Trek Unmasked: Neurodivergence and the Limits of Neoliberalism - Star Trek Analysis
By Edward Michael Francis (they/them)Marxists at the Movies
Before Star Trek was ever a philosophy, a fandom, or an intellectual comfort blanket, it was pure, unadulterated body horror—and to an undiagnosed autistic kid whose nervous system already felt like raw, exposed wiring, it was unbearable.
It lived on our heavy oak family-room shelf, taped off premium cable onto Maxell and Scotch cassettes, shoved right between A New Hope and Superman II. But unlike Star Wars, which arrived as an accessible, sunny, swashbuckling space fairy tale with clean moral geometry, my earliest encounters with Trek were defined by sudden, traumatic boundary violations.
Around age six, I pushed one of those blank-faced tapes into our front-loading VCR, completely unprepared for where the previous recording had stopped. The machine clicked, the heads engaged, the static snapped clear, and I was thrown headfirst into the transporter malfunction from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Sirens wailed in shrill red-alert panic. Consoles threw sparks. Two Federation officers materialized not as human beings, but as shrieking, inside-out geometric agony—groaning glass-like abstractions contorting on the pads before dissolving into absolute nothingness. The scene ended with Janice Rand sobbing over her controls and Kirk quietly delivering the chilling realization that whatever had beamed up didn’t live long. For a brain that already struggled to define where my physical self ended and the loud, abrasive outside world began, watching human bodies dissolve into spatial noise was pure existential terror. If that wasn’t enough to wreck a six-year-old, it was followed almost immediately by the wormhole sequence: the Enterprise violently pulled off course, tumbling into a vortex while the entire bridge crew was trapped in nightmarish, sluggish slow-motion, their voices pitch-shifted down into monstrous, demonic mechanical groans. Thoroughly unnerved, I scrambled across the carpet, hit eject, and backed away from the machine.
Hoping for something more conventional not long after, I rolled the dice on The Wrath of Khan—only to run straight into a visceral wall with the Ceti eel scene. Ricardo Montalbán’s clinical monologue about how that wriggling, chitinous larva wraps itself around the cerebral cortex until its victim goes utterly mad hit directly at the core panic of autistic life: the terrifying loss of executive function and cognitive autonomy. Watching it drop into Pavel Chekov’s helmet, crawling across Walter Koenig’s sweat-drenched face before forcing its way directly into his ear canal while he screamed in raw agony, felt like an invasive, physical assault. I slammed the power switch on the television and abandoned the tapes on the shelf for years.
The terror didn't stay on the feature film cassettes, either. Our teenage neighbors, Ken and Larry, used to come over to dub episodes of the original series onto blank tape because their family didn’t have their own VCR yet. Catching a stray glance at the screen during “Dagger of the Mind,” I watched in horror as an adult man strapped into a sterile, clinical, salon-style treatment chair suddenly collapsed dead beneath a pulsing, blinding overhead dome for no discernible reason other than an abrasive, deafening electronic shriek. When I frantically asked Larry what had just happened, he delivered the casual older-brother fatality without batting an eye: “Oh, that guy just got his brains sucked out!” I went into immediate, inconsolable hysterics.
When my parents dragged me to see Star Trek III: The Search for Spock in the theater, the nightmare only broadened to thirty feet across. On the bridge of the Bird-of-Prey, Commander Kruge was flanked by that hideous, rabid-looking "monster dog"—a hairless, gargoyle-like monstrosity of bare teeth, wet breathing, and twitching malice. Down on the Genesis planet, things went from creature feature to pure biological nightmare. Spock’s open casket had accelerated the evolution of ordinary microbes into massive, predatory serpents. Watching one strike from the foliage and wrap itself straight around Kruge’s throat, forcing him to wrestle and snap the neck of a giant mutated casket worm on the big screen, was sheer childhood trauma.
Every single one of these films had sailed into suburban theaters carrying a polite, harmless, parent-approved "PG" rating. Looking back on the volume of psychological trauma, mind-erasure, and visceral body horror served to elementary schoolers under that green stamp, PG-13 couldn't come fast enough. It wasn't just Trek, either; 1980s family entertainment seemed actively obsessed with the graphic destruction of bodily autonomy. I was already haunted by Vera getting dragged into the supercomputer in Superman III, screaming as circuit boards fused beneath her skin and cold cybernetic lenses snapped over her eyes. Years later, watching Johnny 5 get brutally ambushed and beaten into scrap by crowbar-wielding thugs in Short Circuit 2—bleeding red battery acid onto the asphalt and pleading for his life—felt less like a movie and more like a visceral vivisection. For a child with no sensory filter and no psychological armor, the screen was an unrelenting minefield of dismemberment, assimilation, and cognitive theft.
