Category: Miscellaneous

I had previously reviewed episodes 2 through 5 of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, and this week the season finale came out, so I am going to review my impressions of episodes 6 to 10.

“Ko’Zeine” – Everyone gets to go on leave, but Caleb of course has no family and doesn’t want to live with a host family in Dakar, so Ake gives him dispensation to stay on the base by himself. Only he finds out that Genesis decided to stay behind too. And they spend time playing a bunch of games and pranks until Genesis puts Caleb up to hacking the Athena’s bridge. And while he doesn’t want to go too far with that, she takes the opportunity to try to purge her records of recommendations because she doesn’t think she’s ready for Pre-Command track as Chancellor Ake had suggested. But they get caught by Jett Reno (Tig Notaro) who rats them out to Ake, who puts them on extra work detail.

During all this Jay-Den was scheduled to go with Kyle to Ibiza on Earth, but he sees Darem getting kidnapped and follows their jump gate to end up on Darem’s home planet. It turns out that Darem is not only in a high muckety-muck family, he’s been arranged to be the Prince Consort of the planet’s heir apparent, whose parents have abdicated early and who thus has to become Queen, meaning she and Darem have to get married. But the Queen is sharp enough to realize that Darem’s heart isn’t in it, especially after Jay-Den gives a best-man toast celebrating how much he’s grown since joining Starfleet. So she tactfully annuls the marriage and lets Darem go back to Earth.

While the Caleb/Genesis story actually makes sense for those two characters (given that they’re both bundles of neurotic dysfunction) the character arc for Darem now seems to contradict itself. His whole reason for joining Starfleet was to be of better service to his government, and now he’s given up the position he was training for. So why is he back in Starfleet?

“The Life of the Stars” – after being out for one episode, Tarima (Zoe Steiner) returns to Earth after recovering from her injuries on Betazed. However because of her rogue psionic powers, medical staff have decided that she needs to be transferred from War College to Starfleet Academy, which not only goes against her choice, it puts her in proximity to Caleb. Tilly (Mary Wiseman) returns from Discovery because Ake realizes the kids are demoralized after the battle on the Miyazaki and Tilly has the perfect therapy: Community theater! Sam (Kerrice Brooks) volunteers to choose the play, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. This freaks out Tarima, especially since Sam chose her to play Emily, the female lead who spends the last act of the play observing from beyond the grave. And this stresses Sam, and it turns out that she is still glitching even though her injuries on the Miyazaki were supposedly repaired. The Doctor (Robert Picardo) and Chancellor Ake volunteer to take Sam back to her homeworld of Kasq while the other cadets ponder whether to continue running the play. On Kasq, Sam’s makers declare that she is “unrepairable” and The Doctor realizes that it’s because they made her as a near-adult without the life experience of a grown human, meaning she was unable to process her recent experiences. The only way to restore her would be to have her be born and grow like an organic human. And at that point the Doctor tearfully confesses that the reason he rejected Sam’s attempts to take him as a mentor is because he’d already created a holographic family program where he’d ended up losing his daughter. But he agrees to take up the responsibility of raising her in order to bring her back. (Which is possible because Kasq is apparently in a pocket dimension and the amount of time it took to bring Sam to adulthood was only a few weeks in real space, and The Doctor does not physically age.)

The device of using Wilder’s “play within a play” works very well and everyone in the cast really sells their scenes, in particular advancing the character arcs of The Doctor, Sam and Tarima. In fact, this episode was so effective in moving the larger story that the “Ko’Zeine” episode might as well be ignored.

“300^th Night” – Starfleet Academy celebrates the end period of the term’s first year. The Athena is en route to Betazed, to celebrate moving the capital to that planet. Jay-Den asks his friends to join a ritual welcoming them into House Kraag, as he considers them part of his family. Caleb has another traumatic flashback to losing his Mom, and decides he doesn’t want to be part of another family. Moping in his room, he’s interrupted by Sam, who asks him if he’s tried searching his files to see if his Mom tried to contact him. Remembering a moon she pointed out to him as a child, he enters that as a password and sees two years worth of files. The last shows Anisha Mir (Tatiana Maslany) on a faraway planet that’s about to be invested by the Venari Ral criminal empire.

