Spoilers follow for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Episode 10, “Rubincon,” which is available on Paramount+ now.
Starfleet Academy closes out its first season with a decent if not thrilling wrap up to last week’s big cliffhanger, a tale that accentuates both what’s great about the show and what can also be its biggest weakness.
By the end of the previous episode, “300th Night,” the gang was in a jam, with the entire Federation surrounded by an array of Omega-47 mines that threatened to detonate and thereby damage subspace for potentially millions of years, ensuring a new Burn-like era for the quadrant. With the USS Athena on the wrong side of the mines, it falls to Captain Ake (Holly Hunter) and the cadets to save the day (of course)… and when Ake is abducted by the Venari Ral, it’s up to the kids to get the job done (with an assist from the delightful Tig Notaro’s Jett Reno).
Putting aside the fairly ludicrous science involved in surrounding the whole Federation with mines – like, imagine not just surrounding a planet, or a solar system, but many, many solar systems – the drama onboard the Athena plays pretty well here, as each cadet must take a station on the starship and work a problem. Darem takes the helm, Genesis is at ops (and then the conn!), Jay-Den heads up medical, and so on. Not every character gets the full spotlight this week, of course, but each is at least afforded some fun bit of business.
Not surprisingly, Caleb (Sandro Rosta) receives the most attention this time out, not just in his “learning moment” scene with Reno, but also later with Tarima (Zoë Steiner) as the two reconnect telepathically – and consensually this time – in order to find Caleb’s mom and, along the way, chart the (literal) course to the aforementioned saving of the day. Rosta also gets to participate in the climactic scene of the episode with Hunter, Paul Giamatti’s Nus Braka, and Tatiana Maslany’s Anisha, but more on that in a sec.
As always with this show, the charisma and performances of the actors playing the cadets is really the driving force of the episode. From Caleb/Tarima to Genesis/Sam and even to a quick glimpse of Caleb and Jay-Den having a moment, Starfleet Academy lives or dies thanks to these guys. When something doesn’t make sense plot-wise, or where a scene gets too confusing due to technobabble, it doesn’t matter quite as much because of their charm.
Unfortunately, not as successful this week is the thread involving The Doctor (Robert Picardo). While this aspect of the story starts off strongly, with The Doctor pulling out his old mobile emitter from his Voyager days and using it to essentially “become” the Athena, and thereby save it from destruction by concealing it holographically, the resulting scrambling of the character for the rest of the episode doesn’t play that well. His gibberish talk feels a bit like, well, gibberish scripting, and it’s also somewhat off-putting how Sam (Kerrice Brooks) is now calling him Dad left and right. Yes, I know that they spent 17 years together from their perspective as he raised her back in “The Life of the Stars,” but since we as the audience only saw that happen in a brief montage, it’s kind of jarring to now just accept this new dynamic between them.
Also just generally jarring is the other half of the episode involving Hunter, Giamatti, and Maslany. Having apprehended and taken the two women back to the Athena’s engineering drive section (the ship separated last week during a crisis moment), Nus Braka is holding a show trial for Captain Ake, her guilt predetermined, but with Maslany’s Anisha serving as his trump card; he knows Caleb’s mom hates and resents Ake enough that she will help sell his case against the Starfleeter. Last week I speculated that Anisha might actually still be working for Braka, and I’m glad that this episode finds a more nuanced approach to that concept. Anisha may hate Braka, but she hates Ake more.
Director Olatunde Osunsanmi and the episode’s writers try something interesting here with the idea of Braka broadcasting the trial for all the galaxy to see, but it ultimately plays more as a gimmick than anything else, particularly with the jokey news tickers. Yes, I get the idea of poking fun at our own 21st-century media environment, but it’s too surface level to really bring much to the story.
Overall, the trial portion of the episode tends to give in to the side of Starfleet Academy that can be more base – it’s big and loud and not particularly subtle in its storytelling. And unfortunately, while I had been hoping that the rivalry between Ake and Braka would culminate in some choice scenes between the two Oscar-adjacent actors, it just didn’t pan out this season. Ironically enough, Maslany winds up being the most compelling of the three in the climactic scenes, while Giamatti doesn’t seem able to veer away from the mustache-twirling, even after the reveal that all of his character’s hate is the result of a mere misperception he had as a child. It’s too bad and a disappointing outcome for this character, as well as his dynamic with Hunter’s Ake.
Questions and Notes from the Q Continuum:
- “I think I have to pee.”
- When did Jett Reno become one of my favorite modern Star Trek characters, exactly?
- Who are those ne’er-do-wells in the gallery watching the trial? And boy, does Starfleet need to head out and do some space-copping.
- I’m sorry, but I just don’t care for the design approach on the 32nd century starships. I’ve tried to like them! The Athena is cool though.
- Did you catch the reference to Federation President President Rillak on the news ticker? That’s the character played by Chelah Horsdal on Star Trek: Discovery.
- The closing credits “yearbook” approach is fun.
- Will Braka or Anisha be back in the second season? It feels like their stories are basically finished at this point, doesn’t it?
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