Spoilers Star Trek: Starfleet Academy 1x01 – “Kids These Days”

[Michael]

The interesting thing I find about Kerrice Brooks is she's most well known as a dancer (was a background dancer for Kanye West and Billie Eilish in the past), which isn't something you'd think would work well with SAM's characterization. I'm sure they'll find a way to work it in eventually, though.

Considering the first trailer that came out for the show featured her dancing in one of the quarters I’d say that’s a pretty good bet.

But also, how can she be a professional dancer when she’s clearly a “fat woman”?

 

[BigJake]

Okay, I gave this another viewing and I have to say, liked it much better the second time around. So much better that I upped my rating to a 7/10.

I still think the overreliance on callbacks is a thing, but it's also telling a story that's more than the sum of those parts, and it's a reasonably well-structured story in which everyone's motives and the basic moving parts make sense.

I'm also appreciating the characters much more:

• Yes, the EMH's appearance is leaning very heavily on nostalgia, and yes, the "aging subroutine" thing to explain why Picardo looks so different is probably a sign that a new, different character was warranted. That said, of course Picardo is still great. So is Holly Hunter as Nahla Ake, for all that "Lanthanite" and/or "part Lanthanite" is plainly becoming another cheat code for explaining older actors in this role or that one.
• Caleb works better than I was giving him credit for originally (and holy crap that guy is built), the early going of the odd-couple dynamic with Darem does work and is fun (I got a good laugh out of "Asshole Number One to Asshole Number Two"), and Genesis and Jay-Den and SAM are all fun. (I don't know why Genesis has a name that sounds like it came out of a Stripper Name Generator? But she's instantly likeable. All of them are.) Lura Thok is just as fun as she was the first time around.
• (Oh, and I completely missed Becky Lynch's bit part on the first go-round. Nifty!)
• Although Nus Braka may be a bit of a two-dimensional mustache twirler, I do withdraw my indictment of him being a mash-up of two earlier characters. He's his own villain. I don't know that he's a particularly compelling one, but Paul Giamatti certainly makes him as memorable as anyone could hope to do with the very little screen time he has to work with.

Still flawed, but it's significantly more effective than I was at first giving it credit for.