Starfleet Academy Review: 300th Night

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 thinking about where to rank an episode is how successfully it was in distracting me from the voice in my head that keeps saying “Hang on!”. By that measure, “300th Night” cannot be considered a success. Nothing feels like its being earned here. The Venari Ral, who I’d really rather liked as slightly rubbish space pirates the Federation basically let get lucky, are now an Empire that goes around annexing planets. Sam now has the ability to teleport, not just inside the academy, but anywhere, forcing the plot to add Genesis and Darem to Caleb’s shuttle roster just so there’s someone to threaten later in the episode. This is achieved by the extraordinary coincidence of Genesis being on shuttlebay duty at the time of their heist, and Darem – I’m almost offended I have to type this – wandering into their shuttle because he’s drunk. We then couple this with the absurd“we can’t miss the transwarp tunnel!” clock, a contrivance that’s risible on paper and absolutely laugh-out-loud bathetic when seen in action.

There’s a broader carelessness around space and time here which grates, in fact. Depending on how well Starfleet semesters map onto hours, it feels like several months have passed since “The Life Of The Stars”. This is actually pretty smart in one way, as it (in theory) will quieten those who came out of last week’s episode annoyed at how quickly it

seemed our cadets were healed. "300th Night" suggests a much longer period of work was needed before, as Ake puts it, things have even started to feel like returning to normal. On the other hand, with so long a period of time to convalesce, it seems odd that Sam hasn’t had her conversations here with Genesis and Caleb before now. Far odder, to the point of annoyance, is the idea that Sam helps Caleb crack his cypher problem (with an almost insultingly obvious solution that makes him look like an absolute idiot) on the same day the Venari Ral annex the planet where his mother is hiding, and Nus Braka’s grand plan is finally revealed.

And it’s such a stupid plan. Or rather, it’s just completely ridiculous that it’s gotten so close to working. Seeding mines around the entire Federation? An area of three-dimensional space hundreds of light years across? That’s a ludicrous undertaking, especially while apparently also invading star systems. And no-one in Starfleet Security picked up on any of this? No-one in the Venari Ral tried to cut a deal at some point? There’s making your antagonists dangerous, and then there’s making your heroes look like absolute idiots, and this is so far on the wrong side of that line we’ll need a warp drive to find our way back.

Speaking of warp drives, we can summarise the sloppiness on display here with a single slice of the episode – Reno frets about losing the nacelles in a saucer separation, only for her to active the “reserve nacelles” in the atrium section seconds later. Good job the entire ship was being run by three crewmembers, huh? For absolutely no explained or explicable reason, except to let Braka capture most of the Athena without that having any broader consequences. And sure, I can’t really say I’m sorry that the episode doesn’t sacrifice a bunch of Starfleet officers for some cheap extra tension. That said, the overall effect is to make the show seem small. Compare the Athena scenes this week with the way “Kids These Days” showed how Ake was just as comfortable with and invested in the bridge crew of the Athena as she was her cadets.  Whatever did happen to all of those people, anyway? We don’t even get Lura this week; we’ve not seen her in person since “Come, Let’s Away”.

This all feels like watching a Russel T Davies finale (derogatory); things just happen so we can get to the good bits. Except, what are the good bits, exactly? I mentioned early on in these reviews that my feared failure state for this show was Caleb constantly either compromising or running away from the academy because of his obsessive quest for his mother, and it feels like that’s precisely what we get here. As annoying as that tendency was in the early show (and to be fair, we got away from it pretty quickly), it’s absolutely infuriating here, because of how much of the last eight episode’s worth of bonding is thrown away. Mir’s behaviour during Jay-Den’s ceremony is inexcusable (and yet the episode then sidelines the young Klingon so that he cannot respond). His behaviour to his friend when trying to justify leaving with Anisha (note to future Ric: call your essay on this “How You Met My Mother”) is even worse. I don’t just mean “worse” in some moral sense, I mean that it’s just really not good writing. Everything here, as Caleb finds his long-lost, Federation-hating mother, plays out in the most obvious, cliched way possible. “Guy acts like jerk to displace guilt over abandoning friends” just isn’t a trope we should still be playing straight in 2026. And it’s not even cliché done well. Mir’s criticisms of Genesis are wholly unrecognisable as a summary of her character, as well as wholly contradicting how she’s portrayed in “Life Of The Stars”. This is just the sort of thing that happens in a TV show when teenagers find themselves at cross-purposes, so it’s what we’re given here, too. Even Tatiana Maslany struggles with such thin gruel.

I realise this is mostly just a list of criticisms, rather than a review. But then, when you’re served your food stone-cold on an oil-streaked hubcap, there’s really not much point talking about whether the seasoning was to your taste. Starfleet Academy hasn’t always delivered stories that intersect with the sort of fiction I find interesting, but even then, it’s always been competently made and clear-eyed about what it’s wanting to do. “300th Night” feels like the show’s first very clear misstep. I can’t think of a much more damning summary than this: I don’t actually care how the episode’s cliffhanger will be resolved. I don’t care how our heroes will prevent colossal damage to subspace.

I care about how the show will undo this colossal damage to itself.

Ordering

1. The Life Of The Stars

2. Series Acclimation Mil

3. Kids These Days 4. Vox In Excelso 5. Beta Test 6. Come, Let's Away 7. Ko'Zeine 8. Vitus Reflux 9. 300th Night