A few episodes ago on Starfleet Academy, Chancellor Ake argued that the new generation of cadets didn’t need reminding that they’d grown up in a challenging moment for the galaxy and instead needed to learn to find the light every once in a while. This week, however, the cadets are firmly reminded that the world outside their classrooms is a dangerous place—and so is Chancellor Ake.
Star Trek loves an episode of screaming, “Hey, the kind of stuff that happens on Star Trek all the time is really dangerous” sometimes, and “Come, Let’s Away” is Starfleet Academy‘s answer to that beloved trope, as the kids from both the War College and the academy are brought on their first training mission, only for things to go sideways very quickly.
Starfleet Academy technically already gave us this kind of Trek scenario in its premiere episode, “Kids These Days,” but that was less about reminding our young heroes that they have something to lose in a galaxy still in the early days of recovering from the broad retreat of Starfleet’s reach caused by the Burn and more about forcing them into a fast friendship in a high-pressure situation. This week is more about kicking everyone involved in the gut until they remember that even when they do their very best and act with the best of intentions, sometimes you still lose something—and that something can be your life.
“Come, Let’s Away” opens normal enough, with the two cadet classes taken aboard the USS Athena for an attempted salvage and recovery mission aboard a scuppered Starfleet vessel, the Miyazaki. Left decaying for over a century after an experimental engine test gone wrong, the ship—formerly home to a Starfleet crew famous enough to get its own comic book about its exploits—has become a training ground for students to try and successfully restore its systems and an opportunity for the War College and Starfleet Academy to get along in a more serious manner after their whole prank war situation a few weeks ago.
There’s still some jockeying among the kids, especially when the away team sees Caleb, Sam, and Jay-den have to pair up with Kyle (who Jay-den was getting very close with last week) and B’Avi, the War College’s distressingly yoked young Vulcan cadet. But that has to be put aside almost immediately when, during the joint exercise, the Miyazaki is attacked by a gang of marauders called the Furies. Things go bad almost the moment it looks like the test is going well for the cadets: their commanding officer for the away mission, Tomov, sacrifices himself to get the kids to the safely locked-down bridge of the ship, and with time running out for the Athena to provide an assist, Chancellor Ake is forced to call on Nus Braka for help trying to figure out how to deal with a problem seemingly even more dangerous than he and the Venari Ral are.
Paul Giamatti’s return as Braka for the first time since “Kids These Days” is emblematic of everything “Come, Let’s Away” is going for, as we cut between the growing tension aboard the Miyazaki and Chancellor Ake coming face-to-face with Braka again. Gone is the scenery-devouring camp streak Giamatti earnestly embraced in the premiere, replaced with a calculating, genuinely terrifying presence as he gets up in Ake’s face, needling her endlessly about what she’s going to have to be willing to do to get the cadets out in one piece. It’s already enough of a moral sacrifice, in her eyes, to be “working” with him in the first place, but she’s forced to accept, on Braka’s increasingly pointed terms, that sacrifices like that have to be made in the imperfect world Starfleet is growing back into.
And that’s really the actual teaching moment of this entire episode. Yes, the kids are having a really shit time aboard the Miyazaki, and so are the kids off of it when Tarima decides she needs to use her psionic Betazoid abilities to their full power to try and communicate with Caleb (and eventually, uh, violently pop the heads off of all the Furies before they can kill all the cadets). But it’s Ake and Vance who are confronted with having to take a different approach as they try to sweet-talk Braka into helping them deal with the Fury situation. Braka constantly needles Ake that she’s going to have to treat him as a concerned citizen of the galaxy instead of someone up to no good to make this work, and that she is going to have to give up this idealized Starfleet vision of cooperation and get down in the mud with him.
Which makes his inevitable turn on Starfleet all the harsher a lesson for her. It turns out all along that Braka was playing Starfleet, getting them to draw away defenses from a classified outpost to stop the Furies, and all the moral compromises made up to that point barely get them a win beyond immediate survival. The Venari Ral take off with some dangerous unknown tech from the station, and the kids don’t make it off of the Miyazaki without some severe sacrifices. Tarima is in critical condition after pushing her psychic abilities, Sam is seemingly heavily damaged… and then there’s the case of poor B’Avi just getting a hole clean through his chest, dying to save Caleb just as the Furies make their way onto the Miyazaki‘s bridge.
It’s a surprisingly dark note for Starfleet Academy to leave things on. Of course people die in Star Trek all the time, but it was a surprisingly bold step for the show to actually kill off one of the cadets (main one or otherwise; up to now, this did not seem like it was going to be the kind of show that would go there so soon), jolting the series right out of the comfort zone it’s found itself in so far. Ake and Vance are coldly reminded that while the Federation is slowly building itself back up, they are playing around in a very different galactic status quo.
More often than not, a Star Trek episode like this ends with the risks taken and the compromises being made actually paying off—that even on a road to hell, the good intentions still matter for our heroes to show they’re committed to doing the right thing even with their backs against the wall. But instead, here we just see those good intentions scrape by to achieve the bare minimum of survival, and even then, not even that is a clean achievement with one kid dead and two in serious conditions.
It’s the kind of jolt Starfleet Academy‘s first season has been missing but a necessary one to prove the show is capable of nailing both Star Trek‘s loftier ideals and the darker shadows those ideals are often defended in. At least it’s no surprise, given the strength of the show so far, that it rose to the occasion to deliver it.
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