Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Season 1

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

SPOILERS TOTAL. You've been warned.

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101: Kids These Days 2026 January 15
(First watched 2026-01-15) Some interesting parts, but too much of this felt tropey for me to consider it great. Dude with parent issues getting into trouble but seeing Starfleet Academy as a potential way out is not far from Kelvin James Kirk, or Prime Jack Crusher, and surely many non-Star Trek instances I'm less familiar with. Then first day cadets getting into beefs over stupid shit, to be forced to work together for the common good by the end of the episode... yawn.

The Doctor still seems much the Doctor, not so different many hundreds of years later except perhaps a bit grumpier and more sure of himself.

I've never seen anyone curl up in a captain's char like Captain Chancellor Nala or whatever, but hey, go for it. Her species is a ridiculously long-lived one, but I note she said she was something like 450 years old, which neatly prevents anyone from trying to fit her into events of 22nd-25th century shows.

So the Athena is the academy... but also San Francisco is the academy. I wonder how big they are relative to each other in terms of space and people at a given time? Because having a big part of your eggs in one spacefaring basket seems risky, as the events of this episode would indicate.

As a villain, Paul Giamatti's seems closest to a Strange New Worlds era Harry Mudd. Dangerous but definitely not presenting a more serious air of someone like a Dukat or Khan.

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102: Beta Test 2026 January 15
(First watched 2026-01-16) Why are the chancellors of academies such a central part of these interstellar negotiations?

Took me until the episode was over to get the pun of the title. Beta, Betazed.

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103: Vitus Reflux 2026 January 22
(First watched 2026-01-22) Wasn't having an enjoyable time for the first half, when (again) everyone was just acting incredibly immature, but there started to be some decent character moments in the second half. Exception: Tig Notaro is fun to watch in any half.

So, something that isn't part of this episode but the series in general and that I don't seem to have written about yet... if this show hasn't had any appreciable time jump since Discovery, then it's only a few years since the problems of the Burn were overcome and the Federation started to piece itself together again. Which means the series started with a flashback to something like 10 years before those problems were solved. So in this time of very limited interstellar travel I wonder what the Federation and Nahla in particular were up to on that planet, and how far exactly was Caleb able to travel around in his life as a mini-fugitive.

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104: Vox In Excelso 2026 January 29
(First watched 2026-01-30) OK, now we're getting to a tone I appreciate more. Cadets not being a dick to each other, but still with friction due to their differences, as well as helping each other expand due to their differences.

As a Trek nerd I do quibble with some of the pronunciations which seem to have arbitrarily changed? Like Kahless and Qo'nos now seem to end with an sh sound, and Khitomer now has the accent on the second instead of first syllable? I see Memory Alpha says this is actually something of a return to tradition, following early guidelines for the Klingon language when it was new at the time of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

We learn some of the fate of the Klingon people, with Qo'nos destroyed or heavily damaged and the Klingon people spread out. But I find that kind of hard to buy. A spacefaring people, who have been a spacefaring people for... something like a millennium at the time of the Burn, I'd expect they'd be pretty spread out. At least, enough so that even the loss of Qo'nos couldn't be said to put them near extinction.

The way it dealt with wanting to help a people vs letting them live or die on their own terms... I don't know. In general that is a tough situation. But the solution of "We're willing to accept help if you play pretend so we don't look like we're accepting help" kind of makes them seem like dangerously prideful dopes.

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105: Series Acclimation Mil 2026 February 5
(First watched 2026-02-05) The Benjamin Sisko graphic was seen in one of the trailers, but I wasn't expecting it to be the focus of a full episode. One written in part by Trondy Newman, who it also took me an embarrasingly long time to recognize as the professor of the class Sam was trying to get into. It does kind of lock out any good opportunity for a 25th century story that deals with Sisko since it's established that even in the 32nd century his fate is still a matter of mystery and faith, but c'est la vie. Nice to see Cirroc back as mature author Jake, and professor of the weird class was a far-future Dax. That's kind of a big deal, wouldn't be surprised to see her show up again. A smaller DS9 reference, in one of the city shots we see that apparently Quark's as a business is still around.

B-story was just killing some time with the adults, but it was still a pretty fun time.

So five episodes in there are the first two that left me annoyed, the third one which showed promise, and these last two which were really good. So a mixed bag, but a good trajectory.

Though it is explicitly an episode related to DS9, in concept it has some similarities with something like TNG Data's Day, where we more than usual see the point of view of an artificial life form and their difficulties. We finally see the others of Sam's kind and... they're quite different. The setup reminds me a bit of the Kaylon in The Orville. An artificial people who are out of contact with their original creators, sending out one of their own to test relations with other organics. Though... is Sam one of their own? They sure didn't send out some "experienced" member of their group, but created someone for this task and within months have them in the Academy. So is she different from them from the get-go, or is it only her experiences among organics that have differentiated her?

