SFA honors The Sisko

The newest Star Trek show, Starfleet Academy, dropped its fifth episode this week. Titled "Series Acclimation Mil," which is the full name of the holographic alien character known as SAM, it does everything right that much of Strange New Worlds season three did wrong. It's offbeat but true to theme, character-driven in ways that are wholly satisfying, and honors what came before—specifically, major aspects of the third Trek series, Deep Space Nine—with reverent fealty.

SAM is a character that we knew nothing about other than that she's a delightful mystery. This episode, as she tells us directly in the first minute, is all about her. We learn about her background, but we also learn a lot about who she is—and so does she, which is precisely the sort of writing a show like this, with a YA focus, absolutely needs.

We learn that SAM is an emissary from the planet Kasq, created to learn about the species and cultures of the Federation and determine if they, as organic beings, are basically trustworthy or are they likely to behave as the organic beings that created the Kasqians long ago did and attempt to oppress artificially-created beings like the people of Kasq into servitude. SAM refers to the Kasqians as her "makers," and the makers are really impatient. They've given SAM a task and want results; they're not interested in SAM's experiences on a personal level or what she thinks about music, just find out if it's safe to leave isolation and present copious evidence why or why not.

So when SAM learns that there was an historic figure named Benjamin Sisko that was not only a great Starfleet wartime captain but also a mythological figure in the planet Bajor's culture as the emissary of the alien beings known as the Bajoran prophets, she immediately feels a kinship and wants to learn more. When it seems that Sisko's reluctant acceptance of being the emissary and his ultimate disappearance—believed by the Bajorans, at least, to be a transition from living as a human being to living among the prophets themselves—meant that he was not able to live the life he wanted to live, she really identifies.

It's brilliant. It uses both in-universe history and a writers' room expertise and respect for DS9 to tell a story all about this new character of SAM, one that parallels a lot of people's experience as a youngster gone off to college to fulfill a parent's desire for them—become a doctor, a lawyer, a business mogul—only to discover for themselves that they want to be something else, or at least to find their own way to a path. As with the best of DS9, we also get mysteries of spiritualism versus provable facts, ponderings of what traits are really the important ones in a personality, and questions of free will and destiny and whether they can co-exist.

There's other goofy stuff in this one too, small bits furthering the stories of other characters and a B-story developing Holly Hunter's Chancellor Ake and her War College counterpart Commander Kelrec's odd relationship and giving Bob Picardo and Tig Notaro scenes to show off their comic chops (my favorite line in the episode might well be when Tig's Commander Reno just says "No" through a mini-bullhorn to Picardo's Doctor). But really this is SAM's journey, and I'm loving it.

There's still a lot of ambivalence about Starfleet Academy as a project; it is a YA-oriented show and as such isn't as interesting to some in the demographic that has long enjoyed this now-60-year-old franchise. But this episode, written with reverence by Tawny Newsome and Kirsten Beyer, two women who both know their Trek backwards and forwards and know how to handle story structure and character development, shows how appealing to a YA audience doesn't have to mean dumbing down your material.