So I got to preface this by saying, I do not have a terminal illness. I did not have a terminal illness as a child. I am not the parent of a child with a terminal illness. I am a parent, and my dad currently has a terminal illness, but I don’t really think I have anywhere near the relevant life experience that I can speak to the way the Elysian Kingdom chooses to handle this issue with any degree of specificity or personal stake. That all being said, what the fuck was this episode?
Okay, so, I liked most of the episode. It was silly, and overacted, and absurd, but I don’t mind Star Trek being any of those things. I don’t care that the entity behind the absurdity appeared out of nowhere and the only explanation we are given is, “Well, there is a theory that spontaneous intelligent godlike beings might be created sometimes, guess we found one.” I don’t care that the arbitrary magical godlike being chose to use its powers to fuck around for awhile, or that the character arc of M’Benga, to this point focused on curing his daughter of a terminal illness, is resolved not through science or his own efforts but what accounts to narrative magic. All thats fine and honestly perfectly Star Trek. But I do have a problem with a child character being written into a show and then killed off purely to manipulate my emotions, and I also have a problem with how they chose to kill that child character off.
M’Benga’s daughter has popped up only a handful of times before, only for brief scenes, and always justified by if he let her out too long, her disease would progress, so he has to keep her in the pattern buffer to keep her healthy until he can cure her disease. She basically exists as a character to this point to flesh out his motivation and why he might seem unusually sad and unwilling to relax at times other characters do so. It was honestly just beggining to get slightly tiresome that when it became apparent this episode would focus on M’Benga, my thoughts were “God I hope this episode resolves that plot, and ideally without writing her off the show and without killing her.” At the very least, I was hoping the episode would stabilize her condition so we can begin to see M’Benga actually be a father instead of a man with a low maintenance pet that makes him sad. But instead, the show has her be magically cured - which again, is not a problem - and then has the being that cured her assert (with zero in universe pushback or explanation) that in order to remain cured, she has to stay with the entity. If I’m not mistaken, she asks her father to stay with her, but the show quickly dismisses that option for no given reason in favor of a dichotomy between him taking her with him and her dying, or letting her stay and being cured. He chooses to let her stay, and then she magically ages up to adult and tells him he made the right choice, then disappears.
This is, to be clear, her being killed and written off the show. Yes, she technically didn’t die, but she is gone. He lost the opportunity to be her father permanently. He will never know her, as a child or an adult, nor will we. Its unclear if she will ever even know anything real at all, or is just living in a permanent fantasy with a single other entity who controls everything about her experience. M’Benga says that he has to learn to let her go, which given she is like eight and has a terminal illness, even though we are told she is cured, this is the kind of lesson that only makes sense if we are suppose to read this as a death. Actual parents of actual kids with actual terminal illnesses will never be faced with a choice of “Let my child live with a magical genie and give up all contact with them so they can be cured, or let them suffer and die.” The choice they are faced with is, “Stop treating them if it is just prolonging their suffering, and let them die, or prolong their suffering in hopes you can find a cure.” Read through his lens, the message of the episode appears to be, “If you have a sick kid who you are being overprotective of in hopes they will get better, seriously evaluate whether your overprotectiveness and/or the rigors of their treatment are ruining their short life, and if they are, let them die, they will be better off.” And that feels kinda fucked up?
Moreover, let’s think about this a bit more. The entity is lonely, sure. But it’s also a god. M’Benga knows nothing about it, only that it contacted his kid psychically, read her mind, created an elaborate fantasy world for her entertainment that involved overriding her parents and guardians free will and making them fight, and then insists it can cure her of her terminal disease but only if M’Benga gives up his role as parent and lets this all powerful entity who enjoys making other beings its playthings raise his child. THEN, when M’Benga agrees, and the entity uses its powers on her, she says something to the effect of, “Oh Daddy, it tickles!” My skin fucking crawled. M’Benga needed to shut that down right now, not let some space pedophile groomer take over the raising of his kid. His kid instantly becoming an adult and assuring him he made the right choice is even more worrying. This fucker just took your kid, did something to her that felt like tickling, and now she looks like an adult and is saying everything the entity did is fine and her dad was right to let the entity have its way with her? Like, did the writers think for half a second about the implications of what they were writing?
Like I said, I am not in this position. I did google the reaction to this episode and found some people who do have terminal illnesses saying it resonated powerfully with them. I don’t want to take that away from those people or say they are wrong to feel that way. But to me, the episode read as both lazy from a writing perspective, and creepy. Star Trek has a long history of not wanting to actually deal with child characters and just summarily writing them off. M’Benga’s daughter is neither the first nor the most problematic example. But as a father, I am eager for this trope to die. Why can we not actually get a Star Trek parent who is a good parent? Why can we not see them actually navigate those issues? Star Trek explore tons of other morally complex, “boring” issues all the time. Instead, the child is simply introduced to give M’Benga a tragic backstory and make us cry when he loses the kid, but they didn’t have the courage to make her actually die so we get this fake happy ending that is nevertheless still a symbolic and actual death, plus kind reads like M’Benga letting a pedophile with godlike powers adopt his kid. Its fucking bizarre. I would so much rather his kid have just died in the past and we get a few flashbacks, rather than writing her in just to write her off immediately.
That all being said, they just introduced another kid the next episode, so maybe they will actually be exploring these issues. If so I dunno why they couldn’t have handled M’Benga’s kid better. Maybe the actress just didn’t want to be on the show anymore. Although given that it seems La’an is now leaving in order to find someplace for this new kid to live, sounds like she too is being immediately written off. God forbid kids be allowed to exist on Star Trek.
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