FIRST CONTACT I LET STAR TREK PICK MY COLLEGE BY KENDRA JAMES ’10 ILLUSTRATION BY RYAN OLBRYSH FOR OAM 26
my self-perceived “weirdness” played heavily in my college application process. I wrote essays about my “edgy” love of comic books (it was 2005, and I was still “not like other girls”); my second-grade obsession with World War II; and the harrowing customer service adventure I had with eBay after the bootleg, regionless Star Trek: Deep Space 9 DVDs I’d special ordered from Singapore failed to arrive in my high school’s mail room. Deep Space 9 was my favorite Star Trek series, and at that point, full season DVDs still cost upwards of $55—the approximate price of a college application fee. I perceived my lost shipment as a tragedy worthy of a school-requested supplemental essay detailing a “challenge I had overcome in life.” And so the schools that refused to just take my Common Application essay about attempting to read Mein Kampf as an 8-year-old also had the pleasure of receiving a detailed explanation of my Star Trek fandom. Star Trek was a constant in my house, something both of my parents enjoyed. And four months after Captain Picard’s crew had their encounter with Q at Farpoint in 1987 on The Next Generation, I joined in on the obsession. But it wasn’t until 1993’s Star Trek: Deep Space 9
that I found my home in the Trek franchise. It was my point of first contact. The quick attachment I formed with DS9 hinted at the things that would be essential to my enjoyment of television later in life. It was my first taste of a fully fleshed out, multiseason story arc; the seven-season show spends five seasons taking viewers through the complicated politics that eventually lead to war between the Federation and the Dominion. While I didn’t understand it then, the women of this Trek series were also fleshed out to a degree that was unusual for the time—especially in science fiction—and there were many of them, allowing the show to offer broad spectrums of womanhood. And, of course, there was the show’s diversity, showcased in its lead protagonist: Commander Benjamin Sisko. The character, played by Avery Brooks, was many things throughout DS9’s run: a captain, a war hero, a 1950’s science fiction writer, a baseball enthusiast, even a god. But before any of that, we learn one thing: Sisko is a single black father. In my college essays, I waxed poetic about how much Ben Sisko and, by proxy, Brooks, meant to me as a sci-fi loving black kid. He and his teenage son, Jake, were some of the very few