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.

Geordi basically got super vision from his choice to integrate technology. He did not simply stay blind. What are you talking about?

If you could offer an effective, affordable and safe tech solution to people’s disabilities, the vast majority would use it. Nobody is out here ‘accepting myself’ if a fix exists. We know this because we already fix disabilities when able and nobody is choosing no. All of medicine is fixing disabilities or preventing them, from a broken finger to avoiding diabetes.

The modern process for overcoming trauma is the best we have right now. That it’s the same in 1000 years is bad science fiction, especially when medical science in the same world is lightyears more advanced. Why is mental health processes and treatment no better than 2025?

‘Taking a happy pill’ is, again, the modern equivalent of technology in mental health treatment. People in 3100 might, I don’t know, have advanced since now? The point of science in the fiction is to envision how it might have advanced. If you think mental health treatment is going to be talk therapy or CBT for the next thousand years, that seems pretty unlikely, particularly for severe trauma which has physiological affects on the brain that could potentially be modified.