Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

[Roy Focker]

Latest was probably the best episode of the season. A legitimate good episode.

I still question the intelligence of Star Fleet. Earlier on in the episode the command staff start sharing notes trying to guess what the bad guy's plan is. It is pretty obvious. You'd have to be a complete idiot not to figure it out. They're bunch of idiots.

 

[Thom]

Haven't seen it in two weeks, and it doesn't seem like I'm missing anything...

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, Thom said:

Haven't seen it in two weeks, and it doesn't seem like I'm missing anything...

Candidly?  No, you really aren't missing anything.

There are occasional moments where the writers almost seem to grasp what Star Trek is about, but then they lapse back into churning out faintly patronizing Discoveryslop.

[Seto Kaiba]

S1 E9 "300th Night" really has a hum-dinger of a description.

Quote

As the year ends, Caleb must choose between his old dreams and his new life at Starfleet Academy.

Imagine a protagonist being so completely dim-witted that this is actually a choice at all.

 

Spoiler

Title drop right out of the gate.  Apparently "300th Night" is a sort of traditional end-of-term celebration at Starfleet Academy.  The cadets are apparently just partying right in the Athena's corridors?

The Athena is on its way to Betazed, to take part in the festivities as Betazed officially becomes the Federation's new capital.

Jay-Den is indulging his inner Worf with an obscure Klingon ritual and it seems to be making a bunch of people awkward.  Caleb's flashing back to his mommy issues, Darem's clearly a bit awkward around Jay-Den in general, and Sam 2.0 is still processing everything that happened to her last episode.

Caleb bails on Jay-den's Klingon ritual to make the main cast honorary family members and ends up in a turbolift with Tarima, making a valiant go at self-aware humor with jokes about being stuck on long turbolift rides with someone you've got unresolved tension with.  The delivery is so bad that if this were a pizza, we'd be getting a refund.

I would give real money for the next season to drop Stephen Colbert.  His role in this series is not funny.  It's cringe.  Pure, undiluted cringe.

And just in case we thought this setting couldn't get any stupider... it immediately gets EXPONENTIALLY stupider once Admiral Vance calls up Team Incompetence to let them know what their ten-thumbed Pakled-tier ineptitude in that hostage situation allowed the Venari Ral to steal.

Spoiler

A sh*tload of synthetic omega molecules.  Y'know, that stuff that Starfleet of 800+ years ago knew was way too f***ing dangerous to mess with and imposed a directive that any and all research into it was to be destroyed with extreme prejudice up to an including violating the prime directive?  Yeah, that.

But Starfleet of this era is dumb, so apparently they decided to experiment with weaponizing omega molecules and had a starbase holding a stockpile of them guarded by a single lightly-armed ship.

And now Nahla et. al. cannot imagine what Nus Braka, a Federation-hating moron, might do with weapons that do one and only one thing: make regions of space impassible by warp and impulse drive.  Really?  Are they THIS stupid?  Is everyone in this series part-Pakled?  Literally the only possible use-case for this weapon is cutting the Federation off from the rest of the galaxy.  That's the ONLY way he can use it that doesn't also wipe out his own interests.

My head hurts from watching this.  Why does every character have a room temperature-at-best IQ?

Spoiler

Turns out Caleb is a bit stupid and, once reminded of the password his mother made him memorize, finds two years of messages from his mother sitting around waiting for him.  She's basically spent the last two years livetweeting her location on subspace trying to get him to come to her.  Turns out the planet she's on is about to be invaded by the Venari Ral.

Imagine how stupid Starfleet is... calling every single vessel back inside Federation space knowing the enemy has a weapon that makes subspace impassible.  This is officially becoming an Idiot Plot again, with Ake and Kelrec blindly walking right into Braka's trap because they refuse to do any kind of critical thinking at all.  

So Caleb, of course, decides to go steal a shuttle and go save his mother.  Only to be interrupted by Sam, who it seems has become something of a Smug Super nowadays since she's apparently realized she's way faster and more capable than an organic cadet.  So she literally refuses to leave on the grounds that he's not likely to succeed at getting off the Athena without her assistance because launching a shuttle while at warp is... dangerous now?  What?  They get ambushed by Genesis and a very drunk Darem, who apparently lacks the enzymes to digest alcohol so he's WASTED from Jay-den's ceremonial wine earlier.

