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| Episode: | 2 | | | Writer: | Noga Landau & Jane Maggs | | | Director: | Alex Kurtzman | | | Air Date: | 15-Jan-2026 |
This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm watching another episode of the 12th Star Trek series, Starfleet Academy. I think that's the right number.
Here's some trivia for you, the series has had three writers so far and they've all been women. Encounter at Farpoint was mostly written by D.C. Fontana, Voyager's Caretaker was co-written by Jeri Taylor, and so on, but this is the first Trek series to be established by female writers exclusively.
The first episode was written by creator Gaia Violo, but I've no idea if she had any involvement with this one. Typically the creator will go on to run the series, at least for its first season, but in this case the showrunners are Trek overlord Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau. They also worked on the episode in other roles, with Kurtzman directing and Landau co-writing.
Landau has never written for Star Trek, but she has had some experience running Nancy Drew, which seems to have been successful enough. On the other hand, co-writer Jane Maggs has had plenty of Trek writing experience, as she worked on Star Trek: Picard's second and third seasons. They weren't the most acclaimed stories, in fact some are considered the absolute nadir of modern Trek, but if you start at the bottom then the only way to go is up.
Warning: SPOILERS
Also instead of showing the hero ship flying past the camera, it has shots of their giant academy set. Usually a series' opening titles will give you imagery that's a little different to what you'll be staring at for the entire rest of the episode, but they really love this set.
Okay to be fair it does have more going on than just that. It keeps cutting between the growth of the academy under construction and the growth of one of the trees, so I suppose there's a theme here after all.
RECAP
Caleb has a bad day, with arch-nemesis Darem becoming his roommate, Sam spilling mucus on his jacket, and Jett Reno making an example of him in class. He eventually decides to just climb the fence and make a run for it, but a beautiful Betazoid called Tarima catches his eye. She's the daughter of the Betazoid president, who has dropped by to turn down any offer Ake and Vance make for Betazed to rejoin the Federation.
Tarima gives Caleb information about the planet his mother went to and he shows her the whale tank, but they fall out when she thinks he was manipulating her for his own agenda. They work it out, she convinces her dad to give the Federation one more try, and Ake comes up with an offer to make Betazed the new capital if they join.
Afterwards the president's son becomes Caleb and Darem's new even more annoying roommate, and Tarima joins the War College next door.
REVIEW
Okay to be fair, a lot of people made it through all of Star Trek: The Next Generation without ever noticing that Deanna and her mother both had black contact lenses. Plus Deanna herself was only an empath, not a full telepath.
But this isn't exactly obscure deep cut lore, it's in the first two sentences of the wiki page! Maybe they just didn't want to make the recurring actors wear contacts every episode, I don't know.
The plot reminded me of the Next Gen episode The Dauphin, where Wesley falls in love with a girl who turns out to be a shapeshifting alien leader. Or that episode of Deep Space Nine where Nog and Jake hang out with a girl who is actually a Bajoran leader. They're not really favourites of mine to be honest, but they're both stories without a villain to defeat or a crisis to survive, and I think Trek has room for more of that. Sometimes.
Though I didn't expect the whole damn episode to be about Caleb and Tarima's love story, or that the episode would be an entire hour long! Lower Decks would've gotten through it in 20 minutes, with half that time spent on a B plot following some of the other students. Here Sam had an almost subliminal subplot where she wondered if she fit in and Genesis said that she did. Plus Darem got to be an annoying roommate. That was pretty much it.
There's a lot I liked about this part of the episode: it plays out with absolute sincerity, the Federation isn't in the wrong, and everyone involved is trying to find reasonable solutions with the best intentions. Trouble is that there's not much of an actual story here. There's a lot of discussion about how children are "the ambassadors to now" and can push institutions to evolve to suit the situations they face today instead of getting mired in tradition and old ways of thinking. And then the Betazoid leader gets another turn to say 'no'.
I appreciate how they've given this teen drama series a proper Star Trek coat of paint, but it's not much fun if all we're doing is watching it dry. And this series really wants to be fun. Everywhere else in the episode it's all Doctor singing, roommate drama, wacky mucus science projects, zipper antics, Ake having to deal with Caleb, etc.
We also got a lot of Caleb joking around with Tarima. The two of them are very sweet together. I didn't care.
Don't worry, there's no way to miss them, the episode makes sure of that. When the cadet runs away from training, the camera doesn't focus on her, it pans over to the Boothby Memorial Park sign. It also lingers on the James T. Kirk Pavillion sign, I guess to get their money's worth out of it.
I mean don't get me wrong, I am all about Star Trek series building on the foundations that the other series have built, especially if they get it right. Deep Space Nine and Lower Decks did this all the time and they're my two favourite Trek shows. But this isn't Star Trek: Picard, where they could pull the USS Stargazer model out and it was all very meaningful to everyone watching, no one in Starfleet Academy's target audience of young adults is going to understand why they're staring at random signs.
We also got an Exocomp like in Lower Decks, and a Brikar like in Prodigy.
Caleb has a lot of things going on in this episode, which is good considering he's rarely off screen. His romance with Tarima intersects with his quest to find his mother which intersects with his relationship with Ake and Starfleet overall. Ultimately Ake proves that Caleb was right to trust her, and in return he begins to show her respect. The episode starts with her telling everyone to make their beds and ends with him finally doing it (with Darem's help!), concluding his arc.
On paper this is all good stuff, the kind of plot the characters should be having at this point in the series. So it's a shame I spent most of the episode so bored that I had my notepad turned 90 degrees,
and I was writing my notes sideways,
just so I had something to occupy my brain.
Funny thing is, the text turned out more
readable as I had to think about each letter.
just so I had something to occupy my brain.
Funny thing is, the text turned out more
readable as I had to think about each letter.
What that means is that we've got guest star Jett Reno here in the Jedi Temple to teach the cadets about future science and engineering, but of course that can't actually happen, so we get a quote from Oscar Wilde instead. Unless it's a class on storytelling or poetry, all the writers can do is lead to some life lesson or give the characters a problem to deal with (eg. the mucus).
This has always been one of my issues with the Starfleet Academy series concept, as the students are supposed to spend all their time in classes, and that's the least interesting thing they could be doing. But I guess I'll see what the series has coming up.
RATING
I'm struggling here, as Beta Test comes so early in Starfleet Academy's first season that I don't have a baseline yet. Is this a bad episode, or is the episode fine and the series just isn't for me?
What I usually do is start by rating it on how much it kept my attention, and then add or subtract points for things it did well or things that annoyed me. But if I do that here, then the episode gets...
4/10
That seems pretty low! The episode's fairly well shot, the acting's good, its heart is in the right place, I was fine with a lot of the writing, no one turns into a puppet. And yet I just wanted it to be over so I could do something else. Unfortunately 'something else' turned out to be reviewing it.
I'm not the target audience for this series and I wasn't when I was 19 either, I was more into intelligent sci-fi spaceship adventure than teen drama. But I'm sure a Trek show that stays true to its ideals (and the basic rules of its reality) is going to eventually give me something I can enjoy. Didn't really happen with this story though.
NEXT EPISODE
If you'd like to share your own thoughts about Beta Test, you're welcome to use the comment box below.
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