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.

[pengbuzz]

On 3/6/2026 at 3:01 PM, 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.

 

All that managed to do was to make an impossbile storyline even more impossible.

[Seto Kaiba]

Y'know what Starfeet Academy really needs?  Hammy 40's newsreel announcer guy from Star Wars: the Clone Wars.  

I feel like all the absurdity, all the pants-on-head stupidity, and all the completely inane character writing could only be improved with a sassy matter-of-fact voiceover.

The season one finale - and, sadly, not series finale - is "Rubincon".  

Did the screenwriting team (or ChatGPT) forget to use spellcheck?  That's not how you spell Rubicon.

Oh well, here goes something... 

 

 

Spoiler

A See? BS Studios Production indeed.

 

Our story opens on a flashback to absolutely moronic "hearing" scene from the first episode, serving to remind us that everything occurring here is occurring because Nahla Ake has basically no professionalism to speak of.

Back to where last episode ended, Caleb's mom Anisha "Accessory to Murder and Piracy" Mir wakes up and immediately launches into a psycho b*tchfit as soon as she hears she's aboard a Starfleet starship.  Proving that she's learned nothing she immediately attempts to assault the captain of said starship on sight and has to be restrained.  Jett's managed to get hold of Lura and Admiral Vance, who decide to narrate the obvious at us.  One new thing is definitive numbers are put on the sheer magnitude of Ake's big f*ckup from Ep6 now.  Her imbecilic playing into Braka's hands back in Ep6 has imperiled 80,000 cubic light years of space and 160 billion people on 240 worlds inside of the minefield's blast radius.  According to Captain Ake, this will be a worse galactic tragedy than The Burn.  That's how incompetent she is.

They waste valuable time in the briefing introducing Caleb's mother to Admiral Vance, and then six Venari Ral ships jump them... with the Athena conveniently springing a never-before-mentioned plasma leak so they can't get away by warp.

Apparently the shields are magically sensor-opaque now?  Because Captain Ake seems to think they are, and doesn't want Nus Braka to know his six ships are up against a skeleton crew of a double handful of cadets, Jett Reno, a murderer, and a drooling incompetent.  TBH, I don't think he's worried.  He's got Ake outnumbered six to one with non-functioning warp drive and she's just officially replaced Michael Burnham as Starfleet's Biggest Humanoid Liability.  He could honestly leave her to her own devices and she'd probably choke to death on anything with small parts.

Anisha Mir thinks this is a great time to threaten a Starfleet officer with murder.

 

This is an Idiot Plot.  A story that is literally only possible because everyone in it is behaving as stupidly as possible at all times.

 

Spoiler

For a glorious, golden moment there the bridge was exploding and it looked like Ake and Caleb's mom were dead.  I dared to hope the series might improve with Ake and Mir removed from it, but no... they're fine and Braka has once again captured the Athena.

 

There's a wonderful little meta moment where Nus Braka makes a string of forced and painfully unfunny jokes and then gets upset that nobody is laughing.  You can almost hear the writers speaking through him, demanding to know why almost nobody likes this show and why the studio had to resort to an astroturfing campaign to try to depict its critics as paid trolls.

"Come on, guys, I made a funny! Laugh!" - it's almost the perfect encapsulation of every moment of dogsh*t writing in this series.

 

Spoiler

Their subterfuge pretty much immediately falls apart because, as Braka points out, "You people never travel light" and he's clearly not buying that the bridge crew here were the ones who shot up the marketplace on Ukeck.  He immediately sees through their phony warp core breach as soon as the Athena's computer speaks up about it, which is fair because that is a positively ancient trick people have been using for over a millennium at this point.  (The oldest example on a Starfleet ship being in ENT "Shockwave" in 2152, a whopping 1,043 years ago.)

 

So... the Doctor's mobile emitter from Voyager is back.

 

Spoiler

And, somehow, on the spur of the moment the Athena was able to fake its own destruction with the Doctor's holographic emitter despite it being centuries-old tech by this point and the Venari Ral not spotting the deception when they've correctly called EVERY OTHER attempted deception so far?