Meanwhile Admiral Vance (Oded Fehr) briefs Ake and Chancellor Kelrec of the War College about the raid that the Venari Ral did on their research base, and it turns out they’ve managed to weaponize “the Omega particle” which can warp both space and subspace in a region and destroy its capacity for warp travel for millions of years. And they’ve put it into mines. Vance tells the Chancellors that once the Athena reaches Betazed they’re going to hunker down and await further orders. Caleb overhears this and decides to bail by hijacking a shuttle to get to his Mom’s planet before lockdown. And of course Sam teleports in and points out that he can’t escape the Athena’s warp bubble without her calculations. And then both Genesis and Darem end up on the shuttle. Sam finds a warp tunnel allowing her to reach the planet in minutes, although the shuttle is damaged. They find a seedy underworld and split up while searching for repair supplies.

Caleb goes searching around only to have a knife put to his throat by the person he’s tailing. It turns out to be Anisha, and they have a tearful reunion. And there are subtle directorial cues to indicate that Anisha is even more traumatized by her family separation than Caleb is. As in, she might not be sane.

Ake figures out what’s going on, and Vance gives the “if I don’t see what you’re doing, I can’t tell you not to do it” hint, and Ake evacuates the ship, taking The Doctor and Reno as a skeleton crew, only to find out that Jay-Den and Tarima stowed away when they realized their friends left. Back on the planet, Caleb realizes that his Mom will react badly if she finds out his friends are Federation, so after Anisha agrees to help with repairs, she leaves and Caleb plans to leave with her. And this leads to a lot of anger and insults towards the other cadets and he runs off. But the cadets get captured by Venari Ral and Caleb tries to rescue them, and at the last second, Anisha comes to help. Violence ensues.

The Athena shows up and transports everybody, and against my suspicion all this episode, Caleb’s mom doesn’t die. But they’re ambushed by the Venari Ral, Ake performs an emergency saucer separation to escape, and when they check their sensors they realize that the Venari Ral haven’t just set up a few mines outside Federation space, they’ve created an entire mine network around its borders, effectively cutting them off from whatever the enemy wants to do outside it.

I have to admit, that’s a serious cliffhanger.

“Rubincon” – (which by the way is a stupid title, but they do explain it)

Now the upside to everyone in the main cast coincidentally deciding to play Captain Kirk and disobey orders in order to do the sentimental thing is they all ended up outside the minefield and they’re in position to do something about it. With one crippled ship. This ship immediately gets boarded by Nus Braka (Paul Giamatti), who seizes both Ake and Anisha Mir, after which he orders his crew to destroy the bridge. Reno and The Doctor manage to save the Athena by merging him with the ship’s mainframe and creating a holographic illusion that the ship is indeed destroyed by enemy fire. (Which leads to a great title sequence.) Braka meanwhile goes back to the Starfleet Academy section of the ship, and, being the scene-chewing master villain that he is, sets up a televised “trial” in which Anisha is cast as the judge and jury who has to decide the fate of Ake and the Federation that (apparently) killed her son Caleb.

Meanwhile on the command ship, The Doctor’s language functions have been scrambled by his experience, but using pidgin he is able to give the kids his theory on how to disable the Omega-47 mines using the gluons that were used to bind the original material. But while Tarima and Caleb re-establish their mind meld to help Caleb find his Mom (and thus Braka) the matrix is going to take time to figure out, so Caleb buys some time by taking a shuttle to crash Braka’s show trial. And in front of everybody, he tells his Mom that he was just as hurt by what Ake did as Anisha was, but he learned from it. And being in Starfleet and making friends, he learned the hope that comes from being part of something bigger than oneself. And then Ake walks up and goes over something that Braka said to her to explain his hate of the Federation. He told his audience he grew up on a mining colony producing strontium, and he could see Federation vessels on flyover but never sending any rescue missions. His father improvised a weapon to shoot at the Feds knowing they’d respond, but rather than simply kill or arrest him, they rained “red hellfire” on the colony, and Nus was one of only 8 survivors. But Caleb remembers that Federation weapons are blue or green, and he also remembers that strontium is normally not used because it is extremely volatile and prone to explosions. Ake then deduces that Braka’s father blew up the colony with his own actions and the Federation had nothing to do with it. Ake tells her audience and the people in the atrium, “Is this the person you want to follow into the future? An angry child with his finger on the trigger, whose entire worldview is based on a lie?”

