It’s Friday night, which means Nerd Fights. I’m your host, Mr. Know-It-All, joined as always by the true captain of this starship, Salty Trekker, plus Danny Dorknight and Lore.
The headline going in: Starfleet Academy episode 3 is the first episode that behaves like Star Trek instead of talking about it. The headline coming out: nobody on this panel could agree on whether a single thing in it was earned.
Before we get there, one piece of housekeeping. I owed Dorknight an apology for how I described Jett Reno last week, and I gave him one on air. I never intended to cause harm, but my intent doesn’t outweigh impact, and the fact that I hurt him deeply enough that the female members of his family felt the need to step in and approach me makes it clear I crossed a line. That alone tells me I failed to handle it with the care, respect, and restraint it deserved. Apology given, apology accepted, and then we got back to fighting about television, which is the actual point of this show.
Before the Trek Talk: Mercy and Masters of the Universe
Salty opened with Mercy, which he summarized by recreating the entire film in about fifteen seconds. Chris Pratt on a green screen crossed with a found footage movie, with Rebecca Ferguson as an AI judge. He liked the high concept underneath it: what happens when a judiciary system can pull every piece of digital information that exists? Then, at the end, the AI magically comes to life for no reason the movie ever set up, and he checked out. He’s leaning high six to seven on it. The budget was $60 million, which prompted his observation that anything over $3 million was Pratt’s salary, and that the truck in the big chase looks like a PlayStation 2 game. He did say the 3D hologram room was a novel use of the format.
My version is shorter. It’s a super safe movie that wanted to live in the rafters with Minority Report and never committed to any of it, and then the whole thing comes down to a fist fight. It’s extraordinarily functional. It checks every box. It does nothing to challenge itself or its own thesis. I’ll put it on the critic list around 45 to 50 percent.
Then the Masters of the Universe trailer, where Salty had no nostalgia to protect and it showed. Battlecat looked PlayStation 4 to him, Castle Grayskull disappointed him, and he thought the Sword of Power looked like plastic. Dorknight came in as the target audience: the director made Bumblebee, early trailers routinely ship with unfinished visual effects, and Orko being absent from the trailer is the tell. I saw it on a big screen in 3D, and the 3D looked converted to me, but I’ll defend that Grayskull shot. Somebody took a frame from the cartoon to the team and said recreate that faithfully, lightning bolt and all, and they did it.
Then Lore arrived, and we finally got to Star Trek.
The Footing the Show Actually Found
My position going in is that my problem is not that the show hasn’t found its footing. I like the footing it found. It feels like the collegiate setup I expected.
There’s a running complaint that rude humor is now the new norm at Starfleet Academy, and my answer is: have you watched anything that ever talked about Starfleet Academy? Nobody in this franchise has ever described it as a stuffy place. Everybody describes it as the place where they tripped, failed, and made mistakes. Everybody has a Boothby story about him helping them through something, and that’s TNG era. The Academy has always been represented as a college campus. So this is very much in line with what I expected, if not the way I expected it to happen.
The problem is that the show doesn’t let anything effective happen or sit.
Nobody Is the Lead
Dorknight called this the Durham episode. Durham opens with the voiceover message to his parents, he gets the scene with Jett Reno about the padd, and by the end he humbles himself and apologizes to Genesis.
I love that Dorknight thinks Durham is the lead. He’s not. You know who’s the lead? Nobody. At no point does this show make you care about anybody. They tell you that you’re supposed to care about Durham. They don’t make you care about him.
Where I do give the episode credit is the final resolution. Rather than fighting fire with fire, they land on a prank that has other borders around it. It’s a genuinely intelligent move, four-dimensional chess, even though the show itself is nothing like four-dimensional chess.
Salty went further and said it’s the most Star Trek thing the show has done, because the resolution is the cadets committing a heinous crime on a huge scale, exactly like Sisko. He called it eco-terrorism. His actual objection is the logic: the episode establishes that tampering with these plants is a crime, and yet somehow the War College students are the ones who are going to get in trouble for it when the Academy cadets did it. We did correct him on one point. Genesis didn’t genetically modify anything. She used a growth accelerant.
And if we’re ranking crimes in this episode, the plant isn’t the winner. Two assaults and transporting people naked in front of other people without their consent are the winner.
