Star Trek shows love playing around with a reminder that no one—well, mostly no one—is safe on a show, with proverbial redshirts and the occasional senior character getting bumped off to show Starfleet’s not all fun and holodeck games. But Starfleet Academy, with its young roster of cadet stars, felt like it could’ve been different in that regard… at least, until a couple of weeks ago, when it decided to put a phaser hole right through the chest of one of the kids.
Poor B’Avi, the Vulcan War College student, shockingly bit the bullet in the sixth episode of the show, “Come, Let’s Away,” during an off-campus training exercise. Again, people die on Star Trek a lot, but still, it felt shocking that that would still count for Starfleet Academy, a show that had, up to that point, been about trying to nurture a space for its students, who all grew up in the circumstances of a harsh, hardened galaxy thanks to the Burn, to feel some joy. Phaser entry and exit wounds are not joy!
But apparently the show drew inspiration for that shock value—that even its young, impressionable cast wouldn’t be safe if there was danger—not from Trek‘s past history of killing bright young things, but from a surprising influence: the long-running medical drama Grey’s Anatomy.
“I think this was the thing that was challenging for people who had previously developed Starfleet Academy projects… because it was hard to imagine how cadets could be in danger if they were just in the classroom in San Francisco,” current Trek architect and Starfleet Academy co-showrunner Alex Kurtzman recently told Empire magazine’s January issue (via /Film). “Our idea was to say, ‘What if you look at it like a teaching hospital?’ With a ship that can base itself out of San Francisco, but then can travel into the stars and have the kids learn in the field? When they’re teaching med students how to become doctors in Grey’s Anatomy, they’re thrown into real-life or death situations, and that’s how they learn. Once we applied that model to it, suddenly it opened up a whole new world.”
Grey’s is perhaps infamous for carving a bloody path through its primary cast over the many years it has endured, with characters just as likely to die in a horrifying accident or of some terrible disease as they are simply to leave for another hospital (unless they’re Meredith Grey herself, who at this point is perhaps either invincible or an affront to God). So it makes sense for a show like Starfleet Academy to look to both in that regard and in how it handles putting its students in high-risk situations on the regular.
But Kurtzman’s right in that this iteration of Starfleet Academy—where the academy itself is built out of a ship that can be docked at the school’s traditional San Francisco home or take flight for field missions—definitely opens the show up to plenty of the classic Star Trek episode scenarios more than if the show had been set in an earlier era of Star Trek. Unfortunately for the cadets, though, like we said, that does mean their fatality rate is potentially about as high as any other Star Trek show because of that. Learning that today isn’t a good day to die is as useful a lesson as biochemistry or stellar cartography, at least.
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