Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Casts A Spotlight On One Of The Great American Playwrights

This article contains spoilers for "Star Trek: Starfleet Academy" season 1, episode 8 – "The Life of the Stars"

The kids of "Star Trek: Starfleet Academy" are not alright. After "Starfleet Academy" episode 6 revealed Nus Braka's (Paul Giamatti) true motivation and the USS Miyazaki exercise led to the show's first hard-hitting major death, the young main characters are dealing with an array of lingering trauma. Tensions bubble to the surface when Tarima Sadal (Zoë Steiner) returns from recuperating on Betazed and is transferred to Starfleet Academy, where her psychic sensitivity can be monitored.

Recognizing the need for trauma counseling but knowing that conventional therapy won't work, Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter) calls in "Star Trek: Discovery" veteran Sylvia Tilly (Mary Wiseman), who sits the main cadets down for an obligatory drama class. Initially, the only one who's invested is SAM (Kerrice Brooks), who finds the perfect play for the situation: Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer prize-winning 1938 classic "Our Town." Set in a theater where it's being performed and featuring a stage manager figure as a fourth wall-breaking narrator, the meta play hides deep meaning within its slice-of-life structure ... and as SAM recognizes, its main characters fit the cadets' current mental state to a tee.

"Our Town" also factors in the B-plot, which deals with SAM's own particular brand of trauma. When her seemingly unfixable glitches take her out, Ake and the Doctor (Roberto Picardo) bring her to her native Kasq. Here, the Doctor's voluntary detachment from others casts him (as well as Ake, whose long lifespan makes her an oubside observer) in the stage manager role. The Doctor ultimately chooses to embrace connection, staying on Kasq as SAM's father figure as the young hologram gets to experience a real-time childhood, and fains the resiliency to deal with negative experiences.

With SAM's departure, Tarima inherits the role of Emily Webb — the conflicted protagonist of "Our Town" who falls in love with his neighbor George, briefly resents him ahead of their wedding, and becomes a ghost after dying while giving birth. Naturally, Tarima's will-they-won't-they romantic interest Caleb Mir (Sandro Rosta) is George. Tarima's conflicted feelings toward Caleb, perceived outcast status after her USS Miyazaki power blowout, and forced transfer from War College make her a perfect fit for Emily's "ghost girl" role, while Caleb is an equally good match for the slowly maturing George. The cadets' work to analyze and understand the characters soon turns into a group counseling session where they open up about their various lingering issues.  

Two key aspects of the play become focal points in the group's study. One is the Thornton Wilder quote, "The life of a village against the life of the stars," which provides the episode title and gives the group the revelation that they are the "village" that experiences life together — brief compared to the stars, but still there. Another is the scene where Emily goes through a bout of pre-wedding resentment toward George and wishes to simply remain herself for a while, which is the key to Tarima's own issues.

Tarima sees through Tilly's tactics and calls her out multiple times, clearly uncomfortable about opening up to her new group. However, the others eventually point out that this isn't about just her, as they all have baggage they urgently need to shed. At the end of the day, Tarima connects with the others by joining them in an impromptu performance of the play ... and look and behold, The Arts have saved the day!

Apart from using "Our Town" to unpack the main characters' various issues, "The Life of the Stars" confirms one thing that explains a whole lot about "Star Trek" in general and the Starfleet in particular. As /Film's Devin Meenan has pointed out, one of the biggest "Star Trek" obsessions is  William Shakespeare, and the franchise has always combined science and humanities. Across the various shows, characters set up cultural events, indulge in complex historical Holodeck scenarios, and express a far wider knowledge of humanities than your average franchise's more military-minded explorers would. 

Here, Tilly explicitly states that knowledge of theater is considered to be an essential part of a cadet's toolkit and a crucial component of statecraft and change — and that the handful of cadets who understand this are the ones who become captains. Indeed, as Captain Ake demonstrates, she's intimately familiar with "Our Town" herself, along with no doubt many other historical works across the centuries.

Knowing this and how easily Tilly recognizes the 1,200-plus-year-old "Our Town" when SAM picks it as the group's project, it's pretty clear how much the Starfleet Academy stresses the importance of humanities to its students. "Star Trek" has always contained multitudes, and it's fun to learn that one of said multitudes is canonically "theater kids in space."  

"Star Trek: Starfleet Academy" season 1 is streaming on Paramount+.