Faith Massey was invited to be a guest on the talk show The Alcove, where she was interviewed by Cindy Withers, previously a prominent reporter but currently on The Alcove. “How are you holding up?” Cindy asked, then nodded profusely as Faith replied, “Honestly? It’s been difficult.” In her gray cashmere sweater that she hugged comfortingly around herself, with sleepless gray circles around her gray eyes, Faith came clean about her struggle with addiction and clinical depression. She was healthy and sober—here she raised a wrist ringed by a bracelet that chimed with recovery coins—but the GangrenePete thing had brought back some extremely painful memories. It was common internet lore that on the set of Starship Uprising she had a brief romance with Jake Knight, her costar who went on to have a fruitful career in car insurance commercials. (Though when we got wise to that piece of trivia, we were a bit obsessed and created our own fan art depicting what they looked like in flagrante delicto, supernovae blazing in the background.) When it ended, she was devastated that she had to continue to be entangled romantically with the cocksure yet tender captain of the Audacity on-screen when they were no longer entangled off-screen. As she waited in wardrobe, preparing herself to film a kiss, she started crying and explained the story to the man applying her forehead. What happened next she had discussed ad nauseam: how she and the makeup artist fell in love, had a wedding with a cake shaped as a starship, conceived a daughter. But what she had been too scared to discuss was how he became a jealous husband, how he hit her and gave her bruises, and how, as she sat before him in the prep chair, he covered up the purple that he had made with more purple.

“He threw our dog off the deck,” Faith confessed, impressionistic with tears. “He threw your dog off the deck?” Cindy Withers asked unnecessarily, a rhetorical tactic she frequently deployed throughout her stint on The Alcove. Yes, Faith said. He threw our dog off the deck. After the finale of season seven, when Commander Dinara Gorun is taken hostage by the Voydals and is tortured telepathically for her refusal to cooperate in tracking down the Audacity, they hosted a wrap party at their house in the Hollywood Hills. Her husband saw her chatting with—guess who—Jake Knight and accused her of cheating. She denied it, but it’s possible she was slightly tipsy and it’s also possible that she was flirting a little. As punishment, he threw the dog off the deck. The pooch fractured a paw, the canine metacarpal bones. Post-fracture, the dog had this goofy gait; families at the park would kindly inquire as to whether she had rescued the dog from an abusive situation, and she was tempted to inform them that she was the abusive situation. “You were not the abusive situation,” Cindy Withers nasally consoled. “No, I was the abusive situation,” Faith disagreed. Throwing the dog off the deck was not the last straw. Divorce wasn’t on the table until the show was canceled. During the interim, her daughter was forced to see her mother hurt over and over, and then, when the physical abuse was over, she was forced to see her mother abuse herself with booze, then with prescription painkillers and assorted muscle relaxants. Faith Massey was not a good mother.