So... why are there transwarp tunnels still?  Discovery never really addressed that.  The Borg transwarp network collapsed eight hundred years ago when Voyager infected the Borg Queen with that pathogen and blew up the hub.

Spoiler

Nahla is STILL trying to figure out what Braka's plan is.  This is like, the better part of a day later.  

The planet Caleb's mom is on looks like a Star Wars-style space slum.  We see a few familiar species including a Lurian working a food stall.

We've traded the Planetary Piss Filter for the Planetary Bogwater Filter... it's green.  Caleb's genius plan is to wander in circles until he finds his mommy.  Somehow, this works.

 

It's at this moment that it struck me... I am unspeakably bored with this.  There is no payoff here, because Caleb's mom is an undeveloped flat character and Caleb himself is barely developed and kind of an unlikeable git.  We either waited way too long for this, or not nearly long enough.  Either way, it lands with a thud.

 

Spoiler

Caleb's mom at least seems properly ashamed that she raised her son to be a criminal.  

This series is so badly written that this botched reveal comes full circle in that it's impossible to tell if Caleb's mother is sincere that she was never a part of the Venari Ral or is doing the worst job imaginable of pretending she wasn't.  Nus Braka was apparently the one who sprang her from prison, and she claims she escaped him by faking her own death.

She's awfully paranoid about Venari Ral spies too.  

Captain Ake is still working out Braka's plan in her dim, Pakled-ish way.  It somehow also took them ages to notice Braka mined the perimeter of Federation space and that her ship had stowaways on it.  How she made Ensign, never mind Captain, is a mystery.

Turns out Caleb really IS that stupid... rather than tell his mother he joined Starfleet and tell her that Captain Ake's willing to help her go straight and stay out of prison, he's preparing to go AWOL and return to a life of crime running from Starfleet, the Venari Ral, and a dozen others.  He tries to give a The Reason You Suck speech to the others, and doesn't do a very good job because he doesn't actually know them very well at all.

Darem, Genesis, and Sam get caught almost immediately and are going to be executed... and Caleb and his mom manage to escalate it into a gunfight before the Athena flies into the atmosphere to beam them all up.  

We get a basic triage fail as the Doctor et. al. ignore the critically wounded Anisha Mir in favor of patching up Darem's bloody nose.

What is with this series and Starfleet ships apparently being made of crepe paper and wishful thinking?

Spoiler

Seriously.  Earlier in the series we saw a Venari Ral ship tank like twenty torpedoes without blinking and the Athena's apparently disabled almost immediately after just a few hits.  They end up having to sacrifice the warp nacelles and secondary hull to get away.  

Only now that Braka has played his hand does Ake finally figure out what Braka's plan was.

[Seto Kaiba]

I just realized, Nus Braka's whole master plan is just...

Spoiler

... NuTrek's creators returning to the pile of rejected series pitches from decades past and coming up with Star Trek: Final Frontier for the second time.  They already did this one once already with Discovery's third season "Burn" storyline.

That whole series pitch revolved around an unknown foe using omega particle weapons to collapse the Federation by making warp travel impossible.

 

[Thom]

42 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

  Hide contents

... NuTrek's creators returning to the pile of rejected series pitches from decades past and coming up with Star Trek: Final Frontier for the second time.  They already did this one once already with Discovery's third season "Burn" storyline.

That whole series pitch revolved around an unknown foe using omega particle weapons to collapse the Federation by making warp travel impossible.

 

Which would have worked a lot better if they had left it simple as that

[JB0]

55 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I just realized, Nus Braka's whole master plan is just...

  Hide contents

... NuTrek's creators returning to the pile of rejected series pitches from decades past and coming up with Star Trek: Final Frontier for the second time.  They already did this one once already with Discovery's third season "Burn" storyline.

That whole series pitch revolved around an unknown foe using omega particle weapons to collapse the Federation by making warp travel impossible.

 

Seems like that is a good way to accelerate research into long-range transporters, artificial wormholes, and transwarp conduits. People adapt and overcome. They may bend but they don't break.

I mean, provided you want to write a hopeful and positive story that actually feels like Star Trek instead of just destroying everything to make some kind of point about the futility of optimism.