Star Trek: Starfleet Academy 1×06 review: “Come, Let’s Away”

After a few weeks of blissfully low-stakes episodes, Starfleet Academy decided to remind us that space is filled with danger, featuring Nus Braka, new aliens, and some tragic losses.

Star Trek doesn’t really do redshirts anymore, but Trekkies can spot an expendable crewman a mile away. A quick introduction to a very handsome Lieutenant Commander had me saying, “Nooo, don’t kill that guy!” And then the predictable happened.

Just because it’s predictable doesn’t mean it isn’t effective. Starfleet Academy has a way of shaking up old tropes to make them feel fresh. Our resident beautiful Betazoid woman, Tarima, is probably two episodes away from calling Caleb Imzadi, but we’re still suckers for watching the two of them falling in love. I was initially cheering at the beginning scene of the two hooking up. I want those two crazy kids to be happy! But as someone who watches with family and finds on-screen sex super awkward, it lasted about three minutes too long. (Sorry to my teenager.)

Tarima is an unusually powerful Betazoid, too. Most of her kindred are empaths, but she’s got more active psychic abilities, which her family ordinarily keeps under control with an implant. Who knew that was a Chekhov’s gun? All of us did! Yet the moment the implant comes off to let her save other students by brain-screaming them to death is still genuinely awesome.

Where her predecessor, Troi, was often forced into insulting plots on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Tarima gets to do more than suggest “this bad guy is hiding something.” Tarima gets to murder. That’s cool.

You also know that Nus Braka’s return is surely going to go very badly for everyone involved. Star Trek loves a good scheming villain who can out-think their good-guy foil. Shouldn’t Nahla Ake know better than to ask him for help? Unfortunately, she gets backed into a corner. A training mission goes wrong, and her students are held hostage by Furies. (Shocking? No, but…)

Initially, Nus Braka seems to be outwitted by Nahla Ake: by letting him rain insults over her, she finds a seed of his true motivations, and tries to use it against their mutual enemy. Her intellectual victory fulfills our expectations nicely.

By giving us a few predictable beats, this episode of Starfleet Academy lures us into a false sense of safety. We can stand losing a Lieutenant Commander to the Furies. We trust that everything else will turn out fine.

After all, everything has been going great at the Academy. There was real fighting in the first episode, but then we’ve had a diplomatic episode, a prank war, and some teenage rebellion. I’ve been enjoying the low, low stakes and getting attached to all the students.

I wasn’t expecting to lose one of those students: B’avi, a sassy Vulcan from the War College. He’s been antagonistic to the Starfleet students, but you still had to love him. We never knew how he became friends with a Romulan student. Now we may never get the chance because Nus Braka used the Furies to strike at Starfleet.

This was a well-timed action-oriented episode. Such a short season means we’re now over halfway to the ending, and it feels like we’ve gotten back to building up Nus Braka as a real threat. He’s still the only enduring connection we have to Caleb’s mother, after all, and he’s still terribly focused on relationships between mothers and sons.

I’ve got a bad feeling about where this will go with the Mir family–but in a fun, exciting, Star Trek sort of way. Khan killed Spock, and we still love to see him.

With the way that he keeps forming bonds with his former students, I keep getting this feeling that Caleb Mir is going to be one of Star Trek’s legendary captains. It makes sense he’d need to be formed by a legendary villain like Nus Braka. I loved this episode, and it has me excited to see how Braka’s arc concludes.

Author: SM Reine

Half-Tellarite SM Reine is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of fantasy. She’s been publishing since 2011 and a nerd since forever.

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