Then, right around age nine or ten, a fundamental shift occurred. All these disparate properties had previously bled together in a haze of laser blasts and synth scores, but suddenly the fog cleared. The monster closet became an obsession with the lock on the door.
I gravitated steadily, deliberately away from Star Wars and toward Star Trek precisely because Trek offered a methodical, clinical veneer of control. Where George Lucas gave us mythic space magic and reckless heroics, Trek offered practical engineering designed specifically to keep the cold, terrifying universe at bay. It had plausible-sounding science scaffolding the spectacle: the necessary mechanics of inertial dampeners to keep your organs from liquefying when the ship accelerated, warp factors mathematically plotted out to tame the infinite black.
More than that, it offered a behavioral blueprint. To an undiagnosed autistic kid struggling to decode the bewildering, subtext-heavy playground around me, the Bridge of the Enterprise-D wasn't just entertaining; it was an instructional masterclass in masking. Picard’s crew modeled a social world operating on explicit rules, shared protocols, and flat emotional affect. No one screamed, no one violated personal space, and sudden sensory intrusions were met with calm tactical analysis rather than panicked meltdowns. Social survival in my own life felt impossible, but on WPWR Channel 50 in Chicago—that quintessential, low-budget UHF outfit whose very survival owed an immense debt to Picard’s syndication—I watched adults survive the void simply by memorizing their scripts and adopting an unflappable, intellectualized armor.
I obsessed over the exhaustive, deliberate special effects in the films. They were slower, more architectural, and infinitely more gorgeous than the frantic, arcade-style dogfights of the Millennium Falcon. Star Trek possessed the perfect morality for an autistic brain actively seeking safety: messy enough to acknowledge the existential terror beneath the surface, but clinical enough to resolve inside forty-four minutes. I was building my own mask out of Starfleet decorum, learning to simulate human ease by intellectualizing everything that frightened me.
By the time 1991 rolled around, I was eleven years old, in sixth grade, and my long exile from the first film was officially over. I pulled down that taped-off-cable copy of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and consumed it hungrily. As a budding young nerd transfixed by practical filmmaking—miniature models, optical matte passes, studio lighting—it was pure cinematic sustenance. Even the warp streak sequence that had terrified me half a decade earlier now felt magnificent, powered by studio disco lighting, optical ambition, and the sheer human determination to master deep space.
That film couldn't have reappeared at a more crucial moment. In the fall of 1991, our suburban reality collapsed into logistical chaos. The Gurnee school district was expanding completely out of control due to the sudden influx of families fleeing the failing school systems in nearby Waukegan. In a panicked effort to mitigate a student detonation, the district exiled our entire sixth-grade class five miles away, parking us inside the ancient, decaying husk of the old Zion-Benton High School.
It was institutional, grim, and deeply depressing. The daily commute was an exhausting, extended bus ride through gray suburban corridors, and the building itself had that distinct, drafty chill that strongly suggested it had been intimately acquainted with asbestos for the better part of a century.
The administration’s scheduling philosophy resembled a chicken running around with its head cut off. Even joining band—what should have been a creative sanctuary—was turned into a relentless, disorienting slog of bus trips. Twice a week, we had to pack our instruments, get loaded onto a separate after-school shuttle, get bussed all the way back to our local elementary school just to rehearse in a cramped multipurpose room, and then get loaded onto yet another bus to finally get hauled home. It was sensory whiplash: rumbling diesel exhaust, shifting vinyl seats, fluorescent lighting, and bureaucratic dysfunction disguised as a curriculum.
All of our outdoor activities, recess periods, and physical education classes were relegated to a destitute, neglected soccer field across the street. The entire perimeter was boxed in by a looming, rusted ten-foot chain-link fence that felt less like a schoolyard and more like a prison exercise yard. Over the years, the coarse, black gravel from the decaying running track had migrated outward, bleeding into the dying grass until the whole lot was an uneven, jagged obstacle course that made simply tripping during a game precarious and messy.
That dreary, gravel-strewn lot was where my best friend John Grillo and I forged our bond. One afternoon during recess, standing by the rusted fence with the wind whipping across the black stones, I asked John if he had ever seen The Motion Picture.
When he lit up and told me he had, the floodgates opened. From that day on, nearly every single recess period revolved around Star Trek. While the rest of the schoolyard drifted around us in gray, sixth-grade suburban limbo, John and I stood by that fence debating warp physics, dissecting bridge layouts, and analyzing starships.
To an outside observer, we were just two awkward nerds regurgitating trivia. In reality, we were co-regulating. Standing in that neglected, jagged gravel yard, the encyclopedic minutiae of Starfleet was a cognitive shelter. Reciting warp core ratios, class specs, and shield harmonics acted as acoustic dampening against the chaos of our displaced, asbestos-scented school year. We weren't just discussing ships; we were using Federation engineering to construct a shared mental bulkhead against a world that felt disorganized, indifferent, and violently loud.
