Spoilers below So, in this week’s recognition that a reviewer must consider the place they’re coming from: ten minutes into “300th Night” I sat on and crushed my glasses, while trying to wrestle my dog into position for us to spray antiseptic onto his backside. This has not  put me in a terribly good mood. This might be why “300th Night” didn’t really work for me. I don’t think that’s true, though. There’s too many other reasons I can think of. A helpful metric I use when thi

Spoilers below Writing reviews is hard. "Is something good?". Jesus, I don't know. I just know what it wants to say, and whether it's actually said it. "The Life Of The Stars", though, is very good. I know this because, of every episode of Starfleet Academy  so far, this was the one I least wanted to write up. There just didn't seem any way I could pin it down in a way that wouldn't harm it. It's simply saying too much, and too well. Last week, Past Ric made the point that i

Spoilers below Ko'Zeine performs an obvious function in the season's structure. This is the moment to pause and reflect after the tragedy of "Come, Let's Away". The Academy itself here is all but abandoned, almost sepulchral; a place where a single rolling pebble is a disturbance. Other than some fun intrusions from Jet Reno, our Academy-based storyline this week features only Caleb and Genesis for its first three acts. The royal wedding plot seems like an odd counterpoint t

Spoilers below Craig Finn, lead singer of the Hold Steady , once talked about how, as the old school musician he is, he can't help but think of every album he does as consisting of two sides. We're so past the age of vinyl ubiquity that we've had a whole other era in-between (RIP, CDs), but he always tries to make sure each new album has a killer track as the halfway point arrives, to kick off the second side. I assume it's obvious why "Come. Let's Away" made me think of Finn

Spoilers below I've talked before about my awareness that ultimately, this is a show that isn't really aimed at me. This is, as I've also said, good and necessary, but it also can make it hard to know what exactly to say about what I'm watching. It feels like going to see a Puccini opera without speaking Italian - I'm sure I'd take plenty away from the experience, but there'd always be the awareness that I'm not one of the people being sung to. "Series Acclimation Mil" almost

Arguments over morality? In Trek ? In this  century? Spoilers below There’s a way to see “Vox In Excelso” as being something of a nose-tweak to the first season of Discovery . Here too the story revolves around Federation/Klingon conflict, to the point where we get this show’s first real space battle. Except of course I mean “real” in the sense of “more than one ship per side”, and not “is actual a real battle in any way”. Even without considering how this delightfully invert

Spoilers below Well, this is encouraging. The headline result is that "Vitus Reflux" is my least favourite of the three Starfleet Academy episodes we've seen so far. Much of this review, then, is going to be spent thinking about why that is, and why I'm not actually worried about each installment having gripped me less than the one before, but I'm actually more convinced about the future of this show's vision of the future than I was this time last week. A little while back

First thing's first: we just have to spend a moment sitting silently in awe at that episode title. It alludes, of course, to the Betazoid President and his delegation testing Starfleet's willingness to protect their territory, and to the new Academy faculty getting to see what outsiders think of the way they've set out their stall. But it's also about the fact that the second episode of this show, as with any show, represents a test conducted by the audience, in a way that "

( Spoilers below ) Well well well. Happy birthday me. There's a moment toward the end of "Kids These Days" that summarises the whole episode, and gestures to what we can hope is the mission statement of the show entire. The USS Athena sheds her (owl) wings, and descends from orbit into San Francisco, to form the central campus of the newly reconstituted Starfleet Academy. As it does so, as the cadets we're just beginning to know stare in wonder at the sight, the episode offe