Star Trek: Starfleet Academy 1×08 review: “The Life of the Stars”

This week, our freshman class at the Academy study a play in order to cope with trauma–and SAM gets help with her glitches.

My most-watched Trek show is Voyager, a 90s contemporary to Star Trek: Deep Space 9 where their ship gets stranded in the Delta quadrant. It’s seven seasons of horny, gonzo, and often-affecting space drama that people found polarizing at the time, very much like reactions to Starfleet Academy now.

There are a couple of episodes of Voyager I skip whenever I watch it. One of them features alien duplicates of the ship and crew meeting their slow, untimely deaths, since it’s extremely bleak and I don’t like feeling that sad. “Course: Oblivion” is nonetheless an extremely bold narrative maneuver, co-written by Bryan Fuller, later known for showrunning multiple projects about death. “Course: Oblivion” might even be one of the better episodes of the series. But, again: sad.

This episode of Starfleet Academy takes us back to another sad episode I skip. In “Real Life,” the Doctor explores becoming a fuller person by having a holographic family. Unfortunately, his hologram daughter gets injured and dies. He initially tries to avoid her so that he won’t have to feel the grief, but he eventually goes back to move through the experience with them.

“Real Life” aired twenty-six years ago, but to the Doctor on Starfleet Academy, it’s been about nine hundred years. He’s still not over it.

Relatable, Doctor. Very relatable.

Ultimately, “The Life of the Stars” is about learning to deal with your feelings so that you can heal and keep moving. Like “Real Life,” it’s profound… sometimes. Sometimes it gets a little bit annoying.

While the Doctor and Nahla Ake are taking our beloved SAM to her home planet for TLC, the rest of the class remains in San Francisco to keep processing the trauma of episodes past. Sylvia Tilly of Star Trek: Discovery comes around to help them out with theater class.

I found this plot to be a bit frustrating. The amount of time we spent with a messy drunk Tarima got on my nerves. I’m sorry, Tarima. I love you, but I am almost forty, and I am simply not interested in sitting through that kind of crash-out these days.

Giving the youths of Starfleet Academy credit for surviving the various Star Trek versions of real-life traumas has been a persistent theme on the show. I support it. As older adults, we need to create space for our kids to cope with all The Horrors–like mass violence, deportations, and growing up through a pandemic. That said, we’ve already done this tango with Caleb and crew.

As impatient as I felt with Tarima, I felt an equally opposite amount of affection for SAM’s journey home.

SAM has been desperately reaching for the Doctor as a mentor. He’s been desperately leaning away. Now we know why: The Doctor sees SAM like his late daughter, and he’s afraid of being attached again. He only realizes this when SAM’s makers have diagnosed her as unfixable. He can’t bring himself to hold her hand when she’s losing herself.

The only way they can “fix” SAM is to remake her from scratch, starting her from infancy. The Doctor volunteers to raise her and teach the resilience she needs for emotional processing post-trauma as part of Starfleet. The montage where the Doctor is parenting the various (extremely adorable) actors who play young SAM got me good. I messy cried.

It’s amazing that Starfleet Academy could be so good and terrible for me all in the same episode, but a fondness for complex, flawed things is the reason I love Star Trek: Voyager so much. If I’m not having big emotions, why am I even committing hours to watching a thing?

This is ultimately a good Trek episode, and theater kids will probably enjoy Tilly’s class more than I did. I did love seeing Sylvia Tilly again. It’s a great coda to a great episode of Voyager, filled with compassion for the difficulties our youth are facing in and out of the science fiction milieu.

The final episodes of Starfleet Academy season one will air on Paramount+ March 5th and March 12th.

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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