| Episode: | 5 | | | Writer: | Kirsten Beyer & Tawny Newsome | | | Director: | Larry Teng | | | Air Date: | 05-Feb-2026 |
This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm watching episode 5 of Starfleet Academy, called Series Acclimation Mil. People who got to see the first five stories in advance have been saying that this is the best of the set, the one worth waiting for. So I hope I end up loving it, or else I'm really out of sync with the show's fans.
The episode was co-written by Tawny Newsome, who played Mariner on Lower Decks. There have been lots of actors-turned-directors on Star Trek over the years, but the list of actors who've written a episode is way shorter. Walter Koenig wrote The Infinite Vulcan for The Animated Series, Stanley Adams (Cyrano Jones in The Trouble with Tribbles) co-wrote The Mark of Gideon... I've got nothing else. I suppose there's Simon Pegg, who co-wrote the Star Trek Beyond movie. Anyway, I like Tawny's performance as Mariner but I've got no opinion on anything she's written as I haven't seen any of it. She knows her Star Trek though, so I'm cautiously optimistic.
The other co-writer was Kirsten Beyer, the woman who wrote my least favourite episode of Discovery (Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum), my least favourite episode of Picard (Stardust City Rag), and my least favourite episode of Strange New Worlds (Wedding Bell Blues). I've got nothing against her, but it's starting to seem like she's got something against me!
Though I've been thinking about two other Trek writers who made a habit of writing stories I hated: Brannon Braga and Joe Menosky. Separately they wrote Threshold and Masks, but when they got together they came up with great episodes like Year of Hell and Timeless. So maybe this team-up is going to come up with something spectacular! Actually, it's probably best that I don't get my hopes up.
There are going to be SPOILERS below for this episode and for Deep Space Nine. In fact they should've put a spoiler warning on the episode as well!
RECAP
SAM has been tasked by her photonic creators to hurry up and determine if organic beings can be allowed back to their world. She asks a mysterious teacher for help investigating the mystery of Benjamin Sisko, another emissary like her, and decides that to understand him she should experience how he lived. When she prepares his favourite food for the others to try, Caleb alters her settings so that she can simulate the experience herself... which leads to her going to a bar Sisko used to visit and immediately drinking 12 shots of virtual vodka.
The teacher decides she's the right person to show a special book, Jake Sisko's Anslem, which leads to her having a holographic vision in which he tells her he believes his dad was still with him after his disappearance. (It turns out that the teacher is the latest incarnation of Dax, so she really knows what she's talking about.) SAM learns that Sisko still made his own choices, and tells her makers that she is defying their instruction to return home, as her task requires living in this world, not just visiting it.
Meanwhile Ake helps a reluctant Kelrec rehearse for a diplomatic dinner and it gets a bit embarrassing for him.
REVIEW
I understand that Starfleet Academy was intended to bring in a new audience into Star Trek, but it's supposed to be a young adult audience not preschoolers. This episode is supposed to be the one that Deep Space Nine fans shouldn't miss, the one that'll win them over, but I'm not sure that the editor got the memo.
You can go on YouTube if you want to see how real people use their editing tools to express themselves, and this ain't it. I know that the episode isn't SAM's video diary, despite how she breaks the fourth wall, but it might as well be.
The thing is, this isn't even what put me off the most. What really bothered me was the comedy music.
I love Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry and those bits of classic Star Trek where Kirk would make a joke about Spock and there was a little melody as he raised an eyebrow, I have no problem with that. But when comedy music turns up in anything modern, it usually makes me want to hit 'mute' and watch it with subtitles.
You know what didn't have comedy music? Star Trek: Lower Decks. It played dramatic music with suitably comedic timing.
Though I don't actually hate how the rivalry between the Academy and the War College is played for laughs, as the entire concept is very childish. Most of the students don't even care, it's usually Darem waging his own tiny war against Dzolo, the angriest Romulan, and her Vulcan sidekick.
I hope we get more of Dzolo, B'Avi and Kyle too because I know next to zero about them and they've already made an impression on me.
Dzolo is just the loudest mouth on Team War College, there purely as an antagonist, but man she is relentlessly angry. B'Avi's great as I love the contrast between his perfectly Vulcan behaviour, and the fact that he's hanging out at a club, getting drunk with the others. He's definitely not Spock or Tuvok. And Kyle is standing there with a grin on his face in any situation. Not an evil grin though, the dude just seems really hyped about everything... especially when Jay-Den is involved.
Also I feel like it's meant to be the same place Scotty was at in Star Trek Into Darkness as that "Port of San Francisco" text is very familiar. Also there's some "Quark" text up on that building. I guess Sisko's not the only legend whose name lives on in the 32nd century.
He also got a bit of attention from the internet, which was inevitable when he went out in a skirt. It's taken a few hundred years but male skants are finally back in fashion! Personally I always thought it made sense that an idealistic futuristic organisation like Starfleet had equality between sexes when it came to outfits and hairstyles.
By the way, I like how convincing this bar is. It's convincingly 21st century, but at least it looks like a real place.
Anyway, the episode was actually about SAM's mission, as this is the SAM episode, where we learn about who she is. And she's apparently Mork from Mork and Mindy?
Okay I admit, I don't actually know much about Mork and Mindy, I never watched it. But the impression I've got is that Robin Williams acted like an dumbass for 20 minutes and then told his bosses back home what he'd learned about humanity that week.
