Office Hours: "I Can Live With That" (Starfleet Academy 1.05 Recap)

Good morning, cadets, and welcome to Office Hours! This is a series by your favorite Starfleet Academy TAs, Anaum Hussain of Sirens, Singers, and Mirages and Sinéad McDevitt of My Fair Neadie! Office Hours will be recapping and reviewing each episode of Starfleet Academy! If you want to see the recap for last week’s episode, head here!

Lecture Notes

Starfleet Academy finally gives viewers an episode all about Series Acclimation Mil, aka Sam! The episode opens with Sam directly narrating her day, complete with several great visual gags. Sam is an emissary for her people, other photonics on Kasq, who want to know they can trust organics, a distrust that’s pretty justified if you’ve watched Voyager.

Unfortunately, Sam doesn’t understand organics and why they do things like eat something they know they’re allergic to (side note: turns out Khionians vomit glitter) or why Caleb and Tarima don’t just hook up already.

To help, Sam’s makers order her to take a class on the secrets of the universe taught by Professor Illa, played by episode writer Tawny Newsome. Illa tells her she can’t join since it’s so late into the semester, but Sam asks if she can make up for the missed work by doing a midterm project on the disappearance of Benjamin Sisko, the Emissary to the Bajoran prophets, in part to learn how to be a better emissary to her own people.

After comparing notes with her friends and getting kicked out of Bajor club, Ake recommends Sam visit a virtual version of the Sisko museum in New Orleans. Sam watches a hologram of Jake Sisko (Cirroc Lofton) talk about his father, but this only confuses her more, watching him talk about Sisko’s parenting and not his accomplishments.

At the same time, the episode’s B-plot involves Ake, Reno, and The Doctor helping Commander Kelrec prepare to host a foreign delegation. This is likely important to the broader story as it results in Kelrec and Ake ending on better terms, but frankly, it’s not super relevant to this episode, so this is the last time we’re going to mention it.

The cadets decide to go out to a bar Sisko visited when he was a cadet, currently named “The Academy,” but before they can go out, Sam gets a message from her makers informing her that if she fails in her task as the emissary, they will bring her back to Kasq and she’ll never see her friends again.

Sam is more determined to go out, but they discover “The Academy” is a favorite hangout spot of the War College students, who are still pissed that their dorms and classrooms have been overtaken by a giant plant.

Caleb helps Sam experience getting drunk, and she gives him the push he needs to talk to Tarima, culminating in them making out outside. Sam is bouncing around the bar, going from giddily commenting on Jay-Den awkwardly flirting to bemoaning to Genesis the fact that Sisko had to leave behind everything he loved.

Then she decks the war college’s Romulan Shortstack (she has a name I just think that’s funnier) and starts a bar fight.

At the infirmary, Sam sobers up and asks The Doctor if he ever met Captain Sisko. He didn’t, but did know Jake. When Sam asks how Jake could bear to lose his father like that, he tells her that you get over it.

Having failed, Sam goes to Illa and tells her ,“Emissaries who succeed lose everything they love, and emissaries who fail do too.” Illa then gives Sam a book Jake never published about his father.

Sam reads it in the atrium, and a vision of Jake appears to her. He tells her that despite the Prophets trying to plan his life, Sisko did what they needed, his way. After reassuring her that she’s enough. Jake tells Sam that Sisko was always with them, and disappears.

Then Professor Illa reveals how she got a copy of Jake’s unpublished book: he gave it to her, because she’s Illa Dax, the latest host of the Dax Symbiont that was joined with Jadzia, then Ezri on Deep Space 9.

Taking a cue from Sisko, Sam tells her makers she’s going to understand humanity her way and stay true to herself. When they tell her defying them will be why she fails, she says it’s why she’ll succeed, and she “can live with that.”

Sam leaves, and the episode ends with a voice-over from Avery Brooks himself.

Discussion

I’ve mentioned this in other places, but I haven’t finished Deep Space 9. I was so annoyed by Jadzia’s death that I wanted to wait until it didn’t fill me with rage before I started season 7. To say this episode gave me the motivation to continue is an understatement.

Usually, I make an attempt to give some criticisms of an episode, but frankly, pointing out something like how the Dax reveal doesn’t make much sense to newcomers feels petty.

This episode is a tribute to Deep Space 9, but it’s not just empty references to things that happened in that show; it’s a celebration of what made Sisko great. Not his battle acumen or ending the Dominion War, but the fact that he was a good father, loved his friends, and was a person with his own goals and life, not this larger-than-life aspirational figure.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the racial aspect here. Benjamin Sisko means a lot to Black Trek fans, myself included. The fact that he was a good, present father who constantly supported his son mattered. “Far Beyond The Stars” is an episode I still think about a lot, and its message of “fighting the good fight, even when it seems impossible” keeps me going a lot these days. I can’t help but see myself and my own relationship to Sisko in Sam and her journey.

It’s worth highlighting the work Tawny Newsome did writing this episode. She got Avery Brooks’ approval for the episode and worked so hard to celebrate Benjamin Sisko’s legacy in the series. Starfleet Academy isn’t for everyone, but everyone who’s ever loved Deep Space 9, and the relationship between Benjamin and Jake especially, owes it to themselves to watch this episode.

Episode 6 will be on Sirens, Singers, and Mirages! Go check it out!