Entertainment
Starfleet Academy Finally Finds The Sweet Spot For Storytelling
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
If we’re being honest, there have been plenty of problems with NuTrek since it premiered in 2017, but one of the more persistent problems has been figuring out what stakes a story should have. Discovery and Picard exhausted fans by having huge stakes, whereas early episodes of Starfleet Academy annoyed the fandom with hilariously low stakes. In the latest SFA episode “Come, Let’s Away,” however, NuTrek has finally found a storytelling sweet spot, delivering the kind of medium stakes that typified the Golden Age of Star Trek.
For better or for worse, Star Trek: Discovery was always a show swinging for the fences with high-stakes storytelling. Season 1 involved saving the Federation from Klingons who were intent on destroying the Earth, and Season 2 involved saving the entire galaxy from evil AI. Season 3 involved saving the Federation yet again (this time, in the far future), while Season 4 was all about stopping a threat that destroyed entire planets. The final season wrapped things up with a plot about keeping reality-rewriting technology from ending up in the hands of the scariest aliens the galaxy has ever known.
Star Trek Fans Experience Disaster Fatigue
Star Trek: Picard continued this tradition: Season 1 turned Picard’s quest to help Data’s daughter into an adventure involving an ancient Romulan conspiracy, android rebellion, and all-powerful machine gods from outside the galaxy. Season 2 had Picard and his buddies fighting to keep their entire future from becoming a freaky fascist dystopia. Oh, and Season 3 wrapped things up by having our heroes prevent the Borg from taking over and rewriting the entire galaxy into their cybernetic image.
Understandably, audiences grew tired of what amounted to disaster fatigue; as with superhero movies, the simple truth is that it’s just exhausting when the stakes are always impossibly high. It’s hard to care that the entire galaxy is in danger when this is happening in literally every season. Strange New Worlds tried to fix this problem with simpler, episodic adventures, but some fans thought the adventures were too low-stakes, and it was hard to care about stories with plots like “will everyone stop singing?” and “will Spock fulfill his naughty nurse fantasy?”
Star Trek’s Drama Loses Its Shirt
When Starfleet Academy began, it arguably replicated the problem of Star Trek’s low-stakes stories. It’s a show modeled after Young Adult franchises like Harry Potter, so the episodes mostly revolve around the young cadets discovering the power and value that has been hidden inside of them all along. That makes for some interesting coming-of-age stories, but some fans found story hooks like “will Starfleet Academy win the prank war?” and “will SAM stop arguing with her holographic parents?” so low-stakes that they couldn’t really care about these episodes.
That’s part of why I was so impressed by “Come, Let’s Away:” the most recent Starfleet Academy episode effectively found a narrative sweet spot by giving us an adventure where our cadets were in mortal peril. After a training mission goes sideways, several cadets are kidnapped by killer cannibals, forcing Starfleet to ask space pirate Nus Braka for help. While the cadets are ultimately saved, Braka doublecrosses our heroes, destroying a starship and ransacking a starbase while leaving a trail of bodies in the cold vacuum of space.
How Star Trek Got Its Groove Back
I personally loved this episode for many reasons, including the fact that it ditched the show’s signature bad humor to deliver a tense thriller reminiscent of the Golden Age of Trek. Seeing the characters cut the jokes and pool their different skills to overcome an impossible situation reminded me of why I fell in love with shows like The Next Generation. Eventually, I realized the other big reason this episode reminded me of TNG: it finally found the sweet spot between insanely high stakes and laughably low stakes.
The cadets being in mortal peril is certainly higher-stakes than, say, stories focusing entirely on Caleb’s love life or prank battles with the War College. But it’s not like Discovery or Picard, where the crew regularly had to save the entire galaxy from some insane threat or another. Instead, Starfleet Academy finally found that sweet spot by giving us the ultimate Trek trope of a story: a simple mission goes wrong, and everyone must put their training to the test to overcome impossible odds.
Only time will tell if Starfleet Academy can maintain this sweet spot for future episodes or if we will go back to low-stakes adventures punctuated by cringeworthy potty humor. But as I mentioned in my review of “Come, Let’s Away,” my fingers are crossed that this represents a turning point for this controversial show and that it is becoming the kind of series older franchise fans have been begging for. With any luck, the writers realize they are dealing with their own high-stakes story about whether Star Trek survives another 60 years or gets a Dr. McCoy-like assessment from a bored fandom: “it’s dead, Jim!”