They still had cadets but they were trained on ships or at Starfleet Headquarters. It's the first class on this campus in a century.
Spoilers Star Trek: Starfleet Academy 1x08 – “The Life of the Stars”
We don't know how much respect they get from the populace at large. Ake's seeming "disrespect" of Kelrec is because if they are ever going to get out of the galactic dark age, the definition of "successful" is going to have to change and he is having a hard time changing with it.
This episode was OK, but not much more than that.
It's very realistic for the events of "Come, Let's Away" to have that kind of impact on a group of young adults who (with the possible exception of Caleb) have never really experienced anything like it before ... but realism doesn't always make good television.
I wanted the episode to have variety in pacing. And so far, I think this series does pretty well with pacing; I'm particularly glad that it doesn't fall into the "everything must be all excitement and fast-paced action all the time" thing that modern genre productions often tend toward. But this episode had the opposite problem: it started at a snail's pace and just stayed there. It stayed at not only the same pace, but more or less the same emotional level for an entire hour. And that just doesn't make for great viewing.
I don't mind Caleb and Tarima basically being Ryan Atwood and Marissa Cooper IN SPACE! — but I also don't want to watch that for any extended period of time. In addition, I said a couple of episodes ago that the writers were doing a decent job at not turning her into either a Damsel in Distress or a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but in this episode they leaned heavily into making her a Broken Bird, and that's just too much of a cliche to be interesting.
Spending almost an entire episode on one extended literary allusion was a choice, but I'm not sure it was a very good one.
Elaborating on that a little more: Allusions are best when they're just that — allusions. There is an art to making something like this work for all viewers. If you've read Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men" and pick up Joe Klein's "Primary Colors," you'll immediately see the parallels, but if you didn't read "All the King's Men," you won't even realize you're missing anything. "West Side Story" is "Romeo & Juliet," and "Ten Things I Hate About You" is "The Taming of the Shrew," but you don't need to know the source material to enjoy the work inspired by it — whereas in this episode, if you don't know the plot of "Our Town" or who George and Emily are, it's like listening to a conversation about people you've never met. And when a work does literary allusion well, it doesn't feel the need to constantly beat you over the head with it.
By far the stronger part of the episode was the plotline with Nahla and the Doctor accompanying Sam to Kasq. There were definitely things that piqued my interest. For example, I don't think we can really say how a hologram experiences time, but the time dilation effect around Kasq helps explain why the Makers seemed so impatient when they were talking with Sam earlier in the season. The thought that the Doc's reluctance to be seen as a mentor stemmed entirely from his experience in "Real Life" was a little anticlimactic, but it starts to make more sense when you view it as not being just about his Holodeck family, but about him knowing he's going to continue outliving everyone he ever cares about.
Also, the idea that Sam's glitches stem from not ever having had a childhood is an interesting one. But throwing all of that into the last few minutes of the episode, along with Nahla basically saying "Oh, by the way, her life got completely reset and the Doctor just spent 17 years being her dad and raising her from infancy to her first year of college" was a little jarring.
Exacerbating the flat pacing is the way the last several minutes were just Tarima reciting platitude after platitude, followed by Nahla reciting platitude after platitude. How many codas does one story need?
Overall, watching this episode was a little like listening to a Phillip Glass symphony: it was flat, somewhat repetitive, and lacking much of anything in the way of dynamic range.
I'm glad this series tries to explore the aftermath of major events and doesn't just employ the reset button, putting its characters through major trauma and then, a week later, acting like it never happened. But as aftermath episodes go, last week's was a lot better.
It's very realistic for the events of "Come, Let's Away" to have that kind of impact on a group of young adults who (with the possible exception of Caleb) have never really experienced anything like it before ... but realism doesn't always make good television.
I wanted the episode to have variety in pacing. And so far, I think this series does pretty well with pacing; I'm particularly glad that it doesn't fall into the "everything must be all excitement and fast-paced action all the time" thing that modern genre productions often tend toward. But this episode had the opposite problem: it started at a snail's pace and just stayed there. It stayed at not only the same pace, but more or less the same emotional level for an entire hour. And that just doesn't make for great viewing.
I don't mind Caleb and Tarima basically being Ryan Atwood and Marissa Cooper IN SPACE! — but I also don't want to watch that for any extended period of time. In addition, I said a couple of episodes ago that the writers were doing a decent job at not turning her into either a Damsel in Distress or a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but in this episode they leaned heavily into making her a Broken Bird, and that's just too much of a cliche to be interesting.
Spending almost an entire episode on one extended literary allusion was a choice, but I'm not sure it was a very good one.
