Starfleet Academy‘s first season has been all about teaching its young cadets the lessons needed to navigate through life: sometimes joyous, sometimes harsh, sometimes in the moment, sometimes stretching across generations of Star Trek‘s legacy. Its final episode has one more lesson: it’s up to them to save the day, because their forebears kind of suck.
“Rubincon” is a surprisingly subdued end to Starfleet Academy‘s debut season, especially given the legacy of its predecessor, Discovery, often splitting its two-part conclusions into one part feelings, one part explosive action. And sure, there were a few explosions (mostly bad ones for the poor Athena, but don’t worry, it gets better), but if you thought all the feelings were done with last week, think again. After the Venari Ral almost immediately finds the Athena so Braka can give it a pummeling after kidnapping both Anisha Mir and Chancellor Ake, “Rubincon” is not a ship-disaster episode, it’s another beloved Trek trope: it’s really a trial episode.
Lugging Ake and Anisha back to the Athena‘s abandoned nacelle structure after it was captured last week (and in the meantime has promptly been vandalized by the raiders with plenty of very odd graffiti choices, if it’s meant to be their new home base), Braka sets the stage for his grand plan. He wants to put Ake on trial as the symbolic representation of the Federation’s failures over the course of the Burn, a hypocritical born-again believer in the system she once abandoned herself—but it’s not him that will be prosecuting her in front of hover-cams and a gathered holographic audience of Venari Ral member worlds; it’s Anisha. Who, even after she eventually calms down from her initial freakout aboard the Athena that she’s face-to-face with the Federation again, and that’s where Caleb’s been, has a lot of grudges to still bear.
While the trial is ongoing, back aboard the Athena‘s separated saucer—surviving seeming destruction by Braka’s fleet thanks to a clever trick by the Doctor that, unfortunately, knocks him out of service for the rest of the episode—Reno has to command the kids into becoming an effective team, considering they’re the only people who can find a way to disable Braka’s weaponized Omega molecule mines and save the Federation from complete destruction.
It’s in contrasting these two storylines that the true nature of the actual trial of “Rubincon” is on display. It’s not really an episode about putting the Federation on trial—for all the claims of a democratic process, it’s clear Braka has stacked the deck against Ake and has decided the Federation is doomed regardless of what she could say. Instead, it’s Ake, Anisha, and Braka himself who are really on trial. The episode isn’t about the Federation’s failures; those are well-trodden and acknowledged. It’s about this older vanguard, the defining adults of the show—the mother of our protagonist, his teacher, and the villain that changed his life—and the recognition that none of them are really up to the task of guiding the future of the galaxy.
It’s not on them anymore, and it shouldn’t be, because they’re all products of a galaxy broken by the Burn that have been left forever scarred, too burdened by the past to truly look to the future. Try as she might to rise to the occasion, Anisha can’t ever forgive Ake for tearing her family apart. Braka can never view the Federation as anything but the image he got of it as a child, with supply ships zipping through the skies above his colony to worlds that needed aid more, never stopping to help them. And Ake herself, as she puts it, is a victim of time, forever lingering on the death of her son in the Burn and then the death of the Starfleet lieutenant that led to her charging Anisha in the first place.
These past wounds have exacted too much a price on this generation of adults, and the longer Braka’s trial goes on, the more that it becomes clear that, try as they might, they’ll never get over them. There’s so much between these three people specifically that putting the power of changing the galaxy forever—detonating Braka’s minefield would kill billions and make a huge segment of the known galaxy unnavigable at FTL speeds for millions of years, effectively dooming interstellar society as it’s existed for a thousand-plus years—would inevitably lead to cataclysm.
The contrast with the kids back aboard the Athena then is staggering. Yes, Reno is there to help guide them along the way—it’s a star turn for Tig Notaro, and the most she’s been allowed to feel like a character beyond her acerbic wit, paralleling the seemingly hopeless isolated situation the Athena finds itself in with where we first met her, alone and scrounging to survive after the end of the Klingon War in Discovery season two. But over and over again, we see Caleb, Genesis, Sam, Darem, Tarima, and Jay-den put aside grudges and squabbles to come together as a proper team of cadets as they inch closer and closer to finding a way to save the day.
And they just can get over that stuff in a way that none of the adults in the room can (save for Reno, but chalk that down to her timey-wimey experience). Genesis and Sam get into a bit about feeling like they’re losing sight of their friendship after Sam’s big changes recently but then actually listen to each other and make up. The second Jay-den sees Caleb again, for the first time since he walked out of the ritual to symbolically join his Klingon family, he puts it aside to focus on supporting his friend. Darem gets a few testy moments (because he’s still a bit of dick, although a friendly one), but he implicitly trusts Genesis when Reno leaves her in charge. Caleb and Tarima navigate all their own emotional baggage to form a psychic unit, using Tarima’s powers and Caleb’s memory of his mother to track down Anisha’s location, all the while the cadets take position on Athena‘s bridge and work out the way to disrupt Braka’s mines.
Reno’s in the captain’s chair for most of it, sure, but arguably she needn’t be: it’s these kids we’ve seen growing and adapting who take charge; it’s them building on the connections they’ve all forged with each other to become a team of would-be Starfleet Officers. It’s that message Caleb takes when he transports over to the Athena‘s superstructure and buys the rest of his friends the time to co-opt Braka’s detonation signal and stabilize the Omega in his mines, delivering a speech to his mother, to Ake, to the galaxy, about how the friendships he’s forged at the academy have changed his life for the better.
It’s a bit of a predictable ending—everything’s saved just in time, Starfleet’s armada beams in, and all the Venari Ral are arrested, Braka included (not after both Anisha and, surprisingly, Ake get a punch in on him—again, these people will never get over all this!). And even the “children are our future” message is, too, but Starfleet Academy stuck the landing on it with grace, not just paying off the development we’ve seen these young heroes undergo over the course of this season but also by giving about as close as a damning statement as it could on the show’s older generation in the process.
Sure, Braka’s out of the picture (for now, and it’s not like he hasn’t broken out of Federation captivity before), and Ake and Anisha are amenable enough by the closing scene, for Caleb’s sake. But a torch has been passed thoroughly here—they may have started the show as anything but, but these kids are now Starfleet officer candidates through and through. The future is in great hands.
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