Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Episode 5 Review – Series Acclimation Mil

The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy episode 5.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is finally starting to hit its stride as the series hits the midpoint of its first season. After last week’s largely excellent “Vox in Excelso,” the show switches up the vibe entirely with “Series Acclimation Mil,” a Sam-focused hour with a decidedly youthful feel and a deftly handled story that mixes familiar coming of age tropes with a love letter to what is perhaps the franchise’s most underrated installment. Written by Kirsten Beyer and former Star Trek: Lower Decks star Tawny Newsome, the episode is a delightful blend of old and new, using its plentiful connections to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine to honor the stories that have come before, even as it uses those same threads to inform where the franchise is headed next.

Everybody’s undoubtedly going to be talking about the hour’s Benjamin Sisko focus, the glimpse into his son Jake’s future, the mostly-still-unanswered question of what really happened to him, and the gorgeous spoken word coda from none other than Avery Brooks himself at its end. And, of course, the revelation that Sam’s professor is also the new Trill host of the Dax symbiote that played such a key role in Deep Space Nine. There’s a lot to dig into in terms of larger Trek lore. But, even without all that, “Series Acclimation Mil” is also just a really satisfying story of a young woman learning how to navigate the conflict between the duty that’s been thrust upon her and the things she really wants. 

The overall vibe of the episode is fun and bubbly, complete with colorful onscreen graphics, text descriptions, and fourth-wall-breaking asides to the audience. It’s all very reflective of what we know of Sam’s character thus far, and gives the show the kind of definitive POV and tone that its earlier episodes largely lacked. It’s genuinely charming and engaging enough to make you hope that the show finds a way to do something similar for the rest of its cadets. Yes, there’s a lot of exposition dumping, involving the history of Sam’s people, their curiosity about the experiences of organics, and why she’s been sent to Starfleet Academy in the first place. But because it’s all deployed in the service of deepening our emotional connection to and understanding of Sam, it’s surprisingly effective. The tension between a young woman and her parents — or makers in this case — when it comes to who she’s supposed to be, is precisely the sort of universal coming-of-age story that resonates in any universe or timeline, and one that this series is uniquely equipped to tell. 

It helps, of course, that Kerrice Brooks is a literal ray of sunshine throughout, with an infectious demeanor that fully conveys Sam’s excitement and wonder at the situations she finds herself in, from drinking and bar fighting to recreating classic New Orleans dishes she can’t actually eat herself. Sam’s makers insist that she must gain admission to a course called “Confronting the Unexplainable” to remain at the Academy, as they are, for some reason, convinced it will hold the secrets of the organic experience. In an attempt to impress Professor Ayla, she learns about the life (and mysterious disappearance) of Deep Space Nine’s Captain Benjamin Sisko, and in the process, ends up questioning both what it means to be an Emissary of her people and the duty that comes along with it. 

Longtime Trek fans will, of course, enjoy the ways this episode connects to the franchise’s past, from the return of Cirroc Lofton as an adult version of Sisko’s son Jake to the various items from the Earth-based Sisko Museum recreated in virtual form. There’s even a Bajoran children’s book that recounts his role as an Emissary of the Prophets. Thankfully, the hour smartly doesn’t attempt to really answer the question of what happened to Sisko at the end of Deep Space Nine. (Several characters seem to draw their own conclusions, but the show itself doesn’t put its foot down one way or another, and viewers can decide for themselves how they feel.) 

Instead, the journey is more important than the destination, and it’s a lesson for Sam about what it means to carry both a destiny and a personal identity, and finding a way to thread the needle between the two. As she follows in the footsteps of the man she’s sort of adopted as a role model, it helps her not only understand that she’s something more than a conduit for the hopes and dreams of those who made her, but someone capable of making her own choices for her own reasons. And for a being who’s something like 200 days old, that’s no small thing. 

The hour’s more young adult vibe means we also get the chance to see the students just, well, being students. Thus far, Starfleet Academy seems to work best when it leans into the inexperience of its protagonists. Though this episode still just cannot seem to help itself when it comes to reminding us that Caleb is some kind of genius hacker, the majority of it focuses on the sort of escapades one might expect from a show with this name. The gang’s trip to a cadet bar night is the highlight of the hour, full of the kind of dumb hijinks most of us probably remember from college. 

Unfortunately, the episode stalls out whenever we switch back to its more adult-focused B-plot, which involves a complicated rehearsal for a fully ridiculous diplomatic dinner that War College Commander Kelrec has set up with a visiting alien chancellor. Pretty much everything about this subplot is awful, from Holly Hunter attempting a very weird posh accent and dinner guests being forced to talk to one another through cone shaped mouth trumpets to a strange blob fish-based main course that occasionally passes gas in a deeply uncomfortable way. We really all could have survived not knowing what Chancellor Ahke and the grown-ups were up to this week, is what I’m saying. 

Thankfully, none of the blobfish stuff is remotely relevant to the rest of the episode, which concludes with a Sam who’s confident enough to claim agency over her own fate in a way she never realized was possible before. Its positively lovely to see Lofton’s Jake get the chance to give her the same sort of heartfelt pep talk he so often received from his father, and the confirmation that, no matter what actually happened to him, Sisko’s legacy still lives on in so many ways — through Jake’s book, through Dax’s instruction, and now through Sam herself — is ridiculously moving. But more importantly, “Series Acclimation Mil” isn’t a nostalgia fest for its own sake. It’s a story that makes use of the franchise’s past to truly inform its present, and it’s a lesson we can only hope the rest of the season will follow. 

New episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with the finale on March 12.