That leads to the thing the panel agreed on hardest: those War College students should be facing charges or expulsion, and they’re walking around fine. Worse, this wasn’t just a prank. The War College chancellor handed his security codes to cadets so they could bypass top level Starfleet Academy security. That’s a big deal. He should be fired.
The Sam Problem
Everybody at this table has the same problem with Sam, and it’s the hologram of it all.
The character of Sam is supposed to be for this generation what Data was. Data worked partly because he didn’t get certain things and they had to be explained to him, which is a big part of why so many autistic viewers felt represented by him. They’re going for the same effect with Sam, and they should have just made her an android, because the fact that she’s a hologram introduces problems that pile up the second you think about them.
Air bubbles come out of her mouth when she screams underwater. She needs a physical letterman jacket, when the Doctor on Voyager adjusted his own appearance constantly. She’s referencing databases like a computer, but the Doctor was a walking database because he was built as a medical program with a purpose. Sam is written as ridiculously, insufferably dumb right up until she’s the most intelligent thing on the planet, and there’s no consistency to when she’s which.
Lore supplied the in-universe explanation: on Kasian they built her on purpose to be a teenager going through teenage angst. Fair enough as an explanation, and it doesn’t cover eating dirt. It also creates a worse problem, which is that every time she does something stupid, the answer is that somebody deliberately programmed her to be stupid. The Doctor was fully functional on day one. This show decided to build a hologram that’s dumb and going through hormones.
Somebody in chat said she’ll have growth and her social skills just need work. The problem is that we don’t get seasons like we used to. There are ten episodes this season, not the six we said last week. You don’t get twenty episodes anymore, so you don’t get the four or five that would let a character actually find that growth. They have to blitz it, and you can’t build her properly without making the whole show about her, which you can’t do because you’ve introduced a hundred characters I’m supposed to remember and care about.
Earned Versus Started
This is where the fight actually broke out.
Dorknight has watched this episode four times, and he says the Durham arc is earned: the message to his parents, going to get the padd fixed, Jett Reno telling him the padd works fine and the problem is that they’re not there for him, the turbolift scene where he admits he has mommy and daddy issues on top of everything else, the apology to Genesis, and then saving Caleb from getting caught.
Lore’s counter, and I’m with him: those are beats, not progression. The show gives you the starting point of where an arc could go and lets you fill in the rest, and Dorknight is doing a lot of the writers’ work for them. Lore’s second point is the structural one. If they don’t have enough time, then they shouldn’t have the cast they have.
My specific problem is the weight the episode puts on Genesis being there for Durham. She saved his life during the tractor beam sequence, but they were all working together on a crisis. That’s not the same thing as sticking with him when everybody else abandoned him. When Reno asks him about the girl who’s been there for him when he struggled, my honest reaction was: when? They built no relationship. Those are good starting points and good connectors. They aren’t a payoff.
Salty put it in terms of his classical training. He needs to see actual growth and depth, and the moment where the guy comes back and says sorry, aw shucks, was not earned at all. He was careful to add that if it worked for you, that’s good, he’s not putting it down.
The Cussing Argument, and Whether Trek Was Ever a Family Show
Dorknight’s biggest complaint is the language. They use a variation of one particular word roughly twenty times, and he grew up on a Star Trek you could watch with your family.
Lore is not having it. Cursing has always been in Trek. Kirk got “let’s get the hell out of here” at the end of “The City on the Edge of Forever.” There’s “double dumbass on you.” Data drops the first real four-letter word in Generations. And the family show framing collapses under its own history: TOS, TNG, DS9, and Enterprise all ran sexual assault storylines, including one of the most graphic things Salty says he’s ever seen, in the first season of the original series with Janice Rand. Then there’s “Space Seed,” where Khan forces a woman to her knees to get her obedience.
Salty’s counter is about maturity rather than presence. They did adult things in more mature ways then, and the gravitas of a moment like City on the Edge of Forever is not the same thing as a bunch of twenty-year-olds walking around in their underwear saying dirty words.
My position is that it’s not family friendly, it’s young adult, and those are different categories. I’d also have preferred they invent their own curse words and make it fun. And I’ll add the tonal complaint I put on social: I do not understand the smack talk between the two mascots during the game. One yells about blowing his horn, the other yells whip it out, they’re on opposite teams, and I genuinely cannot tell if they’re trash talking or flirting. It played like the ambiguously gay duo of Star Trek.
