Not that I’m paranoid about everyone knowing how old I am, but I’m dating myself when I state that I watched all of ST:TNG in its first run (except for one episode which I had to record and watch later—in a rare moment, we went out to dinner that evening).
During the run of the show, I was a teenager, a few years younger than the character Wesley Crusher. I assume it was primarily because of the age, but I definitely identified with him, especially in the context of a familial relationship. Otherwise we had little in common: my mother was not a doctor and my dad was alive and well. I was also not a military brat. I guess I was kinda smart—I was in mostly honors and AP classes, but I wasn’t saving the universe every week kind of smart. If I had access to advanced nanotech, while I was generally a responsible kid, with my luck, they would have gotten loose as well. So there’s that.
I also spent some time in high school thinking I was going to join the military, specifically the Air Force. Wesley joined Starfleet and then left to become a higher being. I decided ahead of time the military wasn’t for me and went on to college, have a career, and some kids. (Sometimes I think us moms should qualify as higher-order beings.)
I would say I had a similar feeling with the Sisko’s when ST:DS9 aired, although I was 19 and a little older than Jake when that one started, but I was obviously still closer in age to Jake Sisko than his father. I also obviously got the writing bug. I had it back then, like now, like Jake.
Skip ahead a couple decades and I’m now I my, uh, late 40s with kids of my own. I have re-watched TNG a bazillion times, and DS9 a few. But it was at the bazillion and one-th time that I realized I was watching it differently.
In episodes that feature interaction between Dr. Beverly Crusher and Wesley, I now identify profoundly with Beverly, even though the only thing we have in common is that we’re moms. Okay, there’s a little more than that: we’re both working moms with careers that are very important to us. While growing up there were always working moms as role models around me, including my own mother. But watching Trek now, I can see that Dr. Crusher strongly influenced me, too. I’ve always known it was okay to be utterly engaged with my career, even after having kids. When I watch episodes and Dr. Crusher is giddy over attending a conference, or really into her work, I know that’s exactly where I got it from.
It dawned on me recently as I was re-watching DS9 I now look at Benjamin Sisko differently, too, and several of my favorite scenes are when he’s in “dad” mode.
But another DS9 episode that’s taken on a completely different meaning seeing it now is “The Visitor.”
I recently re-watched it, and as I was doing so realized that I hadn’t seen it in more than a decade. Why is that time period so meaningful? This was the first time I’ve watched it since my own father passed away. Watching the episode in its original run, my Dad was alive and well, so I couldn’t sympathize with Jake Sisko the way I can now.
I was pretty close to my father. When he was diagnosed with his stage 4 gallbladder cancer, I was distraught (to put it mildly). My Dad, however, was insistent that me and my siblings and our families go about our lives. Life is for the living, he believed.
Dad believed this so strongly that he lied to us. It was nearly 10 years ago this month that he was telling us that his prognosis was 1 to 2 years. I had taken my oldest son to Florida to visit that June of 2011. He was on a “quality of life” regimen of chemo, and was mostly himself. We played poker—one of the things we both enjoyed. He brought me to a Hold ‘Em tournament. Our last one together. He lasted longer than I did by a bit. (I was out of practice since I had my kiddo.) I don’t think at that point I could imagine that he wasn’t going to be around much longer.
It hit me the next time I was able to visit a few months later. We were watching Jeopardy. My entire life, my Dad was king of Jeopardy in our house. With the exception of Opera, he seemed to know everything and got them all right. While sitting there one evening watching, I was the one answering all the questions—I was beating him. That was the beginning of the true end, when I knew that he was losing himself.
Dad passed a little over six months after we found out about his illness, just before Thanksgiving, which was well away from 1 to 2 years. To say I was upset is like saying Trek only had a minor effect on a few people. I was like, “But he said 1 to 2 years? What happened? What went wrong?,” and my stepmother confessed the lie. The prognosis was only six months, it was never 1 to 2 years. My Dad knew that had he told us the truth, possibly me in particular, yeah… I might have done… oh, I don’t know… something that might have screwed up my career to be closer to him… and Dad knew that wasn’t the best thing to do. I had to live my life, not up-end it because of him.
Watching Jake Sisko make decisions because he lost his father was heartbreaking. Watching Sisko try to tell him to live his life, and knowing Jake wasn’t going to listen, was even more so. Of course, the episode differed from real life because now and then Jake received this glimmer of hope that his dad might not really be gone. (And spoiler alert—lol—Sisko is back by the end of the episode.)
While my Dad appears in one of my dream’s occasionally, it’s obviously not the same. I guess I’m lucky that in my case, compared with Jake, there was never any hope once he was gone. Dead is dead. I’ve had to move on and live my life as my Dad wanted. I’ve had no random visits from my Dad to keep some hope alive. Visits in dreams don’t count. My Dad died and we’ve all had to move on.
It is crazy to be so into a TV show that after so many years I’m still watching and re-watching and finding new meanings in it all the time. But that’s Trek. LLAP.
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