(Oh of course, we’re not getting political.)

And that causes Braka’s holo-attending audience to blip out of the feed, leaving him abandoned. He reaches for his trigger device, and it fails to work as Sam activates the matrix and disables the mine network. The Feds mass warp in to surround the Venari Ral, Braka is arrested, and we have a serious happy ending where Caleb is reunited with his Mom and is able to finally grow up and move on from his abandonment issues.

So what did I think of Season 1? Cause I’ve seen a lot of feedback saying it outright sucks. I get that. I said before it was often cutesy. Some people didn’t like how “YA” it is in catering to the attitudes and culture of teens and college kids, which is odd given that that is the focus of the show.
But let me put it this way: I was of the generation that saw the original Star Trek in reruns. My friend Don was just old enough to see the original episodes on NBC. And we came of age watching The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. And the fact is, most of these shows, for that matter Babylon 5, did not start off as masterpieces. Some of the scripts were awkward. Painfully awkward. And things started off slow. We kept watching because we liked the characters or some individual episodes, but as series, the ’80s/90s Trek shows didn’t really get good until they each hit Season 3, so from that point on we waited for them to get good. (And in the case of Enterprise, kept on waiting.) Well, recently the “nuTrek” live action stuff has been Picard, which ran three seasons that were basically: meh, outright bad, and pretty good, and the concurrent Discovery, which in my opinion only had two seasons (3 and 5) that had more good than bad. Then you have the ongoing Strange New Worlds, which has been really good so far although people have bitched about Season 3.

Given all this, I think it’s actually pretty impressive that Star Trek: Starfleet Academy had as many good episodes as it did, and given that they moved somewhere in between the episodic approach of SNW’s first two seasons and the season arc approach of Discovery, the overall storyline worked well and led to a very effective conclusion. So that’s good news for Season 1. The bad news for Starfleet Academy is that the already-filmed Season 2 may be the last. That’s partially because each episode takes millions to produce, and partially because the production is in flux because Paramount is owned by an Ellison son and the family is in negotiations to buy Warners/Discovery/CNN in addition to their conquest of Paramount/CBS, because their liege lord Donald Trump thinks that the political/media complex is a game of MONOPOLY. And Strange New Worlds is all but wrapped up, and while they were floating the idea of getting Paul Wesley to play James Kirk in a “Star Trek: Year One”, that’s also up in the air. So after next year, there’s a pretty good chance that the Alex Kurtzman era of Trek will come to an end just as the Rick Berman era ended with Star Trek: Nemesis. And even that doesn’t mean THE end. All Hollywood does these days is recycle intellectual property. If they can bring back The Running Man, they can bring back Trek.

I had recently done a review of the pilot episode for Starfleet Academy, and I thought the show had potential. As of last week it’s had six episodes, and so far it’s a mixed bag. When this show hits, it’s as good as anything that Star Trek has produced, but at least as often it gets too cutesy for its own good. Of course, there’s always a risk of cutesiness where Stephen Colbert is involved in anything, however peripherally.

Basic impressions:

Holly Hunter as Captain Nahla Ake, as I said, is playing a very Holly Hunter-like character, and while she holds her own in dramatic situations and is presented as a competent captain and administrator, still walks around barefoot and says granola-hippie chick stuff like “children are our ambassadors to the future.” I would venture to say that one’s opinion of the character is probably one’s opinion of the show in general.

Sandro Rosta (as cadet Caleb Mir) is certainly physically impressive and has potential as an actor, but his brooding loner archetype has been done to death in other media, which may explain why the middle episodes haven’t been using him as much. I’m also not the only one who’s noticed that he has more chemistry with Holly Hunter as his substitute mother figure than he has with his romantic lead (Zoe Steiner).