I suppose it would be Game Over if they had, but still... there's that Idiot Ball again.

So now it's up to the cadets to man the Athena's busted and actively on-fire bridge and clean up the mess made by their incompetent superiors.  The Doctor's even out of action, since apparently whatever he did managed to damage him.

 

It was at this point that the Paramount+ app on my streaming pod died... apparently a valiant suicide attempt to save me from the rest of this episode.

 

Spoiler

Apparently impulse drives have suffered a massive, massive downgrade in this future.  1/8th impulse is "less than 1,000 kilometer per second".  So, less than 0.0033c, which is odd given that impulse power a millennium ago was capable of 0.5c.  

The showrunners apparently didn't save any money for other sets again, so Captain Ake and Anisha Mir are being held prisoner in a vandalized classroom in the detached secondary hull of the Athena.  Braka's men have trashed the atrium with juvenile graffiti and somehow managed to set the water features on fire, all so Braka can make a televised speech about how the Federation sucks and then put Captain Ake on a show trial.

Braka claims he grew up in a mining colony neglected by the Federation until it tried to shoot down a Federation supply ship out of desperation, only to get blown up by the ensuing return fire.  He actually makes a fair point that Starfleet's assurances that the Burn can never happen again ring a bit hollow when Starfleet is apparently developing omega particle weapons... a completely insane premise.  He's appointed Anisha Mir judge, jury, and executioner over Ake's trial.

Back on the Athena, the crew are bickering like children as the ship slowly comes apart around them.  They've managed to injure Tarima again.

Captain Ake conveniently forgets that the reason omega particle research was banned is because it's stupidly dangerous and even an accidental loss of containment is more destructive than a billion photon torpedoes.  Wanting to create a new power source is immaterial next to the massive, MASSIVE danger Starfleet placed the entire galaxy in.

 

Honestly... Braka's making some excellent points here.  Yeah, his slant is obvious but he's actually got Ake's number on several topics especially how she dragooned Caleb Mir into Starfleet by giving him a choice between service or a death sentence in an alien gulag.

 

Spoiler

Ake asks Braka about his story, and he claims the colony his family lived on mined strontium.  Odd that they'd choose a real material like that... odder still that they'd choose an element that is most commonly thought of in conjunction with nuclear weapons detonations and doesn't have many real world applications.  (It's used in glow in the dark toys, fireworks, and toothpaste among other things.)

Anisha Mir has some good points too... that Ake's whole schtick here is deeply insincere, having resigned in protest only after carrying out orders she objected to on moral grounds to take a cushy landing as a teacher and then coming out of retirement into a similarly cushy posting consequence-free.  She still comes off like a psycho b*tch, so they don't really stick the landing here.  As nuts as she is, I'd wager she really did commit that murder she was sent to prison as an accessory to.

This extended bit with the Doctor being aphasic due to damage is kind of silly, It leads to them just brute forcing a solution to the omega-47 problem based on some of his gibberish... which feels like an ass pull.  If stabilizing omega particles was that easy, you'd think the Borg would've managed it... or Starfleet would've done so before they got stolen.

Tarima is somehow going to use magic to isolate Caleb's mother's location across dozens if not hundreds of light years based on his connection to her.  That's... that's not how telepathy works.  Not in this franchise anyway.  It worked like that in Nemesis because the Enterprise and Scimitar were within a few thousand kilometers of each other.

 

We learn that the guy that Caleb's mom went to prison as an accessory to the murder of was on his last rotation before retirement, because no cliche is getting left behind today.

 

Spoiler

Anisha Mir is thrown by the revelation that the guy she helped kill had a family too.  She's a bit of a psycho.  She of course finds Ake guilty anyway.  After all, the lives of 160 billion people plus all the future victims of Nus Braka matter so much less than revenge.

Caleb conveniently arrives just in time to prevent the sentencing, to give a longwinded speech that doesn't really land because it's full of generic platitudes to buy time while Sam hacks the minefield.

