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The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Starfleet Academyepisode 8.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s first season returns to excellent form with “The Life of the Stars,” an emotionally complicated hour about healing and growth in many forms. A satisfyingly layered, creative installment that sees the return of a Star Trek: Discovery fan favorite and the creation of a unique new bond for the show’s Star Trek: Voyager alum, it’s a love letter to the power of community, found family, and, strangely enough, Thornton Wilder. Yes, this is an episode that’s targeted like a laser at theater kids everywhere, but it’s also a much better follow-up to the tragic events that unfolded aboard the shipwreck Miyazaki than last week’s frequently clunky “Ko’Zeine”.
For one thing, “The Life of the Stars” actually tries to confront the long-tail impact of everything these students have been through. They had to fight for their lives. One of their friends is dead. Another revealed she can basically melt people’s heads. Their idea of the world as a safe place has been fractured. It makes sense that many of them are struggling to find meaning in these kinds of events or fully understand the ways they’ve been changed by them.
What makes slightly less sense is the Chancellor’s decision to combat their PTSD with the power of theater, but it’s such a perfectly Ake-coded weirdo move that it’s hard to be mad at it, particularly when it allows Discovery’s Mary Wiseman to pop in for a guest spot. If anyone is going to forcibly cheer up these kids, it’s Lieutenant Sylvia Tilly, who has somehow grown even more aggressively sunny since the last time we saw her. (Teaching really suits her.) She plans to coerce the struggling cadets into facing their collective trauma by making them perform a play together, and honestly, it’s hardly the weirdest group bonding activity we’ve seen folks forced to do in this franchise. Sadly, however, Jay-Den’s campaign to do a murder-filled Klingon opera is passed over in favor of Sam’s pick, a piece from Ancient Earth times called Our Town.
Wilder’s classic is a bizarrely perfect fit for this moment, a story that wrestles with themes of existential dread, fear of death, the inevitability of change, and the importance of appreciating life while we’re living it. The episode itself adopts a quasi-Our Town framing, opening and closing in darkness, with both the Doctor and Ake playing the role of the Stage Manager who exists outside of both time and the play’s main story. Fitting — and bittersweet — since they’re both functionally immortal, with lives that will extend well beyond any of the cadets they’re so desperately trying to help at this moment.
The hour deftly draws parallels between various elements of the play and the experiences of the Starfleet cadets and staff, allowing Tarima to find a kind of camaraderie with Wilder’s Emily in her fear of losing herself and Sam to be charmed by the hopeful resilience at the core of his take on village life. Even the hour’s B-plot, which sees Ake and the Doctor escort Sam to her homeworld of Kasq in the hope that her Makers will be able to fix the debilitating glitching still impacting her, reflects the larger themes of this central work. Kasq is rendered in black and white, a greyscale planet that lacks the emotional context that Wilder insists both colors (literally) and gives meaning to living. (The Kasqs, being holograms, do not see the world that way.)
It is the Doctor who ultimately changes that. Longtime fans will particularly enjoy the way this plot ties back to the Voyager episode “Real Life,” in which the Doctor creates a holographic family of his own and must watch his young daughter die. His still-present grief from that loss is the reason he’s been so rude and standoffish toward Sam ever since her arrival at the Academy, fearing what it might mean to experience that kind of emotional connection and eventual heartbreak once more.
“The only thing that allows me to bear my infinity is not having to love anyone,” the Doctor says. “You mean not having to love anyone again,” Ake replies, she herself one of a scant handful of people who actually have personal experience in this kind of thing. (If we do not get some sort of broader Ake backstory episode this season, I’m going to lose my mind.)
But to save Sam’s life, the Doctor, like Tarima, must find a way to become part of the story of his own life again. He essentially ends up becoming Sam’s father, raising a new version of her from childhood that will have the learned resilience to process the trauma her teenage self has faced without her programming breaking down. (This is possible thanks to the way time works on Kasq, where seventeen years is the equivalent of about two Earth weeks.) The last eight minutes of the episode are a montage of the rebooted Sam growing up from infancy, interspersed with shots of the Starfleet cadets’ impromptu performance of Our Town. Set to a voiceover of Tarima’s brother Ocam reading the Stage Manager’s lines, we follow Sam’s growth from a baby to a young woman, and see joy return to the eyes of our formerly miserable cadets.
It’s a surprisingly moving sequence for many reasons, not the least of which being that Sam’s “birth” is the act that brings color to the Kasquian landscape. Gone is the greyscale when life steps onto the stage, in a physical manifestation of an internal transformation that reflects the emotion of the choice the Doctor has made. As he himself said earlier in the hour, a moment is just a moment. It is when a moment becomes a memory — infused with context, emotion, nostalgia, regret, and joy — that it becomes something larger than itself. He is, quite literally, making memories. And they are beautiful to watch unfold.
“The Lives of the Stars” is an episode that works on multiple levels: Yes, it’s the story of a group of college kids putting on a play. It’s also the story of an ancient hologram opening his heart again, building an entirely new and different life to save a young woman he was afraid to admit he cared about. But it’s also a story of making meaning in a large and frightening world. The hour’s title comes from a line in the play: “the life of the village versus the life of the stars.” Humans, of course, are the village, living tiny lives of little consequence when held up against a vast unknowableness. Our lives are all a brief blip in the larger scheme of the universe, so what can we do besides live them to the fullest while we can?
New episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with the finale on March 12.
The post Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Episode 8 Review — The Life of the Stars appeared first on Den of Geek.