Elaborating on that a little more: Allusions are best when they're just that — allusions. There is an art to making something like this work for all viewers. If you've read Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men" and pick up Joe Klein's "Primary Colors," you'll immediately see the parallels, but if you didn't read "All the King's Men," you won't even realize you're missing anything. "West Side Story" is "Romeo & Juliet," and "Ten Things I Hate About You" is "The Taming of the Shrew," but you don't need to know the source material to enjoy the work inspired by it — whereas in this episode, if you don't know the plot of "Our Town" or who George and Emily are, it's like listening to a conversation about people you've never met. And when a work does literary allusion well, it doesn't feel the need to constantly beat you over the head with it.
By far the stronger part of the episode was the plotline with Nahla and the Doctor accompanying Sam to Kasq. There were definitely things that piqued my interest. For example, I don't think we can really say how a hologram experiences time, but the time dilation effect around Kasq helps explain why the Makers seemed so impatient when they were talking with Sam earlier in the season. The thought that the Doc's reluctance to be seen as a mentor stemmed entirely from his experience in "Real Life" was a little anticlimactic, but it starts to make more sense when you view it as not being just about his Holodeck family, but about him knowing he's going to continue outliving everyone he ever cares about.
Also, the idea that Sam's glitches stem from not ever having had a childhood is an interesting one. But throwing all of that into the last few minutes of the episode, along with Nahla basically saying "Oh, by the way, her life got completely reset and the Doctor just spent 17 years being her dad and raising her from infancy to her first year of college" was a little jarring.
Exacerbating the flat pacing is the way the last several minutes were just Tarima reciting platitude after platitude, followed by Nahla reciting platitude after platitude. How many codas does one story need?
Overall, watching this episode was a little like listening to a Phillip Glass symphony: it was flat, somewhat repetitive, and lacking much of anything in the way of dynamic range.
I'm glad this series tries to explore the aftermath of major events and doesn't just employ the reset button, putting its characters through major trauma and then, a week later, acting like it never happened. But as aftermath episodes go, last week's was a lot better.
It was a made-up class, nothing they chose or knew about, so they could get unannounced treatment
I feel like I keep saying the same thing over and over again, but this episode is like good idea, somewhat flawed presentation.
Our Town is an okay framing, especially with what they wanted to show with the Doctor, but it's really used in a way that doesn't feel like it's perfectly there. It's like taking the Cliff Notes (or I guess ChatGPT summary) of the play and shoehorning in the themes of being invested in the moments of life onto the idea of the episode rather than it feeling organic.
I get that SAM is the full of life character, but I don't get why she would connect with Our Town specifically. Even if we stuck to English language plays in the American canon that I guess are in the public domain so CBS didn't have to buy any rights, there so many options. It's like the writers made her pick the play because they wanted to write around it.
Earlier in the season I had questions about SAM and hoped they'd explain her weird background and I'm glad they did see my questions coming in their season planning. I'm mostly satisfied, but I don't get why they'd choose this specific age and time of life for her either. Maybe the Kasqians don't have a concept of childhood so they didn't bother... fine. But why arbitrarily pick 17? Why have her join the Academy other than the show is called Starfleet Academy and not Starfleet Diplomacy or whatever. Or why not have her live as an actual child and grow up among organics to see if organics would mistreat her?
Like at least the gap in her knowledge was so they could do a Doctor episode, so I get that... but I'm still not really satisfied with why they chose to send her off into the world like this in the first place. They said they spend 200 years designing her... but I would have liked to see what came out of that time.
The Academy side of things was... just fine I guess. There isn't enough time for any of this to be traumatic, especially since I as an audience member don't care about a random character dying so I'm not sure why the students care other than that's what is expected to happen to the characters. You would have thought that first episode with being invaded and almost dying would have been more traumatic, but they gloss over all that like nothing happened.
And that just makes it worse in terms of Tarima and her trauma which I really don't understand. Perhaps I'm dense but it's not like Picard being assimilated or Nog losing her leg, at least not to me as a simple audience member, so it's hard to connect with her going through her prescribed drunken rebellious phase before she "gets over it" and learns her lesson from reading Our Town. I don't even know why she couldn't just visit her War College friends because they literally share the same campus. Is this Harry Potter rules where schools are not allowed to ever mix on penalty of death? (I've never watched Harry Potter but I assume that's how it works).
What makes it worse is that the episode is an hour long, so it's not even a matter of not having enough time to flesh things out. It's just that the characters just feel like going through the motions, so it really does feel like I'm watching a table read of a script rather than being immersed in a TV show.
