| Episode: | 10 | | | Writer: | Alex Kurtzman & Kirsten Beyer | | | Director: | Olatunde Osunsanmi | | | Air Date: | 12-Mar-2026 |
This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm watching Starfleet Academy's season one finale, Rubincon!
When I heard that this had the same title as Discovery season 4 episode Rubicon I was a little surprised, but only a little. We got Prodigy's Kobayashi less than two months after Disco's Kobayashi Maru (also from season 4). Plus Disco season 4 stole the title Anomaly from Enterprise, which is the only time two Trek episodes have ever 100% shared a title.
It turns out however that it's actually called Rubincon, with a second 'n'. Maybe it's the name of a planet, I don't know.
But I do know that the director this time is Discovery's Olatunde Osunsanmi! He's the guy who brought flame throwers to Discovery's bridge and to that planet in Section 31, so if I had to make a guess at what I'll be seeing in this episode it'd probably be flame throwers.
The episode was written by Kirsten Beyer again, along with Star Trek overlord Alex Kurtzman. This was his first time writing for the series, but he's had a big influence on it from the start. He even directed the first episode himself and established the show's style. All of his episodes have had co-writers so I'm not sure what I think of him as a writer, but I've typically enjoyed stories with his name on them so I'm cautiously optimistic.
There will be SPOILERS below.
RECAP
The Venari Ral discover the Athena's saucer section and soon Nus Braka is sitting in the captain's chair. But Ake pulls the same 'the ship's about to explode' trick as in episode one and he buys it, kidnapping her and Caleb's mother Anisha... before pummelling the vessel with torpedoes.
The Doctor fakes the ship's destruction by projecting an illusion (hey I just saw this in a Marvel show), but his program is damaged, so
Meanwhile Braka is putting Ake and the Federation on trial in the Athena's stolen atrium, giving her and Anisha a chance to actually talk to each other. The cadets need the trial to go on a little longer to give SAM time to finish the algorithm so Caleb flies a shuttle over to tell everyone how much he's appreciated his year at the academy.
Ake works out that Braka's hatred of the Federation is based on a misunderstanding, as his dad must have been the one who blew up their colony while he was trying to shoot at one of their supply ships. The audience turns on Braka, so he hits the detonator... and nothing happens. Starfleet warps in, Ake and Anisha assault their prisoner, and everything's okay again!
REVIEW
I was expecting that the cadets would have to do a Die Hard and take back the ship from Braka, but instead they actually spend the episode finally learning how to do Star Trek stuff, with Reno simultaneously instructing and commanding them. It's like that scene in The Naked Gun where Frank Drebin asks a girl taking driving lessons to 'follow that car'.
It makes sense that a chief engineer would make a good commander, in fact we've seen it before with Scotty and Trip Tucker. Really they should've had the sense to put her in charge back in Disco season 3 instead of Tilly.
In fact, I'd say that she did a better job here than Kirk or Picard could've done, because of how comfortable she is with handling an inexperienced crew of kids who need to fail a few times to get the hang of things. She doesn't berate Darem when he messes up, she tells him you learn more from failure and talks about her own screw ups.
Incidentally I was surprised they didn't go back to the crime planet in this episode. I assumed they were going to reuse it to get their money's worth. Instead they contrived a way to reuse the atrium!
Anyway the first half of the episode is good stuff, both the scenes with the cadets on the Athena and the scenes with Ake's trial on the other bit of the Athena. But after the scene about Caleb's issues, the episode goes on to a scene dealing with SAM's issues and it started to lose my attention.
Last episode SAM mentioned that she wanted to move out and get another room, and that's all the hint we've been given that she's feeling resentful about being Genesis' goofy sidekick. So it's not great that the episode takes time to resolve a trivial situation we're only learning about now, especially when Braka could press the button to destroy subspace and kill billions at any moment. One scene with Reno and Caleb, that was fine, but I was ready for the episode to shift to another gear.
But after SAM and Genesis immediately make up and hug, the episode goes on to a Caleb and Tarima scene where they deal with their relationship! So the it's still in that same gear, crawling forward. It's like the writers were trying to wrap everyone's arcs up in one season, just in case, and I think the episode would've been stronger if the focus was just on Caleb and Reno, and Ake, Anisha and Braka.
Don't get me wrong, I liked the character moments, like when Darem messed up at the helm, but a whole extra scene of him talking to Jay-Den about how he's worried that his life is going into uncharted waters now that he's given up his throne wouldn't have improved the story. More story would've improved the story.
