It’s the Most Dangerous Field Trip On This Week’s Starfleet Academy

It’s field trip time on Starfleet Academy and things get real, fast, as the cadets get attacked by cannibalistic bat alien/human hybrids and Paul Giamatti returns for a heaping helping of scenery in “Come, Let’s Away,” written by Kenneth Lin & Kiley Rossetter, and directed by Larry Teng.

Austin Gorton: Remember field trips, Mark? Any favorites? 

Mark Turestsky: We went to see a dubbed Crimson Tide for French class. I don’t know if it was a Quebec or France French, but they referred to Star Trek as Patrouille du cosmos (which I believe exists in the script thanks to a Quentin Tarantino punch-up), which is not as cool a name, I’m afraid. Also, why were we taken to see a dubbed movie when we were in Quebec, a place with no lack of its own films?

Austin: Living in the Twin Cities, we had dual field trips in 9th grade, one day to downtown St. Paul, one to Minneapolis, to do a sort of walking tour of notable sites (the Capital, the governor’s house, etc.). That was fun. We ALSO had a movie-based field trip; my Earth Science class saw Twister at the Mall of America.

Thankfully, none of those ended up involving attacks by hostile human/alien hybrids as part of a complicated scheme executed by space pirates. 

Sexy Time

Austin: “Come, Let’s Away” (a line from King Lear) opens with a steamy reminder that this show is, at its core, a teen drama, as Tarima and Caleb follow up the mutual lowering of their romantic shields in the previous episode with some (very) carefully edited naked time (were Caleb’s roommates — one of whom is Tarima’ brother — just chilling in the hallway?). This is, to my recollection, probably the most exposed skin we’ve gotten in Trek? Which, I mean, definitely fits the “Star Trek by way of the WB” vibe.

Mark: Hey, why did you look directly at me when asking about nudity in Star Trek? I can, yes, provide an answer, though. We saw fully exposed Klingon breasts in the Discovery episode “Into The Forest I Go.” Now, considering L’Rell had that Discovery-era Klingon design, you can pretty safely bet that what we saw was a prosthesis of some kind that the performer was wearing. Also, if you’ll recall, in Enterprise, they had their own “sex sells” moment that they tried to get into just about all of the early episodes, where crewmembers would strip down to their underwear and rub vaseline-like “decontamination gel” on each other. Somehow, in the SERIES PILOT they didn’t edit around one of their performers having a very clear erection during the scene. I believe they edited around it in subsequent airings.

Austin: First of all, huh. I’ve seen that Disco episode but I don’t remember topless L’Rell. Second of all, you’re damn right I remember Enterprise‘s decontamination gel, but I definitely did not clock the crewperson with a boner in the pilot, even though I was there watching day onel

Mark: Let’s step back for a moment, though, and think of more elevated things, shall we? You mention that the title of the episode comes from King Lear, where the complete line is “Come, let’s away to prison:/We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage,” which Lear says to his daughter Cordelia as they’ve been arrested by the villainous Edmund who’s secretly ordered their murder. By the end of the play, both Lear and Cordelia will be dead. So far, so good as a source for the title of this episode, where the good guys get captured, there are secret plots, and a few people end up dead.

However, the phrase also shows up in Romeo and Juliet, after the young couple first meets. The line comes at the end of the act, and is said by the Nurse. It’s really a housekeeping kind of line, she says it to get her and Juliet off the stage so the scene can end, so it’s not quite as good as having one of the leads say it, but consider the situation: two young lovers from either side of a feud, ending ultimately in tragedy. Well, doesn’t that remind you of some folks in this episode?

Austin: Indeed, and it doesn’t exactly bode well for their future beyond this episode, either. Which is a good example of how this opening scene isn’t just about titillation/proving teen drama bonafides; it also sets one of the two big emotional stakes for the episode, in that Tarima and Caleb are now closer than ever, but to a degree that is almost too close, as Caleb finds himself freaked out when Karima accidentally stumbles into his mind in a moment of coital bliss. The “troubled tough guy with a heart of gold fears intimacy” bit is more or less a cliche at this point, but I still appreciate the way this sequence gets used as setup for events later in the episode rather than just being a thing which happens.

