Starfleet Academy Review: Kids These Days

(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 offers us a modern version of Scott McKenzie's "If You're Going To San Francisco".

It's an absolutely inspired choice, for multiple reasons. There's the historical significance - McKenzie's track dropped a month to the day after the first season of Star Trek ended. It soundtracked not just the Summer of Love, but the first summer those inclined could imagine what it might be like to be loved by Spock. There's the decision not just to offer a new version of the song - reflecting the show's status as a take on 60 year old material - but to add a backing choir, turning one man's version of what to expect from the City by the Bay to a glorious, multi-voiced affirmation. Then there's what is actually being promised. The version used in the episode cuts out the lines about love-ins (though we're already on to the question of the whats and whens of the inevitable hormone-soaked hookups by early into the second episode), but keeps the song's central message of political hope.

All across the nation Such a strange vibration People in motion There's a whole generation With a new explanation People in motion People in motion

This, then, is how Starfleet Academy wants us to see it. A story of how the new generation offers hope, and offers change. That the point at which we can start making a difference arrives earlier than a lot of people would like you to believe, and likely before you're prepared to believe it yourself.

Unsurprisingly, this is an approach I am entirely on board with. Starfleet Academy takes the sad, fractured state of the Federation introduced to us in Season 3 of Discovery, and uses it as a foundation upon which to build a story of unironic, unapologetic hope. And not just some vague sense of how things might be better, either; hope based on student activism, and those of older generations sensible enough to know . As Chancellor Ake says in a deeply moving scene at the episode ends, the one thing she wishes she'd done better in her relationship with her long-dead son was to have listened more, and tried to advise/manoeuvre him less. The kid's aren't just alright, they're fully right, much of the time, a fundamental truth even the best Trek has frequently failed to grasp.

This is a review, though, not an episode essay. None of the above is actually going to matter much if the show can't actually be entertaining. That's always a little difficult to tell from a series premiere, of course; that's always about trying to put your best foot forward. As we've talked about before (and are about to again), it's a show's second episode that tells you what you can expect from it week on week. It's not just that Starfleet Academy isn't going to be about life-threatening starship battles with dastardly pirates every week; it's that we shouldn't want it to be.

That said, though, the thing about putting your best foot forward is that it looks particularly bad if you trip over your own laces. Put another way, you can't really prove your show has legs in episode one, but you can definitely show that you don't. Within that reality, "Kids These Days" comes about as close as can be expected to telling us what's coming is going to be worth our while. I think that how to write a series opener is now a well-established science - you give each character a breezy intro, at least a couple of solid character beats, and preferably a memorable (or at least funny) line, and trust the audience to either fill in the blanks themselves, or find what they can't fill in intriguing enough to come back for more. Add in a central throughline for a few characters (here Holly Hunter's delightfully flexible Chancellor Ake and Sandro Rosta's tropey-but-solid Caleb Mir), and you have A Premiere.

It's hard then to not feel like I'm damning with faint praise when I say "Kids These Days" nails the formula. But it really does, better than any other Trek show to date. Even Lower Decks, which is otherwise the best example of how to construct an opening episode (a distinct consideration to which opening episode is best) had an easier ride, if only because it just had to be competent and funny. Starfleet Academy's opener is both these things too (seriously, this isn't a Trek comedy, but there were multiple lines that made me laugh out loud), but also has to nail the dramatic beats of Aka and Mir's relationship, and introduce the political aspect to the show that suggests we're about to see the most widely-focussed show of the franchise since Deep Space Nine.

There's a lot of balls to juggle, is what I'm saying, and the basic fact we've all seen plenty of jugglers before shouldn't detract from how well the trick is pulled off here. I already feel that, if you gave me quotes from future episodes and asked me which of the regular characters said them, I'd have a decent chance of getting the answer right. The cast is uniformly impressive, including the younger actors. The inevitable callbacks to past Trek are well-chosen in tone and timing, including the decision to bring back Robert Picardo, whose character is neither ignored nor venerated, save by the show's other holographic - excuse me, photonic - character, in a scene that's both sweet and funny and suggestive that the show has every intention of using the franchise's strongest past ideas to generate new opportunities. I'm hugely looking forward to learning more about Sam, almost much as I am regarding Lura Thok. Procreating Jem'Hadar? What will they think of next?

As an episode of television (more of a short film, really, at 75 minutes), "Kids These Days" is extremely diverting. As the latest contribution to Trek's third age, it shows colossal promise. Many have expressed concern, for reasons I'm broadly sympathetic to, that Strange New World's anaemic and timid third season suggests genuinely progressive Trek simply can't be made in a fascist America.

Starfleet Academy kicks off trying to prove them wrong, without forgetting that if you're not going to try to be fun, there's not much point in trying to be any else.

Welcome back to the fleet.