Star Trek has always been my church. I recognize how offensive this might sound to some people of faith, but it’s the honest truth. My parents, who came from different religious backgrounds, agreed to raise me and my sister in a secular household, and growing up, episodes of Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation became my Bible stories. Star Trek instilled in me many of the same values that are taught in houses of worship across the world, but in my faith, there is no God to judge or punish me—I learned how to rely on my own moral compass and inner strength. Last year, Skydance Media bought my church.
The ideals espoused in its text may be lofty and anti-capitalist, but Star Trek is a product, and has been since Lucille Ball bought the first pilot from creator Gene Roddenberry in 1965. It’s been in the hands of soulless business machines since at least 1968, when the Desilu library was purchased by industrial conglomerate Gulf+Western, who had recently gobbled up the storied Paramount Pictures. During the 1970s, Roddenberry parlayed his canceled TV show into a second career on the college lecture circuit, stoking the show’s passionate audience into the first modern pop culture fandom, a social club with conventions around the world and an insatiable appetite for branded merchandise. That movement gave birth to one of the seminal franchise reboots, as Trek returned not just to television but the big screen, eventually becoming one of the “crown jewels” of the Paramount portfolio.
As easy as it was to divest financially from Star Trek, divesting emotionally is proving much more difficult.
The asset that is Star Trek is now in the hands of Paramount Skydance, a merger of the century-old studio and the relatively young media corporation founded by born billionaire David Ellison, who have been co-producing projects since 2016, including two Trek features. Since the merger was finalized last year, Ellison has been utterly transparent in his pandering to US President Donald Trump, an old friend of David’s father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. (Correction, 1/15/26, 4pm--This story initially incorrectly stated the Ellisons' first names). The new Paramount’s first act of fealty was granting Trump a $16 million settlement in his frivolous lawsuit against CBS news magazine 60 Minutes, in which he claimed the program deliberately defamed him in favor of opposing presidential candidate Kamala Harris, causing him “mental anguish.” Just days later, CBS cancelled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, whose host is a tireless Trump critic. It’s been speculated that both of these acts were done in exchange for easier merger approval from the FCC. Just weeks ago, CBS’s new embarrassingly Trump-friendly new director Bari Weiss shelved a 60 Minutes segment that interviewed victims of brutal abuse at the US prison in El Salvador where Trump has been deporting — well, whoever he wants — despite the story having been fact-checked and cleared with the network’s attorneys.
This is the company that, for the foreseeable future, stands to profit from the massive library of Star Trek stories about tolerance, curiosity, honor, and social justice, as well as from any forthcoming entries. Canceling my Paramount+ subscription was not a tough decision. But as easy as it was to divest financially from Star Trek, divesting emotionally is proving much more difficult.
Being a Trekkie has been a crucial part of my identity for my entire life. It’s one of the lenses through which I view the world and, even since childhood, it’s been one of the ways I invite people to get to know me. My love of Star Trek is deeply tied to my love of sharing Star Trek, of curating episode guides for specific friends, of writing columns or reviews with the aim of demystifying this dense mythology for curious newcomers. I was lucky enough to do this professionally for a few years, writing regularly about Star Trek for websites like Fanbyte, Looper, and Polygon. Between 2020 and 2025 I wrote dozens of reviews, interviews, and retrospectives praising its glories and dissecting its many, many failures. 2026, being Trek’s 60th anniversary, offered ample opportunity to get back into Trekkie missionary work again, if not for money then at least for the joy of it.
Now, by the very standards of the fictional heroes I wish to celebrate, I don’t feel that I can do that.
As a fan, you are at best a stockholder — at worst, a tenant.
There’s an ugly truth that you learn when you get into the modern economy of media journalism or criticism. As far as the corporations you cover are concerned, you are an extension of marketing. You keep the conversation going around a product. You draw eyes to it, and you engage its audience between releases. Even if your feedback about the product is negative — and mine frequently is — you are helping to sustain the brand. That’s why you’re granted access to screeners and talent interviews, even, for example, after your scathing and spoiler-filled review of the series finale to Star Trek: Picard is accidentally published early. You’re part of the team.