Mark: Yeah, I mean, they’ve just started dating: it would freak anyone out to have their new lover stumble upon the most sensitive thing in their lives. So we should sympathize with both sides of the subsequent argument: Caleb very much had some boundaries crossed and is feeling sensitive about it, and also Tarima couldn’t help it, her neck thingy blew out with all the good-good sexytimes she was having. Caleb was just too good at sex. But seriously though, this mind-link between lovers thing isn’t new to Star Trek: we see Riker and Troi able to connect telepathically the first time they encounter each other in “Encounter at Farpoint,” and Tarima clearly had much stronger psionic powers than Troi ever did.

Austin: Put a pin in that, cuz we’re going to come back to Tarima’s power. 

The Field Trip

Austin: I’m continuing to dig how, in addition to the way it layers in the tropes of teen drama, this series uses familiar school traditions as the springboard for various plots. Joining a sports team, participating in debate, midterms, and now the field trip. Here, we get a kind of analog Kobayashi Maru, as the combined Academy and War College student bodies must work together to repair a derelict Federation ship, the delightfully-named USS Miyazaki, with an away team aboard the ship being monitored and supported by teams aboard the Athena. Honestly, I could have just watched an entire episode of everyone trying to work that problem, but of course, things take a turn pretty quickly.

Mark: The whole idea that there’s this ghost ship out there with experimental tech that’s never been recovered… I might quibble that perhaps they should send experienced personnel to recover it once and for all, and not use it as a cadet training ground, but that’s just one man’s opinion. But as you say, it’s a good rug pull for the audience: that’s what we’re expecting! The two sides learn to work together, they accomplish the impossible, learn a lesson, etc. And it would be a perfectly expected episode, very much in tune with every other episode we’ve gotten so far in this young series. But of course, that’s not what happens.

Austin: Indeed. No sooner does Caleb succeed in restoring life support on the Miyazaki then the ship is boarded by the Furies, a new species of Marauders that are alien/human hybrids, who speak mostly in clicks and growls and have a shimmery after-image effect to their heads that almost makes it seems like they’re moving superfast. Thanks to the sacrifice of Commander Tomrov (the chaperone), Caleb, SAM, Jay-Den, Kyle (the cute War Academy guy) and B’Avi (the Vulcan War Academy guy) seal themselves in the bridge, while Reymi and Genesis work with the adults back on the Athena to help. 

One of the things that works really well here are the ways each of the groups are working to effect a solution – no one is entirely a victim or savior, except for maybe the adults, who largely get snookered. But we’ll get to that. 

Mark: I was convinced we’d find out that the Furies would be revealed to actually be the Miyazaki crew. All the elements are there: they’re part human, they seem like they’re out of phase somehow, the ship had this crazy experimental engine aboard. Not to mention that the name Miyazaki, assuming he’s named for the Japanese animator and mangaka (at least from a behind-the-scenes angle), conjures a possible connection to his work that often deals with the liminal spaces between the material world and the magical spirit world.

Anyway, this is, theoretically, a comics website. What do you make of the comic subplot?

Austin: I was also expecting a twist along those lines for the Furies. Speaking of Enterprise, the way the Furies’ heads phase shifted almost made me wonder if the Temporal Cold War was coming back. 

At any rate, the comic subplot was…cute, I guess? I rolled my eyes at Caleb’s whole propaganda thing (just because, of course, Caleb has to be too cool for school). But the idea of feeding it to the computer to convince it the crew was dead and it needed to listen to them was clever – not like anything we’ve seen before (even if it didn’t entirely make logical sense). 

Mark: I really had trouble following the comic book subplot, to be honest. Why would a comic book help the computer deal with the crew being missing? Also, the comic didn’t look great, having been put together by the art department on the show. Still, it’s consistent with the current The Last Starship series, as it shows the Starfleet uniforms around the time of The Burn being very inspired by the TOS uniforms.