Also, it is an irony lost on them but not on the viewer that their worries about organics are due to their creators treating them as only tools, while that is exactly what they are doing with Sam, trying to dictate exactly how she goes about trying to fulfill her role.

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106: Come, Let's Away 2026 February 12
(First watched 2026-02-13) OK, another good episode. They're now the majority.

So it's a training mission, yes. But when the shit hits the fan why are the cadets on the bridge left there? Did they give the entire standard bridge crew (all shifts?) shore leave?

Apparently the Nus of Nus Braka is short for "Nustopher", but when watching the episode I thought he said "Nusifer", which I thought was pretty funny. Aside from that, yeah, he hasn't shown up much this season but this episode made him a convincingly smart and dangerous threat, and thanks to Paul Giamatti a charismatic one as well.

Academy and War College students finally working together well aaaand one of the War College semi-regulars dies.

Tales From the Frontier, an in-universe comic about the crew of the abandoned ship they were training on, pretty amusing.

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107: Ko'Zeine 2026 February 19
(First watched 2026-02-21) Easiest-going episode yet. Nice change of pace, letting us see some characters better.

So the Khionians have point-to-point interstellar wormhole tech? Seems like the sort of thing that would've been extremely powerful during the post-Burn years.

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108: The Life of the Stars 2026 February 26
(First watched 2026-02-26) What a full episode, all kinds of stuff going on.

The Doctor reveals himself to have become more like... The Doctor (of Doctor Who). He's lived so long and outlived so many people that he sometimes gets to a place of wanting to get away from attachments to prevent more heartbreak.

So, the Doctor and SAM spent 17 years "rebuilding" her by giving her a childhood rather than just blipping into existence at 17. But I wonder how that really worked? If it was just her, one ~human hologram, and a bunch of Kasq-type entities, that doesn't seem like it would be a childhood anything at all like what a meat person would have. In the end it also makes for a strange situation even in science fiction. At the start of this episode, they were unrelated. At the end of the episode, one is the parent of the other, and not just in name but in actually having raised them.

How different will SAM be from here on out? They stated she was active for 209 days before being rebooted. So if she reached Earth age 17 and then had those old memories reinstated, it would mean "old SAM" would only account for about 3% of her existence. On the other hand, by the start of this episode it seems like already the vast majority of her existence is during the period of the show, and her behavior hasn't changed all that much.

The cadets studying Our Town felt sometimes a bit too forced in their timing, but there's only so many minutes to go around. Everyone confused and upset at first, and (almost) everyone coming around to understanding the point at the same time.

Tilly is back, and said to have been elsewhere working with third year students. I guess that both explains why we haven't seen her, and why we haven't seen older students. Also, kind of funny that Nahla says that Tilly was in the place of the cadets not that long ago, when in objective time it was about 900 years.

We're nearing the end of the first season, and due for a "shit hits the fan" finale. I wonder if that starts next week with the penultimate episode?

On a personal historical note, this is the last episode I see before my Paramount+ subscription runs out which I've had running for quite some time. The increased prices and decreased amount of Star Trek per year have stopped making it worthwhile to be subscribed permanently. I actually almost dropped it last year for the same reason, but the system's automated response was to offer me a 50% discount on the next year, which I took. They weren't going to do that twice in a row, though.

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109: 300th Night 2026 March 5
(First watched 2026-03-05) OK, yep, the shit-hitting-the-fan starts now. Nus has the ability to make areas of space warp impassable, and is threatening to essentially cut off the Federation from the universe at large. And of secondary importance to the Federation but high importance to the show, most of the Athena has been captured, though the people are safe.

Caleb finds Mama, who as of the end of this episode seems a bit freaked out by her Starfleet surroundings.

Interpersonal stuff got... complicated again this episode. On the one hand, hard to believe his friends find it hard to believe he'd choose to leave with his mom, since finding her was a primary reason for him joining the Academy in the first place. But also, dick move on his part by making the split full of insults to the people who've befriended him.

SAM seems upset that people don't know who she is... but it seems like it's been a few months since the last episode. Has nobody gotten to know the new her in that time?

Hey, you know what would be useful to have when someone has set up a bunch of mines that threaten to make the Federation border impassable by warp? A spore drive.

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110: Rubincon 2026 March 12
(First watched 2026-03-12) Well who'da thunk it. After a rough start, this ended up being one of the stronger first seasons among Trek shows.

So they did bring up Discovery and spore drive, but handwaved an explanation for why it wouldn't work. Didn't really convince me it was an impassable issue, though.

So Nus Braka sets up a "trial", but... maybe it's just the portion we saw, but I don't recall him actually laying out what things they were supposed to find guilt or innocence of? Just... "Are they bad?"

Considering the scope of the danger, the solution seemed a little too easily found if it could be managed by a handful of cadets and instructors on a busted up fraction of a ship. Buuut seeing them manage such things despite where they began is kind of what the show is about, so I can give it some slack.

The end credits were unlike anything I can recall in Trek, showing very out-of-universe pictures for the actors.

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