I Watch TV: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
From the start, a regular Star Trek show has a starship visiting planets, and thus a regular episode is one in which they arrive at a new location, encounter a situation, and attempt to resolve it. Following this they then move on, the continuity between locations lesser or greater depending on the particular show and the style at the time. Perhaps the largest and most successful alternative is Deep Space Nine, though as a port of call at an important and politically sensitive location, an early episode template would be essentially the inverse; someone comes to visit the station and creates a situation that requires resolving, following which they move on.
Starfleet Academy is partially built around a training ship, the Athena, and as well as heading out in space plays host to more than one event on site. Co-located with the War College in San Francisco they do go to places and people come to them, with situations that need resolving. Due to the ten episode season length it’s hard to pin down a typical episode. I hope I’m not unfair in suggesting that if it has one, then a typical episode is that for some reason someone asks one of the cadets what their deal is, and then the majority of the episode is finding out what their deal is.
This is just as well as the opening story starts with Nahla Ake, destined to be academy chancellor, and how she arrested the mother of Caleb Mir. Now fifteen years on she recruits Caleb, offering him a place as a cadet as an alternative to prison; he grudgingly accepts. He almost immediately plunges them into danger when he attempts to locate his mother, drawing the attention of Nus Braka. Braka, once a minor gangster arrested at the same time as Caleb’s mother, has risen to lead the Venari Ral, a powerful pirate fleet. He becomes the recurring villain of the season. This all threatens to be like Discovery, where the core characters struggled to form an ensemble due to the centrality of Michael Burnham.
It avoids that, using most of the episode count to explore one of the core group of cadets and their deals, while the other characters get on with more ensemble side plots. Sam, the hologram student, gets two episodes focused on her, meanwhile Caleb and Ake’s stories link into the over-arching season plot, so get played out over more episodes. Although there were some that dragged I enjoyed most of this, yet it made the season feel like prologue. We’ve had the getting to know you stage, now let’s get on with the main event*.
Watch This: Star Trek adventures with a motley crew of
youngsters learning to become themselves
Don’t Watch This: Bunch of kids in space make a mess of
things
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