Otherwise let me review what’s been shown up to last week:

“Beta Test” – in which the Federation negotiates for Betazed to rejoin the alliance. Since the galatic “Burn” of dilithium, the telepathic Betazoids have enforced a psionic shield to protect their planet, and Admiral Vance (Oded Fehr) points out that this defense will not suffice against the advances of Federation science, or that of their enemies. Even so, the Betazed government leader advocates for isolationism against the wishes of some of his own delegates. Caleb ends up falling in love with one of these delegates, Tarima (Steiner) not realizing that she’s actually the daughter of the leader. Wackiness ensues. (Incidentally, the Betazoid leader is deaf and needs sign language to communicate with non-telepaths; this seems like the producers’ nod to DEI, but it later turns out there is a reason for his disabilty.) Eventually the Federation offers to move the government capital from its historic home in Paris, France to the Betazoid homeworld. With this Tarima and her brother end up joining the school, but while the brother ends up becoming one of Caleb’s roommates, Tarima for personal reasons joins the rival War College, which puts a wedge between him and her.

“Vitus Reflux” – the rivalry with the War College is further explored. In their defense, during the Burn, the War College was a lot more necessary to the survival of the Federation, with exploration at a standstill and defense as a primary. At this point in the history it is the established school and the Starfleet Academy is just being rebuilt, so the kids at the War College have some reason to feel superior. Even so, things degenerate into a prank war, and the Academy regulars feel obliged to step up. There is also a parallel plot with the elitist Darem (George Hawkins) in rivalry with Genesis (Bella Shepard) to lead a battle-simulation team against the War College, and trying, at first unsuccessfully, to recruit Caleb and Jay-Den. It turns out that Darem and Genesis both come from deeply perfectionist families, and that realization causes them to quit competing with each other and become more team-oriented. Even so, the character histories are in service of a movie-comedy frat rivalry, and one of the recurring issues with this season is that the War College head Kelrec (Raoul Bhaneja) keeps getting set up as the Dean Wormer to Captain Ake’s Otter.

“Vox in Excelso” – as is often the case with post-original Star Trek, the Klingon episode is a step up from what came before, and Karim Diane’ as Jay-Den turns out to be one of the better actors in the young cast. The Klingon medical student Jay-Den remembers the events that brought him to Starfleet as a planetary disaster threatens an already decimated Klingon race, and the Federation is obliged to take a position. In the public debate, Jay-Den ends his studious avoidance of conflict, taking up the unpopular position that the Klingons cannot survive on Federation charity. This episode thus squares the circle and shows how this most un-Klingon character is still totally Klingon.

“Series Acclimation Mil” is the episode centered on “Sam”, (Kerrice Brooks) the photonic life form who was created by the artificial Kasqian culture to be an emissary to the Federation. This is the episode where the cutesiness is on full blast, with details like the cartoon doodles in Sam’s point-of-view scenes, and the fact that Darem’s race vomit glitter. Sam tries to approach other cultures by crashing a Bajoran appreciaton course, and changing her parameters to get herself drunk. All of which confirms that while she is infectiously cheerful, she is also too much. The serious story, such as it is, is where Sam chooses her elective course as a biography of Benjamin Sisko, the Emissary of the Bajoran Prophets. Sam finds out that Sisko was partially created by the Prophets, just as she was purpose-created, and despairs that her course in life is set, as his was. But in a virtual conversation with Jake Sisko (Cirroc Lofton), Jake tells Sam that he knew Ben Sisko primarily as his Dad. He had a career, interests and a life of his own, no matter what his ultimate fate was. And this inspires Sam to stay on her own course. Even so, the episode is dependent on Benjamin Sisko and it points up the fact that Avery Brooks has been retired for years and refused to be directly involved in this episode, and this absence calls attention to itself in a way that undermines the story.

“Come, Let’s Away” – and here, shit gets real.

