Starfleet Academy has launched out of spacedock—well, come to landing in San Francisco, really—with a two-episode premiere that speaks to two very different sensibilities the show has. The first is more classically Star Trek, even as it does a lot of legwork to introduce us to the kids, teachers, and villains we’ll be spending time with this season, and the second leans more into the kind of young adult vibe the show finds freshness in, albeit with some occasionally jarring results. But while there’s stronger to come in Starfleet Academy‘s debut season, these are two episodes that give us a good picture of what the show can play with in the Star Trek universe.
“Kids These Days”
Nothing says a first day of school like a terror attack, right? It’s in its very first episode that Starfleet Academy arguably pulls the most from its predecessor in Discovery, even beyond just the high-stakes details of its 32nd-century setting—a Starfleet examining itself in the wake of galactic disaster in particular, as we’re broadly given an episode that is pulled from the big bumper trope of Star Trek episode scenarios: our heroic ship, in this case the USS Athena, after it’s just got done inducting the first class of academy students recruited by Starfleet in over a century, having an extremely bad day when it’s almost crippled by outside forces, in this case raiding pirates called the Venari Ral.
This is all big and zippy high-action Star Trek stuff. There’s people looking grim on a starship bridge as things go from bad to worse, and occasionally getting flung about. There’s people on the lower decks caught up in cascading system failures and mounting injuries who have to MacGyver their own ways to avoid hull breaches and other deadly threats of that nature. It’s good that Starfleet Academy wants to immediately prove it can do this kind of meat-and-potatoes Star Trek plot, even if it is admittedly doing it a bit more in the splashy, action-packed manner of Discovery than more classical Trek eras. It’s big booms and creepy alien tech stuff, but it’s also that beloved competence porn of people reacting calmly to a high-pressure situation and performing their jobs in spite of it.
Is it particularly new? Not really. Is it still exciting and fun? Absolutely, especially because it’s an almighty clash of wills between Holly Hunter’s Captain/Chancellor Nahla Ake, and the Venari Ral’s charismatic leader, Paul Giamatti’s Nus Braka. The two seniors of Starfleet Academy‘s cast both rise to the occasion remarkably here, with Hunter balancing a playful, hippie-esque inquisitiveness in Ake (a part-Lanthanite, meaning she’s lived for centuries, and as we’ll get into a bit later, has seen Starfleet at its highest and its lowest), and Giamatti going so full ham he’s close to shoving an apple in his mouth and serving himself at the all-you-can-eat buffet of scenery to chew on. Their charisma together—even if Braka is, for the most part, a hologram gloating from his own ship as the Athena is locked down by his virus-laden programmable matter attack—is electric, a chance for Hunter to imbue Ake with more of the traditional Star Trek captain sternness, while Giamatti has a ton of fun going big and broad as her foil.
But maybe the most important twist on this traditional Star Trek scenario here is that we’re not just watching a seasoned, senior crew of Starfleet veterans react to the Venari Ral’s attack: this is that same high-pressure situation we’re used to, but half the cast are kids. These aren’t junior officers; they’re literal children on their first day of school, and that massively ramps the stakes up, not just because we don’t really know how Starfleet Academy is going to approach the often high price there is to pay in the line of duty, but because this becomes the ultimate crucible in which our core cast of cadets begin to form both their bonds with each other.
Thankfully, no one’s getting phasered on day one just yet, and our main quintet—Caleb, Jay-den, Sam, Genesis, and Darem—work together to already show some of the Starfleet spirit they’re hoping to hone in their time at the Academy (even if the whole “so your spaceship school got attacked by pirates first day of the semester” situation is kind of Caleb’s fault). Dynamics in the group already start to emerge as the kids find themselves dealing with both trying to find a way to free the Athena from Braka’s control and also a developing medical situation with the critically wounded first officer, Lura Thok.
