Star Trek: Starfleet Academy “300th Night” Review: Stumbling into the Season Finale

Review: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Season 1 Episode 9 “300th Night”

It’s the end of the school year, a time of celebration for the cadets at Starfleet Academy. Athena is on her way to Betazed to solidify that planet as the new headquarters for the Federation, and the mood is generally light-hearted, with parties happening across the Academy.  

On a more intimate level, Jay-Den Kraag (Karim Diane) welcomes his friends, including Genesis Lythe (Bella Shepard), Darem Reymi (George Hawkins), Sam (Kerrice Brooks), and Caleb Mir (Sandro Rosta), into his Klingon house, a loving and ceremonial gesture that everyone accepts except Caleb, who is still weary of becoming reliant on anybody and is still focused on finding his mother. 

“Drink up, and join the family. And try to appreciate how hard it was for me to tell you that.”

– Darem to Caleb at Jay-Den’s ceremony.

A conversation with Sam leads Caleb to finally crack the correct subspace encryption code for messages his mother has been sending him over the years. As a result, he is suddenly overwhelmed with communications from Anisha Mir (Tatiana Maslany). He also knows her most recent location — the trading market on the planet Ukeck, where the Venari Ral are soon to make a move. 

Meanwhile, Admiral Charles Vance (Oded Fehr) alerts Chancellor Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter) and Chancellor Zeeren Kelrec (Raoul Bhaneja) that Starfleet finally knows what Nus Braka stole from the Starfleet space station back in “Come, Let’s Away”: Omega molecules. Lots of them. 

Voyager fans will remember being introduced to this super-duper deadly element in“The Omega Directive.” Braka detonated an artificial Omega molecule near Federation space, which puts the entire Federation on high alert, since these molecules can disable warp travel wherever they are detonated — like the Burn all over again. Worse yet, Braka has Omega mines, too. Athena and many other Federation ships are ordered to bunker down at Betazed as the rest of the Federation goes on lockdown within its borders.

A Series of Unbelievable Events

Ukeck’s imminent Venari Ral occupation poses bad news for Caleb, who opts to not tell Ake about his recent discovery so she can’t stop him. Instead, the young man tries to steal a shuttle to get to Ukeck. What follows is a series of unbelievable events that ultimately sees Genesis, Sam, and Darem join Caleb on their illegal trip off-ship. 

The way the gang found themselves on this shuttle and soon in orbit around Ukeck really stresses the narrative integrity of this episode. It’s all just too damn convenient: Caleb knowing how to steal a shuttle out of the shuttlebay without any alarms going off; Genesis volunteering to lock down shuttles before getting to Betazed; Sam being able to calculate variables to make Caleb’s escape attempt a success; Darem stumbling drunk into the same shuttle that his friends are onboard; the group knowing there is a transwarp tunnel mere minutes away from Athena so they can quickly get to Ukeck. 

Talk about wanting to have your characters in a place and not caring how they get there. 

“One day, I’m going to become a captain so I can ruin each of your lives.”

– Genesis to her friends as they steal the shuttle. 

Their shuttle is damaged as they approach Ukeck, and the group splits off once they are on the surface; Caleb heads off to find his mom and the others find parts to repair the shuttle. Caleb does indeed find Anisha thanks to her randomly stumbling upon him within the seedy market on Ukeck. It’s a joyful reunion, touchingly played by Rosta and Maslany. Caleb’s friends catch up but decline, like Caleb, to explain they are all Starfleet, since, remember, Anisha hates Starfleet for separating her and her son. 

Getting Off Ukeck

Mom and son use their programmable matter skills to create a replacement part for the shuttle, but the Venari Ral soon occupy the market. Caleb faces a choice — leave with his mom, or leave with his friends. To make the separation easier, Caleb rips into his friends, insulting them so they are more inclined to walk away. This works, mostly, but soon they are captured by the Venari Ral. Caleb goes after them, even admitting to his mom that he and they are Starfleet cadets, but it ends up being Anisha who comes to the cadets’ defense, and gets shot for her trouble. 