Caleb and Tarima finally consummate their relationship, and establish a Betazoid mind-meld. She brings him into a safe space in her mind, but sees a fragment of memory where Caleb is taken from his Mom during childhood. Caleb freaks at this (accidental) invasion of his privacy, and breaks things off. Shortly thereafter, the two schools are brought together on the Athena for a joint space mission to explore an abandoned Federation ship, one group from each school boarding the vessel and the other cadets observing from the command ship. But immediately they are ambushed by alien Reavers Furies who take them hostage and threaten to cannibalize them. The away team’s badass War College commander sets up a fight for the kids to escape, sacrificing himself in the process, but the cadets are holed up on the ship’s bridge with transporter signals jammed. Over a barrel, Vance tells Ake to negotiate with her old enemy Nus Braka (Paul Giamatti) because apparently he’s fought Furies before and defeated them. And this leads to all kinds of psychological probing between the two as Braka holds out for concessions. Meanwhile Tarima uses her bond with Caleb to contact him on the hulk and send communications from the Athena. Eventually Braka tells the Feds that the Furies are descended from bats and thus vulnerable to sonics. Vance commissions a cruiser from a nearby research base and has it equipped with a sonic cannon to assist the Athena. But when the ship arrives, Braka, now safe on his flagship, reveals that he was working with the Furies all along. The Furies breach the bridge, disrupt Sam, kill another cadet and Tarima ends up overloading her power with a psychic scream that kills all the invaders but puts her in critical condition. The research base, now undefended, is raided by Braka’s crime syndicate, who kill its staff and take their critical experimental projects.

It’s hard to see how they’re going to go back to silly school rivalry after that.

That’s an example of how the show can come up with genuinely dramatic work, but up to that point it’s been atypical. As the first season of Starfleet Academy winds down, it will be worth seeing if the story will end up being worthy of this setup.

I wanted to go back over Strange New Worlds before doing a review of Starfleet Academy so far. Star Trek – Strange New Worlds Season 3 came and went a while ago, but Season 4 is coming up in 2026, and in terms of its overall story arc the show continues to build a bridge between Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) and the classic crew of the Enterprise that followed him.

Leading up to the Season 2 cliffhanger, the show had replaced the late engineer Hemmer (Bruce Horak) with Delia, a Lanthanite played by Carol Kane. Lanthanites settled on Earth and pass for Humans and are very long-lived, although since Delia is played by Carol Kane, this basically meant she is from outer space by way of Latvia. Well anyway in the last episode of Season 2, the Gorn staged a massive attack on a Federation settlement, which led to several members of the crew getting captured. But at the same time, Captain Pike’s team ended up finding local survivors, including Delia’s old engineering student, a young Montgomery Scott. Played by Martin Quinn. An actual Scot! With an actual Scottish accent!

Much like the other cast members (or Simon Pegg from the movies) Quinn doesn’t look that much like his Original Series counterpart, especially because of his age. But he looks like he could grow into the role. In Season 3, Quinn became a regular cast member as they established Scotty’s relationship with Delia and others in the cast, including frequent guest star Paul Wesley as Jim Kirk.

I liked this season overall, but I can understand why a lot of people think it jumped the shark. In particular the episode “Four and-a-Half Vulcans”, which did a lot to stereotype Vulcans when this show and other media had done much to give them depth. At the same time, casting Patton Oswalt as a Vulcan hippie was highly illogical.

While Strange New Worlds Season 3 apparently played out in an episodic fashion like the first two seasons, it ended up putting together a seasonal story arc that came together in the end. Again, the cliffhanger was the Gorn capturing several Federation people, which was a source of great tension for Pike, especially since Pike’s fellow captain and steady girlfriend, Marie Batel (Melanie Scrofano) had been implanted with Gorn eggs. Not only did they have to try and fix that, ship pilot Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia) had to help her friends escape a Gorn containment unit, during which time she was severely injured and traumatized. This led to several episodes where Ortegas dealt with her anger only to end up stranded with a Gorn pilot who helped her to survive a hostile planet, who ended up shot down by Starfleet security sent to rescue Ortegas. Some of us wanted Melissa Navia to have a little more to do, and she did pretty well with this character arc.

As one-shot episode stories proceeded, Captain Batel remained on the Enterprise recuperating, as her condition required her to keep Gorn DNA in her body. The show introduced a likeable medical aide named Dana Gamble who accompanied the crew and Dr. Roger Corby to an ancient ruin, but Gamble picked up an ancient artifact that destroyed his eyes. It actually ended up devouring his soul, and Batel, with Gorn territorial instinct, holds him off until he is put in the brig. Gamble ends up escaping and killing a guard only to get killed by Pelia, who recognizes him as part of an ancient evil called the Vezda. The crew puts the spirit in a transport pattern buffer but it escapes and builds an apocalypse cult at the planet where the Vezda are imprisoned. In the season finale, Dr. M’Benga and the crew realize that the genetic experimentation on Batel has effectively made her akin to the race that imprisoned the Vezda, and in the pocket dimension where the Vezda are imprisoned, Pike and Batel confront Gamble, and after their victory they marry and live past Pike’s foreseen maiming, having a child and growing old together. But as Batel dies of old age, she tells Pike to answer a knock at the door, and when he does, he realizes that he was living in an illusion of the life she wanted them to have together. To defeat Gamble and re-imprison the Vezda, Batel had to evolve into the guardian of the dimension and abandon humanity altogether.