You’ve got Caleb and Darem sparring with each other, the kid who doesn’t really want to be where he is versus the honors student wannabe, you’ve got Caleb finding some kinship with the reserved Jay-den, already struggling to fit in as a Klingon who wants to be on the science track. You’ve also got Genesis and Darem beginning to form an interesting pair within the group, bonding over their eagerness to prove themselves and their similar high-pressure backgrounds giving them the burden of expectation, and then you’ve got Sam—programmed to be similar in presented age to the rest of the kids but, as a hologram, a being who is barely weeks old—being the spunky glue that gels this unlikely unit of friends-to-be together. The Venari Ral attack gives us a very simple way to kickstart their relationship, and while the more immature vibe you’d expect of young college students is there, so too are the seeds of that Star Trek-ian system of people learning to be the best they can be.
“Kids These Days” is thematically strung together throughout all this thanks to Caleb’s backstory serving as the arch of the episode. In its opening, we flash back to a decade-and-a-half prior to the opening of the academy, where a weary and somewhat disillusioned Ake presides over a sentencing case that sees Braka jailed for food theft alongside his unwilling accomplice, Caleb’s mom (guest star Tatiana Maslany), and attempting to take Caleb in as a ward of the Federation state. Instead, the young boy flees into an eventual life of crime himself before their paths cross once more years later. It’s clear Caleb’s personal score to settle with Braka is going to become the key arc of this debut season, but more importantly, it’s this moment of profound failure for Starfleet—worn down by time and circumstance—that serves as Academy‘s moral compass.
For both Ake and Caleb, it’s a chance for redemption in some ways, the former taking the latter under her wing at the Academy to prove that Starfleet’s ideals still matter, and can be brought to the fore again, amid the ruins of a rebuilding galaxy. But it’s also a chance for the show itself to show that, even on the bleeding edge of Star Trek‘s universe, taken further than we’ve known it, the franchise’s ideals can not just be passed down to new generations and audiences time and time again, but they are constantly works in progress, a faith in which can be diminished and built back up with dedication and effort. All the whizzbang explosions of this episode are a very Discovery idea carried over to Starfleet Academy, but so is that faith in the process of progress, and to see it carried on in a show that is explicitly about a new generation of young people coming of age in this universe, that’s far more important a thing for Starfleet Academy to nail than the ability to do a “standard” Star Trek story concept as it does here.
“Beta Test”
Okay, we’ve gotten the intros out of the way and proved that this gosh darn new Star Trek show believes in Star Trek and can do Star Trek-style plots. Now to scare away the old guard: in this episode, Caleb must flirt with a girl, or the Federation is doomed!
While this is both a) flippant and b) still an accurate description of the events of this episode, “Beta Test” is going to be the first of many tests Starfleet Academy asks of a skeptical audience to see how much they’re willing to tolerate what are still ultimately very Star Trek ideas and episode scenarios when they’re wrapped in a decidedly un-Trekky tone. After the first episode gave us Ake as a woman still trying to wrestle with her belief in Starfleet’s ideals after a century of those ideals being put aside out of desperate necessity, Hunter loosens up even more so here, roaming around the place barefoot and practically slathering herself over any seating surface she can find—giving a vibe that is less stern-faced head of school and more like a cool aunt that had a hippie phase (hers just happened to be on Bajor), which causes consternation with both Admiral Vance and her rival principal in the form of the Starfleet War College’s head, Commander Kelrec (Raoul Bhaneja).
The kids, meanwhile, are, well, acting like kids. It’s mostly Caleb who’s being abrasive on purpose, determined that his role at the academy is both the lone wolf and the person who’s strictly there on a transactional basis: get info about where his mom is and leave. That means he’s butting heads with his fellow students, like his new roommate in Darem; it means he’s butting heads with teachers (huzzah for Tig Notaro’s return as Discovery‘s glib engineering whiz Jett Reno), especially since he is certain his busy life as a delinquent has taught him more about how the galaxy works than they ever could.
But if the first episode was trying to slowly bring you in with something that felt a bit more like Star Trek in its general tone, “Beta Test,” just like Caleb or any other fine young adult, is immediately testing how long it can bite its thumb at authority. Everything’s got a bit more jokey, a bit more loose, and a bit more rough around the edges. It also means—cover your ears, Star Trek puritans—a lot more explicit cursing in this single episode than there’s probably actually ever been in Trek‘s 60-year history. Gasp! Won’t someone please think of the children?
