Starfleet Academy Review: Rubincon

(A quick note before we get started: if you've been enjoying my Starfleet Academy reviews, you might be interested to know that I've been hard at work writing the first season up as full IDFC essays. The first of these, on "Kids These Days", will be up Wednesday 1st April, which is an amazingly funny date considering it'll be the first time I put an episode essay up outside of the established blog order.)

Spoilers below OK. There we go.

I put some effort ahead of "Rubincon" into getting in the right head space. Having really not dug "300th Night", I wanted to make sure I came into the finale with an open mind and open heart. One thing I told myself was there was every chance last week's episode was just an extended exercise in getting everyone and everything in place for the finale; that if they stuck the landing, no-one would remember the clumsiness with which they lined themselves up with the runway.

And I think that's pretty much what's happened. Starfleet defeats the Venari Ral with just three officers and six cadets, and without a single shot fired, by working together, and by being themselves. Did it trigger my hyper-sensitive cheese sensors from time to time? Sure. As I keep saying, though, this isn't a show for me, a grizzled husk of a man more than halfway through his forties. If the numerous patch-ups and make-ups here strained my patience a little, they're on theme, and I much prefer melodramatic comings together than melodramatic tearings apart.

It's worth noting in particular that my biggest fear for the episode - Anisha Mir had been working for Braka all along - didn't play out. In retrospect that makes the board setting-up of "300th Night" even more ridiculous - we really were supposed to believe that Caleb broke his mum's code, Anisha needed immediate rescue, and Nus Braka activated his Omega-47 mines all at more or less the same time. But the idea Anisha has genuinely been running from Braka, and her ending up being put in the position of judge for Starfleet as someone honestly hurt by them, is a much more interesting idea than Ukeck having been a trap.

Braka's trial in general is a savvy idea to base the episode around. It's obviously a callback to Q in "Encounter At Farpoint" and "All Good Things", but it's also an inversion. Q was a godlike being taking it upon himself to judge humanity. Anisha Mir is a woman thrown in jail for trying to secure food for her son, who is being asked to judge the authorities who passed sentence on her. While almost everything about Braka's "revolution" is set-dressing and deception, he gets this part right - the ruled get to pass judgement on their rulers (his point about neither of them getting a trial hits hard, too). The question of whether Starfleet can justify itself has also been a key question for the whole year, both within the text and in terms of trying to secure an audience amongst those barely born (if that) by the time Enterprise ended. It makes perfect sense to literalise this by having Ake answer for what she did to Anisha and Caleb.

Ake gives a good account of herself, and Starfleet. She's maybe a bit bullish on the "leadership is hard" angle, but she doesn't flinch from recognising she is still responsible for what happened, and that she could have done more. What really makes this sing, though, is her bringing up Lieutenant Lee, the until now nameless shuttle pilot that Braka killed during their robbery. As is common for this show, Ake doesn't drive her points fully home, letting them hang in the air instead, but it's clear what's she's getting at: Anisha is no less guilty of robbing Lee's children of a father than she is for robbing Caleb of a mother. This too has been a recurring theme for the season: it isn't just the people we know and love who matter. Tarima makes a similar point to Caleb on the Athena, but it's Ake's iteration of this that actually lands, because it's based on actual moral concerns, rather than whether your two mums are worth more than the lives of trillions of people (it doesn't help how wretchedly stupid it is to claim everyone in the Federation will die if they're cut off from the wider galaxy).

In the end, Anisha still finds Ake guilty. And that makes sense. Nahla was making the case for why Starfleet did what it did, and that her actions are ultimately no more wrong than her judge's, but Anisha being equally guilty is distinct from Ake being innocent. If there's a misstep here, it's that Braka's lieutenant interrupts with news about Caleb's arrival before Anisha is able to pass sentence. It would have been extremely interesting to hear what she had to say. On the other hand, by episode's end it's clear Ake had gotten her point across to her. Maybe anything she said in the moment would have either weakened that, or take weight off Caleb's own intervention. And hey, what's more fitting for a courtroom drama than a "One last witness, your honour!" eleventh-hour intervention?

And all this started with Caleb. It needs to end with him, too. While the Chancellor gets the chance to contextualise her personal decisions fifteen years prior, her defence is focused on Starfleet as an institution. It's witness for the defence Caleb Mir who truly makes the case for Captain Nahla Ake herself. He also helps prove that the entirety of the Venari Ral is built on a tragic mistake - Nus' own father caused the catastrophe on Braka's world that he'd attributed to the Federation. Whatever Anisha continues to feel about Ake, they make the case that Braka isn't a better bet for post-Burn cooperation than the Federation.

And hey, since all of this is tied up in politics anyway, let's just note that the most recent season of Strange New Worlds wrapped up with our heroes fighting a literal personification of ultimate evil. Starfleet Academy casts its big bad as a whining man-baby who'd rather commit mass murder than engage for a second in some honest self-reflection. I trust the respective political valences of these choices is not lost on the reader*. The alternative to mutual understanding and cooperation is being made extremely clear here.

I've talked a lot about the trial, but we should at least stop off at The Athena. I'm not quite as sold on this strand. It's annoying to get so little of Lura - I don't think we've seen or heard from her for as much as three minutes in total during these last four episodes. New moody Sam seems like a huge misstep, given how delightful her character has been up to now - she's not only anchored the two best episodes of the season, she's just been a glorious ray of sunlight in a show I'm desperate to not see get darker. Beyond that, though, the Athena plot is solid enough, with everyone getting a role to play in saving the day, and the hope that Caleb and Tarima have moved into a new stage of their relationship that might involve a little less teenage angst. I also loved the "rubincon" reveal, partly because its making interesting use of the Doctor, but because the mispronunciation of a word about going to war makes perfect thematic sense in this episode, where our heroes send in the cavalry, but don't quite go to war in the traditional sense (see also Remo's Da Vinci quote). To again return to "300th Night", I noted there that one of the reasons I was so disappointed by the episode was that, until that point, even the show operating in modes that I'm not necessarily terribly interested in felt very competently done. "Rubincon", happily, gets us back to that position.

Overall, then, and last week's episode notwithstanding, the overall impression of "Rubincon" is that the show knew precisely what it was doing all along. The finale isn't just in the best tradition of Trek, it's both a mirror and a response to "Kids These Days", with the cheeky use of another Rufus Wainwright song just the icing on the cake. Naha Ake, and Starfleet Academy, and Starfleet Academy have been on trial all year, and they have wholly proved themselves, to our heroes and to ourselves. Proof of context has been thoroughly supplied.

I am back, once again, to being thrilled to think about where we might be warping to next.

Ordering

1. The Life Of The Stars

2. Series Acclimation Mil

3. Kids These Days 4. Vox In Excelso 5. Beta Test 6. Rubincon 7. Come, Let's Away 8. Ko'Zeine 9. Vitus Reflux 10. 300th Night * I swear to the Prophets, if they cancel Starfleet Academy but greenlight Star Trek: Year One, it might be the thing that finally breaks me.