‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ Episode 7 Recap – You Can Have Too Much Of A Good Thing

I’m always surprised when the latest episode of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy turns out to be an hour long. I’m not sure why, since they’re the same every week, but it always strikes me as a bit much for what this show is. Sometimes, as was the case in the pretty great preceding outing, you don’t feel that runtime so much. But in Episode 7, “Ko’Zeine”, it hurts. After the chaos of the whole Miyazaki debacle, this episode is a bit of a lower-stakes, character-focused reset, but there isn’t really enough going on in it to justify a full hour.

I mean, we’re literally on a break. “All Worlds Day” is basically the equivalent of Spring Break in any other teen-focused show, and it allows for the episode to be parcelled off into A- and B-plots. The character pairings of Caleb and Genesis and – more interestingly – Jay-Den and Darem work just fine, but just fine is as far as the whole episode goes. We don’t see anything of Tarima here – she’s recuperating on Betazed – and get very little of SAM, who nips off to some kind of hologram spa to get her lingering glitches sorted out. Thanks to Caleb refusing to go and stay with the host family Nahla has sorted out for him, he’s left behind, and when Genesis sneaks out of a visit with her admiral father, the two of them are left to get up to mischief. Jay-Den, meanwhile, spots Darem being kidnapped by some unknown assailants and follows him through a portal.

We’ll break these two subplots down in turn, for ease.

Marriage of Convenience

Darem hasn’t been kidnapped, per se. Instead, he has been whisked off to a barren Khionian matrimonial moon to wed his childhood sweetheart, whose hand he has been promised since basically forever. The only downside is that this is a touch earlier than expected, since he was supposed to be allowed a few years in Starfleet before that happened. The royal parents of his wife-to-be, Kaira, have had a bit of a health scare, though, so they’re planning to abdicate the throne immediately so that Kaira and Darem can rule in their stead.

A lot of the specific cultural stuff here is a bit weird, since Khionians are essentially fish people, but it took Jay-Den mentioning scales for me to remember that. “Ko’Zeine” – which is, incidentally, the name of the role Jay-Den accidentally inhabits by his presence; he’s essentially Darem’s best man – provides a helpful lore reason for why the moon is a desert, but it ends up feeling a bit discordant. There are gags revolving around Jay-Den being annoyed by his posh coral suit, for instance, and every time I was reminded about the fish thing, I just found it weird that these people seem to exclusively present as human and there’s no water anywhere, presumably for budget reasons. And yes, I know this is a nitpick.

Anyway, Darem is perfectly happy to get married, at least in theory, and he does seem to really earnestly care about Kaira; it’s just the speed of the nuptials has thrown him a bit, and he’s having to very quickly process the idea of leaving Starfleet behind just as he was starting to get into it. Jay-Den takes the rather simplistic view that he should just cancel the whole ceremony and return to Starfleet, but Darem, because he’s panicking, says he can’t just give him up on his people like Jay-Den did, and they have a bit of a falling out.

Happily Ever After

You don’t need me to tell you that Darem and Kaira don’t get married. And you probably don’t need me to tell you that it’s largely thanks to Jay-Den, whose speech during the ceremony talks up Darem’s selfless attitude, how he’s always willing to put others first, which doesn’t really jive with what Kaira knows of him (I read this, rather unavoidably I suppose, as him having historically been notably selfish.)

But it’s Kaira who calls things off. Knowing this, that Darem is just playing along for the greater good, puts her off the idea, and she doesn’t want her husband to marry her out of obligation. This initially seems like quite a nice gesture, but she also says, “I deserve better than that”, by way of explanation, so she isn’t taking it that well. Either way, she’s going to get the marriage annulled so he can abdicate and she’ll rule alone. No problemo.

This allows Darem to return to Starfleet with Jay-Den, who reunites with a badly sunburned Kyle, who has been partying in Ibiza in B’Avi’s honour and for some reason didn’t notice or care that Jay-Den wasn’t present. Also, can’t just be me who noticed some sexual chemistry between Darem and Jay-Den, can it?

Genesis Has A Secret

Meanwhile in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Episode 7, Caleb and Genesis spend their time playing prankish games with one another while occasionally stopping to discuss their respective personal arcs. Of the biggest interest is Caleb’s, since he hasn’t even bothered to reach out to Tarima since the Miyazaki incident, since he was still weirded out by her accessing his deepest, darkest memories. For some reason, it takes Genesis pointing it out for Caleb to realise this is deeply selfish, but whatever.

Of more concern to Genesis is what turns out to be a secret mission. After being told by Nahla that she’s being recommended for the pre-command track, she uses the escalating game of dares with Caleb to manipulate him into hacking the bridge so she can “sit in the captain’s chair”. She frames this as if it’s some kind of resistance to claims of nepotism, but she’s actually using it as a ruse to build a key that’ll allow her to access her academy application before the command review committee sees it. But why?

Well, when the two are eventually caught, we find out why. Genesis doctored her letters of recommendation since they all implied she was a bit more emotionally shaky than she’d like the command board to know. She’s obsessed with the idea of proving herself on her own terms, so she thinks she needs to appear “perfect”. Nahla’s lesson – there’s always a lesson, isn’t there? – is that nobody is perfect, and she’s going to need to come to terms with that before she pursues a serious posting in Starfleet.

And Caleb sends Tarima a message after all, at Genesis’s urging. But, again, it can’t just be me who noticed a bit of genuine chemistry between these two as well, can it? Maybe it is me.

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