Review: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, "The Life of the Stars" | Season 1, Episode 8
"The only thing we know for sure is that one day we'll all be gone."
Many works of art come into their full strength only when they exceed the constraints of their original premises. What makes Starfleet Academy exceptional, to my eye, is how little it's needed to do that in order to become a very good show. Its best qualities all come from it growing even more deeply toward its logline: when it is great, and it is great more and more often in the back half of this season, it is because it is unashamed to be a coming-of-age story about messy, emotional kids.
One thing Starfleet Academy's premise offers it, as I discussed in my review last week, is thematic clarity. Even as the show's characters come from radically different circumstances and want many dissimilar things from their lives, they are all concerned with the hard, awkward work of individuation. That work—of understanding what you believe and why and how you will live those beliefs out—often puts characters through parallel crises. Their moments of existential fright and anxious delirium about the unbounded possibilities of adulthood aren't the same, but they often rhyme. It's that sense of singular thematic purpose that helps "The Life of the Stars"—a very ambitious Starfleet Academy, to the point of being almost overstuffed—feel unified, cohesive, whole.
In "The Life of the Stars," our existentially adrift cadets are Sam and Tarima. We've seen very little of the two of them interacting thus far in the series, but we know that they are the two main cast members most acutely hurt by what happened on the USS Miyazaki in "Come, Let's Away": Tarima blew out her neural implant to save everyone' life, while Sam's injuries appear to have glitched out her central processor. In the weeks since then, the school has reached a state of uneasy equilibrium, but Sam and Tarima's hurt still lingers, albeit in different ways.
