Starfleet Academy Review: The Life Of The Stars

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 in a season with only ten episodes, dedicating one of them as a direct response to the events of another isn't something there's really time for. What an idiot I was. "Ko'Zeine", it turns out, is that strange period immediately after a loss, where everything is quiet and far away, and you're mostly just taken aback by how little you're taken aback.

"The Life Of The Stars" is when that interlude comes to an end, and the grieving actually starts.

"...Stars" isn't simply about grief in itself, though. It's about shared grief, and what it actually means to call it "shared" in the first place. Grief is so personal, so utterly a shivering buzzing coldness inside every single part of you. It's hard to know how to connect that feeling with others who are feeling something exactly the same, and entirely different. Especially when you're still just a kid. Ake says here that people learn resilience as children, but of course that's only partially true. We begin to learn it. We never really get all the way, even if, like the Doctor, we've been trying for eight hundred years. When you're a teenager, and everything feels like a disaster a vindictive universe has arranged for you personally, the genuine tragedies overload you just as wholly as they do Sam.

Not that it's easy for those with more experience. We've mentioned the Doctor already, but he's not the only member of the faculty to have lost a child, as Ake very deliberately chooses to only remind him of obliquely. It would be impossible to list every ache and stab of grief, but one of them is that it reminds you that life is finite, and so that you'll have to go through this again and again. Grief is time-travel, spreading backwards through your history and littering your future with tripwires. It's no wonder the Doctor, effectively standing outside of time, works so hard to avoid it. Except of course that he can't.

Reaching for outside assistance seems like an entirely sensible choice, then. Enter Lieutenant Sylvia Tilly. It's wonderful to see Mary Wiseman again, and just as delightful to see Tilly enjoying life again. For a few minutes after her return I found myself struggling a little to connect how she's written here with the character we followed over five seasons of Discovery, but then I realised she's simply grown into herself, that she's happy and confident and fulfilled enough to let herself be herself.

And all that self-confidence seems wholly justified, because Tilly very clearly has got the assignment regarding the giving out of assignments. Theatre as statecraft but also backdoor therapy is a brilliant call. I confess I've neither seen nor read Our Town, but at least in the way it's discussed here, it seems an inspired choice. The tension between mundanity and tragedy, and how the former remains in the wake of the latter, and how that's stupid and maddening and unfair, but also beautiful and necessary and what life fucking is. The village matters precisely because it is as nothing to the stars. We cannot change that by trying to shut the village out.

(It's also, to return to banging an old drum, why Trek needs the quiet, reflective episodes like this one. If we're to care about the lives of fictional characters, we need to see them actually living them.)

As well as being an exploration of loss - past, present, future - then, "...Stars" is about how we engage with art. This is a running theme through the season, actually. I'm sure I'll have plenty more to say when I start writing this show up properly starting in June, so for now I'll just note the episode functions as a beginner's guide to subtext, which a depressingly large number of Trek fans clearly need to (re-)read. Tilly is using Our Town to give our cadets the chance to address their trauma without directly speaking of it (and note how cleverly the show weaves in Caleb's more general discomfort with his situation, and Darem's experiences last week, into that process of not-talking talking), but the show itself employs it to gently remind us of the value that stories can heal. If you let them, of course. This is ultimately what happens with Sam, in a sense, with the story of how she began rewritten on Kasq. Yes, the show goes to great pains to make it clear her new upbringing with the Doctor is "real", whatever that means, but there's no actual meaningful or functional difference between the Doctor spending 17 years in hologram Narnia and doing it via updates to Sam's code. It's a lovely development for the Doctor, who fittingly in an episode about the theatre takes centre stage here for the first time this season. It's also a nice paying off of Sam's desire for the Doctor to mentor her, which I think takes some of the sting out of what's otherwise the episode's only major misstep - Sam doesn't get to consent to how her life is changed in order to save it. But then that itself is a broader part of what the episode is engaging with. Tarima gets to express what Sam can't; the decisions on how she can continue after total disaster have been wholly taken from her hands. However that fact will eventually sit with Sam, it's clearly eating deep into Tarima. Much of the episode is given over to how badly she's doing in the wake of losing not just B'Avi, but effectively everyone in the War College (and presumably being a multiple murderer, and on new more powerful meds, and having to reckon anew with the memories of deafening her father, and....). She has little interest in discussing the stories of others, when she sees her own being rewritten in front of her without her input or consent.

In the context of her life becoming wholly unmoored, Tarima sees pulling her out of the War College as rubbing salt into some very, very deep wounds. The results are heartbreaking; Tarima spins faster and faster as she tries to simultaneously regain control (via attempting to sleep with Caleb in the mess hall), lean in to the feeling of helplessness (by getting shitfaced on space-age space-aged booze), and dealing with Tilly's theatre class by simultaneously denying there's an issue (scorning the idea there's a subtext to Emily's wedding day blues) and that the issue is too profound for anyone who wasn't there alongside her to understand.

It's tempting to call this a pitch-perfect representation of how teenagers deal with their trauma, except I think it works as rather broader depiction than that suggests. In any case, "...Stars" does very well at presenting someone struggling with being, as Tarima says, "looked at like you're a grenade", only for her brother to eventually point out, with deep love but exhausted frustration, that that's a situation which is also awful for everyone who is staring at something which could explode at any moment.

Gods, this is good. And sad. The whole back third of this episode, I could feel that pressure behind the eyes, as we take in the scale of how much is broken, and how hard it will be to fix. I said above that there's no difference between Sam being raised by the Doctor and her being programmed to believe she's been raised by the Doctor, but that's not wholly true. The experience of time passing is crucial here. Even the Doctor and Sam will one day no longer exist, and the rest of us will be gone long before. As Caleb says, there's no way to stop the train, still less turn it back. We can only keep going, in our endless moments of mundanity that are, when it comes down to it, neither endless nor mundane. They are, instead, simply life, that thing we insist on keeping doing, even when the next tragedy crashes down on us, and those moment of mundanity become impossible and everywhere, and you realise the only way to deal with the fact all life ends is to just go on living. Not because there’s no choice, but because as Sam puts it – Sam, who’s barely been alive six months, and who hadn’t even considered the concept of plays a day earlier – part of our essential nature is our capacity for hopeful defiance.

In that one sentence, Sam herself pins the episode down. Hell, this whole series. If this is televised theatre (note the deliberate nod to this in the final shot of the episode), and if theatre is statecraft, then this is what it means to live and fight in this grimmest of political moments. We go on living in the face of everything that threatens to harm us, and everyone who would take pleasure in that harm. We’re reminded here that Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town in the days before the Second World War – the first ever performance of the play took place seven weeks before Hitler annexed Austria. The circumstances and symptoms of the second age of fascism look very different to those of the first, but still; there’s no sensible way to argue “The Life Of The Stars” didn’t premiere in a similar historical context.

The show knows that, and it knows what it wants to say. Be defiant. Be hopeful.

Keep living.

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