Tarima has the confidence to take off her inhibitor and use her powers at full strength again, locating Anisha through Caleb's connection to her. Uh... what connection? She's his mother, so they're connected in that way, but they're not mentally linked or anything like that. And where does she pull the coordinates from? I can use my eyes to locate a building in the distance but I couldn't tell you its position on Google Maps.
But that's not the only bit of science weirdness in the second half, as the Doctor gives SAM the idea to make an algorithm to disarm the Omega particles by reducing Rubin particles. Just like disarming a lit stick of dynamite by writing software that makes a bucket of water drop onto it. Maybe I just missed a line that explains this, but how are they adjusting the amount of something in someone else's bomb by writing code?
Even the geniuses who made the things couldn't figure this out (though to be fair they also couldn't figure out that Omega particles were a bad idea). The main characters on Discovery who once solved the Burn didn't phone up with a solution. The Borg never assimilated a race that had cracked this conundrum. But the Doctor just had the answer right at the start of act one, and the only reason it takes half an hour for them to do anything about it is because he's struggling to say the technobabble.
What was weirder is that he only attempts to communicate the solution verbally, he doesn't try writing it down or using the computer himself. It might not have worked, but they weren't exactly exhausting all their options here.
Meanwhile director Olatunde Osunsanmi kept the pyrotechnic team busy working on his redress of the atrium set.
So that made me smile a bit, which probably wasn't the reaction they were going for when we see that the villain has trashed their school. (It's fine, the ship gets put back to how it was almost instantly when they get it back.)
The plot over in the atrium uses a classic Trek trope: a trial. Though it's presented more like the debates we've seen in a couple of episodes, with the characters stepping up to make a speech. For example Ake decides to tell them a bit about the Starfleet pilot they killed. Turns out he was only one day from retirement! So there's another classic trope.
There were two lines last episode that I've been thinking about. Reno mentioned that they don't use money and Genesis said that she'd trade for parts with star charts. Meanwhile Braka is all about money. He'll come and take your warp core to sell even though he taxes trade routes and his galactic empire annexes planets.
You've got a ideological conflict here between the Federation and a man who believes that it's his right to get rich.
And like in a lot of those stories, Braka believes that the Federation owed him more assistance. When he was a child his colony waited for their share of the Federation's aid but it never came. His dad got desperate enough to attack a ship and in return they got missiles raining down on them. But I guess Braka's never told anyone his story before, because Ake's able to poke holes in it immediately. The missiles were the wrong colour for Starfleet! His dad made a makeshift weapon that blew up and killed everyone.
So Braka and Caleb both had a devastating event in their childhood that left them messed up and obsessed, and not in a good way like Batman. But Caleb ended up in a healthier environment while Braka turned into the Joker with a Harry Mudd moustache, who rages against the heroes for not having enough to give while feeling justified in taking everything he wants.
Still, Paul Giamatti's pretty good here. The writers were definitely onto something when they took three great actors and put them in a scene together. Plus Sandro Rosta may have shown up late, but he didn't let the side down.
Here's Tatiana Maslany doing some fantastic 'thinking about all these words she's hearing and feeling a bit conflicted maybe' acting. You can tell that Anisha is really taking it all in, silently. But I reckon the scene would've probably been better if the actors were bouncing off each instead of monologing.
On the plus side, I appreciate that the situation is resolved through debate, understanding, and knowledge of explosives. Plus the mines are disarmed with the power of science as well, saving the entire Federation with 0 seconds left on the clock. Classic trope.
Though hang on, how did the ships get all the way across from the other side of the wall in seconds? Is warp travel just that fast now?
Also, how did they arrive from multiple directions when they were all behind the same wall?
And where the hell is Discovery?
Well, actually someone told me that it turned up here. And even then it took me a while to find the shot with it in. I blame the cloaking device.
The ship appears but there's no cameo by Captain Burnham as she drops by to see her old friend Reno. Maybe next season.
Plus we finally get a good look at where the big atrium window is on the ship. It's where the torpedo launcher usually is, at the bottom of the neck.
Another thing that's confusing is that it shows actual photographs of the actors when they were younger... including the young cadets. Why are they showing them all as kids instead of university age?
But the most confusing thing is that they didn't get Dzolo back for a scene as an excuse to put her in the credits too. The ship's computer voice got a picture but not her. There's no Kelric, Ocam or Kyle either. Though we at least got Vancypants.
RATING
Sometimes I like to compare an episode to other episodes to help me decide what I think about it.