The story is tragic not only in terms of Pike’s personal loss, but in that it confirms his pre-determined path towards ending his Starfleet career crippled and alone.

It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t make a lot of sense when you examine the particulars, but as a story it ends up working. What it reminded me of more than anything else was the season-to-season story arcs of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where every season they basically set up a “Big Bad” villain with low-key appearances in early episodes, the threat escalates towards the end of things and then the threat is defeated in a season finale that could double as a series finale. And the reason the Buffy producers did that is because their show was on a cheap-ass indie network and they had no idea if they would get renewed next year.

That isn’t the issue with Strange New Worlds, but we know now that the series’ days are numbered. The seasons have only been ten episodes each, and after a ten-episode Season 4 (which has already finished production) the final fifth season is supposed to be only six episodes. And while the premise is already a setup for the timeline of The Original Series, they’re implying more strongly that they’re going to pass the baton to Paul Wesley for at least a “Year One” season of Kirk as Captain of the Enterprise. And while I personally think Wesley looks more like Jack Lord or the young Morrissey than the young Bill Shatner, he’s good enough on his own terms to keep watching.

Well, maybe, because in the wake of David Ellison buying up CBS/Paramount to make Paramount Skydance, he and his father Larry seem to be using their capital – and their clout with Donald Trump, Viceroy for Russian North America – to buy out CNN and if possible its parent company Warner Brothers/Discovery, so it would get that much closer to having a state media monopoly. And as we’ve seen with Warners’ own maneuvering and consolidating, a lot of development projects tend to fall by the wayside in order to satisfy the bottom line. Possibly including not only an SNW sequel but Starfleet Academy, which hasn’t finished its first season yet.

Yeah, I promised myself I would quit complaining so much about the Trump occupation government, but reality keeps getting in the way.

And now for something completely different.

On January 15, Paramount Plus released the first two episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. I’ve only had time to see the pilot (‘Kids These Days’). And while I don’t know if I like this as much as Strange New Worlds, it has potential.

It is notable not for its cast of young cadet characters so much as the stellar cast around them, like Holly Hunter, Paul Giamatti and recurring Trek people like Oded Fehr and Robert Picardo as “The Doctor” (who as a hologram could feasibly exist for 900+ years in the Star Trek: Discovery timeline).

As with Discovery’s even farther-into-the-future than regular Star Trek setting, there are a number of alien-hybrid characters and a vast array of species on screen, one of which by canon really ought to be extinct by now.

Hunter plays Captain Nahla Ake, a very Holly Hunter-like character who rolls her legs up on her command chair while giving orders or facing off a villain. But the point-of-view character is named Caleb Mir, who is first shown in flashback from 15 years prior, when his mother (Tatiana Maslany) has been manipulated by the ruthless Nus Braka (Giamatti) into a supply raid that ended up killing Federation officers. Ake is the officer who pronounces sentence on the two which means separating Caleb from his Mom and making him a ward of the Federation. But he made his first opportunity to escape and had been on the run ever since. Ake resigned her commission over the whole incident, but after the “Burn” disaster is resolved (in Season 3 of Discovery) Admiral Vance, the head of Starfleet (Fehr) catches up with Ake and offers her the chance to run a new Starfleet Academy/War College to train the (ahem) next generation of officers as the Federation rebuilds. She demurs but Vance dangles the carrot of being able to trace the whereabouts of Mir. Mir (Sandro Rosta) turns out to be a roughened criminal escaping from one prison planet to land up in the next, but Ake gives him her own offer to use her resources in Starfleet to find out what happened to his mother.