And yet, for all that superficial, in-your-face provocation that this show is different and edgy and not for you oldies, “Beta Test” is actually still, at its core, a very strong Star Trek idea, and mines all it can out of the potential of setting this series in the 32nd century. Starfleet Academy is chosen to be the host of diplomatic talks between Admiral Vance and the president of Betazed to discuss the latter’s potential reunion with the Federation now that it’s seeking to rebuild itself. The stakes are geopolitically high, arguably higher than the prior episode putting the Athena at risk: Betazed wasn’t a founding world, but it was one of the earliest and most vaunted members, and as Ake puts it, the Federation failed it.
Now, from behind a psionic barrier, the Betazoids represent their own coalition of dozens upon dozens of worlds that, should Betazed rejoin, would also provide the struggling Federation with a significant boost to its membership, as well as vital trade routes and territory. If even the Betazoids can’t be brought back to the table, then what hope does the Federation have of rebuilding? It’s not just a chance for the Federation to put its best foot forward on the galactic stage again, but one to show a message, just as Ake believes the Betazoids are showing too—the Betazoid campaign to rejoin is being led by its own activist youth movement, so if the Federation can show, through Starfleet Academy, that it is also putting its next generation forward as a priority, it can show former members that it truly believes in looking to the future.
Enter the girl who must be rizzed up for the sake of the galaxy: the President of Betazed’s daughter and a prominent figure in that youth movement, Tarima Sadal (Zoe Steiner). Caleb accidentally crosses paths with her as he continues to try and flaunt the academy’s authority, glitching out security holograms and attempting to escape out of school grounds, and just like with any two volatile, dashing young people, the sparks immediately being flying. There’s a kinship between them, even if Tarima has a bit more of a level head on her (brought about, apparently, by a medical need to restrain her empathic abilities), and Starfleet Academy mirrors the ups and downs of their initial flirtations with the diplomatic process of the talks between the Federation and Betazed.
It’s a really fun and clever way to view what we would see as “traditional” Star Trek storytelling through this more youth-oriented lens, and it’s not the only way the episode is doing it. In the existence of the War College—an idea wrought out of the old FASA Star Trek RPG and now thrust into the spotlight, that Starfleet would shutter its academy but maintain an explicitly martial facility to train officers how to fight and survive, Starfleet Academy renders the franchise’s generations-long debate about whether or not Starfleet is a scientific, exploratory organization or a martial peacekeeping taskforce in the form of a rival schools matchup that’s more like nerds vs. jocks. In turn, the diplomatic fate of the United Federation of Planets is hinged upon Caleb successfully whisking Tarima away to go see some Earth whales, and that moment turning romantic. Taking these big ideas and twisting them into this new lens is a fresh way to bridge the gap between what we expect of Star Trek, and the tone this show wants to strike.
However, Caleb and Tarima are interrupted, especially as Tarima’s father has decided that talking with the Federation is at an impasse. Some 120 years might have passed since the Burn, and the Federation may have gotten some early wins bringing worlds back into the fold, but every other indication is that the organization is unwilling to change from its past failures. The Federation is too focused on reestablishing the status quo, relocating its HQ back to its prior home in Paris, and being unable to acquiesce to the fact that Betazed has grown behind its own walls and is not the same world it was before the Burn. It’s stuck in the expectations of the past, rather than seeing what could be different in the future, much like Tarima finds herself irked that Caleb may not have been interested in her as much as he was the Betazoids’ stellar cartography data to find clues about his mom. Miscommunication: it happens between potential couples and planetary alliances.
Thankfully, with a little encouragement from Ake, Caleb is able to meet up with Tarima before the Betazoid delegation departs and lets his walls down to convince Tarima (and through her, her father) and give the Federation (and him) one more chance. Vance takes that chance to make his own gesture to change, one accepted by the Betazoids—relocating Federation HQ from Paris to Betazed, a sign that the Federation is coming to the people it left behind, instead of them coming back to it. The day is saved… well, at least for the Federation. Caleb has to learn the hard way in the end that Tarima has decided to sign up for the War College rather than Starfleet Academy, leaving their burgeoning feelings for each other separated by the jovial animosity between the two schools. “Beta Test” may go a long way in showing how Starfleet Academy as a show wants to balance Star Trek tenets with its youthful new perspective, but it can’t reward itself by getting the girl that easily.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