Austin: Speaking of comic books, the whole Tarima psychic powers thing comes back around here as well, as she discovers she can reach Caleb on the Miyazaki from the Athena, and is able to relay information through the jamming field that is disabling coms. And when the Furies bust through to the bridge, Tarima rips out her implant in order to telepathically turn their brains to mush, something we definitely never saw Troi do.

Mark: It’s a Psychic Scream (a World of Warcraft and late-edition D&D spell)! It’s teased a bit earlier in the episode when we learn that the Furies are vulnerable to sonic damage and also that Tarima’s telepathic abilities are the cause of her father’s deafness, so the attack is Super Effective. But not before B’Avi gets killed. The threat felt real, in that I was half-convinced we were going to see both Tarima and Kyle killed, but thankfully we avoided having a Fridging and a Burying of Gays so early in the series. 

Nus and Nahla 

Austin: So, what are the adults doing while their students are, essentially, saving their own asses? Entering into some deeply shifty deals with the series chief antagonist. That’s right, Paul Giamatti’s Nus Braka is back! 

The idea here is that Nus apparently got the Furies out of some sector or another, so the Federation is going to trade him some concessions for details on how he did so. To Ake’s credit, she doesn’t love the idea, amending the old “the enemy of my enemy…” cliche to “…is usually still my enemy,” but goes along with it in the face of no better options. 

Mark: The grups here show some absolutely remarkably bad judgment. But all of that is in service of bringing Paul Giammatti aboard where he can bathe in the river of ham. Once again, let’s have more of Nus Braka!  I think with this appearance, I can narrow down a bit more what works so well about the character for me: it’s that he’s actively trying to be one of the grand, capital-C Classical villains of Trek, like a Khan or a Soran, but he hasn’t got the erudition necessary for it, and so he comes up with delightfully overblown phraseology. 

Austin: The great thing about this whole sequence is that it’s 100% a self-own by the adults. The kids essentially rescue themselves and Nus plays the adults like a fiddle. But it’s absolutely worth it for several extended scenes in which Giamatti & Hunter are left in a room together to just cook. And it’s delightful. And for as big as Giamatti goes (though he is a little less hammy than in the first episode), Hunter does the opposite, pulling back and letting Giamatti do his thing, saying so much with just her expressions and posture. It’s so much fun. 

I dig the way Nus disguises his true intent (conning the Federation into leaving a starbase with experimental weapons ripe for piracy) by spending most of the episode psychoanalyzing Nahla while he waits for his “official” payment to be made. You get the sense he’d have been just as happy if that’s ALL he got out of the deal, but he gets the concessions AND the loot from the starbase. It’s all just win, win, win for ol’ Nustopher. 

Class Notes

• That’s right, Nus is apparently short for Nustopher. God, I hope that’s true. 
• A (hopefully) brief aside about Tarima’s anecdote about having sex with a Deltan: the Deltans and the Betazoids started out as effectively the same species. Back before The Motion Picture, Gene Roddenberry started pre-production on a TV continuation called Star Trek: Phase II. One of the characters on the show was going to be Ilia, a Deltan with special mind powers. When Phase II was scrapped in favor of The Motion Picture, one of the elements that came over from that production was Ilia, as well as first officer Will Decker. Now, even though these characters are in The Motion Picture, versions of them were still brought into The Next Generation in the form of Deanna Troi and Will Riker. Keen-eyed classicists might notice that the name Ilia comes from Ilium, the Greek name for the possibly mythical city we call Troy. So, Ilia becomes Troi, and her species changes its Greek letter from Delta to Beta, and there you have it. Long story short, I found it amusing that Betazoids get along so well with Deltans.
• The Furies keep threatening to throw their hostages out of the airlock. Aren’t the hostages wearing fancy programmable matter life support suits? Did I miss something?
• Also, the Furies have big “Reavers from Firefly” vibes. 
• The way this episode echoes the pilot in bringing back Nus and touching on the Nahla/Caleb mother/son dynamic almost gives it season finale vibes. Which makes me curious what the season finale is going to look like. 
• Despite being the commandant of the (supposedly more tactically-minded) War College, Kelric doesn’t really do much here.