Review: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, "Rubincon" | Season 1, Episode 10

Hey, free subscribers. It's finale time, which means that here's a preview of Lily's review of the Starfleet Academy finale if you've been following along and have thoughts on the adventures of Caleb Mir and Co. Yearly subscriptions are still on sale for $44 using this link. I'll get to an anniversary post next week, promise!

"When you reach the end of a journey," says Caleb Mir, "you think back to the beginning." He says this in the middle of a gauzy montage at the end of his show's first season. His long-vanished mother has returned to his life; he's defeated the cartoonish supervillain who threatened to use his family—biological and found—as a way to destroy the Federation; and now he and his friends are about to go off on a long, well-earned summer vacation. It only makes sense that he'd be considering the arc of his own life right now.

But I do have to quibble with the way Starfleet Academy is using the past in "Rubincon." Caleb's right: It's only natural to think back on how a story started when it ends. But Starfleet Academy seems to think that to end a story, we have to live in that beginning again. It tries so hard to put the end of this season in conversation with its start that it risks losing what made its journey so special to begin with.

"Rubincon" is, for all intents and purposes, a direct sequel to "Kids These Days," Starfleet Academy's pilot. Aside from some rushed-seeming, proper-noun-heavy scenes on the Athena's bridge, it's largely a three-hander between Ake, Nas Braka, and Caleb's mother Anisha. Just like last time we saw the three of them together, they're in a courtroom, this time an improvised one in the Athena's stolen atrium that looks like a set from an edgy middle school production of Urinetown. They're going to finish the implicit argument they began when Ake sentenced Anisha to prison so many years ago, this time with the distance of time and with the presence of someone—Caleb, arriving late to deliver a crucial courtroom speech—who was not permitted to speak for himself in the pilot's sentencing hearing.