be things in your life that you don't want to change. I don't want to stop being a day-to-day dad. I don't want to do that. When I moved my son into his dorm, after I was done getting his room all set up and putting the sheets on his bed and getting stuff moved into his dresser and putting together furniture and all of the stuff that we were doing, we were just sitting around. I sat around with him for a couple of hours, and then I said to him, "I'll stay as long as you want me to, but I feel like I'm just in the way now." He was saying, "I do want you to stay longer. But I don't know what else there is for you to do." And so then he walked me back to my car, and we both got a little emotional. But, you know, I gave him a hug and he walked away, and then I sat in the car and cried for a while. And part of that is because I could tell he was emotional and I felt bad. But the biggest part is because this was a change. So much of who I am is a dad. That's the main thing about me. I don't get to do that in the same way anymore. You don't get to do that in the same way anymore either. When you have put so much of yourself into this understanding of yourself as a parent, when it feels like it's gotten taken away from you, that hurts. I think the pain of it is at least in part that your body and your mind and your spirit need to move and are moving. They are moving. There is a part of you that is resisting that, that is trying to hold you in place. It is the tension between the thing that is moving that you can't stop it from moving. It's the holding on to it that hurts so much. I feel like the thing is that I don't want it to stop hurting. Because if it stops hurting, then that means that that process is done and I have moved on, and I don't want to. I don't want the me that I knew and that I liked and that I appreciated, I don't want that to be gone. That's why it hurts. I am still sad about it. I'm stalking his Instagram and his friends' Instagrams, and he left his location sharing on. So even though I told him, "If you leave your location sharing on, you don't have to do that. You're 18 now. But if you do, I'm probably going to check up on you." [laughs] It doesn't hurt as much because I know that he is growing into that, and he has found people to spend time with, and he is becoming a young adult. That's lovely to see. And I am heartbroken about it. I would like to get to the point where I can be the more dryly sardonic Commanderino about it. [laughs] But I'm not there yet.
RZ: Yeah. We can talk about this more, but you're still a day-to-day dad. I know it is different, and this loss is real, and I want to hold space for that. Also, I think he knows how to turn his location off, as you know, and he chooses not to. Yeah, you're still a day-to-day dad, even if he doesn't live with you. And it is really, really different, and it's really, really sad. I have a very good-looking man who's waiting for me in my driveway. [laughs] He's a landscaper. I did not need to say that he's good-looking. I don't know. [laughs] But I guess I'm still alive. I don't know. He's a little early. But I'm going to stop in this moment. I'm going to go down because he's going to help me with my apple trees. That's not a euphemism.
MS: [laughs] Okay. I think we got somewhere.
RZ: I do too. I'm going to do all the tech things that we do later. But we did a good job. We did a good job. Okay. Bye
MS: Bye.
[Music]
Mike Sakasegawa: You've been listening to Hey, It’s Me with Rachel Zucker and Mike Sakasegawa.
Rachel Zucker: Hey, It's Me is a production of Rachel Zucker and Likewise Media.
MS: Editing and transcription for this episode is by Shea Aguinaldo, with additional editing by Mike Sakasegawa, and the music is by Podington Bear.
RZ: You can find more information about the show, including contact information and transcripts, at heyitsmepodcast.com.
MS: If you'd like to hear more from us, you can find Rachel's other show, Commonplace, at Commonplace.today.
MS: And you can find Mike's other show, Keep the Channel Open, at keepthechannelopen.com. Thanks for spending this time with us.
RZ and MS, together: Take care.