In hindsight, this reads as ridiculous, self-aggrandizing, stooge-like behavior. As if artists and entertainers don’t already have an inflated idea of the social value of their work, the idea that a critic or commentator should feel proud of his tertiary involvement after the fact is ludicrous. But this is a symptom of the way I – and to an extent, all of us — have been taught to relate to media. Art compels us to invest part of ourselves into it, and under capitalism, artists need us to do so. Entertainers curate fanbases not only out of the joy of building community or the desire to boost their egos, but to ensure their continued employment. They are incentivized to involve us. And when art becomes the property and concern of massive corporations, it’s now the corporations who profit from that loyalty.
The people discussing the teaser trailers for Avengers: Doomsday aren’t fans of actor Chris Evans or screenwriters Chris Markus & Steve McFeely or (god forbid) directors Anthony & Joe Russo, they are fans of Marvel. Your cousin with the Stitch tattoo isn’t a fan of writer/artist Chris Sanders, they’re a fan of Disney. And in the above paragraphs, despite expounding on my love for television shows called Star Trek, I have failed to mention showrunners Gene Coon, Michael Piller, Ira Steven Behr, Michelle Paradise, or Mike McMahan. These are some of the most prominent of the literal thousands of creative professionals who have shaped the fantasy world around which I’ve built myself. They are writers who have enriched my life, but rather than being a fan of theirs, I am a fan of Star Trek.
This is a disease, and if you’re reading this, you’ve probably got it. If not for a media franchise or a fictional character, then perhaps for a sports team. At some point in your youth, you imprinted on this amorphous thing, a ship of Theseus that you’ve continued to love even after its every component has been replaced. Everything about it has changed, except that it’s yours.
Nevermind that it isn’t yours, and it never was. You are at best a stockholder — at worst, a tenant. The modern media economy dictates that you are, most likely, paying a subscription to access or license whatever it is you love to watch, play, or listen to, and only a sliver of the proceeds will find their way to the artists who move you to do so. Instead, that value is passed up the chain to the financiers and executives, to whom the art you love is just another asset to be exploited. The people who produce it do so with love and care, but it’s our devotion to the brand that makes it an inexhaustible resource to be consumed forever by a class of corporate Doomsday Machines.
No one is a hero for not watching a television show, nor are they a villain for continuing to watch.
Star Trek has given me a sense of purpose towards a better future, and a strong sense of responsibility towards myself. I cannot take back the countless hours or dollars I have invested in Star Trek for the past thirty-six years of my life. I have, however, seen a bountiful return on that investment. So much of what I love about myself has been instilled or nurtured in me by these characters, their stories, and their storytellers. Chief among these qualities — tolerance and curiosity, the kind of values that compel me to resist the impulse to reject the unfamiliar.
My first tattoo, which I had inked shortly after Donald Trump’s first election in 2016, is of the Vulcan symbol for IDIC — Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. It’s a shorthand for a philosophy codified by Leonard Nimoy’s Spock in the 1968 episode “Is There In Truth No Beauty?” that’s come to define Star Trek as a whole, one that celebrates the differences between people and cultures. I got this tattoo to remind me, when I’m an old man who’s alarmed by the amount of change around me, not to rally around whatever figure rises to validate my worldview at the expense of someone else’s. Instead of reflexively shunning new ideas and the people who believe in them, I will try to remember that the world is more beautiful because it’s not all about me, or like me, or for me. That’s the return I’m walking away with.
No one is a hero for not watching a television show, nor are they a villain for continuing to watch. Certainly, the large majority of creative professionals who are directly responsible for the brand have nothing to do with Skydance’s politics and lack the leverage to do anything about them. But in the years ahead, as more and more of what makes us who we are is gobbled up by fewer and fewer ghoulish robber barons, we’re all going to have to decide how much of ourselves we’re willing to keep renting from people who hurt us. We’re all going to make moral compromises, we’re all going to be subject to whataboutism, and we’re all going to make hypocrites of ourselves here and there. But sometimes, it will be shockingly easy. One to beam out.