Whatever you feel about Starfleet Academy so far, you have to admire a series with this kind of gumption. For reasons good and ill, the show has made no qualms about its desire to shake things up about the way a Star Trek show presents itself over the first half of its debut season, a playful act of rebellion befitting its youthful cast of characters that has been unafraid of poking at certain sections of old-school Trek fandom already primed to approach the new series with a degree of wariness.
And then it had the sheer audacity to turn around and say, “Actually, we’re going to touch one of the holy grails of classic Star Trek, Deep Space Nine,” and tie its transgressive aims to the legacy of a show that has spent the past 30-plus years being relitigated from a similar place to where Starfleet Academy finds itself among some audiences—an outside provocateur that “disrespects” what Star Trek ought to be—to being some of the truest and most beloved Trek around.
But by god, whether those skeptics are willing to see it or not, Starfleet Academy made something beautiful: a fitting revisitation to the life, love, and legacy of Captain Benjamin Sisko.
Star Trek fans have, of course, spent half of Trek‘s entire lifetime building up the pillar of Who Ben Sisko Should Be Remembered As. He’s the not-Picard, the doer, the man willing to get his hands in the muck and ruffle feathers (but still in a respectably Star Trek-y way, of course). He is the captain of the Dominion War, the human, imperfect face of a dark heart that questioned what parts of itself the Federation and Star Trek alike were willing to carve off of themselves in the face of an existential crisis.
“Series Accilimation Mil,” named for the technical name of Kerrice Brooks’ holographic student Sam, who serves as the anchor of the episode, takes a different track. We’ve had plenty of time to canonize Sisko as one of the great captains of the franchise among his peers or his role in the moral grays of Star Trek‘s darkest hour. The episode sees Sam taken to task by her photonic masters on Kasq that she is not taking her role as an Emissary, made to help them decide if organic life can be trusted again after they were made to be enthralled to their biological creators, seriously enough. Instead, she is told the best way to prove herself is to solve the unsolvable (and in that, answer the fate of her fellow Emissary) and take a remarkable look back at Sisko’s true legacy in what he left behind.
Those aforementioned skeptics will perhaps shudder a bit about how Starfleet Academy spends much of this episode presenting this look back. “Series Acclimation Mil” manifests Sam’s own particular brand of quirkiness through a lot of heavy-handed editing choices, from graphics covering the screen in a child-like scrawl (Sam is programmed to be a young adult but is only a few months into her entire existence; I would think she would have better handwriting) to lots of slow-mo and freezes as the show zooms in tight on her perspective, as we’re given a rundown of how she’s a) a unique cadet as both a photonic and an the Emissary of her unknowing, alien people, and b), made a lot of progress in making friends and exploring the vast, contradictory, and—especially in the case of a gaggle of screwy young kids still figuring themselves out—occasionally very silly complexities of the human condition.
© ParamountHer holographic masters back on Kasq, much like those skeptics, immediately call Sam out and tell her to stop faffing around with things like “having fun” and “making friends” or, most egregiously to them, taking a music elective. The role of Emissary is a serious diplomatic mantle, and if Sam doesn’t do it right, she threatens isolating her entire people from the rest of the galaxy. So they challenge her: the academy has a course on challenging the unknowable they demand she take instead. And although initially reluctant, Sam finds a hook visiting the class of Professor Illa (hello to our first major 32nd-century Cardassian, played by Lower Decks‘ Tawny Newsome, who also co-wrote this episode with Kirsten Beyer) that she believes will solve her superior’s problems—she will be the one to solve what actually happened to Captain Sisko, a fellow Emissary, at the end of Deep Space Nine, a question untouched by onscreen Star Trek for almost 30 years, if only because no one has dared to yet.
But again, Starfleet Academy is going to make you work for this juice. “Series Acclimation Mil” is an episode about Deep Space Nine and about Ben Sisko’s legacy, but it is not an episode of Deep Space Nine; it is an episode of Starfleet Academy. That means in Sam’s explorations of the evidence, she has to answer the question of whether or not Sisko really transcended reality and joined the Prophets in the Bajoran wormhole, and what remained when he did so is rooted in her perspective and her growing bond with her friends at the academy.
