A Bold, Brutal Sixth Episode Pushes Starfleet Academy Into Prestige Trek Territory

Starfleet Academy delivers its most intense episode yet as the cadets face deadly new threats and Captain Ake is outplayed by a familiar foe in the sixth episode.

SPOILER ALERT!

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s sixth episode, “Come, Let’s Away,” pits the cadets against a new enemy, Captain Ake against a very familiar enemy, and gives the fledgling series its strongest episode yet.

In the episode, the cadets from Starfleet Academy team up with those from the War College for a test away mission on a derelict starship, the USS Miyazaki. The ship, located in a ship graveyard, is over 100 years old and once housed an experimental singularity warp drive that exploded, killing the entire crew. In recent years, the War College has been using it as a test bed for cadets.

But this time, the first away team finds alien/humanoid creatures called Furies waiting for them. When the Furies kill their teacher, Lt. Commander Tomov, the cadets—Caleb, Jay-Den, SAM, Kyle, and B’Avi—must stay alive with their only connection to the Athena being a telepathic link between Caleb and Tarima.

Meanwhile, Captain Ake, Admiral Vance, and Commander Kelrec are forced to reach out to space pirate Nus Braka for help in learning how to defeat the Furies.

As Ake wriggles under Braka’s thumb, the Athena crew and the remaining cadets work to find a way to rescue the away team on the Miyazaki by restarting the ship’s singularity drive.

In the end, Ake believes she has outmaneuvered Braka, only to discover he has outmaneuvered her—and Starfleet. He was behind the Furies all along. His plan results in the disabling of the USS Sargasso, the raiding of a high‑security Federation starbase, and the utter embarrassment of Ake and Vance. Worse still: B’Avi is killed, Tarima—having torn out her implant to disable the Furies—is in critical condition, SAM appears badly injured, Kyle is injured, there are uncounted dead on the raided J19 starbase, and the cadets (and their Starfleet instructors) are shaken to their core.

• This episode is easily one of the best—if not the best—of the NuTrek era (excepting Picard Season Three). This is what Starfleet Academy should’ve been from episode one. Sure, there was a need to build to this, but this episode was firing on all Trek cylinders.

• Holly Hunter gives an award‑worthy performance as Ake. With Braka needling her about her dead son and now potentially dead “adopted son” (Caleb), the captain takes it all in, trying to catch Braka in a slip‑up. Little does she know, he’s three steps ahead of her.

• The Furies/Miyazaki plot feels like it may have been trimmed down. I almost expected the Furies—with their strange, temporal‑looking movement—to turn out to be the century‑old Starfleet crew. That never materialized, and the Furies were simply left dead on the old starship.

  

• We mentioned Holly Hunter, but everyone delivered their best work this episode. The series is well‑cast with quality actors across the board. We see the Doctor being his old self, while small touches—like the Jay-Den/Kyle relationship—are hinted at without ever overshadowing the plot or action. Even the slightly risqué scenes between Caleb and Tarima at the episode’s start end up paying off in a major way by the finale.

• Using the comic book about the Miyazaki was cool—but why were the crew in TOS uniforms? That era was roughly 700 years before the Miyazaki’s final mission, likely during the Burn era.

• The story mirrors the Marvel Starfleet Academy comic to a small degree—one of their cadets is killed early on, shocking the others. In that case, it was a Klingon. It’s too bad about B’Avi; I liked the character, and this episode gave Caleb and B’Avi an almost Kirk/Spock dynamic.

• This episode will certainly have a major impact—not only on the cadets, but especially on Captain Ake and the Federation. The anger is visible, particularly from Admiral Vance. It seems the Federation and Starfleet thought they could simply reemerge from the Burn and find the same galaxy waiting for them. That doesn’t seem to be the case. This is a darker, angrier galaxy with old battle lines erased and strange new alliances like the Venari Ral and the Emerald Chain from Discovery.

• If this episode is any indication, Starfleet Academy is getting good. It would be a huge setback if the next episode forgets all this and returns to the pranks and hijinks of earlier installments.

• The Sisko episode last week is a nice counterpoint. This new galaxy needs a Sisko‑like commander—or maybe someone who was there during the Dominion War (i.e., Dax).

• The modern dialogue continues here and is slightly less annoying, but still feels inappropriate at times.

• Captain Ake had her boots on the whole episode. Just sayin’.