‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ Episode 6 Recap – Things Are Getting Serious

Wait, what happened to Star Trek: Starfleet Academy? I was more on board with this show than most to begin with, but I felt as though I had a fairly good grasp of what it was. But Episode 6, “Come, Let’s Away”, opens up with a surprising sex scene – chaste by most standards, but not really by those of this show – and then proceeds into a simulated away mission that quickly turns out to be much more real than anyone imagined. People die. Others end up in comas. It’s all very serious and not at all the jovial learning experience that most of these episodes have been.

And that’s good, right? I think it is, anyway. In its broad strokes, there’s a bit of predictability here. Nus Braka returns for the first time since the premiere, in the guise of a reluctant potential ally, and while you can tell he’s going to pull a fast one, you probably don’t anticipate quite how villainous he ends up being (he even gets a monologue). And there’s a whole point about Tarima – “Come, Let’s Away” is nominally about her in the same way that “Vitus Reflux” was about Darem, but not to the extent that “Vox in Excelsio” was about Jay-Den or “Series Acclimation Mil” was about SAM – unshackling herself from the dongle that suppresses her enhanced Betazoid abilities that you’ll see coming a mile way, but again probably not anticipate how serious the consequences end up being.

Signs and Symbols

So, the main plot of the episode revolves around a joint training exercise that Starfleet Academy is running with the War College. It takes place on a derelict ship called the USS Miyazaki in a great-looking space graveyard, and the general idea is that they’re supposed to get the vessel back online to some extent while taking the context extremely seriously. This show can’t really do a proper away mission, given the setting, so it makes sense.

Around this time, a fictional comic book called Tales from the Frontier gets a mention and quickly becomes a recurring motif, feeling a bit reminiscent of the Tales of the Black Freighter story-within-a-story comic that was threaded throughout issues of Alan Moore’s Watchmen. B’Avi, a Vulcan student at the War College, was inspired to enrol by the comic and its mention of the Miyazaki. Caleb describes it as Federation propaganda, but then again, I suppose he would.

But what’s being introduced here is the idea of the power of storytelling, of mythologising, and how signs and symbols can resonate for different people in different ways. It could just be a throwaway thing, but it ends up being quite a nice thread, so it’s worth raising.

Enter the Furies

This fake away mission takes quite a real turn with the arrival of the Furies, a new – I think – race of bad guys who eat people. Naturally, they aren’t taking the training exercise quite as lightly as the cadets are, so the simulation quickly becomes a very real life-or-death scenario, with Nahla having no choice but to turn to the only man who has had a scrape with the Furies and lived to tell the tale – Nus Braka.

While this is going on, the cadets make their way to the bridge, and SAM wakes up the onboard AI, which problematically thinks the Miyazaki is still undergoing the same attack that downed it in the first place. In a nice touch, B’Avi realises that Tales from the Frontier provides a complete history of the ship’s exploits, so by allowing the computer to “read” the comics, it can fill in the blanks of its own history and recall how its previous crew died during a rescue mission that went terribly wrong.

The cadets are able to get the computer to recognise them as the new crew and seal the bridge, which buys a bit of time, but the solution to the problem of the Furies has to come from Nus Braka.

Nus’s Gambit

Nus is a riot in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Episode 6, hanging around on the Athena, getting drunk, and just being generally belligerent. His interactions with Nahla are great, and particularly tender for her, since her own son died on a starship like the Miyazaki. It’s obvious that Nus has a plan, but not immediately obvious what the consequences of him pulling it off might be.

The con involves a ship called the USS Sargasso, which is dispatched from a nearby – in space terms – experimental weapons base with a sonic device that the Furies are apparently vulnerable to. But when the Sargasso turns up, Nus destroys it and sacks the undefended weapons base. The Furies breach the bridge, killing B’avi and injuring SAM. The only solution is Tarima removing her inhibitor dongle and using the full extent of her powers to puppet Caleb against the Furies, but this results in her falling into a coma.

It’s a resounding defeat for the heroes, and it’s clear that this isn’t the end of Nus’s plans to terrorise the Federation. It’s also probably the best episode of Starfleet Academy yet.