Taking our obsession to the next level was only a matter of time. Soon after, John and I convinced our parents to let us attend our very first convention, where Jonathan Frakes was headlining. Frakes was impossibly, effortlessly handsome—a fact that cemented an enduring crush that holds up to this day. John and I sat cross-legged on the thin hotel carpet right at the foot of the stage, gazing up at him alongside a room packed with equally mesmerized nerds. His opening line absolutely brought down the house:
“Hello, I’m Michael Dorn.”
He was everything a young fan could have dreamed of: friendly, hilarious, charmingly flirtatious, and totally in command of the room. Watching him work that crowd was dazzling. For someone who had to manually calculate every smile and eye contact interval, Frakes possessed the ultimate effortless mask—a warm, charismatic fluency that conquered the room without breaking a sweat. When he casually teased that the Borg would be returning for the Season 3 finale—the breadcrumb that would soon become “The Best of Both Worlds”—an electric hum of pure anticipation ripped through the ballroom.
I had already heard whispers about the episode on early AOL dial-up message boards, but nothing prepared me for actually experiencing it during the summer reruns. Sitting in the family room with my sister, we watched the tension build to an absolute breaking point. When Locutus appeared on the viewscreen, stripped of humanity, the old childhood body horror came roaring back—only now, it was intellectualized. Locutus was the ultimate anti-mask nightmare: not a protective armor chosen to survive the world, but a cold, metal apparatus welded directly into your flesh against your will, obliterating your autonomy and conscripting you into mindless, bureaucratic compliance. The camera pushed in tight on Frakes’s grim, hardened face. The sheer gravitas of him uttering those four syllables—“Mr. Worf... fire”—followed by the brutal smash cut to black, sent my sister and me into absolute, screaming hysterics right there in front of the TV. It was the first cliffhanger in my life that utterly and completely hooked me.
Yet even amidst all that burgeoning devotion, the illusion was already showing its seams. Walking out of that convention ballroom and into the dealer room, I remember feeling distinctly unsettled by the sheer, unvarnished carnival capitalism on display. The folding tables were piled high with cheap, overpriced, and often shamelessly bootlegged plastic, all pushed with relentless, high-pressure carnival-barker intensity. The Federation preached that humanity had evolved beyond material greed and the petty squabbles of currency; yet here we were, suffocating in a dingy hotel basement where that enlightened future was being auctioned off as marked-up polystyrene.
Naturally, I walked away with clean pockets. My father had driven us, and while he was endlessly invested in appearing generous—basking in the performance of the dutiful dad willing to spend his afternoon ferrying kids to a nerd convention—he was far too self-involved to actually part with a dime once we arrived. The mask of his benevolence, much like the post-scarcity myth of the Federation, was entirely superficial: it looked great from the stage, but it collapsed the moment it demanded real material sacrifice.
Back then, Star Trek wasn't just a cozy suburban split-level elevated into the stars—it was an engineering manual for neurodivergent survival. It was the comforting promise that human rationality, deliberate protocol, and a tailored uniform could sanitize the terrifying unknown and protect a fragile nervous system from an abrasive, chaotic world.
I can see it now for the sterile, neoliberal utopian fantasy that it always was. It was a product born of an era and crafted by people who genuinely believed that history had ended—that market managerialism, polite diplomacy, and enlightened technocratic leadership were the final, permanent summit of human civilization. For a decade or two, that fiction worked. It felt stable. It felt aspirational.
Until it didn't.
Just like masking.
Because masking is an unsustainable transaction. It is an exhaustive daily performance where you bolt on decorum and technocratic logic to keep from being crushed by an inhospitable environment, praying the hull holds against the pressure. But eventually, the sheer energy required to maintain the simulation burns out the core. The reality you are trying to smooth over—whether it's the sensory violence of the world, decaying municipal schools, or the predatory hustle of late capitalism—refuses to be pacified by boardroom diplomacy. Starfleet’s sanitized horizon was never real liberation; it was just a polite, corporate assimilation pact.
I enjoy Star Trek today with fully opened eyes, recognizing that its managerial utopia is a remarkably narrow, limited end goal by the standards of the world we actually have to build. But having grown up terrified of inside-out transporter corpses, ear-burrowing parasites, mind-wiping chairs, and giant casket worms in the dark—and having clung to its clinical order while marooned behind a rusted fence on a field of broken black gravel—I still completely understand why the child I was needed that ship. I don't need the uniform anymore, and the mask has long since been deconstructed, but I will never begrudge the armor that kept me alive until I was strong enough to take it off.
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