I didn’t go into this episode wanting to dislike it.
In fact, I went in trying to reset myself a little. Last week really surprised me. I didn’t fully understand why I was okay with that episode, but I was. So this week I sat down thinking, all right, maybe this is where the show settles.
And for a while, I thought it might. Then, somewhere in the middle, I caught myself doing something I didn’t like. I wasn’t reacting anymore. I was waiting. Not for a twist, not for a reference. I was waiting for the episode to stop telling me what it was doing and let me sit inside it for a second.
Once I noticed that, I couldn’t unnotice it.
We’re talking about Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Episode 5. This probably isn’t going to be a normal episode-by-episode review situation for me going forward, but I need to talk through this one, because it clarifies something about how this show behaves when it gets uncomfortable. This isn’t a rage take. It’s not a culture war thing. I’m not trying to light anything on fire. I’m trying to explain why an episode with this much intention left me feeling oddly empty.
The Parts That Almost Worked
Let me say this clearly: there are parts of this episode that almost worked for me. The idea of revisiting Sisko’s legacy in the far future isn’t bad on paper. Framing that legacy through a character who’s also positioned as an emissary of sorts makes sense conceptually. Even the tone works in places. The episode is gentle, reflective, thoughtful.
For the first stretch, I kept thinking, okay, maybe this is going to slow down. Maybe this is going to let something land.
And then it didn’t.
I want to stay here for a moment, because this is where the disconnect actually started, and I didn’t have language for it right away. Everything in this episode arrives with an explanation attached. Every idea, every belief, every emotional beat. Nothing is allowed to exist on its own for very long. When Sam questions faith, it doesn’t sit there. It resolves quickly, cleanly, almost too cleanly.
At first I thought maybe that was just the rhythm of the episode. Maybe this is how the show moves. But the longer it went, the more boxed in it felt. I didn’t feel challenged. I felt managed. I felt handled.
I’m not even sure that bothered me immediately. I remember thinking, am I being unfair? Is this just modern pacing? Am I resisting something that isn’t actually a problem? I don’t know. I still don’t fully know. What I do know is how it felt.
The Repair That Never Happens
Here’s the exact moment where it all broke for me.
Sam’s entire mission is to understand humanoid life. So when she confronts the Bajorans, dismisses their belief system, and then later learns her lesson somewhere else, I kept waiting for the obvious follow-up. I thought, surely we’re going back. Surely there’s a moment where she sits with them again, where she acknowledges the misstep, where she listens instead of interrogating.
It never happens.
And that absence stuck with me longer than anything she said, because I didn’t feel like the episode had resolved something. I felt like it had avoided repair. She doesn’t change through interaction. She changes because the episode tells her she has to.
That’s not curiosity. That’s a narrative checkbox.
Legacy as a Relief Valve
This is where the legacy elements come in, and I want to be precise here. They are not the problem. In truth, they’re the relief valve.
Jake Sisko works. Cirroc Lofton is genuinely moving. That weight landed on me immediately. But it didn’t land because of Sam. It landed because of me. Jake is doing emotional labor the episode hasn’t earned on its own. He’s carrying history the show didn’t build. Same with Sisko’s voice, the language, the music cue, the dedication. All of that is powerful. I won’t pretend it isn’t. But it’s powerful because I already care.
Here’s the part I’ve been avoiding saying out loud: it works on me anyway, and that makes me angrier, not less. Because the episode knows it can do that. It knows it doesn’t have to learn, or even earn, that reaction. It can just activate it.
Even the Dax reveal (spoilers), which should have landed like a brick, just kind of passed by for me. Not because it was mishandled, but because by then I was already emotionally full.
Shortcuts Everywhere
The more I sat with it, the clearer the pattern became. Whenever the episode could have slowed down and let something be awkward or unresolved, it takes a shortcut. Alcohol replaces earned intimacy. Legacy replaces earned history. Exposition replaces silence.
The Doctor and Jett Reno are here, but they don’t really complicate anything. They don’t force anything to happen. They’re just sort of there. They exist. They occupy space in the B-plot. And that whole War College B-plot, in the very beginning I thought it was going to mirror everything, and then it just stops.
When I say these are shortcuts, I don’t mean that morally. I mean it as a writing choice. The harder version of these scenes would have been quieter, slower, probably uncomfortable, probably less quotable. It would have required the actors to sit in uncertainty. It would have required the edit to let a beat die. And that’s risky.
This episode doesn’t take any kind of risks. This show refuses to take serious risks. And by the end of the episode, I wasn’t angry yet. I was disengaged. I think that’s worse.
Sam’s independence felt pre-approved. Her growth felt ideological. The future felt thinner than the past. The show jumps 800 years into the future, but every time it needs emotional weight, it keeps reaching backward. That’s when the frustration finally tipped into anger. Not because of the ideas, but because of how safe the execution was.
The Verdict
So what is the Know-It-All Index for this episode? This episode isn’t bad. It’s average. And I think average here is a problem, because bad episodes can be fixed. They provoke. Average ones quietly train you to stop expecting more. And that’s why, for me, this episode is a 5 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
I’ll revisit the season as a whole when it’s done, but I’m not doing individual episode reviews for this show anymore. I just don’t see a reason to.
So there you go. Now you know. And if knowing’s half the battle, you’re halfway to being a know-it-all yourself.
Was I wrong? Was I right? Don’t just hate on the show. Walk through my thought process and tell me something I don’t know. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above, and you all have been fostering a community that thinks, where it’s okay to have objections. That genuinely excites me.
