By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 43 seconds ago

Since Starfleet Academy first began, haters have lobbed one accusation at it above all others: “it doesn’t feel like Star Trek.” Older critics often lament surface-level issues with the show, including its poor humor and its reliance on distractingly modern slang. But to these veteran fans, the real structural issue with this new spinoff is that it feels so glaringly different than the shows (like The Next Generation and Voyager) that came before.

Recently, though, Starfleet Academy has been addressing this problem by directly calling back to earlier Trek, including dedicating an entire episode to the mystery of what happened to Sisko after Deep Space Nine. Now, the most recent episode (“The Life Of The Stars”) calls back to two of Voyager’s best episodes while providing us with plenty of familiar franchise tropes. The result is an episode that decently channels classic Trek but fails to deliver on its full potential. 

Unpacking Trauma

 “Life of the Stars” is a follow-up to “Come, Let’s Away,” and it’s all about our Starfleet Academy cadets unpacking the trauma of that earlier episode. In that story, some of our heroes were ambushed by the Furies, fearsome foes who ultimately killed multiple members of the War College. Chancellor Ahke calls in Nus Braka for help, and Tarima weaponizes her telepathy, but both efforts go away: Braka destroys a Starfleet ship and ransacks a Starbase while Tarima blows her mind, landing herself in a coma that required treatment on her homeworld of Betazed.

Believe it or not, “unpacking trauma” is my lowkey favorite Star Trek episode genre. The stories are predictably good, like the TNG episode “Family,” helping Picard work through his time (as seen in “The Best of Both Worlds”) as the ruthless leader of the Borg. Over on DS9, “It’s Only A Paper Moon” explored how Nog dealt with the trauma of what happened in “The Siege of AR-558,” an episode in which he lost a leg.

Done well, this kind of story makes for great Star Trek, but this Starfleet Academy episode delivers mixed results. It has some great highs, including a killer, dramatic performance from Robert Picardo and the triumphant return of Sylvia Tilly. But “Life of the Stars” drops the ball by focusing so much on its ensemble that its central cadets (namely, SAM and Tarima) don’t get enough screentime or development. 

The Doctor Gets Serious

Perhaps the most interesting thing about “Life of the Stars” is that it permanently intertwines the lives of the Doctor and SAM. She’s the holographic girl who is suddenly on the fritz, and the Doctor travels with her back to her homeworld for repairs. There, he discovers that her glitch is emotional in nature (she’s stuck in a trauma loop, in case you thought the episode was being too subtle), and he volunteers to parent SAM, raising her for the equivalent of 17 years on her homeworld. But that’s only two weeks back at the academy, which is a callback to “Blink of an Eye,” the Voyager episode where three years on a planet is only about three minutes back on the ship.

In “Blink of an Eye,” the Doctor adopted a son, and he later lamented that, thanks to the time dilation effects, his kid is long since dead. In “Real Life,” the Doctor used the holodeck to simulate having a family, and he makes the program so realistic that he loses his holographic daughter to a freak sports accident. “Life of the Stars” basically mashes these plots together: after revealing that he hesitated to bond with SAM because she reminded him of his dead daughter, the Doctor agrees to raise her as a father; 17 years will pass on SAM’s planet while only two weeks pass at Starfleet Academy.

This plot is mostly an excuse to let Robert Picard do some serious acting, and this comedic actor does an amazing job with the dramatic material. Plus, the episode finally answers why the Doctor has had a bug up his holographic butt about SAM all season. However, this focus on the Doctor comes at a cost: SAM is either shut down or mind-controlled for most of the episode, which feels that much weirder considering how much new lore this episode is giving her.

The Girls Are Back In Town

“Life of the Stars” features the long-awaited return of Sylvia Tilly, a fan-favorite Discovery character that most of us originally assumed would be a regular on Starfleet Academy. She is here to help our cadets (no point in guessing) unpack their trauma, and at the chancellor’s suggestion, she is doing so in the craziest possible way: by making them take a theater class. They end up studying “Our Town,” and with all the subtlety of Quark’s sweater, the play becomes a metaphor for returning student Tarima to process her feelings about being transferred out of the War College and into Starfleet Academy after the injuries she sustained in “Come, Let’s Away.”

The results on both ladies’ returns were mixed: while it is always great to see Sylvia Tilly, she barely feels like herself, and she isn’t afraid to get mildly combative with students. She cheerfully tells the class that she doesn’t care if they all fail, and she practically gets into a verbal sparring match with Tarima. Granted, these are both acts of tough love, and her methods get results, but the woman taking these actions rarely feels like the adorkable Tilly we all fell in love with back on Discovery.

As for Tarima, she is a victim of performer’s success: actor Zoë Steiner does an excellent job playing a recently traumatized cadet, but thanks to the script, that means she spends most of her time in a dull stupor punctuated only by bouts of anger and drunkenness. Is this realistic for someone who narrowly survived an attack that killed multiple colleagues? Sure. But it’s not very engaging to watch, and unlike Patrick Stewart in “Family” or Robert Picardo in this very episode, Tarima never gets a satisfyingly cathartic release of her inner pain, and we have to settle for her having a light bulb moment while reciting an ancient play.

The Final Verdict? Good, Not Great

If it sounds like I’m nitpicking, that’s because I am: “Life of the Stars” is a mostly solid episode, and it’s notably better than the early episodes of Starfleet Academy. The show continues to improve, and as usual, spending less time on forced comedy has made the episode stronger. It also features the return of Sylvia Tilly, deep lore for the Doctor, and even updates on Caleb and Tarima, the couple who have quickly become the hottest Star Trek pairing since Riker and Troi.

But we really just get Tilly in name only here, and the Doctor’s cool new lore comes at the expense of sidelining SAM. The Caleb and Tarima stuff remains very cute, but Tarima mostly spends the episode in a boring daze before snapping out of it due to a sleepy inspirational speech. It all adds up to an episode that’s good, not great, and one that showcases both the potential of Starfleet Academy and how much the show fails to reach that potential.

Once again, Starfleet Academy is getting better, slowly clawing its way back from its negative reputation at a snail’s pace (and not even a warp snail). One episode at a time, it’s channeling more classic Star Trek than ever before. The question is, will any Trekkies still be watching by the time this show crawls past the finish line?