to save the universe, we must also save ourselves

We are the fans of Starship Uprising, and we have gathered together, under the gentle supervision of our godly moderators, to share our love of the hit television show and occasionally rant about politics. Hunkering behind screens, we like and we dislike. Laptops toasty on top of our tummies, we comment. We throw down. We emoji. It’s difficult to surmise our actual number—we may be thousands strong, or we may be one insomniac hacker. These episodes got us through rehab when we craved the sweet relief of fermentation, the self-loathing when we were laid off, the despair of existing alone in this world when our mothers died. Nevertheless, there is a caste system to us outcasts. Prove yourself fluent in Kil’aathi, which is a fully realized language with its own grammar and lexicon, and you shall be deemed worthy of our respect and admiration. Assert that your favorite character is Spambot, the accident-prone bartender android who constantly tries to upsell in the awkwardest of moments and offers unsolicited advice to customers, and you shall be deemed a loser, subject to our derision and relentless mockery. Questions plague us late at night, questions we need answered, such as: If the telepad works by ripping you apart atom by atom and reassembling you in another location, does that mean it is a clone machine? If the replimat converts waste to sustenance, does that mean you’re eating shit? If the empath senses the emotions of the crew, does that mean she knows when you are masturbating? At least there is something we unanimously agree on, that Commander Dinara Gorun, played by Faith Massey, embodies the feminine ideal. Tough yet vulnerable, gorgeous but proudly bearing the scars of battle, she was our first crush. We wanted to bed her, or be her, or both. She made us who we are.

This infatuation can be traced back, for a majority of us, to the finale of season one, entitled “Our Nebulous Past.” The Audacity, a cunning rig of down-on-their-luck interstellar smugglers, was on the run from the Voydals, a ruthless species that enslaved or annihilated every life-form it encountered in its mission to conquer the universe. With the enemy closing in on their hypertrail and their vessel severely damaged, the captain had the Audacity steered into a nearby nebula. But this was no ordinary cosmic phenomenon: this nebula was sentient, and once it had other beings to keep it company, it didn’t want to let them go. Hallucinations of the dear and departed started to torment everyone on board. So powerful were the hallucinations, so seemingly alive, that those most affected obeyed their hallucinations. They shut off the engines and sabotaged the navigation system. Any who objected were locked inside photon prisons. Only Commander Dinara Gorun, the fearless and straight-talking second-in-command, had the will to resist. She broke out of her photon prison, incapacitated her captors, and restored basic functionality to the Audacity. As the starship moved out of the nebula, she lay down in the arms of her mother, who stroked her daughter’s hair and sang a lullaby. Dinara hadn’t been immune to the hallucinations, but she didn’t give in to their siren allure. Even though she had lost more than anyone, her whole family murdered in Voydal internment camps, she was still the baddest bitch in the galaxy.