Star Trek Harm’s Way A Ponderance

David Mack’s newest Star Trek: The Original Series novel, Harm’s Way (2022) is set within his Star Trek Vanguard series, and just after the TOS episode Doomsday Machine. There are many touches which makes it a fast read, and gives it a feel of an original episode, as Mack is equisite at getting the characters voice right. It is a subplot in the work where this ponderance comes from.

See the death/suicide of Commodore Matt Decker, has left Kirk with a quandry on how to communicate this loss to Decker’s family (his son, Will, many will be familiar with from his role in The Motion Picture). See, does he share that it was a suicide due to grief over losing his entire crew of the Constitution, or does he speak of him in a hearoes death that ended the Planet Killer? What is truth? What is comfort? Where does the power of grief guide one?

In the internal struggle, Kirk is brought back to his own loss of 200 lives when he was a junior officer on the Farragut, and that internal deconstruction we do of tearing ourselves down of past decisions, errors and losses in our life story when we look back on the events of what we know now.

It is a gambit that does not aid us in moving forward, or healing or keeping the healing work done. See, we cannot even judge yesterday’s decision by what we know today. For what happened yesterday and alld ecisions made were done with the full knowledge and expereince of who we were in that moment. It is unfair and unethical to ourselves to relook and re-judge those moments of our story from where we are now. This is the struggle within Kirk, and how he then has to struggle how to share the story of Commodore Decker’s Death with Decker’s family.

Why does this ponderance matter, I posit a simple refelctive question/exercise for you:

How would you write the letter?

Now look at your own life, and those moments when you want to use hindsight to tear yourself up:

How would you write a letter to yourself?

Be kind as we enter 2023, and may the new be birthed well in our world.