• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Spoilers Star Trek: Starfleet Academy 1x04 – “Vox in Excelso”

Rate the episode...

  • 10 - Excellent!

    Votes: 8 11.9%
  • 9

    Votes: 18 26.9%
  • 8

    Votes: 23 34.3%
  • 7

    Votes: 10 14.9%
  • 6

    Votes: 3 4.5%
  • 5

    Votes: 1 1.5%
  • 4

    Votes: 1 1.5%
  • 3

    Votes: 1 1.5%
  • 2

    Votes: 1 1.5%
  • 1 - Terrible.

    Votes: 1 1.5%

  • Total voters
    67
Temporal Accords. Starfleet time agents now never existed.
Danial's and his knowledge about the future shows they very much do.


Do expect a cop show to explain how the internal combustion engine works before embarking on a car chase?
Nope, but I do expect a cop show to explain why the cops have to get an old Dodge Aspen out of the police museum after an EMP goes off and knocks out all their modern vehicles.
 
One minor thing I kept wondering about: why are healers in Klingon society treated as inferior to warriors? Sure, I get the stereotype—everyone wants to be a warrior—but the outright dismissal of a healer felt odd. Personally, I think Klingon healers should be highly revered. After all, they’re the ones who stitch warriors back together so they can return to the battlefield. If that’s not honorable, I don’t know what is.
Even IRL, it's usually hard to find a Healer in most online multi-player Action/RPG games.

You can usually find somebody willing to play any role other than healer.
 
One minor thing I kept wondering about: why are healers in Klingon society treated as inferior to warriors? Sure, I get the stereotype—everyone wants to be a warrior—but the outright dismissal of a healer felt odd. Personally, I think Klingon healers should be highly revered. After all, they’re the ones who stitch warriors back together so they can return to the battlefield. If that’s not honorable, I don’t know what is.
Klingons have always been basically a one-dimensional caricature - this works in TOS when their presence just signals "technologically-equivalent hostile nation", and it works at times in TNG when they're just shorthand for "uneasy allies who are nonetheless able to be negotiated with", but IMO falls apart if a script treats them as anything other than allegorical.

This episode's fault IMO was in treating them entirely literally, because when we do that, it's incredibly hard to sympathise with them - we're dealing with a slaver empire (or, here, a former one that still wishes it was one). Thok's scene didn't sit right with me where she said that Jay'Den's parents screaming at him, pushing him around, breaking his shit, then abandoning him was simply their Love Language or whatever - that is what Thok would say and is perfectly in character, don't get me wrong, but the script seemed to trust that this was a beautiful thing and that Jay'Den had a duty (based on his species, I guess?) to accept this as proof of his parent's love, rather than have the option to say "actually, fuck that, I was treated unacceptably."

Again, definitely not a pitfall unique to this episode or show, of course.
 
On a TV show where you only have a matter of weeks to break and write a 10 episode season?

Doubt it.

Television writing is an entirely different beast than feature or novel writing. There simply isn’t the time to deep dive on anything when you have a schedule and budget to keep.
That's not how modern streaming writing works.
 
so what's the point of the nacelles if the Athena can go to warp without them

Why it only occured to me - we don't know if the Halo Drive or the Ventral Fin can go to warp without nacelles, only the saucer (and, presumably the Hilt if attached). They may have left the nacelles behind for the Halo and Fin to return to Earth, should things go badly.

This also explains Engineering being in such an odd position, as its Main Engineering for the saucers warp drive presumably.
 
This episode really felt special to me. I'm sitting here listening to the intro music to TNG thinking "Did I just watch a bottle episode?". I loved the juxtaposition of the debate segments, though the debate segments themselves were the only true flaw. Caleb, I'm not sure, didn't really feel like he learned anything from the encounter, but I could be wrong. Spitting facts, a debate does not make. I felt the emotional plots were on point, especially as someone who has suffered through similar situations as Jay-Den, and though the solution was easy to see, I didn't mind whatsoever. It felt like low-stakes, low-budget mid-season TNG.

Last weeks episode left a bit to be desired, but there's another thread for that now that I've had some time to sit on it.

Nahla remains the star of the show. She's out here bumbling around, drinking with the Wochak, and yelling QaPla'! like she's Jadzia Dax meeting Kor again after a long time. In the first few episodes, she reminded me strikingly of Janeway, but with softer edges. I'm beginning to view her as a combo of Janeway and Jadzia, she definitely has the free-spirited carefree attitude to make it work. The only difference is, Jadzia would have gotten so caught up in Klingon Culture, she would have missed the point until Worf pointed it out, not from lack of intelligence but just pure zeal lol I also feel like Wochak is going to be our Captain's love interest. He has the right fire to tame the free spirit :lol:

Overall, I give this episode a 10. First 10 of the streaming era, I'd say. It felt like Classic Trek done right, even if a bit unoriginal, and with a few plots you saw coming a mile away, but, if anything, that's Star Trek!


My favorite of the first four episodes. Almost a start-to-finish winner. I give it a 9.

The show isn't perfect by any longshot, but so far it's surprised me with how good it's been.

Definitely some flaws, but flaws I feel make the show better overall weirdly.

I’m pretty sure only a handful of you (if even that) would pronounce my name correctly. So I have no problem at all with there being multiple ways to say certain Klingon words. ;)

Haha, I felt that. My entire name is in Polish because we have some pretty strong family history. I've had SO many nicknames over the year. Ani (fron Anakin) via my former best friend, I managed to get people to call me Spock for like 2 months instead of butchering my name :lol:, and most recently everyone seems to like calling me Danny (My sister started that one haha). Way easier than trying to make sense of my name for most people. When I was a kid, people mispronounced my name as Worf, and I would get so mad because I wasn't into Star Trek nearly as much as I am now.

I'm kind of sad we didn't see at least one classic Bird of Prey in the spacebattle.

That also got me a little bit, but I wasn't upset with what we got. I loved the aesthetic of it, very 90s DS9/TNG. I was more sad they didn't have a Bird of Prey in the flashback immediately following them name dropping a bird of prey. It would have been beautifully poignant to see a BoP fly overhead as they left, but I feel as though it would have detracted from their point with showing the literal bird of prey.
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top