Spoilers follow for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Episode 6, “Come, Let's Away,” which is available on Paramount Plus now.
The latest episode of Starfleet Academy is exciting at times, touching at others, but then there’s another mode that it sinks into here or there which I can only describe as, well, boring. Essentially, “Come, Let's Away” tries to do too many things in one episode, and as a result it feels overly long and bloated – and as such it’s indicative of one of my biggest complaints about the show so far this season.
I’ve been pretty positive about Starfleet Academy through the first half of this first season, but one element that I’ve found consistently troublesome is the streaming bloat of the individual episodes. So far, each segment has been roughly an hour long (not including the pilot, which was 75 minutes), and frankly, that’s too long for a standard episode of TV, Star Trek or not. We don’t need all of our TV to be 60-minute episodes if they don’t need to be 60-minute episodes, and in the case of Starfleet Academy Episode 6… well, this definitely did not need to be a 60-minute episode!
So in what could’ve been a tight adventure tale with a dose of character development in the classic Star Trek mode, we instead get an overly-stuffed story with too many characters, too many detours, and not enough oomph.
Things start interestingly enough with the reveal that Caleb (Sandro Rosta) and Tarima (Zoë Steiner) have taken their relationship to the “let’s get down to business” level, which is a refreshingly realistic approach for the often staid and chaste relationships of much of Trekdom. While Captain Kirk was doing his thing with various alien ladies of the week back in the day, the 1990s era of Star Trek more often than not played the sexual side of its characters down in a big way. Anyone writing off Starfleet Academy as just a kids show should take note here.
Of course, the scene isn’t about the sex, but rather is an opportunity for us to learn more about Tarima’s telepathic abilities and the troubles they’ve caused her (and will continue to cause). It turns out she’s the reason her father, seen in Episode 2, is deaf, having inadvertently injured him when she lost control of her heightened powers as a child. And even here, she doesn’t quite have control, as she accidentally violates Caleb’s trust by pulling from his memories of his mother. It’s a nice little wrinkle in their relationship that adds depth to things, where the couple could’ve topped out at batting eyelashes and flirting. And by episode’s end, not only does Tarima use her abilities to help save the day, but she also winds up the worse for wear as a result. To be continued there.
The idea of a lost relic of a ship that's at least a century old is pretty compelling, and the lighting and atmosphere for the scenes onboard the Miyazaki are effectively creepy.The other major thread of Episode 6 involves a training exercise on a long-abandoned Starfleet ship, the USS Miyazaki, which really does have all the makings of a great Captain Picard (“Starship Mine”) or Captain Kirk (“The Doomsday Machine”) story. The Academy kids team up with the War College gang for what is apparently a ritual for the Federation's finest students to go on a joint mission to the wreck, but of course things don't go as planned once they're onboard.
The idea of a lost relic of a ship that's at least a century old is pretty compelling, and the lighting and atmosphere for the scenes onboard the Miyazaki are effectively creepy. This also goes for the new villainous race introduced here, the Furies, who we're told are “human/alien hybrids.” We don't get much more on them beyond that, and I kind of assumed that the episode was going to culminate in the reveal that the failed singularity drive of the Miyazaki actually led to the creation of these mutant freaks (who by the way are also described as cannibals). The fact that they're not the lost crew of the Miyazaki and are instead simply puppets of a returning Paul Giamatti’s Nus Braka is kind of disappointing, actually.
Still, putting Caleb and Jay-Den and Sam and the rest in the situation of having to fight these things off is pretty exciting, and there's lots of cool bits and pieces to be found in solving the puzzle of how they're going to get out of this mess, including Sam plugging into the ancient computer and the Vulcan B’Avi (Alexander Eling) falling back on his knowledge of a Star Trek comic book about Starfleet history in order to troubleshoot their situation. (B’Avi’s interest in, or perhaps reliance on, comic books to learn about Starfleet as a child actually makes a ton of sense when you consider that these kids grew up in the era of The Burn, when it was no easy task to visit or even communicate with other worlds.)
It's a shame then that the Vulcan is killed in the climax of the episode, even if it’s somehow dramatically satisfying in that we now know that Starfleet Academy is at least willing to kill off its B-tier characters. Not everyone is safe here, it seems. Still, B’Avi had seemed as though he was being set up to be a recurring player, and now he's gone, which is kind of a bummer.
But where the episode really does stumble, and this gets back to my earlier point about a 60-minute episode that should have probably been 52 minutes, is in the return of Giamatti's character and his tête-à-tête with Holly Hunter’s Captain Ake. Sure, the history between these two is of some interest, and we knew that Giamatti would be back after the pilot eventually. But this doesn't seem like it's the right place for it, and their scenes frankly drag. The charged character dynamics that the writers and actors are striving for between these two just don't feel like they're there in these scenes, and I hate to have to say that because I've really been hoping that the show would find some kind of center to Ake/Braka’s adversarial relationship since the pilot. Of course, we still have four more episodes to go this season, so there's still a chance that they'll get there. But this wasn’t their week.
Questions and Notes from the Q Continuum:
- A USS Miyazaki apparently was featured in a piece of fan fiction called Harry Potter and the Return of James T. Kirk (!)… but this is the first time it’s appeared in actual canon as far as I can tell.
- I wonder who the ship is named after?
- Captain Ake says the Miyazaki was destroyed after its singularity drive failed back in the day, but that seems like a weird turn of phrase since the ship, while damaged, seems mostly intact.
- Speaking of which, the “ship graveyard” that the Miyazaki is in… is it composed just of the one ship? What’s all the debris floating around it?
- The creature design of the Furies is pretty scary in that they seem to be trans-spatial or otherwise displaced in time and space, which again would have supported the idea of them being the byproduct of some kind of singularity/wormhole event gone wrong.
- I love the comic book bit, but why are the characters in the book – who are supposed to be from a century before this episode – wearing 23rd century uniforms? What did I miss?
- They’re still quoting Spock in the 32nd century, eh?
Connexion