 

 

Using a real element in Braka's speech earlier turns out to have been a mistake, as the writers are now inventing fictional properties to the stuff... 

 

Spoiler

Caleb describes strontium as a fuel... a cheap but lethal fuel.  Real strontium is not explosively volatile in any sense.  It's dangerous if ingested because it replaces calcium in bones, but it's used in toothpaste and in cathode ray tubes.  The one and only property listed correctly is that its ignition spectra is red light.

They end up picking apart Braka's claim that the Federation destroyed his colony by pointing out that Federation weapons don't emit red light... they've been blue or green for centuries, apparently.  

Braka takes this poorly.  He tries to blow up the minefield just in time for the mines to be deactivated, the fleet to warp in and arrest the Venari Ral en masse.  Then we see the fleet flying back to Earth and everything is magically repaired.

 

Honestly, the fleet shots we get in this episode serve to remind how little Starfleet Academy resembles Star Trek.  So few of those ships look like they belong to Star Trek at all, many look like they'd be more at home in Star Wars.  Very little of the franchise's iconic design language is on display.

 

The credits definitely make it feel like they weren't expecting the series to get renewed too, going through the cast's childhood photos (or younger photos of the older cast) in a setup that feels like it was designed for a series finale.

 

 

 

With the first season of Starfleet Academy now officially over, I can say this of it.

It sucks.  It really sucks.

To paraphrase the composer Gioachino Rossini: "It has some good moments, but awful quarters of an hour."  There are a few moments of solid character writing scattered across its ten episodes, but the vast majority of the series is just pure low-effort slop.  It'd be a fairly generic, but painfully unfunny, coming-of-age school dramedy if it weren't for the paper-thin Star Trek veneer over the proceedings.  The writing is fairly cringeworthy throughout and has three main recurring problems:

• It's incredibly patronizing.  The cadets are meant to be audience surrogates, and it's incredibly clear the showrunners do not respect their intended audience.  The cadets are audience surrogates and college-age students who the series insistently treats like unruly primary school children most of the time.
   
• As much as it tries to respect past Star Trek, it can't help sh*tting all over it.  Not just in depicting this class of cadets as immature morons, fratboys, and meatheads who lack all of Starfleet's signature discipline and desire to learn.  They also unintentionally assassinate several legacy characters.  Especially Ben Sisko, who is ex post facto turned into the absent black father his actor Avery Brooks fought so hard to not present him as.  It's clear the respect for past material is purely superficial and an attempt to get fans invested in the series.
   
• Every time the series attempts to step away from generic fratboy hijinks and do actual Star Trek-like storytelling it immediately serves up an idiot plot every time.  The whole crisis defining the second half of the season was brought about by a string of unforced obvious errors by Captain Ake, whose depiction veers from desperate to reckless to simply out-and-out incompetent most of the time.

These problems were/are fixable.  This series could be made watchable, if not actually good.  I definitely agree with how it landed on Rotten Tomatoes and other review aggregators.  It's not as dog**** as Discovery, but it's still noticeably worse than Strange New Worlds's worst effort and light years short of the high mark set by Prodigy and Lower Decks.

[Roy Focker]

It sure felt like a series finale. It closed all loose threads introduced in the first episode. 

One thing I can't accept is the logic behind many of the character's motives. Calib's mom is mad a HH for what reason? What did she expect to happen? She took part in a robbery someone got killed. Of course, you're going to do some time. I don't still see what HH did wrong.

I'd describe Paul's performance as trying to do Beetlejuice with none of the charm. How does a common space pirate become a leader an alliance of planets? And do these planets have against the Federation? They were originally all independent worlds who didn't want to join the Federation that are mad the Federation didn't give them stuff. I don't understand why anyone would follow such a crude person like Paul's character. Imagine an entire country following such a crude person in real life ... oh I see what they did there.

Tig can't act. But does a good with this character. I had teachers that were this boring. Not a very entertaining performance. Same goes for a lot of the characters. Little personality and boring to watch but brings an element of realism.