So far, largely in a playfully rebellious manner, Starfleet Academy has been focused on what new things it wants to bring to Star Trek—what ideas to challenge and what to push forward into new status quos to make its farthest-flung future setting feel like it’s actually evolving from what we’ve come to expect from the series. This week, in a standout spotlight for one of its most intriguing cadets, the show decided to instead embrace the fact that not everything needs to be changed.
That cadet is, of course, Jay-den Kraag, the soft-spoken Klingon who just wants to blend into the crowd and study the sciences, no matter how effervescently rambunctious his new friend circle at the academy has gotten in the past few weeks. Ever since Discovery jumped to the 32nd century, the Klingons have been one of the period’s biggest mysteries—an iconic Star Trek species that seemed to have vanished entirely, even as we got huge updates on similarly enduring species like the Vulcans and Romulans. So when Jay-den showed up as a seeming anomaly in Starfleet Academy, we could figure that we were due for a check-in on Qo’nos, and “Vox in Excelso” finally gives us that.
Except the answer is that there is no Qo’nos to check in on. The Klingon Empire is no more, replaced by a diaspora that has spent the past century-plus splintering ever further and on the verge of extinction since the events of the Burn—and Jay-den finds out pretty early on in the episode that that extinction might have gotten a bit more personal when he’s informed by Chancellor Ake that a Klingon ship believed to be carrying his fathers and mother (and seemingly much of what is left of just eight great houses of Klingon society) has been in an accident.
While this is absolutely a Jay-den power hour—with Karim Diané proving himself a standout among the show’s strong roster of young stars over and over—this, of course, wouldn’t be an episode of Starfleet Academy if it didn’t frame an exploration of a huge Star Trek concept through a decidedly more offbeat framing. So of course, the question of what the Federation can do about the Klingons is not a crisis solely addressed by senior staff in bouts of diplomacy, but through… the doctor starting the Academy’s debate club.
It feels a little wild at first that an extracurricular school activity is largely launched by the looming shadow of the dying breaths of a major galactic power, but it’s Jay-den who makes the case for the Klingon diaspora’s future to be the hot topic for the cadets’ debates, giving himself a chance to both tackle his own anxieties about public speaking and also to reckon with his own complicated relationship with Klingon culture, while Chancellor Ake beseeches one of the Klingons’ remaining leaders—and an apparent old flame—Obel Wolcek (guest star David Keeley), with an offer of Federation aid in the form of a potential new homeworld for the Klingons to begin rebuilding on, Faan Alpha.
“The future of the Klingons is decided by high school debate club” may seem on paper like an episode premise that is not going to convince Trekkies skeptical of Starfleet Academy‘s vibe so far, but “Vox in Excelso” is arguably the best Klingon episode of Star Trek in the 21st century. It certainly stands up to explorations of their post-TOS revamp in TNG, DS9, and Voyager as perhaps one of the best Klingon episodes Star Trek has ever done—offering fresh perspectives and a genuine conversation with what has come before with the species in the franchise, and embracing that the traditions established by those prior interrogations can co-exist alongside something new.
Even though The Next Generation revamped the Klingons as a wary ally of the Federation rather than the racially charged outright villains they had been in the original Star Trek, over the past 40 years that status quo has existed for the Klingons; we haven’t really ever seen them in a mode that existed outside of conflict. Sure, they’re not always at war—although they often are—but even as Klingon culture and their codes of warrior honor got fleshed out more and more, Klingon society as we’ve known it has always been shaped by exterior threats and, more importantly in contrast here for “Vox in Excelso,” interior ones.
Backstabbing games in the court of the Klingon Chancellery and among the Great Houses defined so much of the new Klingon society from TNG onwards, and much of Star Trek since those years has been about trying to retroactively render that state across their long timeline, from Enterprise famously giving an origin story for the species’ redesigned look to Discovery‘s own radical aesthetic overhaul of the species leading to an almost-immediate retreat to a more traditional Klingon design, while maintaining that focus on political treachery and honor-driven scheming in a bid to reassure audiences that they could “do” Klingons right.