Like most of the episodes, I don't necessarily dislike this one but it's hard to like it as well. Even the revelation about the Doctor is fine, but then they just montage away meet of the story with lines from Our Town... while we spend 5 minutes watching drunk Tarima deal with Caleb. I dunno... I feel like if they just made it a one hour SAM episode with Tarima as the b story, maybe it would have been better. But we'll never know.
Some pointless thoughts:
I still don't understand how students can just show up for a class and have no idea what it is. Apparently the class also just ends arbitrarily and I guess Tilly will give them an A? Yes I know the class isn't the point and this was to trick them into therapy or whatever, but how does that actually work within the context of running a school?
Like I said before, sometimes this feels like a college, other times it feels like a high school where everyone takes the same class and can have Breakfast Club-like adventures together. Yes, I should just stop trying to figure out how the school actually works.
Oh during one of the "classes" there was an extra no-name student sitting in the back. Why was she there at all? Did she get roped into trauma class because no one would talk to her or remember her name?
I know this Doctor episode is probably one of the more famous ones, but I won't forget the time that the Doctor took over Seven's body and started drinking and getting horny.
I'm assuming no one will do a follow up on that any time soon.
I'm going to assume that the people who are wearing uniforms without the red/gold/blue are undeclared majors, but I still don't know what that means... but also it doesn't seem important.
Anyway, I feel like the show is just on the cusp of being enjoyable for me but it can't quite get there. It's just missing something that would elevate it for me.
Our Town is an okay framing, especially with what they wanted to show with the Doctor, but it's really used in a way that doesn't feel like it's perfectly there. It's like taking the Cliff Notes (or I guess ChatGPT summary) of the play and shoehorning in the themes of being invested in the moments of life onto the idea of the episode rather than it feeling organic.
I get that SAM is the full of life character, but I don't get why she would connect with Our Town specifically. Even if we stuck to English language plays in the American canon that I guess are in the public domain so CBS didn't have to buy any rights, there so many options. It's like the writers made her pick the play because they wanted to write around it.
Earlier in the season I had questions about SAM and hoped they'd explain her weird background and I'm glad they did see my questions coming in their season planning. I'm mostly satisfied, but I don't get why they'd choose this specific age and time of life for her either. Maybe the Kasqians don't have a concept of childhood so they didn't bother... fine. But why arbitrarily pick 17? Why have her join the Academy other than the show is called Starfleet Academy and not Starfleet Diplomacy or whatever. Or why not have her live as an actual child and grow up among organics to see if organics would mistreat her?
Like at least the gap in her knowledge was so they could do a Doctor episode, so I get that... but I'm still not really satisfied with why they chose to send her off into the world like this in the first place. They said they spend 200 years designing her... but I would have liked to see what came out of that time.
The Academy side of things was... just fine I guess. There isn't enough time for any of this to be traumatic, especially since I as an audience member don't care about a random character dying so I'm not sure why the students care other than that's what is expected to happen to the characters. You would have thought that first episode with being invaded and almost dying would have been more traumatic, but they gloss over all that like nothing happened.
And that just makes it worse in terms of Tarima and her trauma which I really don't understand. Perhaps I'm dense but it's not like Picard being assimilated or Nog losing her leg, at least not to me as a simple audience member, so it's hard to connect with her going through her prescribed drunken rebellious phase before she "gets over it" and learns her lesson from reading Our Town. I don't even know why she couldn't just visit her War College friends because they literally share the same campus. Is this Harry Potter rules where schools are not allowed to ever mix on penalty of death? (I've never watched Harry Potter but I assume that's how it works).
What makes it worse is that the episode is an hour long, so it's not even a matter of not having enough time to flesh things out. It's just that the characters just feel like going through the motions, so it really does feel like I'm watching a table read of a script rather than being immersed in a TV show.
Like most of the episodes, I don't necessarily dislike this one but it's hard to like it as well. Even the revelation about the Doctor is fine, but then they just montage away meet of the story with lines from Our Town... while we spend 5 minutes watching drunk Tarima deal with Caleb. I dunno... I feel like if they just made it a one hour SAM episode with Tarima as the b story, maybe it would have been better. But we'll never know.
Some pointless thoughts:
I still don't understand how students can just show up for a class and have no idea what it is. Apparently the class also just ends arbitrarily and I guess Tilly will give them an A? Yes I know the class isn't the point and this was to trick them into therapy or whatever, but how does that actually work within the context of running a school?
Like I said before, sometimes this feels like a college, other times it feels like a high school where everyone takes the same class and can have Breakfast Club-like adventures together. Yes, I should just stop trying to figure out how the school actually works.
Oh during one of the "classes" there was an extra no-name student sitting in the back. Why was she there at all? Did she get roped into trauma class because no one would talk to her or remember her name?
