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.
“300th 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.