Starfleet Academy has spent the last few weeks putting its young heroes through the emotional wringer, so they can all learn how to process trauma (through the power of community, through the power of 20th-century American theater). Good news! They’re all about to get a new traumatic event to learn how to process.
“300th Night”—named for the final night of the first year of lessons for academy students, meaning we’ve zapped quite a way forward over the past few episodes—would only scream “We are part one of a two-part finale in all but the actual use of the words ‘part one’” slightly less if it didn’t open with a smash-cut impact font title card that reads “YEAR’S END,” but that’s really what it is: an episode that largely exists to set up a lot of little dominos that it can knock over just in time for a cliffhanger climax.
That’s not to say there aren’t some good ideas in “300th Night”; it’s just that it’s hard to really see where those ideas are going to land in the grand scheme of things when the show is clearly saving a lot of its cathartic release for next week. This is something Star Trek is not a stranger to, but it’s especially something that Star Trek: Discovery wasn’t a stranger to, often splitting its season-ending stories into one slice of emotional setup and a second slice of bang-bang-pew-pew theatrics.
The emotions, then, for the most part, are pretty good. The episode is largely centered around Caleb discovering (with a little encouragement from Sam, who is trying to adjust to suddenly going from someone basically born yesterday to someone who has lived a whole childhood of experience and not always in a delicate way) his mother Anisha has actually been leaving him messages for years on a simply encrypted comms channel that was coded to a play on sentiment that Mister Desperately Attempting to Avoid Sentiment never believed she’d use: a code phrase based on the moon they promised each other to go to before Anisha was torn away from Caleb by Starfleet all those years ago.
Naturally, with the Athena going one way—Betazed, along with half the Federation Fleet, to attend its official declaration as the new headquarters of the Federation—and his mom’s signal going another—the planet Ukeck, on the cusp of being invaded by the Venari Ral—Caleb promptly decides it’s time to peace out. But this would be a very boring episode of Star Trek if he did it alone, so through a series of happenstances, Sam, Genesis, and a very drunk Darem (still high off celebrating year’s end with Jay-den, who tried to induct his friend group into his Klingon family with a drinking ritual) are all tagging along for the surreptitious escape from the Athena.
All this is to set up the actual conflict that’s still roiling inside Caleb when he tearfully reunites with Anisha on Ukeck (the Starfleet Academy production team has decided giving Tatiana Maslany a pixie cut is the way to age her roughly 15 years from episode one, but who cares, she actually gets to do something this episode!): whether or not Caleb can choose between his family with his mother, who has grown independent to the point of paranoia in her time on the run, or the family he’s come to embrace at the academy.
Trek’s no stranger to found family stories, but Starfleet Academy at least explores this well-worn ground interestingly by generating a lot more friction between Caleb and his friends when he begins to make it clear his choice is his mother. There’s little enlightened understanding here; these are still kids, and they’re going to lash out at each other as meanly as they can when they’re upset. So Caleb snipes at Darem and Genesis as he makes his farewell, trying to push them away as angrily as possible, and Genesis gets in a few verbal licks of her own after the two bonded together a few episodes ago. The only one he can’t do it to is Sam, but not for a lack of trying; she just manages to wrap him up in a hug before he can make that mistake. It’s a good beat for these characters, even if you can predict where it’s going to go: just as Caleb pushes them all away so he can escape Ukeck’s rapidly encroaching planetary occupation with Anisha, he finds himself wrenched back to saving them when these three very clearly Starfleet kids almost immediately get caught by the Venari Ral.
For Caleb, there’s no time to make his choice again—a firefight breaks out as he and his reluctant mother attempt to con the kids’ way out of arrest, and Anisha is badly wounded in the process. At least the Athena arrives in time to bail them out—it turns out no one enjoys following rules, as Chancellor Ake spends much of the B-plot up to this point repeatedly telling her remaining crew and the audience alike, “I’ve been given about as much free rein as I can to ignore my extremely important orders, because this is Star Trek, and there wouldn’t be an episode if I didn’t.”
It’s here “300th Night” plays with one of its more interesting ideas: the Athena showing up is only a big damn hero moment to the Starfleet kids. Everyone else on Ukeck looks kind of horrified as this massive Federation starship shows up in the sky, buffeted by it breaking into the atmosphere to beam its targets out—the kind of reaction you’d expect people to have for the Venari Ral showing up, not our heroes. It’s a reaction that’s mirrored when Anisha wakes up in the Athena sickbay recovering from her wounds, only to see Ake walk in and welcome her: sheer terror, realizing where she is and where her son has been, and being confronted face-to-face with the woman who tore her family apart (even if she has yet to learn how much Ake regrets that). We’ve seen plenty of Star Trek treat the Federation in a skeptical light, but rarely do we see the kind of horror Anisha feels in this moment. Time will tell if Starfleet Academy manages to bring her down from that terror interestingly next week, but in the moment, it’s shockingly effective.
And then there’s the other interesting idea, one pulled in the early parts of the episode but really coming to the fore for the cliffhanger: while the emotional stakes are firmly on Caleb this episode, the bigger ones for the galaxy come in the form of a revelation of what Nus Braka managed to steal from the Federation back in season one’s big turning point: a synthetic, weaponized iteration of the Omega Particle, which he ultimately uses to parcel the Federation and its defense fleet (save for the renegade Athena after it goes beyond borders to save the kids) into their current territory under the threat of completely annihilating warp travel in the region for millions of years.
Omega isn’t new to Star Trek—Voyager touched on the danger of the particle and what it can do to degrade subspace to the point of rendering FTL capabilities impossible, while The Next Generation also dealt with its own separate subplot around warp travel’s damage to subspace, even if that didn’t touch on Omega specifically. But returning to the idea in a post-Burn world—where the galaxy has already reckoned with an age where FTL was near impossible and is now being asked to confront it again with practically zero way out of it—has a ton of potential.
But again, we’re simply in part one here, where all the ideas always sound good and filled with potential. Next week, Starfleet Academy‘s final test begins: can it stick the landing?
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