I know this Doctor episode is probably one of the more famous ones, but I won't forget the time that the Doctor took over Seven's body and started drinking and getting horny.
I'm assuming no one will do a follow up on that any time soon.
I'm going to assume that the people who are wearing uniforms without the red/gold/blue are undeclared majors, but I still don't know what that means... but also it doesn't seem important.
Anyway, I feel like the show is just on the cusp of being enjoyable for me but it can't quite get there. It's just missing something that would elevate it for me.
No, you see the Chancellor is kind of dorky and overly likes tea,
And they have dark uniforms.
So they're clearly evil.
Why didn't the Kasqians introduce SAM to that class of cadets then?
(I mean obviously because that's the point of this show)
Yes, but presumably that meant they were taken out of their actual classes... which they have to catch up with now? It's just funny to think about how that would work in real life.
It may not have benefitted them at the time or the secrecy of Headquarters made the observations they wanted to do difficult if not impossible.
Blinks in confusion in Space Cadet.
Yeah, I'm unconvinced the War College is any worse than our heroes given our heroes are just as jerkish.
If they were in a bridge simulation, presumably Reno could simply assign one of them to the simulated command role instead of just sitting there and haranguing them about how much they suck. That actually doesn't make much sense as a method of selling their trauma (though I'm willing to let it slide given the other things the episode does well).
They didn't because Sam wasn't created yet. Sam was only activated 4 months before the series starts.
Sure, but I mean why would you send someone to the academy at all? Other than because the show is called Starfleet Academy? I'll just handwave it since it doesn't actually matter. lol
They wear all black for some reason, therefore they are evil. lol
Same reason why the Founders did with the Changeling infants, Tan Ru's originators leading to Nomad, etc.
Stares in Luke Skywalker.
I mean Starfleet Academy as a series probably didn't exist then so sure. Since the Kasq are an invention of the writers though, it could have happened at any time.
Like I said, it'd make sense if they sent an actual child. But to decide to make SAM a teenager instead seems to be an active choice.
Kylo Ren is Luke's fault so...
Why one and not the other? Children are treated very distantly in the Federation so it wouldn't serve their purpose at all.
I mean, Kylo already fell to Snoke so no.
Oh — forgot about this.
There was a line in this episode that I thought was going to be significant, but that the writers immediately undercut.
When Tarima said "I'm not a mindreader," I had two thoughts in pretty quick succession. The first was that it was going to be literally true, and that she was about to reveal that her new inhibitor suppresses her abilities to the point where she isn't even capable of telepathy anymore. This would be a pretty interesting thing to watch her deal with (and yes, I know TNG covered that ground with Troi in "The Loss," but I think SFA could have done it better).
The second was she was actually making a subtle promise to Caleb. She didn't say "I can't read minds," she said "I'm not a mindreader." You could easily read that as Tarima saying "I know how violated you felt when I accidentally saw that moment from your childhood that you've never told anyone about, so I'm promising you that I will never do that again without your permission."
And then they just had her go "LOL, just kidding, I AM a mindreader," and a potentially meaningful moment became just a one-off joke.
There was a line in this episode that I thought was going to be significant, but that the writers immediately undercut.
When Tarima said "I'm not a mindreader," I had two thoughts in pretty quick succession. The first was that it was going to be literally true, and that she was about to reveal that her new inhibitor suppresses her abilities to the point where she isn't even capable of telepathy anymore. This would be a pretty interesting thing to watch her deal with (and yes, I know TNG covered that ground with Troi in "The Loss," but I think SFA could have done it better).
The second was she was actually making a subtle promise to Caleb. She didn't say "I can't read minds," she said "I'm not a mindreader." You could easily read that as Tarima saying "I know how violated you felt when I accidentally saw that moment from your childhood that you've never told anyone about, so I'm promising you that I will never do that again without your permission."
And then they just had her go "LOL, just kidding, I AM a mindreader," and a potentially meaningful moment became just a one-off joke.
People making too literal comments as jokes?
I am shocked, shocked, I say. I am shocked and enraged.
Yes, and we're all showing it.*
I am shocked, shocked, I say. I am shocked and enraged.
Yes, and we're all showing it.*
I was also reminded that the Doctor basically abandoned his family and his "child" in that time dilation planet without any follow up and became a deadbeat dad. Maybe shouldn't have brought that episode up. lol
If the point is to see how the Federation operates and you're going to send someone with no knowledge or bias whatsoever, a child makes as much sense as a teenager with no memories of being a child.
Hey, he fell because Luke was about to murder him in his sleep. lol
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