That includes, on her part, making a terribly silly faux pas by showing up at the student body’s Bajoran extracurricular group and essentially asking them, “So hey, is your god real?” or having Caleb figure out a way to alter her programming subroutines so she can replicate getting absolutely smashed at the local cadet-friendly bar, built on the grounds of a similar haunt Sisko himself visited during his time at the academy. This is Starfleet Academy‘s well-established comfort zone at this point, brimming with youthful energy and humor. But it’s also paired with the first of this episode’s huge shocks, when Sam, on Chancellor Ake’s advice, calls up the archives of an entire museum dedicated to Sisko’s legacy.
© ParamountAnd finds herself face-to-face with that legacy made flesh: a hologram of Jake Sisko, played by the returning Cirroc Lofton for the first time since Deep Space Nine ended.
It’s a remarkable moment, if not just for the metatextual shock that most Star Trek fans are going to be confronted with the fact that our memories of both Lofton and this character are almost entirely of him as a child, and that to see him as an adult stirs something deeply moving within. It gives us a chance in the moment to feel something similar to Sam, as we realize we’re hearing the words of Captain Sisko’s own son reflect on the man—not the captain, not the Emissary, but his father. In seeing that bond, Sam’s curiosity about Sisko’s fate, and her own if she fails to sufficiently achieve the unyielding standards of her masters, turns maudlin: being an Emissary means giving this up, this profound love and connection, and if that sacrifice is necessary, then maybe being an Emissary and having your fate decided for you—Sisko as the predestined arm of the Prophets, herself a literally created tool of Kasq’s photonic society—is worth nothing at all.
Time and time again, we see Sam return to the idea of exploring who Sisko was and what happened to him through the bonds she has forged in her time at the academy, and it’s clear that she begins to become enamored with the humanity of the man, more so than his galactic, spiritual status. Her initial explorations see her prioritize the thoughts of her friends over her own because she values them; we see her bring them food based on recipes from the Sisko family’s restaurant because they can bond with it in a way she cannot. The reason she wants to go to the cadet bar is both because Darem tells her Sisko hung out at a similar one and because it is also an act of teenage defiance in the face of her creators forcefully reminding her that time is running out to comply with their demands or lose these bonds she has already come to cherish—just as Sisko did when he traded his life with Kasidy and Jake, with his colleagues on DS9, to defeat the Pah-wraiths.
That is the lesson that Sam initially takes back to Professor Illa: the answer to the mystery of Sisko is that whatever happened, it sucked, because he left behind his wife, son, and friends, and that she’s probably going to have to do that too. But Illa decides to show her something—a copy of Anslem, a book Jake wrote but never published about his life. Reading it, Sam conjures up Jake again, not a holographic archive this time, but her imagining of the man and author as she looks over his work and mourns for this figure she’s come to find kinship with.
© ParamountBut Jake turns a page for her and gets her to reflect on something: Sisko lived his life as an emissary doing the work of the Prophets his own way, centering the bonds with his family and friends, pushing back, and defying them to accept his lived experience on his own terms. That is what Benjamin Sisko left behind: a love that carried on in his son, that was passed down through the ages to now impact itself upon a young woman almost a thousand years later. Not a Starfleet officer. Not the representation of compromises made in dark times. A man who defined and strengthened his life through connection in the wake of almost being broken by the loss of one and endured through it all and beyond it because of it.
One last legacy of that connection is made manifest when Sam returns Anslem to Professor Illa, who reveals that she is not just Illa but Illa Dax (so part Trill, part Cardassian, another of Starfleet Academy‘s interesting commentaries on future hybridization), keeping the spirit of her very best friend alive one further bond at a time. Sam looks out of the USS Athena to thank Sisko for helping her find the courage to stand up to her own arbiters and tell them she will teach them about what it means to be human in her own way, in her own time. As she walks away to do exactly that, we hear the voice of Sisko himself, Avery Brooks, echoing out:
Divine laws are simpler than human ones, which is why it takes a lifetime to be able to understand them. Only love can understand them. Only love can interpret these words as they were meant to be interpreted.
Again, it’s more than just the emotion of a voice not heard in Star Trek for decades, something that felt impossible given Brooks’ broad exit from the public spotlight. But it’s that Starfleet Academy rose to the biggest potential of its far future setting and of its place as the Star Trek show leading the series’ 60th anniversary to explore what one generation of Starfleet heroes can mean to another, across eons, and have the impact of time felt by its audience reflected in its characters. Only Starfleet Academy could’ve pulled a tribute like this off, and Star Trek is better for the fact that it was brave enough to defy fate and do so.
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