STAR TREK: STARFLEET ACADEMY Review — “Rubincon”
For its season finale, Starfleet Academy passed with flying colors, meeting the ultimate year-end assignment head-on and finding a way to perfectly encapsulate everything we love about this show into one final hour of gripping, edge-of-your-seat, coming-of-age Star Trek. In “Rubincon,” the action is spread into two distinct storylines: the adults in the room having very adult conversations about the nature of life and consequences, and the kids out in the workplace putting their very real school lessons to the test in what amounts to a series of on-the-job final exams in a number of life-and-death situations. The adults in the room, of course, are Captain Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter), Venari Ral baddie Nus Braka (Paul Giamatti) and stuck-in-the-middle nomad Anisha Mir (Tatiana Maslany), squaring off in a hackneyed trial of the century being staged by Braka in which he has Ake standing accused for all Federation crimes and Anisha serving as judge and jury. The trial is taking place in the captured atrium of the Athena, which has been lit ablaze and completely desecrated by Braka, and it does a good job to stand in for so much of today’s pervasive “us or them” modern discourse. But where this episode really comes to life is on board the Athena’s saucer section where Jett Reno (Tig Notaro) is leading a skeleton crew of cadets to try and methodically piece together a way to combat the Venari Ral threat to the Federation. And honestly, if someone had said that Jett Reno captaining a starship with the sublime efficiency and precision of any of Starfleet’s best captains across the past thousand years was going to be one of the highlights of not only this season, but for all of new Star Trek in the past 10 years, I don’t think I would have believed them. But here we are. Time to get rolling on those new Captain Reno series petitions, because Tig in command was extremely special.
