Starfleet Academy's dark new episode changes the series' stakes

Paul Giamatti on the joys of true villainy: 'It was nice to be able to play a guy who’s like, I’m just going to tear everything down.'

Starfleet Academy is packed with silly college hijinks, like a prank war between rival schools and a faculty dinner filled with bizarre rituals. Episode 6, “Come, Let’s Away,” starts in that same spirit. The Starfleet Academy and War College students are competing in a training mission as they try to reboot systems on the derelict Starfleet ship, the USS Miyazaki. It’s an opportunity for more verbal sparring between brooding Starfleet cadet Caleb Mir (Sandro Rosta) and the Vulcan War College bully B’Avi (Alexander Eling), and even some betting among the faculty about which group will win. Then events take a serious turn.

“We all felt it was important to turn this show on its head so that suddenly, the cadets realized the world they were stepping into had real stakes, that joining Starfleet isn’t just about being in a classroom,” co-showrunner Alex Kurtzman told Polygon in a video interview. “In fact, the stakes were massive.”

[Ed. note: This story contains major spoilers for Starfleet Academy episode 6.]

The training exercise is interrupted when a group of extremely hostile aliens called the Furies board the Miyazaki and surround it with a dampening field that prevents the students and their faculty chaperone, War College Lt. Commander Tomov (Jeff Teravainen), from beaming out. Caleb in particular gets a real wake-up call. Moments after mocking B’Avi’s Starfleet comic book about the Miyazaki’s heroic crew, calling it colonizer propaganda, he sees Tomov and B’Avi spring into action to protect the other students from the Furies. “He didn’t hesitate,” Caleb gasps as Tomov pays for his courage with his life.

While the Furies demand a ransom, but the Federation worries that the ruthless criminals will kill the kids even if they get their payment. Admiral Charles Vance (Oded Fehr) decides the students’ best hope might be to get help from the devious space pirate Nus Braka (Paul Giamatti), who has successfully fought the Furies before. Chancellor Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter) has a long history with Nus, and isn’t keen on trying to negotiate with him.

The conflict sets up an extremely tense episode where the cadets have to try to buy time on the Miyazaki, using the teamwork and technical skills they were meant to learn from the trip, while Nahla tries to figure out what Nus really wants out of this negotiation. The Federation hopes Nus could be an anti-hero, a scoundrel they can work with against a nastier foe. But he’s just preying on their optimistic naïveté. He engineered this entire situation for his benefit — making an alliance with the Furies so he can distract the Federation and rob one of their military facilities.

“He is a bad guy,” Giamatti told Polygon. “He’s a messed-up, damaged person who does bad things. I don’t get to play a whole lot of out-and-out villains. I play sort of muddled, confused, unpleasant people, but it was nice to be able to play a guy who’s like, ‘I’m just going to tear everything down because I hate all of you so much.’ That was fun to do.”

By the end of the episode, B’avi and Tomov are dead, the holographic student SAM (Kerrice Brooks) has been critically damaged, and Caleb’s Betazoid girlfriend Tarima Sadal (Zoë Steiner) is in a coma after using her psychic powers to knock out the Furies. It's a shame that the War College is just treated like a joke, because this debacle would be a great chance for them to question Nahla’s authority and push for a training program that focuses more on combat preparedness.

It’s unclear what Nus stole, but Kurtzman promised the villain's return sets up the back half of the season.

“It’s all been fun and games up until now, but this job is actually really scary and really hard,” he said. “The point [of the episode] was to honor the truth of what it means to be a cadet or an officer in Starfleet Academy.”

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The first six episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy are available to stream now on Paramount Plus. Future episodes release on Thursdays through March 12.