Though I'm with Captain Kirk, "There's no such thing as the unexplainable, only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood." Okay he said 'unknown', but my point is that SAM was right to keep chasing an answer, as expanding the boundaries of knowledge is what Starfleet is about. That, and ferrying diplomats across space.
She discovers that Sisko is someone she can relate to, as he was bossed around by visions too. And the more she tries to relate to him, the more she learns about living as an organic, and the more she does that, the more she understands how necessary it is for her mission that she keeps doing it.
Poor Kelrec ended up predictably embarrassed by it, feeling like it was another prank at his expense. Maybe it was? I don't think so, but the ceremony was so weird I'm not even sure. The funny thing is, I found I related to him more than I did the others, when he got frustrated that they couldn't take anything seriously for even an hour. Which is incidentally the exact length of a Starfleet Academy episode.
Maybe they should've cut this subplot, then it would've been shorter. Though we would've missed out on learning Kelrec's real reason for distrusting Ake: that she quit Starfleet for 15 years. Dude, she'd been in Starfleet for four centuries, let her have some time off!
One of the concerns I had about the series is that it's set so far in the future that a display like this can casually give away a character's fate. Like that list of names in the atrium that reveals that Nog never made it to captain.
But the episode definitely didn't give away Sisko's fate casually. If there's one thing that it treats with absolute respect, it's Sisko and his legacy.
Anyone who watched Deep Space Nine already knows whether Sisko died in the Fire Caves or lived on in the Celestial Temple (it's the second one). The big question is 'Did he come back to his wife and unborn child like he said he would?' and sadly we get a pretty definite answer to that.
It's sad because it doesn't match my head canon. I was happy believing that he returned to Kasidy in secret and kept his kid out of the public eye. I would've been totally okay with him giving up his career in Starfleet and his role as the Emissary, because the dude had done his job! Weirdly, the family tree actually kind of supports that theory, with how his other kid is suspiciously missing.
Incidentally it was great seeing Jake again and learn that he hadn't lived his whole life obsessively trying to get his father back, like the Tony Todd version of him did in The Visitor. Turns out he got married and had kids himself, presumably to a Bajoran by the look of the earring he wears.
Speaking of his look, his taste in clothes got better as DS9 went on and this outfit looks like something he would've ended up wearing if the series had carried on going. And they clearly nailed Cirroc Lofton's casting back in the day, because at this age he looks a lot like Avery Brooks. More than he looks like Tony Todd at least.
I thought Tawny Newsome was well cast as Dax, due to her extensive knowledge of the 24th century. Though I was able to appreciate her performance even better in hindsight when I realised that she was imitating Terry Farrell. I just wish the makeup didn't throw me off every time I see her.
It's not just that it's inaccurate for a Cardassian, it seems plasticy and the way the jaw ridges curve towards her natural smile lines makes it look like the prosthetic hasn't been glued down properly. I don't know what's going on there, as the other aliens in the series look pretty good.
Using SAM's very first focus episode to look back at another show is a bit strange, DS9 itself waited until season 5 for that, not episode 5. But using Sisko's story to teach us about her worked out pretty well I reckon. Even if we still don't know how she's projected, which seems like an important thing to know! Do bars have holoprojectors in the 32nd century? Does she have a light bee hovering around inside her like Rimmer from Red Dwarf?
Anyway, I think that it's pretty amazing that the franchise still has the same continuity after 60 years, more or less, and can celebrate the characters from earlier series. In fact it's been exactly 30 years since Trials and Tribble-ations, DS9's tribute to TOS, so we were actually due for another bar fight. Shame we didn't get to see it!
Star Trek's had a lot of success with outsider characters who've had to struggle with what it means to be human, and I think making SAM impulsive and emotional was a smart way to freshen the trope up a bit. She's naive and youthful, without being blatantly too young to be at the Academy.
Well, except for in the scenes at the start, and that was mostly the graphics' fault.
At least there was one thing that stayed consistent through the episode, and that was Kerrice Brooks' acting. Whatever the script asked her to do, she committed to it, and she definitely won me over in this one. In fact I'm sold on the whole cast at this point, even George Hawkins who is supposed to be kind of a dick as Darem.
In fact if she was watching it when it first aired then she would've seen the whole series as a teenager. I saw DS9 as a teenager too, plus Voyager, Babylon 5 and Farscape. I was even younger when I started The X-Files, and I was definitely too young to have been watching Lexx. I didn't watch classic Doctor Who as a teen but I did watch classic Star Trek. Plus RoboCop, Terminator, Starship Troopers, The Matrix...
The point I'm trying to reach is, why do the writers have to make the 'young adult' Star Trek show more juvenile than the Trek they loved as a child?
RATING
I feel like if an episode literally ends with a dead character's face in the clouds I should subtract a point from the score, but I'm already feeling a bit guilty for how harsh I've been to this story.
In fact I'm going to rate both halves of the episode separately:
First half: 2/10 Second half: 6/10
I suppose it's technically my lowest rated episode of Starfleet Academy, so Kirsten Beyer's streak as my least favourite Trek writer remains intact! Though she wasn't the one who did the music and the cartoon visuals weren't in the script, so I don't think she can take the blame this time.
NEXT EPISODE
If you've got anything you want to say about Series Acclimation Mil (the episode or the character), then you're welcome to leave a comment.
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