the therapeutic utility of a shared mythical framework
good news, bad news about that approach, soji baby
So this is a week late. Sue me! (Wait, don’t.) On the bright side, you’ve all had a chance to watch last week’s episode of Picard, though, yes? Good.
Let’s drill down on this line from Soji, when she’s explaining to Hugh (!!!) why her work would benefit from her speaking to Ramdha, the formerly Borg-assimilated Romulan historian with the weird fingernails and tarot cards: “There is ample evidence of the therapeutic utility of a shared mythical framework.”
On its face, it’s an unapologetically writer-y idea, isn’t it? The assertion: that stories are the backbone of society, actually; they’re how we make sense of our individual lives, so you’d better take what we do seriously, goddammit. (That’s what you get when you let a Pulitzer-winning novelist write Star Trek!) It’s also well-trodden territory in psychology circles. Anyone who has ever been to therapy, whether or not they have experienced trauma (though particularly if they have), will recognize the strategy of reframing one’s identity—the narrative of who they are, where they come from—to begin to heal and move forward. A running joke between me and my therapist is that I constantly process my own life and the things that happen in it in terms of pop culture, none of which she has ever seen, read, or even heard of, so I end up having to tell the existing story first, weaving a big metaphor onto which I can then map my own experiences and feelings. (I know you’re thinking this is a trick she’s deploying to get me to talk through it, but I assure you, she really hasn’t heard of this stuff. Once I was talking about a rapper I’d known who had died, and she perked up and was like, “Wait, was it Mac Miller??” and we had a real moment about it.) So obviously, as a writer and sociology nerd who spends a lot of time thinking about archetypes, I loved this idea and this line. My heart sang in that moment!
But the concept also promises to be massively consequential in a Star Trek context, in a not-so-good way, and I’ll tell you why.
For decades, Trek has tried—in the wake of the “space western” of the original series, anyway—to be anti-mythical framework, for the most part. The Federation was ostensibly built by an alliance of peoples from myriad cultures who wanted to forge something new together. The Vulcan symbol representing IDIC—which we’ve encountered in the original series, once (I think?) in Next Generation, in the animated opening credits of Discovery, and now on a box on the desk of that “Vulcan” (probably Romulan in disguise) Starfleet security chief/double agent—stands for Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, an ideology that places value on the absence of a common mythical framework.
Superstition, legends, myths—all are regularly positioned throughout the franchise as limiting relics of the past, to be respected to a degree, certainly (see: the Bajorans’ Way of the Prophets), and to be fetishized in a Sherlock Holmes holodeck program often, but to be viewed in practical terms as something that makes people fearful, territorial and gullible. Remember the episode of Next Generation where Picard has to prove that “Ardra” isn’t actually the devil but a shapeshifting über-scammer trying to grift an entire society into believing she’d come to collect on their “deal”?
As much as I personally adore the concept of a “shared mythical framework” being the key to psychiatric recovery, it’s already becoming a huge problem for Picard, though he doesn’t know it yet. Sure, it might help individual organic life forms separate themselves from the anti-cultural abyss that was Borg assimilation, and reacclimatize to their own respective cultures. And yes, to be fair, Soji does say “the therapeutic utility of” and not “the ultimate supremacy of.” But it’s still a deeply seductive, fraught idea that does not play nicely with Star Trek’s overall goal—in fact, you could argue it’s its antithesis. (It’s some Star Wars shit, is what it is.) (C’mon, what would this newsletter be without a playful potshot at The Other Franchise?)
The Romulan legend of “the Destroyer,” whatever that is, has already convinced Ramdha, Narek (bad-teeth’d pickup artist) and Narissa (weirdly incestuous sister of bad-teeth’d pickup artist) that Soji is a foretold enemy, a silicon-based Hela who will bring about the end of literally everything, and must therefore be destroyed. What could possibly go wrong with “the therapeutic utility of a shared mythical framework”?
Coming soon (Friday)…
A question re: Q
A proper tribute to Santiago Cabrera’s Rios, the Wolverine/Han Solo/Riker surrogate of our (my) dreams, and his ship of international hologram clones
Warrior nuns (not entirely sure whether that breaks an embargo, so don’t snitch, OK?)
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