And by the way, props to the producers for casting the male lead as a black person, in the tradition of Ben Sisko and Michael Burnham, and in the spirit of Whoopi Goldberg saying that when she saw Nichelle Nichols on the original Star Trek, it confirmed that Black people would continue to exist in the future. Cause right now, that’s kind of up in the air.

The two fly out to the starship Athena, which looks pretty impressive, at least from the overhead view. It is actually the nucleus of the campus building which is to fly itself to San Francisco and serve as the Academy’s new headquarters. In his first day or so, Caleb runs into other cadets, being a pacifist Klingon med student, a young culture student who happens to be the daughter of an admiral, an elitist jerk who is still capable of doing the right thing, and another culture student who is actually from an entire culture of sentient holograms.

And on the way to Earth, Nus Braka shows up to attack the ship, with a Tic-Tac-Toe game carved into his hairdo and serving up more ham than an Easter Sunday brunch. He uses “protomatter” to disable the Athena and try to steal its warp drive, but Mir with his own hacker knowledge of protomatter is able to devise a scheme to override his controls. But this leads to Braka teleporting on board to fight Caleb, in the course of which he tells him that his Mom helped him break out of prison, but doesn’t say what happened to her before he inevitably escapes.

This is yet another case of a Star Trek hero breaking protocols and getting away with it because it turned out to yield the right result. So Caleb gets to stay in the Academy on detention while Ake helps continue the search for his mother, and so the premise is set.

As you see, this isn’t treading that much new ground, with several Trek shows having aliens cast against type and Voyager having officers who were not just roguish but actual criminals. What intrigues me about the long term prospects of Starfleet Academy is that it potentially expands the setting of Discovery from Season 2, which the latter seasons didn’t really do much with. In particular, the rebuilt Starfleet Academy is set up to be part of a larger story in which a former “good guy” nation reduced to the Dark Ages rebuilds not only itself but the broader civilization that formed around it.

Which seems pretty relevant right now.

Well Strange New Worlds Season Three totally snuck up on me and now that it’s about over, I realized I hadn’t covered SNW Season 2.

Season One was clearly a showcase for modern Trek’s breakout star, Anson Mount as Captain Pike, with the broad arc of the season being his attempts to either escape or cope with the knowledge of his grim fate, culminating in an alternate timeline where he was the captain of the Enterprise during the “Balance of Terror” scenario and his decisions turned out to be disastrous for everyone but himself. We don’t see that much of Mount in the first few weeks of Season Two; it turned out he was taking family leave to be present for the birth of his first child. This was a good thing insofar as the audience got to see the strength of SNW’s large ensemble cast.

This started with the resolution of the Season 1 cliffhanger where Number One (Rebecca Romijn) was arrested for being from a genetically modified species, against Federation laws. This continued Romijn’s development of a character who only appeared in the original pilot by actually giving her an origin and a sympathetic background. It ended with the premise that Una would get to stay in the Federation on the grounds of being a refugee, which is one of those recurring science-fiction things (especially in Star Trek) where the status quo is technically preserved but the protagonist is made an exception to it because of “main character energy.”

Later when Pike was brought back to the Enterprise, they had the episode “Among the Lotus Eaters”, which was set on Rigel VII, in reference to one of Pike’s previous adventures referred to in “The Cage.” A radiation anomaly affected both the away team and the ship in orbit, causing everyone to lose their memories and revert to either barbarism or helplessness. This story highlighted one of the show’s most popular original characters, Erica Ortegas, who managed to get herself together to go to the bridge and save the day, but the writing was still a bit forced. Ortegas is a good enough character and Melissa Navia is a good enough actress that she needs a bit more motivation than “I’m Erica Ortegas, and I fly the ship.” Fortunately, they did work on that in Season 3.

One of the minor recurring arcs in Season 2 was where the implied attraction between Nurse Chapel and Spock in The Original Series became a full-fledged romance, and they managed to do it in a low-key way that didn’t violate established continuity. Too much. They also established a certain history between Chapel (Jess Bush) and Dr. M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), having served not only as physicians but as combatants in the Klingon War. This leads to a later episode, “Under the Cloak of War”, in which M’Benga is told by Pike to assist in a peace mission with a Klingon diplomat that he knows to be a war criminal. Olusanmokun establishes his character’s intense internal pressure and stress, with events leading to a confrontation in which M’Benga ends up killing the Klingon, in what was probably not self-defense, though the case was ambiguous enough for Pike to go along with it.

