#Chakotay is ultimately the one who says 'I can't go there with you.' and Tuvok says (silently) 'I'll stay by your side no matter what.' | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mylittleredgirl · 2 years

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Imagine, if you will, that you are sent back in time. You are now a showrunner on Voyager through timey-wimey Q reasons. You can now add an arc to a character that deals with mental illness(and deal with it well). Who do you choose and why?

oh i'm immediately sweating at the idea of being responsible for something like that! 😂

[three hours later]: i wrote the longest tumblr dot com essay of my life about mental illness in voyager. it's below the readmore.

tl;dr: voyager Did Some Things with janeway, b'elanna, and chakotay, and i ultimately choose b'elanna, because i think that arc has the most interesting facets to pull apart.

so, voyager does have a few mental illness episodes already: "night" (janeway; depression), "extreme risk" (b'elanna; parasuicidal behavior), and "the fight" (chakotay; psychosis). there are things to love and hate about each of them!

"night" sure is a portrait of depression, in a way that's hard for me to even watch. it's a great episode and mulgrew nails it, but the depression isn't named, and it's not treated at all -- the scene where the crew mutinies to keep her from sacrificing herself is great family feels, but the overall solution to janeway's mental breakdown is to fling her back into the fire. "we need you so don't leave us" is a different message than "we see your suffering and are here to help you through it."

janeway needs and deserves a multi-episode arc with how they set it up, and she doesn't get one. HOWEVER, if it were up to me and i were designing the show, i would choose to give my mental health arc to someone other than the captain, especially the first female captain of the franchise. it's 1998 and my girl has enough PR problems.

gender aside, i want my arc to have open disclosure and community support, and that creates real problems when she's at the very top of the military hierarchy (in voyager especially, with no external oversight or chance for respite). any significant mental health arc involving the captain will be about her captaincy as much as her healing.

remember the exchange between the doctor and janeway in "year of hell" when he tries to remove her from command for mental health reasons and she just... says no? what if it's chakotay instead? what if it's tuvok? what if it's the whole command staff sitting around together discussing whether or not to have a mutiny? what if it's the whole world sitting around discussing whether a woman with mental illness is capable of being in charge of something important like people's lives? and is it irresponsible for her not to step aside for someone "saner"? if we put this up for debate in the 90s, we are not going to like what comes out.

realistically, janeway's mental health does impact her command decisions sometimes. the more people who know she has a diagnosed condition, even in the far-flung enlightened future, the more people who are going to have this bit of data in their mind when they consider her more extreme orders and actions.

it's very messy. it's interesting messy, but not the best option for star trek's first time digging into this.

i really like "extreme risk," especially the end -- b'elanna is healing, but it will be a journey. it portrays the whole thing so well: the way b'elanna is living this silent parallel life from everyone else that they don't know about, the way they try to reach her but can't, the way she hides it, the way she articulates it.

on the flip side, the "treatment" she gets in that episode is absolutely batshit, and that should really come up more whenever someone says that chakotay would make a good ship's counselor. (neelix, on the other hand, is a GEM to b'elanna here and elsewhere.) if janeway's psychiatric treatment plan was "more work," b'elanna's is "more trauma" (and then more work). i'm going to come back to this one!

"the fight" is like... the worst if someone is looking for "good representation." it is not handled well. AND YET, it's the only episode where it's explicitly called out as mental illness (even if it's a made-up one), and the ONLY episode where anyone says it can be treated (successfully!!) with ongoing use of medication. prior to that, we saw mental illness treated one of two ways in trek: counseling (mostly for situational, trauma-based mental illness), or institutionalization (some tos episodes & ds9 "statistical probabilities"). it's wild watching the reg barclay episodes now, wondering why deanna wasn't encouraging him to take an anti-anxiety hypospray.

i've blogged about this before, but i feel like there's some realism in the Terrible Representation parts of "the fight." hear me out: mental illness can be fucking terrifying. especially in the case of a sudden acute onset, it can feel like it will ruin your life. untreated mental illness can be a burden on those around you and impact the children in your home.

