On ‘Starfleet Academy’, the Theater Kids Are All Right

Gizmodo · Feb 26, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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Star Trek has always had a history with theater. From the forefront of “public domain” contemporary culture being the spine of the 23rd and 24th centuries’ pastime interests to the Shakespearean ways of performance that have influenced the way the franchise has sounded for generations, plays and the act of performance are suffused into Trek even beyond the fact that it is, in and of itself, a performance. But rarely is Star Trek really about theater in the way Starfleet Academy is. “The Life of the Stars” is an interesting sister episode to last week’s emotion-unpacking smorgasbord, but at the same time, a counterpoint full of friction. Both episodes continue to deal with the aftermath of what the young cadets of the academy and the war college experienced losing one of their own in the field, but if “Ko’Zeine” found the path to healing was through positive affirmation and healing among friends (and maybe a little homosexual yearning), “The Life of Stars” gives our young heroes permission to crash out about it all and allow themselves all to be a bit shitty about facing something awful and being expected to come out the other side okay. And also permission to read Thornton Wilder. © Paramount Yes, the American playwright—and more specifically, his 1938 metatheater drama Our Town—is fundamental to the plot of this week’s Starfleet Academy, as is the 1997 Voyager season three episode “Real Life,” about the Doctor creating himself a photonic family and inadvertently giving himself existential grief in the process, which is to say this is a very peculiar episode of Starfleet Academy. It’s arguably the episode that has felt the most like its sister show, Star Trek: Discovery, in that it is an episode of high emotion, highly messy emotion, and just how much that clicks with you is ultimately going to be down to how willing you are to accept when Star Trek plays with form and meaning. The form and meaning this time just so happen to be about the healing power of after-school amateur dramatics. But before we get to the Wilder of it all: Tilly’s back! It is she who sparks this theatrical moment when Chancellor Ake essentially brings her in as the ultimate therapy counsel when she realizes that maybe the kids directly involved in watching one of their peers get a phaser bolt clean through his chest might not be as all right as they professed. Especially Tarima, who is not only back to school after a lengthy coma (and fitted with an even stronger neural inhibitor) but has also been transferred to Starfleet Academy out of a concern that the more martial focuses of the War College may put her in more dangerous scenarios likely to set off her psychic powers. Except that’s not even half of it. Although Tarima is acting out the most publicly, no one among the kids is really okay—they’re tired, they’re lashing out at each other, and they’re, to be perfectly honest, not actually getting that great care, all things considered (maybe Reno’s tough love was not the ideal choice for a team-building exercise, for example). And things only get worse when Tilly’s impromptu theater class turns into a crisis of its own, when the only student among the crew excited to engage, Sam, collapses, revealing that her photonic glitching, purportedly solved by a few visits to the proverbial holospa, hasn’t been repaired at all. © Paramount It’s this scenario in particular that both brings in Wilder and allows our young heroes to really start acting out. It was Sam who had chosen Our Town for the group to study and perform (a fascinating choice, given its meditations on finding joy in the meniality of human life and a willingness to move on from grief and loss), but watching her graphically collapse mid-class really exposes the cracks and raw edges. Everyone gets a bit more, well, teen. They’re sniping at each other; they’re arguing with Tilly about what studying literature has to do with Starfleet, and in Tarima’s case, they’re getting smashed on Betazoid booze and trying to get flirty (Caleb, at the very least, pushes back on her advances, not wanting to take advantage of her while she’s so vulnerable and also heavily inebriated). If “Ko’Zeine” was Starfleet Academy showing processing trauma in a positive, healthy way, then this is the direct opposite, and it’s interesting for the show to do so, showing that things don’t just go away for people, especially young adults like our heroes. But also, apparently, that’s the case for some of the eldest among the academy… namely, the Doctor. The other half of the episode focuses on Chancellor Ake and the Doctor taking the glitching Sam back to her homeworld on Kasq, which, it turns out, operates in a unique slice of space-time, where years on the planet are mere days in normal space. That’s not unlike another episode of Voyager—name-checked by the Doctor en route, “Blink of an Eye”—but like we said above, “Real Life” is the episode that matters most to “The Life of the Stars.” As Sam starts shutting down and Kasq’s photonic creators throw their proverbial hands up at how to fix her, we finally start digging into why the Doctor has been so bitter across the show so far, especially toward Sam. He’s also still not over a trauma he felt, even if his has been sitting around for the best part of 800 years compared to the couple of months our young heroes have had to deal with the Miyazaki incident. © Paramount It’s a fascinating layer, because again, like Tarima and the other cadets, the Doctor is dealing with this trauma—the death of his holographic daughter, Belle, in the simulated family he made for himself in “Real Life”—poorly as well. Seeing something of Belle in Sam when she first came to the Academy has manifested as the Doctor lashing out at her, distancing himself from her lest he get attached to another photonic child: one who is facing the same kind of existential harm as Belle did when her creators decide that Sam’s damage is so severe (and a product of interaction with organics) it’s not worth attempting to repair her. Again, it’s a great mirror to “Ko’Zeine,” which told our young crew that it’s okay for them to be imperfect as they respond to this moment in their lives—because clearly, the adults among them are doing that as well. It all climaxes as Tarima has a meltdown of her own, sniping at Tilly for what she thinks is a facile attempt at using Our Town to get the kids to open up about their own traumas (because, of course, young adults don’t think anyone could possibly understand what they’re going through), but that’s when the play itself finally clicks for everyone else. They realize, in studying it, that the point about life and what they’re dealing with is to appreciate the moments because as people you are constantly changing, and evolving, and moving on—caught up in the bigger picture of life instead. Tarima comes to understand that too when she overhears the rest of the kids trying to parse through the last act of the play, and so does everyone back on Kasq when the Doctor and Chancellor Ake conclude that Sam’s cascading failures are in part because her creators programmed her as a child without an experience of childhood—she keeps trying to look back to find understanding about what she’s going through and coming up empty. And so, the Doctor decides to give her one. Sam’s childhood, 17 years on her homeworld, will pass in just two weeks in normal space-time, so he stays behind to guide her through it as the mentor and father figure he’d refused to be for her up to this point. That time also gives Tarima and the rest of the cadets a breather to reflect on what they got out of Our Town too, to acknowledge that life will always move on and things will change who you are as people for better and worse, and to appreciate the moment you live in, whether it’s celebrating the good or weathering the bad. © Paramount On the surface, it might feel weird that Starfleet Academy has now dedicated basically a third of its first season to the Miyazaki incident and its fallout, especially with two back-to-back episodes of very different approaches to dealing with such a traumatic event. But as sentimental as “The Life of the Stars” feels at points—again, Our Town as the restorative crux of the episode feels a little bit like theater kids getting the run of the writer’s room—it’s overall been time well spent, in a way that other Star Trek shows might not necessarily have been able to. That’s not to say they don’t show people dealing with traumas; of course they do, but the broadly episodic nature of the franchise means the journey of dealing with those traumas is often sporadic or left by the wayside to deal with the next Thing of the Week. Starfleet Academy taking a little time to have its characters process this kind of loss, something that can usually be so familiar to typical Star Trek (where the heroes are more than familiar with losing people in the line of duty), and having the space to do it messily is a great use of its unique circumstances. Now, they can get back to a bit more boldly going and growing… although maybe now that Tilly’s work is done once more for the time being, we can put a hiatus on the Starfleet Academy drama department planning anything anytime soon. Want more io9 news? 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