It sort of figures that the show sandwiched its most dark and grim episode between “Those Old Scientists” (the Lower Decks crossover) which was the most silly episode of the series up to that point, and the musical episode, which was bound to be even sillier than that. Although on that score, “Subspace Rhapsody” was clearly inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s “Once More, With Feeling”, especially the conceit that living in a musical reality causes everybody to confess their most uncomfortable motives in song. The difference being that unlike with Buffy, everyone on the SNW cast can actually sing.

And they did much to humanize the combative and hostile security chief La’an (Christine Chong), especially in the early episode “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” which somehow manages to combine “Space Seed” with “City on the Edge of Forever”, using James Kirk (Paul Wesley) as the bridge. In this case, La’an is stuck in a dystopian variant time line and the Kirk of this dimension is a captain of a united Earth military ship who ends up having to help her restore her timeline by going to 21^st Century Toronto, where they try to make sense of things and end up falling for each other. It turns out La’an’s ancestor, Khan Noonien Singh, is in Toronto, living as a child in a special academy, and he is being stalked by Sera, a young journalist who turns out to be a Romulan agent trying to kill Khan to stop his influence from changing humanity’s timeline to where they become a threat to the Romulans. And in the midst of all this, Sera blurts out to La’an that she was supposed to have traced Khan to 1992 but thanks to multiple Temporal Wars she ended up stuck in the 21^st Century instead.

This one episode, almost offhandedly, answered the ongoing question of why so much of the Discovery/SNW line of Star Trek doesn’t look like the previous Star Trek timeline- because it isn’t.

This is not the original Star Trek timeline. It’s just not. It is at best an alternate universe like the “Abramsverse” that split off from the “Prime” universe with a certain event.

What this does is address a very common problem with science fiction, where the creator suggests a future at a certain date which will have all sorts of radical things, and here we are in 2024 and we don’t have ray guns or flying cars. Soylent Green was set in 2022, yet we don’t have ecological collapse, discolored skies, masses of people cramming the streets and industry casting about for meatless alternatives to traditional foods.

Okay, bad example.

Real history passed the period of the Eugenics Wars from the original series bible many years ago, and so the original series is very clearly not plausible as our future. But in SNW’s debut episode, Captain Pike did a primer on the Eugenics Wars for an alien government, and showed real footage of people marching on Washington after the 2020 election. So right from the get-go, they’ve retconned The Original Series background to make it fit in with our history up till now.

I mean, consider “Turnabout Intruder”, the famously bad Star Trek episode that marked the end of the original series. In this story, Dr. Janice Lester is an old contemporary (and former lover) of Captain Kirk who wants to destroy his life out of insane jealousy that he gets to be a starship captain but Starfleet will not allow women to be captains. Of course as the story goes on it becomes clear that Lester is too mentally unstable to be a captain regardless. The show did imply that this gender barrier was a double standard, but it did so in the most awkward and patronizing way. Which gets to one of the issues with the Original Series: It really was progressive in terms of its diversity casting (what was then called ‘United Nations casting’) but its treatment of women mostly remained old-fashioned.

Even so, ’60s Trek clearly modeled Starfleet after American military services, and at the time it might have seemed unrealistic, even for this series, to show women captains. Now it would seem unrealistic NOT to. This is where you have Captain Batel, and Michael Burnham, not to mention Burnham’s role model, Phillippa Georgiou.

As they put it in another classic science-fiction series:
If you wonder how he eats and breathes

And other science facts

(La La La La)

Tell yourself, ‘It’s just a TV show,

I should really just relax’

I wouldn’t say this is the greatest TV show of all time, but in just two seasons of Strange New Worlds, Paramount finally seems to had gotten the sweet spot for New Trek where it combines complex modern sensibilities with the ’60s Trek feel. As opposed to Discovery, which is often too impressed with its own “progressive” politics, or Picard, which was so dark for most of its run that it might as well have been produced by Zack Snyder. Did Season 3 do as well this year? Well… mostly.