ACA s1e8 “The Life of the Stars”
I’ll take academy all day everyday, with its focus on friendship and chosen family, support and heart, and lower decks style lack of seriousness, over the Picard, eyeballs hanging by a knife closeup, too bright to be noir but really wannabe noir, only boomer tv watched “grit” can save us from the Nazis, hey remember this guy?, horseclops.
Nus, with his ridiculous XO haircut is the perfect tongue in cheek, TOS over the top, post story, meta villain I need. The focus on kids who don’t have their shit together is so much better than old men who pretend they got their shit together. And Nahla is our much needed mother-mirror of Sisko’s devout father figure.
It is exactly what was needed after the weekend at Bernie’s decade of exploding, spooky, gritty, holywood junk they animated the universe with. Lower Decks was a full pendulum swing away from that, and Academy is an attempt at reconciling them both. Star trek is silly play, friendship, and social commentary, and Academy was closer to that than anything since DS9 and Voyager.
The next series should be the academy kids in a live action lower decks, while things slowly get more nonsensical as base reality and created reality merge. They should take the theme they have been working hard on since Data, of Datal people (androids, holograms, etc) asking “am I real?” and upend it with “natural born” species blurring the line and asking “am I real?” and the phildickian hole of “is real real?”
My only issue with Academy was the presence of a captain who refused to act like an officer. Stand up straight, put on your boots, sit in the chair like a normal human.
Other than that, I loved it.
I think her attitude and presentation are crucial and indispensable. The federation is trying to claw itself back from violent fascism. Before the pendulum can find its center again it must first swing in the opposite direction.
Once the federation has a complete and thriving culture of Not putting people in a torture prison for stealing bread, I agree that a captain needs to display discipline lest we slip into ineffective hedonism. That’s just not where they are right now.
I think her presentation isn’t just an example to students, and a counterbalance to the strict boot-crushers that still abound in the federation, but a litmus test of how viable a change to the previous culture is. If she got kicked out for her bare feet or queer sitting style, there was never a chance she could effect change anyway. Which was one of the reasons she didn’t want to rejoin. She didn’t believe she could change things.
You make some good points, but I don’t want discipline out of her. She was a good captain, particularly for an environment that is supposed to produce Starfleet Officers.
She just needs some decorum.
I like you.
I like you both!
For me it’s Reno. Love her.
As for if I liked Academy or not:
Tawny Newsome. Give her her own show.
They were planning on one. A resort planet workplace comedy. Given the merger(s), who knows now.
In this context I meant her character on Academy, but I’d also love anything with Mariner.
I liked them all! Each one of them for their own personality.
Robert was the only good thing about ST academy
Tig Notaro’s continuing smarm from DISCO was fun.
My bad, tig was great too.
Personally i think she and the emotionally unstable chief engineer(?) were so immersion breakingly unprofessional and annoying, possibly the worst part of the whole show. Well them and the whole “a kid cries and the galaxy breaks down” plot.
Anyway, constantly bringing personal issues to work and, respectively, treating the engineering section like her personal one-bit comedy stage, is wildly inappropriate for any junior not to mention senior officer in charge of an entire department. I can somewhat excuse it for him because he is the eccentric genius who came up with the central element of the ship and is necessary for it to run, but still…
Also sorry for the rant, that gif of her has me riled up lol
I liked the cadet master as a character and it was at least an interesting concept to try and give genders to the Jem Hadar so she could be half that and Klingon. Out of all the characters she had the best one liners in the show.
It would have been nice to give her more screentime.
Her and Colbert as the announcer we’re funny