also, chakotay has established, unresolved internalized issues with his own culture, so the fact that his grandfather refused treatment on spiritual grounds is going to be a tough thing for him to respect or forgive (and might actually be the origin of some of his resistance to his culture!!). the fact that he's rude and dismissive about his grandfather ("crazy old man") is pretty shocking from someone as generally open-minded and caring as chakotay, but it works... as a starting point, where he's terrified and facing his worst childhood fear that he has never processed as an adult.

so that's where this episode blows it: it brings up all these terrible mental illness stereotypes and then just leaves them there unchallenged. chakotay goes on an emotional journey toward surrender (he has to let himself go "crazy" in order for the ship to survive), but there's no journey toward acceptance. he doesn't come away from it with a greater appreciation for his culture or with a new empathy for his grandfather. and because it's medically handwaved off-screen, he never has to think about it again.

i'm honestly obsessed with the possibilities here for chakotay, but in the context of 90s episodic trek, i don't think i need to spend my magical Q-powers multi-episode arc to fix this. this genuinely could have been wrapped into the end of the episode (and left to the hurt/comfort fic writers after that).

because they don't NEED to magically cure chakotay! it has already been established in the episode that his condition can be managed with "a couple of hyposprays a day." imagine that it's the spring of 1999, and a Strong Male Lead in a family viewing tv show now takes prescription psych meds!!! and they work!!! not only is he on his way back to being first officer with this permanent condition on his medical chart, his mental illness is evidence of heroism, not weakness. at the climax of the episode, the doctor fully activates the gene (with chakotay's permission) so that he can communicate with the aliens -- with an implied warning that it may not be reversible.

so if i'm in charge, we get a scene at the end that's more emotionally in line with the end of "extreme risk": chakotay isn't happy about this outcome, but he will continue to live his life and serve the ship with the full trust of his captain and crew. "this is part of me forever, but i can learn to live with it" kind of vibe. he hopes this will be an opportunity for him to better understand his grandfather, but he's making a different choice that's right for him (medical treatment). janeway says she's here for him. maybe in a future episode we get a mention, the way we do with neelix's single lung. dishes are done.

so now, my multi-episode arc can go to b'elanna.

because she needs it. her situation is complex! she has childhood trauma and self-hatred and so much other internalized shit that she needs to process, embrace, and/or unlearn.

and the bones of the arc are already there! there's obviously a connecting line between "faces" and "lineage," because both are about b'elanna not wanting to be klingon due to childhood abandonment, but i feel like a line should also be drawn between "extreme risk" and "lineage" too.

in "extreme risk," she tries to cut her trauma out of herself. she tries to do the same to her unborn child in "lineage" (not incidentally, by undergoing a medical procedure herself). in both cases, she has a "this is the only reasonable course of action" attitude about a WILDLY unreasonable course of action, which feels very personally familiar to me from a mental illness perspective.

in both episodes, her extreme behavior is treated as something situational (as a response to grief; as the result of a hormone imbalance) but it would be soooooo easy and good to tie these things together into a recurring character arc toward treatment and wholeness.

with the exception of "extreme risk," all of b'elanna's issues get pinned on her being klingon ("juggernaut," for instance, where she is sent to punitive meditation lessons to learn to control her temper). any mental health arc for her would have to tease that apart -- what's her natural temperament? what's a chemical imbalance? what's internalized racism? what's an unhealthy coping mechanism? what's a trauma response?

i would love - love!!! - for her depression to be identified as specifically a human problem, and for her to find ways to lean into her klingon side to help her.

that's actually a really important part of this, to make sure it isn't star-trek-ed too deeply into an Alien Metaphor. actually name it! let this forge connections between her and others on the ship! talk about the how the doctor can fix the chemical imbalance (it's the 24th century, after all), but that's not the end of the work that needs to happen.

b'elanna is in charge of a department and could be in charge of away missions, so we can still explore the "is someone with this still capable" question that we could with janeway, but in a way that's more manageable for the audience to take in (basically, something like "juggernaut" reimagined through this lens).

and maybe, instead of janeway at the end of my reworked version of "the fight" up there, b'elanna's the one to offer chakotay support and hope, sharing some of her hard-earned expertise. her hard journey is now a Good Thing as well, because of how she can support others.

thank you anonymous friend for this theoretical exercise, and congratulations to anyone who read this all the way to the end!

