| Episode: | 6 | | | Writer: | Kenneth Lin & Kiley Rossetter | | | Director: | Larry Teng | | | Air Date: | 12-Feb-2026 |
This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm watching Come, Let's Away, the sixth episode of Starfleet Academy.
Director Larry Teng is back after directing last week's Series Acclimation Mil, but co-writer Kenneth Lin is new to the show. He's not new to Star Trek however, as he did several episodes of Discovery, including The Sanctuary and Whistlespeak, while the other writer, Kiley Rossetter, worked on Picard episodes Assimilation and Võx.
Disco writers teaming up with Picard writers is interesting, but I'm more curious about what happens when Lower Decks writers team up with Prodigy writers. What does an episode co-written by Mike McMahan and Aaron Waltke look like? Or failing that, they could just write episodes separately again! I'd be okay with that.
Anyway, this review is going to have SPOILERS for the episode.
RECAP
A team of cadets is captured by Furies during a field training exercise on the ancient wreck of the USS Miyazaki. Instructor Timov sacrifices himself so that the others can escape to the bridge, but the computer is too damaged to give them control. They use a comic book to convince the computer that its crew has died, but they can't beam out due to jamming.
Ake and Vance decide to call Braka and make him an offer in exchange for the secret of how to defeat the Furies. Meanwhile Tarima uses her psychic connection with Caleb to tell him how to activate the ship's singularity drive and give them a clear transporter signal.
The USS Sargasso arrives from Starbase J19-Alpha with a sonic weapon to use on the Furies, but is immediately disabled by one of Braka's Venari Ral ships! The whole situation was a trick to lure the Sargasso from the station so that Braka could ransack its technology. The Furies break onto the Miyazaki's bridge and shoot SAM, but B'Avi saves Caleb by sacrificing his own life. Tarima is able to use her psychic power to blow up the Furies' heads, but the effort leaves her in a coma.
REVIEW
Their relationship has actually moved forward a bit and they've reached the 'out of focus, yellow tint' phase. Which quickly transitions into the 'I didn't give you permission to spy on my traumatic past' phase after Tarima accidentally uses her immense psychic powers on him.
Oh plus they were talking about something, but I was trying to not listen to the music and ended up not listening to any of it. This happens a lot to me when it's a scene with Tarima in to be honest. The important thing is, they've got a psychic link like Riker and Troi had in Encounter at Farpoint (before the writers forgot about it).
I get why the cadets drove all the way out here for something they could've done in a holodeck, as it was part of War College training during the years that Starfleet had been exiled to space. That also explains how Braka knew they'd be there.
What confuses me is that the ship's been offline for 125 years, so it's basically the same age as any pre-Burn ship we've seen still flying around. But this is clearly the 23rd century Enterprise bridge from Strange New Worlds!
Okay to be fair, redressing their spare bridge set to represent ships from different time periods has been a Star Trek tradition since the very start of Next Gen. Granted the redressing process used to be more elaborate than draping black plastic bags over everything, but it's fine. The SNW crew still need this set to film on. Well, they did at least.
Whatever, a ship from the 3060s looks like it's from 2260, it happens sometimes. Like the Titan-A from Picard for instance. That thing looks like there had been a tragic accident at the fleet museum and they had to put pieces of the old ships back together from memory.
Was the ship originally supposed to be from the 23rd century and it got changed in a late script revision? Did the production team think the series took place at the same time as Picard?
Incidentally, I've seen people point out the absurdity of the computer giving the cadets control of the ship because they showed it a comic book. That does seem kind of bad, even for a damaged fragmented mess of a computer. But this was part of the test they'd been given, so it makes sense they would've been given everything necessary to succeed, like command codes.
Plus if kids weren't able to hijack mysterious spaceships we couldn't have series like Prodigy and Skeleton Crew. So I won't complain about that. But I will complain about the episode's evil Furies.
And now Starfleet Academy has done the same thing 29 years later! This is why people who make Star Trek should watch '90s sci-fi first and do the research. I know they've watched Firefly already, as I remember when these guys were called Reavers.
I'm a fan of Firefly myself, and the Battlestar Galactica reboot, so my next complaint might seem a bit hypocritical, but I didn't like the shaky camera work in this episode. The action scenes with the Furies were stable enough to make out what was going on (mostly lots of people getting kicked), but they weren't much to look at.
About 25% of the episode is scenes of him talking so it's a shame that doesn't really have that much to say. He mentions that being a bad guy means he gets what he wants, like how his dad got to beat him as a kid. He tries to torment Ake by talking about how she let her son die on an away mission like this. And there's a bit of talk about what he wants in exchange to help them in there as well.
It doesn't help that the dialogue is very one-sided. It's not a duet or a waltz, the characters aren't fighting a verbal battle with counter-attacks and defeats. Holly Hunter's doing all the acting she can with what she's been given, but she might as well have been a picture of a sad face stuck to a wall. Well, stuck to a chair... and forced to sit upright with her shoes on.
The gist of their scenes is that Ake's long life gives her longer to be tormented by her choices and her tragedies, and that's just depressing really. Especially as she has all the people who died on the space station on her conscience by the end of the episode as well.
Though they don't torture him or rip the information out of his head telepathically, or hack his emails, or anything like that. They're really trying not to compromise their values, they're just not very successful at it. Fortunately it doesn't even matter as Braka was only screwing with them the whole time!
I have to admit, I didn't see this coming. Possibly because it doesn't make much sense to do all this just to lure away a vessel that a single Venari Ral ship could disable with its first volley of torpedoes.
Anyway, the episode really defines who Braka is, teasing the possibility that he will actually work with Starfleet, at the cost of their souls, before pulling the rug and revealing he set their cadets up to literally be eaten. He is not a good man!
I suppose he was the right cadet to kill off if someone had to die, as he's not in a love triangle, he's not particularly beloved by the fans, and he's shown up enough times for us to know who he is. It feels like wasted potential though. I've been impressed by how this guy could read comic books, start a prank war, and complain about Academy cadets invading his favourite nightclub, without ever seeming anything but 100% Vulcan. Well, except for when we saw his red blood.
I guess the VFX team weren't properly coordinated with the makeup team, as he's got the proper green blood around his mouth later.
I think the series is way past due telling us what SAM's deal is, now that she's going on away missions. How is she being projected? How does being shot make her programming glitch out? Why didn't she teleport around to help them out on the ship?
If she's a different kind of hologram technology to the Doctor then that's cool, I just want to know what's going on with her.
She's still my least favourite of the recurring characters though. Except for that girl who's only there to panic when things get rough so the others can look more heroic.
RATING
I can see why Come, Let's Away has been winning people over with its tension, Star Trek space action, and long stretches of intense acting. It's definitely not a prank war this week. Plus you've got the officers being professional, working together and getting the job done, which is nice. But I wasn't entirely keen on the direction, some of the choices in the story, and how they made poor Paul Giamatti read out half the script on his own. So I'm giving it:
7/10
If it seems harsh, that's a higher rating than I'd give to any episode 6 from any other live action Trek series. Except maybe Lethe from Disco, that one was pretty decent.
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If you want to share your own thoughts about this episode, there is a comment box below. If you want to share my thoughts, you can do that too!
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