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Spoilers Star Trek: Starfleet Academy 1x08 – “The Life of the Stars”

Rate the episode...

  • 10 - Excellent!

    Votes: 28 22.6%
  • 9

    Votes: 35 28.2%
  • 8

    Votes: 17 13.7%
  • 7

    Votes: 11 8.9%
  • 6

    Votes: 5 4.0%
  • 5

    Votes: 8 6.5%
  • 4

    Votes: 3 2.4%
  • 3

    Votes: 2 1.6%
  • 2

    Votes: 6 4.8%
  • 1 - Terrible.

    Votes: 9 7.3%

  • Total voters
    124
So a couple of weeks in kasq (sp?), equates to ~15 years in ‘the real world’ outside of the temporal fold. That could be a hell of a place for training for long lived races. Go spend a day in Kasq studying xenolinguistics or alien martial arts or whatever and return to ‘real space’ with a year of experience and training. You’d be a year older, despite ‘only being gone for a day’ to your friends outside of the temporal fold, so it’s not quite as magical as Matrix-style skill uploading, ‘I know kung fu!’ But still pretty cool.
 
There is a lot wrong with this episode, but it’s essentially extremely boring.

When they set off for kasq I was hoping to see a bit of the holo planet but no, academy sets “to put people at ease”. Weren’t they using wall screens to avoid this kind of necessities?

The doctor changes idea suddenlly. Trauma just decides to be better. Right.

3.
 
Sure, basically in that first episode where they're at the academy they montage it away. But it's not really clear how long classes last, the curriculum, and so on. It's a school where they barely show them being students unless it's for special classes that specifically just for them. In episode 9 they also basically do a time skip too.
I disagree. “How long the classes last”? Why would I care about that? I’m not watching this to know how exactly a 32nd century space academy works or analyze if it’s portrayed like I would expect from a school a thousand years in the future. “They barely show them being students”? They only ever show them as students. They are not only students when they are shown in classes. They are also shown as students when they fraternize with other students, make friends, learn about different perspectives, learn to share rooms with people they don’t like, get in trouble for being late or untidy … all that stuff that’s part of the experience of being a student. I will agree with you that it would be nice to put a bit more focus on showing them take interesting classes that tie into the episode’s storylines, but at the same time I feel they’ve shown plenty of different classes and the focus is pretty clearly on the life of students and all that entails.

The doctor changes idea suddenlly. Trauma just decides to be better. Right.
Well, no. If you rewatch the episode you’ll notice that SAM, you know, dies. That’s what changes him.
 
Star Trek fans before Academy aired: "Why the $*##! are they setting it at a school? How boring. They won't ever go anywhere and how can there be any Star Trek action!"

Star Trek fans after Academy has aired: "Why the absolute f*&**!!!!!!! are they not studying? They're students and should be in school!"
Reminds me of something I picked up on recently. Back before Christmas when the preview clip from the premiere was released showing the Athena getting attacked, many complained "this is why it's so stupid for the Academy to double as a starship, they're recklessly endangering their entire Cadet class!" Yet, as the season has aired and the Athena has stayed parked in San Francisco for the most part, we're getting complaints like "we should be seeing them travel more often. What's the point in the Academy doubling as a starship if they never go anywhere?"

Star Trek Fandom will complain about a current show no matter what.
 
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Star Trek Fandom will complain about a current show no matter what.
Well yeah. Because at this point Star Trek still has two or more viewers and they're not going to agree on everything.

Personally I thought making the Academy a ship solves the 'an academy is not a place that generates interesting Star Trek stories' problem in a way that works with the backstory that Starfleet had been exiled to spaceships for dozens of years.

I think that stories where the cadets are never in danger are the best match for the premise, and we've been getting a lot of them. But stories where the cadets fly into space and have adventures are the best match for Star Trek, for obvious reasons, and tend to be the highest rated episodes.
 
The kids on BTVS spent minimal screen time in class, while receiving almost no instruction.

That show is the gold standard, so case closed.
 
I watched 7/8/9 yesterday and something about this episode I was wondering about.

First off, if I had a nickle for every tv show I watched that put on the play "Our Town" I'd have 15 cents. I remember a Growing Pains episode where it was performed and it was also on My So Called Life.

But my question. What's with that random female student in the theater class with our 'regular characters'?

She was in the back row in the 2nd to last theater class and seemed to be in the front row off to the end in the last actual theater class.

Never got addressed or talked by Tilly. Never said anything even when Tilly had made a point to talk to every single person in the room.

Is this some kind of observer the audience is being shown, but the characters in the show are unable to see/acknowledge?
 
But my question. What's with that random female student in the theater class with our 'regular characters'?

She was in the back row in the 2nd to last theater class and seemed to be in the front row off to the end in the last actual theater class.

Never got addressed or talked by Tilly. Never said anything even when Tilly had made a point to talk to every single person in the room
That is May Travisweather.
 
Really, how many shows about high school or college kids actually show the characters attending classes?

In general, American tv series don't seem to be comfortable writing about college (as opposed to high school), at least once they work through the three stock plots: not getting along with your roommate in the dorms, an evil fraternity/sorority, an ill-advised affair with a professor.

Note that Buffy and Smallville only got one season out of their heroes' college years, and that Veronica Mars planned to skip over the rest of her college experience had the show been renewed for another season.

Off the top of my head, only Felicity was expressly about going to college for its entire run. Can't remember how much time she actually spent in classes. *

(I dimly remember reading somewhere that TV networks are leery of shows about college because, unlike high school, it's not a universal rite of passage shared by pretty much every tv viewer.)

* There also The Paper Chase, but that was about law school.
 
There was the Paper Chase ( based on the film) and the short-lived Delta House (based on Animal House). I think Dobie went to college in the later seasons of the Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
 
There was the Paper Chase ( based on the film) and the short-lived Delta House (based on Animal House). I think Dobie went to college in the later seasons of the Many Loves of Dobie Gillis

I thought of The Paper Chase (see footnote in my post), although that was technically law school, not undergraduate studies.

Or so I recall.
 
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