#star trek voyager #mental illness #star trek thoughts

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bumblingbabooshka · 6 months

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Chakotay being a person who (while of course being willing to follow orders to a point) ultimately puts what's morally right and wrong in his eyes over Starfleet protocol while Tuvok is shown to be a person who will follow Starfleet protocol (and more accurately Janeway's word) over what he personally thinks is right is something that could have been so interesting if the three of them were actually shown as a triumvirate instead of it usually being Janeway-Chakotay and even then mostly just Janeway.

It would be an opportunity to explore more about the Maquis v Starfleet dynamic, about how Chakotay & Janeway's different leadership styles work and don't work with this new crew and with different people, to interrogate what exactly Voyager should look like - to incorporate more leniency and Maquis tactics into its operation so that they really do become a blended ship instead of the Maquis simply becoming subsumed into Starfleet. It'd also give more opportunities to let all three characters shine and introduce more moral quandaries that they can have differing ideas about and how does that affect them? At one point Tuvok is willing to go against Janeway's orders because she wants to do something but can't due to Starfleet protocol. In another episode he also follows Janeway's orders to assist in killing an entire ship of people despite that being against both Starfleet protocol and certain moral standards because she feels strongly that they should. He protests this but once she rebukes him he doesn't object again or attempt to stop her (like Chakotay - though they both know at that point that she's crossing lines). This sort of implies to me that he's much more loyal to Janeway herself than he is to Starfleet as a concept. Meanwhile Janeway is shown to be staunchly and strictly Starfleet - adopting the code AS her moral compass a lot of the time. She sometimes has to go off-script due to the nature of their situation but most of her decisions are made depending on how Starfleet would feel about it. If she wants to do something but Starfleet would disagree, she rarely if ever questions Starfleet protocol and instead will go with what it says is best even if it's painful on a personal level. She also tells Tuvok in the episode aforementioned that he is "Her advisor, her moral compass" and having a moral compass/advisor that's either a bunch of rules written by the space government or a person who is mostly just going to agree with you no matter what they actually think and not challenge you if you rebuke them isn't the best idea. Enter Chakotay. Chakotay's willingness to disagree with Janeway and not back down is something I wish had been shown more. When he says "I don't care about logs or reports or whatever - I care about person to person shit. I care about what's right and what you're doing is wrong." it's something that could be so interesting and so necessary when contrasted with the other two. A good example is of course 'Equinox' but also 'Manuevers' where he goes off against literally everyone's orders and friendly advice because he feels responsible. And that's important - he's doing it because he feels responsible. That's different from Tuvok (who doesn't feel) and Janeway (who would most likely try to find comfort in protocol) - because Chakotay feels he's responsible and that he needs to protect the crew since he (in his eyes) is the one who put them in danger. He's a person who's shown to be willing to go against everything anyone says in order to do what he feels is right if the wrong is too great to allow. Voyager if these three were actually allowed to argue and be equals and figure out how to work together as sort of a microcosm of how this new blended crew is going to be able to fight and work and band together.

#st voyager #Chakotay #Janeway #Tuvok #bea actually wrote a long rambling post instead of rambling in the tags of a deceptively short post???? My God.....#Tuvok is NOT a guy who's gonna ask the hard questions...Chakotay IS!!!#I can see how Tuvok was more effective as an advisor in the alpha quadrant - I see it my mind's eye #All he would have to do really is prod at Janeway and remind her of protocol or tell a brief story and she'd be like -sigh- you always know #what to say old friend <3 but in the DELTA quadrant????#He's literally just as out of his depth as Janeway is and obviously becoming less preoccupied with actual protocol and more loyal #to her herself <- Another interesting concept!! & understandable. What's the logic (one might ask) of following Starfleet protocol #to the letter? Starfleet isn't around. I honestly don't think Tuvok would be following it if Janeway didn't put so much stock in it.#BUT Janeway's around. (His friend) The Captain's around so he'll follow HER and if SHE'S following Starfleet then he will.

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