“Vox in Excelso,” meanwhile, jukes and, through the disintegration of the Klingon Empire as a structure, offers us a chance to see this mode for Klingon culture without the broad framework that has defined it ever since TNG. It does so through three distinct forms, anchored around the broader preparation for the debate club’s seminar on the Klingon Question. The first is in Ake and Wolcek’s back-and-forth, which perhaps leans most into those older visions of Klingon leadership—a political fight about image and honor that is as much about two former lovers meeting again after years apart as it is about Wolcek’s belief that the Federation’s offer of Faan Alpha is the antithesis of the Klingons’ steadfast independence, even if it could save them from extinction. But the ones the episode hones in on the most are rooted in Jay-den’s own connections to his two communities: his history with his family and his new circle of support among the peers and staff of Starfleet Academy.
In flashbacks to 16 months prior to him joining Starfleet, we see Jay-den’s strained relationship with his three parents, as the Kraags (mother LíVanna, played by Dorothy Atabong; fathers Drekol and Enok, played by Martin Roach and Sean Jones; and brother Thar, played by Tremaine Nelson) live an isolated, yet purely Klingon life on a world called Krios Prime. Even though they are, through the disaster of the Burn, freed from the political dramas of the Great Houses we’ve been familiar with across decades of Star Trek, the conflict explored between them is still rooted in that interpretation’s tried-and-tested notion of honor.
The divide here is between Jay-den and one of his fathers in particular, Drekol, as the latter bristles at Jay-den’s increasing curiosity about the world beyond his family: his interest in other cultures on Krios Prime and Federation technology, his desire to study science rather than hunting, and a general reservation that balks at the idea we’ve come to expect of typically brash Klingons. When a stubborn refusal to accept outside help leads to the death of Thar, who supports his brother’s different path, Jay-den’s relationship with his family seemingly disintegrates entirely, with Drekol destroying the Starfleet Academy recruitment orb Thar had encouraged Jay-den to tinker with and, after a failed ritual hunting experience, leading to him abandoning the young man and leaving him behind on Krios Prime.
Or at least, that’s how Jay-den perceives it. He’s spent the past 16 months internalizing his “failure” to be what is expected of a Klingon, even as he’s pursued his curiosities and his dream of joining Starfleet, creating a divide within him that manifests time and time again across this episode, both in his panic attacks as he tries to adapt to participating in the academy’s debates and also in his arguments with Caleb, who, both in and out of the debate practice, pokes at Jay-den for seemingly hypocritically advocating for an independent, isolationist future for the Klingons while seemingly abandoning his people for Starfleet.
An explosive crashout later, Jay-den turns to the only other person at the academy who might actually understand him in Cadet Master Thok, given her own Klingon upbringing. And it’s her, and her own nature as a woman of two worlds, that actually allows him to synthesize a new point of view: Drekol wasn’t using Klingon tradition to ostracize his remaining son when he disrupted the ritual hunt but using Klingon tradition to signal to Jay-den that he had accepted the future the young man wanted for himself. Gaining that perspective instills Jay-den with the confidence to rise to success at the debate club, advocating that the reason the Federation’s offer of Faan Alpha has been rejected up to this point is because Starfleet (and namely Ake, who watches on from the audience) has failed to meet the Klingons on their own terms—that the Federation stops being the Federation at its best, a community of different perspectives, if it offers charity blindly and undermines the Klingons’ own self-independence in the process.
In overcoming his own doubts—both at the debate podium and in his reckoning of his relationship with his family—Jay-den provides Starfleet with the answer it needs. Instead of handing Faan Alpha to the Wolcek and the Klingons on a platter, they make a grand display that is essentially a mock battle between the Athena and a flotilla of Starfleet ships and what remains of the Klingons before pulling back and allowing the Klingons to claim the world as the spoils of their warrior traditions. Everyone gets what they wanted: Starfleet helps, the Klingons save face, and Jay-den in particular learns not just to find comfort in the bonds he’s started to forge at the academy, but also how to stand up for himself and exist as both a Klingon and a member of Starfleet.
It’s perhaps Starfleet Academy‘s strongest hour so far, one that really nails the comfortable scenario the series has found for itself by framing big explorations of Star Trek‘s world and 60 years of ideation through its academic setting. In thoroughly believing that the kids are the future, getting to see one of them shape the new status quo of one of Trek‘s most important species in such a deftly handled manner is a testament to what Starfleet Academy can do at its best.
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