The Things That Just Didn’t Track
The first two episodes have almost no relevance to this one. There is no mention of Caleb’s mother. That was the sole driving force of his character, they teased at the end of last episode that they know where she went, and this week we get nothing. Not one scan, not one line. Meanwhile we get the big dumb jock’s transmissions to mom and dad. It’s also arguably a soft retcon, because Caleb tells Timma he had no choice, it was this or prison, when what actually happened is that he was talked into it so he could find his mother.
Then there’s the eyeball. They bypass the chancellor’s top level security with a duplicated eye. Salty’s right that it has a basis in lore, because Voyager established a fluid that duplicates an object you drop into it, and having a lore basis doesn’t stop it from being ridiculous. From the computer’s point of view, somebody walked up holding a retina with the thing dangling in front of the scanner, and the scan says it’s the chancellor. That system should conclude the chancellor has been murdered and call security. You can’t do that to the phone in your pocket right now, let alone an advanced Starfleet installation nine hundred years further along. It’s a big gaping hole.
Lore’s better version of the whole sequence: they should have gone full Weekend at Bernie’s and carried the man around. I would watch that.
The Neck Device Theories
The thing on Timma’s neck that glows red is the one piece everybody wanted to solve.
Lore’s pitch is the strongest. Starfleet can remove telepathic abilities, per Voyager, which means Starfleet can detect them. So build a device that indicates when a young telepath is actively using their powers. Then every time it turns red, she’s reading Caleb’s mind and he doesn’t know it, and a couple of episodes later a teacher mentions offhand what red means, and you get the whole “I can’t believe you did this to me” blowup. That’s an interesting use of the technology, and it even feeds the teenage angst material the show wants.
Salty read it as a dampener for Betazoid puberty: her powers are hard to control, so it suppresses the telepathy while leaving the empathy intact, which would explain how she still detected who was inside the costume. That also ties back to his tirade last week about a telepath using sign language, which remains beyond stupid, and the interpreter making the signing audible only makes it worse, because if he can read the thoughts, why sign at all.
My take is that it’s an inhibitor, because she’s more powerful than she should be. As for why, I’m going with the genetic spawn of Riker, which is why her eyes aren’t black.
Lore’s prediction: Paul Giamatti shows up in episode 9, everything is on fire by episode 10, Earth is in flames, and she takes the thing off her neck and blows up his ship with her brain. Which raises a fair question of its own. Where is Paul Giamatti? Where’s Becky Lynch? Why isn’t she teaching at Starfleet Academy? All the bridge crew should be teachers.
Who Is This Show Actually For
The last argument was the one that mattered most to me.
I’ve made a few shorts that do nothing but correct factual complaints about this show. Starfleet Academy’s food problem and how replicators work. Why the Academy ships actually make sense. The fact that Star Trek captains were never professional. None of them praise the show. They just take the complaints that are wrong and explain why they’re wrong according to the lore. I’ve gotten more hate for those than I’ve seen since 2016. Six hundred comments across three shorts.
Lore’s argument follows from that. If you’re a producer and everything you make gets buried regardless, why would you care about the original fans at all? The critics online have made it look like the original fans aren’t worth getting. So you go after whoever you think you can get. He’s not saying that’s the right call. He’s saying it’s the rational one from a producer’s chair.
Dorknight’s version is the mirror image: figure out who your target audience is and stick to it, because right now they’re alienating longtime fans and they’re never going to get the new ones, since the people who aren’t into Star Trek aren’t going to show up for a Star Trek show.
Which brings me to the one thing I’ll plant my flag on. If you start a sentence with “real Star Trek fans,” your sentence is already invalid. Anybody who is a fan of any Star Trek series, including this one, is a real Star Trek fan. We can be critical of a show without pouring hate on it, and we did that for the better part of two hours. Let’s stop trying to sort ourselves into the good ones and the bad ones.
You don’t order a chicken dinner and then get mad that it isn’t a steak. This is young adult television set in the Star Trek universe. It doesn’t break the universe. It just isn’t built for the people who keep demanding it be built for them.
Where do you land? Was the plant the most Star Trek thing this show has done, or was it eco-terrorism with a bow on it? And is the Durham arc earned or just started? Bring it to the comments on the video above, because Salty, Dorknight and Lore are all still wrong and I need backup.
