While using the wreckage of the fallen USS Miyazaki as a training ground for crisis response, our cadets soon find themselves in a real crisis that puts them at risk of sharing the fate of its lost crew.
For viewers craving more action and more space in their space series, “Come, Let’s Away” serves plenty of both. We’ve arrived at the season’s midpoint, so the producers are raising the stakes and putting both the Academy and War College kids in serious danger for which they’re not yet ready. And indeed, not all of them make it out alive as Star Trek: Starfleet Academy delivers its first fatality this week.
B’Avi (Alexander Eling), the Vulcan cadet from the War College, is shot by enemy troops. The death could have hit stronger with a longer season, but the writers made the best of the limited time we’ve spent with these War College kids for it to carry some weight. If the only deaths had been the anonymous station crew and characters we only now met for the first time, Ake’s failure wouldn’t hit so hard. Tarima and SAM also did not escape entirely unscathed, leaving us to wonder if they’ll be fully recovered by next week.
Paul Giamatti’s pirate Nus Braka is back and revealed to be the mastermind behind this trap and possibly the leader of the entire Venari Ral, the powerful group of marauders we’ve been hearing about since the first episode. Fortunately, the character works a bit better this time around. Giamatti was surprisingly one of the weakest elements of the pilot — just too arch a performance and too thinly drawn as a villain.
By the end of “Come, Let’s Away” I’m still not completely sold on Braka, especially if he’s being built up to be the big bad of the entire season or series, but he’s certainly shown here to be smarter as well as more calculating and formidable than he previously seemed. And while Giamatti’s still chewing the scenery, there’s a little more modulation here, moments for him to turn it down a bit. I suspect Braka won’t be back until the season finale, but he needs a lot more development — a more compelling motivation, backstory, and underlying philosophy — if he’s to become one of the franchise’s more iconic villains.
Of course, while these sorts of big action stories come with the territory, they don’t often leave much to discuss. The action starts to feel a bit rote and perfunctory. It’s a flaw of these shortened ten-episode seasons. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds also ran into this problem of squandering three spots of their limited seasons (usually the premiere, fifth episode, and the season finale) on big stakes “oh-no!“, explosion-heavy plots less interested in thoughtful theme or commentary.
What does work though is seeing our heroes suffer a costly defeat and put on their back foot because future successes feel more earned when they’re the disadvantaged underdogs. Nus Braka completely out-maneuvered Starfleet and Ake personally, then popped in to menacingly gloat to Ake while warning of an even more diabolical plan on the horizon. This is solid supervillain stuff and shows great potential. I just hope Braka’s plan is more interesting than the same kind of generic, galactic threats that permeate so much of our pop culture today such as last year’s abominable Star Trek: Section 31.
Photo: John Medland/Paramount+
The biggest character development this week involved Caleb Mir and his progressing relationship with Tarima Sadal. We already knew a human “Imzadi” with a deep emotional connection to a Betazoid is capable of telepathically communicating with them from the days of William Riker and Deanna Troi, but the extent to this ability was never properly rendered in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Perhaps because Troi was only half-Betazoid and Tarima is a kind of super Betazoid with mysteriously enhanced abilities. Here, Tarima and Caleb travel to some sort of mind palace, a constructed imaginary realm outside of time and space which Tarima calls the safest place she knows. But when this begins to break down the walls Caleb has built up to shield others from his childhood pain, he proves not yet ready for this level of intimacy and retreats.
After their fight, Caleb and Tarima don’t really speak again until witnessing B’Avi’s death, and it triggers Tarima to bring both she and Caleb back to their shared mind palace. She uses this brief reprieve outside of time to spend one last moment with Caleb before unleashing the dangerous power she’s tried so hard to suppress as a weapon against the armed boarding party on Athena’s Bridge. She appears to kill all the intruders but at personal cost, appearing to have entered a coma.
“Come, Let’s Away” is action-packed, and the direction by Larry Teng is impressive at times. Where the episode suffers is lack of a cohesive message to connect its main plot to some larger theme. Writers Kenneth Lin and Kiley Rossetter appear to have been tasked with simply making a big space battle story but only found brief moments to touch on more compelling ideas.
There’s a wonderful moment where Caleb dismisses the heroic comic book adventures of the USS Miyazaki that inspired B’Avi as nothing but Starfleet propaganda to convince poor kids to fight for Big Brother Starfleet. This beautifully touches on real world concerns worthy of further interrogation and feels like the sort of idea a whole episode could be built around exploring. Sadly though, the assignment was big explosions, so it’s just tossed off so the episode can get back to the pew-pews and ‘splosions. It’s a missed opportunity.
New episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy release Thursdays on Paramount+.
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