This paper argues that the proliferation of geographical inquiry into popular culture as a prism for understanding geopolitical processes can benefit from more sustained engagement with psychoanalytic theory, particularly the work of Melanie Klein . Klein’s account of guilt and the urge to make reparation as both central to the development of conscience and profoundly unevenly distributed contributes to a critique of dominant, uneven geographies of guilt and encourages a nuanced approach to guilt’s potential ethical implications . To illustrate, I identify resonances between the contradictory legacy of the Obama administration and the character of Captain Sisko on the television program Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . Both Obama and Sisko, in some ways uniquely empathetic to the uneven distribution of suffering, also authorize forms of violence that differentiate among the relative values of civilian lives . Yet Sisko’s and Obama’s “bloody messes,” I insist, prove not simply individual failings, but matters of unevenl
