Spoilers follow for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Episode 5, “Series Acclimation Mil,” which is available on Paramount Plus now.
So here it is – the Benjamin Sisko episode that Starfleet Academy has been teasing since at least as far back as last summer. The notion of returning to the mystery of what happened to Avery Brooks’ legendary Deep Space Nine captain is a daunting undertaking for the fledgling Starfleet Academy, but fortunately the episode’s writers (Trek vets Kirsten Beyer and Tawny Newsome) don’t attempt to alter or add to Sisko’s story – which after all was essentially completed with the end of DS9 – but rather use his legend to expand on one of the new show’s main characters, Sam (Kerrice Brooks).
I mean, that’s literally how the episode starts off as “A Story About Me” is scrawled over the “A CBS Studios Production” title screen. Make no mistake: “Series Acclimation Mil” is about Sam, not Sisko. The episode is even named after her!
And while the story involving Sam is another of the coming-of-age type tales that Starfleet Academy is interested in, one where the holographic student finds some semblance of independence from her overbearing “parents,” there’s no denying that merely evoking the name Ben Sisko is a big pull, and that as a result anything short of the return of Brooks in the role can’t help but feel a bit anti-climactic.
As all the episodes of this first season have done so far, “Series Acclimation Mil” focuses on one of the series’ leads, and in so doing finally gives us some information about who and what Sam is. We knew she was a photonic being, aka a hologram, but now we know that her real mission at the Academy is to serve as an emissary for her “people,” who come from a world called Kasq and were enslaved by organic beings “a long time ago.” As a result, they now fear that interacting with non-photonic lifeforms will mean a return to the slavery of their past, and so they’ve sent Sam to feel things out and figure out what the deal is with these organic types.
The thing is, her overseers are basically jerks who don’t get her or understand the outside world in the same way that Sam has already come to do in her short time at the Academy. So basically she’s the same as any student who goes off to college and realizes their parents are totally out of it. Join the club, kid.
The episode is shot in a pretty unconventional way for Star Trek, with Sam talking directly to the camera at times and doing some impromptu dancing, while on-screen graphics illustrate some of what she’s discussing and distinctly non-Trek music pops off in the background, all of which will surely infuriate the Very Angry crowd who either specialize in the monetization of hate or just plain don’t understand what Star Trek was ever about (or maybe are just bots). Whatever the case, I liked the unique presentation of this episode, though I do suspect that if the aim here is to have it speak to young audiences, it will read as more “cringe,” as they say, than anything else to that very same audience.
Of course, the real reason Sam is talking to the camera is that this is all supposed to be the message she sends Sisko at the end of the episode. Speaking of which, if they couldn’t get Avery Brooks back, then Cirroc Lofton returning as his son Jake is the next best thing. The holographic recording of Jake talks about his dad the way he knew him, as a man, a guy who loved baseball, a chef, but most of all as a dad… the lessons and example of which Jake pulled from when he eventually became a dad himself. This father/son relationship was always one of the most important on Deep Space Nine, and the fact that Beyer and Newsome lean into it with their script is just perfect, as is Lofton’s return. Sisko’s relationship with his status as Emissary of the Prophets was always an uneasy one, and it only makes sense that Jake would remember his dad as the man he was, not the god he would become.
Meanwhile, the B-story involving the War College’s Chancellor Kelrec (Raoul Bhaneja) is amusing in and of itself, especially since it gives Tig Notaro and Robert Picardo something to do this week, and certainly the reveal that he feels that Holly Hunter’ Chancellor Ake betrayed Starfleet when she resigned years earlier is interesting.
But back to Sam, the return to Sisko’s old stomping grounds to party, resulting in the hologram getting drunk, leads to various hijinks that just stop short of becoming annoying. Starfleet Academy has proven adept at weaving its various characters’ ongoing story threads into whatever else is going on each week, and just when drunk Sam is about to become too much, we cut to Caleb and Tarima flirting outside the bar, or tensions with the War College kids escalating (again).
The culmination of the episode is sweet, as Sam visits with Jake through some Magic Science and comes to realize that just as Sisko did 800 years earlier, Sam has to make her own life choices for herself as much as she can. It’s the “We’re Not Gonna Take It” of Star Trek resolutions, thank you Dee Snider, and it works beautifully, culminating in words spoken by Avery Brooks himself (if not recorded for this actual episode) as the image of Sisko can faintly be made out in the clouds.
Questions and Notes from the Q Continuum:
- When that DS9 theme music kicked in… man.
- Tawny Newsome didn’t just co-write the episode, but that’s also her as the Starfleet instructor who turns out to be the latest incarnation of Dax.
- I’m surprised Robert Picardo’s The Doctor, as a hologram himself, hasn’t been given more of a stake in Sam’s story so far. Although his advice about moving on after loss is telling…
- While it doesn’t seem that Sam’s “people” were created by humans or the Federation – presumably Sam has been made to look humanoid/human to fit in better – their history of enslavement does sound familiar, as we saw on Star Trek: Voyager how a whole army of holographic doctors had been forced into hard labor when they became obsolete.
- Those War College jerks!
- A theremin? Why not!
- “Bajoran kids don’t play.”
- They don’t even show images of Sisko anymore on Bajor because they believe he’s transcended human form… and probably because Avery Brooks would have to be paid for it?
- Why would the Sisko Museum have Benny Russell’s typewriter if Benny had only existed as a dream/vision/whatever?
- Jake’s novel Anslem does have its roots in the original DS9, having first been mentioned in the all-time great episode “The Visitor.”
- The bar formerly known as The Launching Pad was in fact the site where Sisko fought a Vulcan, specifically Solok, the a-hole who he’d also battle in a baseball match in the episode “Take Me Out to the Holosuite.”
- While I said earlier that this episode doesn’t really change Sisko’s story in any way, that is perhaps not entirely true. After all, if Dax and Jake don’t have the answers regarding what happened to Sisko after he ascended to the Celestial Temple, then presumably nobody does? Which means Sisko never did come back… even though he promised in the DS9 finale that he would. But then again, maybe Dax and Jake just aren’t talking…
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