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The following contains spoilers for Starfleet Academy episode 9.
The penultimate episode of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s first season has to serve many masters. From a high-stakes plotline that puts the very future of the Federation at risk once more to the conclusion of the institution’s first school year and all the conflicting emotions that big change can spark, it’s an hour full of both big feelings and big threats. So it makes sense that the show brought in someone who knows the franchise well to help guide it.
Jonathan Frakes is best known for playing William Riker on Star Trek: The Next Generation, but he’s also a talented and prolific director. He’s helmed episodes across seven different Trek series and directed two feature films, all while continuing to make guest appearances onscreen in various properties, including an extended run on Star Trek: Picard season 3. And, according to him, Starfleet Academy is doing just fine — despite the negative criticism the more youthfully-minded property is getting from some corners of the internet.
“What’s with the haters? This show is great,” Frakes tells Den of Geek. “Really, I’m thrilled with it. I think it has a real optimism. It’s representative of Star Trek moving into the future. I mean, it’s all really in the future, but this is after the Burn, this is after so much other stuff. There’s a lot of canon that is in place that Starfleet Academy is reestablishing itself in San Francisco after a hundred years, so there’s a lot for the hardcore Trekkies to dig into, to say, ‘Oh, okay, this is where they are now’ while still being [full of] surprises.”
Frakes takes the helm on one of the season’s more complicated episodes, which reveals the extent of space pirate Nus Braka’s plan to cripple the Federation, pays off a big emotional moment for Caleb, and sees Chancellor Ake break the rules to save a group of missing cadets. But for the man behind the camera, it’s the emotion underneath the action that was most interesting to highlight onscreen.
“Alex Kurtzman and Noga [Landau], they laid out the season in a way that I thought brilliantly gave a lot of the characters key moments to reveal who they are, which let the audience get to know them,” Frakes says. “So by the time I got there at episode nine, Alex had really already established a lot of things, including a motif of how he wanted the show shot. He shared the first two episodes with me when I got there, and he was using these new lenses, these anamorphic spherical lenses. They’re wide, but we could shoot very tight with them on people’s faces. And this episode, as you see, is filled with emotion for that kind of shooting.”
Though the season’s penultimate episode features a fair amount of action set pieces – a face-off between the runaway cadets and police, the sudden arrival of the Athena to rescue them — its heart revolves around a key character moment: The long-awaited reunion between Caleb and the mother he’s been searching for since he was a child.
“It’s really all about the emotions of these scenes,” Frakes continues. “Especially the reunion of mother and son. But my favorite is the confrontation where I lined up the cadets opposite Sandro [Rosta, who plays Caleb], and he goes down the line just reading them the riot act, ‘you’re full of shit’ and this and that. But then Sam turns the tables on him and throws herself into his chest. It’s such a great payoff for that scene that she can totally see through him, can see how much he’s struggling with what’s going on. It really shows off the relationship he has reluctantly developed with all these cadets with whom he was in such conflict at the beginning. So I love this episode and everything it teased up for Tunde’s [referring to frequent Trek director Olatunde Osunsanmi] finale.”
“300th Night” is the first half of Starfleet Academy’s first two-part story, and the events of this episode lead directly into the season finale, an episode that Frakes isn’t directing. But, to hear him tell it, a lot of thought went into the transition between the two halves of the story.
“Tunde and I have done this before on Discovery, where we did the two-parter finale together,” Frakes says. “The handoff takes place in that little medbay with the two actors, and he and I were together to set up the way he wanted to start. So certainly that, specifically, was in place. But when I prep, I prep. He’s around all the time. I’m very close with him, and we’ve worked together quite a bit, and we’re very competitive. He inspires me, and I think I inspire him, and we have a ball making stuff.”
Frakes also delighted in the opportunity to work closely with the “brilliant” Holly Hunter, whose casting he describes as “magical.”
“She’s spectacular,” Frakes says when asked about working with Hunter. “What brilliant casting! She’s funny. She’s so smart, she’s tough… and she works barefoot! She’s fearless. By the time I got there, it was clear she has a methodology for how she works. We had built in Sunday rehearsals so that we could go through the scenes in her office and on the bridge, because she finds her blocking organically. So she and I and the other actors and my cinematographer and the first AD, we spent hours going through the beats in the scenes and figuring out the blocking we all wanted to pursue, so by the time we got on the floor to do the scenes, we had a pretty good idea of where we were going to put the cameras. To have the privilege of the company giving us the time to rehearse without a hundred people waiting around for us to find a scene was a really good choice.”
Frakes himself once played a character who was known for his… let’s just call it a cavalier approach to furniture. His famous “Riker manuever” is so well known that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds even poked fun at it during a season 2 crossover with Star Trek: Lower Decks. (A move Frakes himself apparently found hilarious.) Hunter’s Chancellor Ake is something of a spiritual successor to this trend, draping, lounging, and sprawling across virtually any surface she encounters.
“I’ll tell you how Frakes reacted,” he laughs when asked about how his famous character might see Ake’s sprawling approach to interacting with the set. “When I saw that in the first episode, I said, ‘This is going to be it. This is the defining moment of her captainship.’ It made me smile. I thought, ‘This show has balls doing this.’ And she just embraced it.”
The Star Trek: Starfleet Academy season 1 finale premieres Thursday, March 12 on Paramount+.
The post “This Show Has Balls” – Jonathan Frakes Talks Directing Starfleet Academy Episode 9 appeared first on Den of Geek.
