Star Trek: Starfleet Academy episode 5: “Easter In February” Perhaps the only SFA review I’ll write.

“Easter in February” is the fifth episode of Starfleet Academy, but the only one which I give half a shit to talk about.

Wait. Yes, I know that “Easter in February” is not the actual title of this episode. I don’t know what the actual title is [edit from fleishmi: the episode is "Series Acclimation Mil"], but since this episode’s main selling point is that it is one, huge and sometimes nicely decorated Easter egg and not much else, my title works.

The Easter egg here is that the brain trust at the new production team want to convince us that they appreciate older Trek, Star Trek from the Berman era. This doesn’t quite wash, because the storytelling style since 2016 has been eschewing that style for something more modern, and perfect for people who scroll and watch, rather than just watch. In the past, Star Trek was slow (or, more accurately, deliberate) and asked the audience to trust the storytellers to be patient. It asks the audience to get to know the characters over a long period of time, to care about the recurring themes that would come up. Recent Star Trek doesn’t really have any recurring themes, except that it will do whatever it can to try to hold on to its dwindling audience while not really offering anything to the older and more loyal fans.

So, “Easter in February” tries to give something to those fans by decorating a huge Easter Egg to look like Captain Sisko and Deep Space Nine. There isn’t much of a story here; instead they jam-packed every moment with as many DS9 and Sisko bits of trivia as they could find. I was even thinking while watching this that they even got the whole idea that he grew tomatoes himself, as mentioned by Eddington. That said, watching that exchange again, it seemed that Eddington was more into growing tomatoes than Sisko (who just grew vegetables, which, alas, could be tomatoes, I suppose). That’s the point, these “close but not quite right” little callbacks always turn up in “New” Star Trek. They try so hard to throw us little morsels, but they are always off. In episode four, they literally misquoted Satie’s famous words. Here, in addition to the tomato problem, they showed us (get this) Sisko’s typewriter. I know what they were thinking:  you can’t do a Sisko-themed giant Easter egg without mentioning his time that he was (or believed he was) a writer named Benny Russel, who worked in the racially turbulent 50’s. This Easter egg feels off because that identity was likely just in his mind, and he probably only told his father and a few other people about it all. There’s no physical “typewriter” that belonged to Benny that could be found preserved at the Sisko exhibit. Like every time New Trek tries to pay homage to old Trek, it feels off (remember in the Picard Season 2 trailer, when they showed the artifact from DS9’s “The Reckoning”? Why would Picard have that?)

That said, most of the Sisko stuff is pretty accurate to the lore. They clearly did their homework, trying to get the stuff right. That does not mean that they are half the storytellers the writers on Deep Space Nine were, however, so while these things were nice, it’s all fairly rote. I give them more credit for bringing back Cirroc Lofton. He actually had a lot to say about his father, and the story had a lot to say about him and his father and their relationship. Sometimes even these new producers can get something right, and I like that they got something right that was actually important to this longtime fan. I’ll say if you are a fan, and if you have the patience of a saint to get through a lot of nonsense, this episode does reward you by giving us Jake Sisko. Was the story Anslem really about his father, even fictionalized? It seems like another “off” detail, as I remember it as being a difficult and personal story he just wanted to finish. That being said, I don’t find this change to Anslem to be a negative one.

There’s something else too: I don’t like any of the main characters in SFA. Sorry, that’s just how it is. When the show first dropped, my least favorite character was SAM, the holographic girl. This was because a holographic character seemed like a dumb idea, and what a photonic person is, and how this person operates; are there projectors everywhere? Why would she need to attend classes? Combined with an all-too-cheery attitude that I could not imagine taking seriously, and I just declared, at the time, that SAM was the worst in a cast of terrible characters. I take it back. The writing is still abysmal, but the actress is trying her hardest to make SAM the “outside human perspective” person on this show, and that was as close to Trek as we’ve come. So I’ve gone from not liking her at all, to not liking her but at least finding her a more welcome presence than anyone else

The young actors in this show always seem to give their all, and I blame the writers and producers for the fact that I can’t stand the characters that they are playing. Here, we find them in a nightclub that is “kind of” connected to the Sisko story, but it’s really there just to give them some screen time.  Somehow, the adult characters are even worse. The Doctor isn’t quite as sharp or interesting as he was on Voyager. I don’t find any of the other adult characters interesting at all. There was a subplot in this episode that involved the Chancellor, (played by Holly Hunter) and the Chancellor from the rival War College eating dinner or something. I don’t remember what this subplot was about, and I don’t care enough to look it up.

So there you go: when DS9 ended, they left Sisko’s fate up to interpretation. I honestly never thought it would be brought up again. I wrote this one and only SA review because it was brought up again, and DS9 is close to my heart. The characters speculated about his fate, but thankfully, the producers did not come down and tell us. They still left it open ended. I might not like where Star Trek has been heading these days, but I thank them for their restraint here. In the process, they reminded why Deep Space Nine was so much better.