Luckily, Chancellor Ake wasn’t content to stay at Betazed after Tarima Sadel (Zoe Steiner) and Jay-Den informed her that Caleb had left the ship to pursue his mom — which explains why Caleb said such an awkward, heartfelt goodbye to Tarima before he left. With Vance’s implicit blessing, Ake flies Athena to Ukeck and swoops in to save the day — literally, as Athena deftly hovers just above the marketplace to rescue the cadets and the wounded Anisha. 

It’s out of the frying pan and into the fire, though. The Venari Ral ambush Athena, forcing Ake to separate the saucer and ditch the atrium, a painful action for her but one she swears to avenge. Ake and her skeleton crew — which includes the Doctor (Robert Picardo) and Jett Reno (Tig Notaro) — realize the full extent of Nus Braka’s plan. The crazed pirate aims to use many, many Omega molecule mines to effectively wall off the Federation and its fleet. Athena, one of the only Federation ships outside this box,is forced to hide from the Venari Ral in a (convenient) nebula as Ake comes face-to-face with the mother she separated all those years ago.

Too Good to Be True

We think “300th Night” is the weakest episode of the season so far — and with only one episode left, it’ll likely keep that ignominious title unless the finale is really bad. Several narrative faults presented themselves from the script by Kirsten Beyer and Kenneth Lin, all adding up to make the events of this episode unbelievable. Here are the ways we found this episode narratively flawed: 

1. The aforementioned way the cadets gather together in the shuttle before leaving the ship.
   
   
2. The convenient transwarp tunnel that leads the cadets to Ukeck.
   
   
3. The way Caleb and Anisha stumble into each other in the Ukeck market.
   
   
4. The way Athena can hide in a nebula to avoid — for now — Venari Ral detection.
   
   
5. The way Jay-Den and Tarima were able to hide on Athena by simply raising the pressure in the airlock to avoid the ship’s internal sensors. (Although, to the show’s credit, we did laugh at Ake’s reaction to this clear design flaw).
   
   
6. The way Nus Braka has apparently, without trouble, boxed the entire Federation — which, granted, likely constricted a lot in the years following the Burn, but is still a huge area of space — with an all-encompassing wall of Omega molecule mines. It defies our understanding of just how big space is. Reno, moments after learning of the minefield, asserts there is absolutely no space to break through, which just seems ridiculous. Not one starship-sized hole through which to access Federation space?
   
   

It’s all a bit much to believe, requiring a suspension of disbelief that this show hasn’t earned. 

Despite how we got here, the stakes are huge now as we head into the season finale. With the Federation boxed in by Omega molecule mines, Athena separated from the atrium, and Chancellor Ake facing the consequences of a past trauma, the pieces are dramatically set for what we hope will be a more convincing conclusion than the storytelling we saw in “300th Night.” 

Stray Thoughts: 

• Anisha tells her son she’ll be at the trading market on Ukeck. Good thing there’s apparently only one trading market on that planet, huh?
  
  
• Why did it take the Federation so long to realize what Nus Braka stole from the space station? Surely they would have noticed something as important as Omega molecules missing from their inventory?
  
  
• Why would it have taken Sam 14 hours to reverse the encryption Anisha used to contact Caleb? We’ve seen Sam claim to do amazing things — in this episode, she proves she is faster than Athena’s computer when she helps Caleb escape. Why would reversing this encryption take so long if not just for Caleb to have a reason to go to Ukeck?
  
  
• Because the cadets leave Athena to go to Betazed, does that mean the ship loses its bridge crew, too? Why doesn’t Ake have a bridge crew aboard Athena when she leaves Betazed?
  
  
• Is anyone else tired of the dystopian market settings that seem to be used often in modern Trek? They are like the overused caves of the Berman era.
  
  
• The shot of Athena rescuing the kids reminded us of a shot in the Star Trek: Picard series finale, where the Enterprise-D swoops in to save Jean-Luc Picard and his son from within a Borg Cube.
  
  
• Was Athena not accosted by Venari Ral while diving into Ukeck’s atmosphere? She encounters trouble on the way out, but not the way in. For a planet under annexation, this seems pretty lucky. 

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