So, is Rubincon better or worse than the Discovery episode Rubicon or the Legends of Tomorrow episode Aruba-Con? I can't remember much of either of them to be honest, but 'better than Disco, worse than Legends' sounds like a safe bet.
This has better dialogue than Disco's Rubicon, I think, and the better acting that it enables. In fact I enjoyed the first half a lot. But the second half shows that the series is still too fond of characters working through their own problems instead of working through the problems they're facing in the story. It kills the momentum and leads to rushed solutions.
So I'll give the first half 8/10 and the second half 6/10, which results in an average of...
7/10
SEASON REVIEW
Of course Paramount knows this. They want to expand their audience by making new series that stray from what Star Trek has been in the past, knowing that fans will turn up anyway... unless it's something like Star Trek: Scouts, I don't know anyone who's watching that. I do know a few casual viewers who would give Starfleet Academy a shot if I recommended it to them, but now that I've seen all 10 episodes I'm going to tell them to give it a miss. I don't think it'd be their kind of thing.
Okay maybe if they only watched episodes 1, 4, 6, 9 and 10, that could work. But this isn't a case of a series struggling to find itself, like TNG and DS9's first seasons, this is a series that knew what it wanted to be from the start. It's just that it also knows what fans what it to be, and doesn't mind giving them a little Star Trek from time to time to keep them coming back.
THE BAD
- They finally came up with an opening theme worse than the Enterprise theme! At least "Where My Heart Will Take Me" has a tune.
- The use of language is too contemporary. I get that cadets are going to be less formal and I'm glad the dialogue's more natural than in Discovery season 4, but you don't get to say "dumpster fire" on Star Trek. And I don't even know what they were doing with the lines they gave Paul Giamatti to say.
- I'll give the series credit for being consistent with the 32nd century ship designs established in Discovery... but I still don't like them. And the Athena itself is a weird design, with its pointless nacelle wings and chunky neck leading down to nothing. It's distinctive though I suppose.
- The writers are still doing stories about characters dealing with trauma, even after Discovery and Picard (and even Lower Decks) ran it into the ground. SAM even dies from it!
- Episodes last a whole hour.
- I don't care about Caleb and Tarima's relationship, I don't care about Jay-Den and Kyle, and I don't care about Darem and... anyone he's alone with.
- Jay-Den is a dumb name.
- They killed off B'Avi! And his blood wasn't even green! Speaking of that, they forgot that Betazoids have black irises. And can read minds.
- Sisko never came back!
- Glitter vomit.
THE GOOD
- I can see why they focused so much on that atrium set in their marketing, because damn that's a nice set! They've definitely done the Star Trek thing of spending a fortune on the standing sets instead of the Doctor Who thing of being able to go to other places, but it's a fantastic looking place and they don't spoil it with dark lighting and blue filters.
- Great actors. There are a few cast members I'm not sold on, but it's got Holly Hunter, Gina Yashere Paul Giamatti and Tatiana Maslany, plus returning fan favourites Robert Picardo, Tig Notaro and Oded Fehr. And the newcomers like Sandro Rosta, Kerrice Brooks, Bella Shepard and George Hawking do a fine job of keeping up with them.
- The teachers get their own interesting things to do. The focus isn't all on the cadets and what they're going through.
- The Klingons look like Klingons again!
- The stakes are suitably low and the plots fairly sane. Okay it ends with the entire Federation surrounded by mines, and the characters have a habit of having a major influence on the situation of entire civilisations, but most of the time they're just getting into a prank war, or having a debate contest, or analysing a play.
- Caleb found his mother by the end of season one! I'm so glad they didn't drag that out.
- It's reasonably episodic, with story threads that were properly pulled together for the finale. I didn't need subplots about Tarima worrying about her superpowers and SAM getting frustrated by Genesis, but any viewer who was interested got a bit of closure.
- It makes use of its post-Burn setting, with characters tormented by the choices made in a more desperate time, while still depicting an optimistic future where good people can help things get better.
Anyway, for me Starfleet Academy's greatest flaw is that I've never wanted this series and it's done nothing to convince me I was wrong. Okay that's not fair, it's added some extra dimensions I never imagined and it's certainly less cringy than that Discovery episode about Tilly saving some cadets. But I don't want to watch Young Sherlock Holmes or James Bond Jr. or even Smallville, I want the real thing.
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NEXT EPISODE
Either way, that's all we're getting for now so I'll be switching to a different series. Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, ELDRAD MUST LIVE!
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