First broadcast 22 January 2026.

Every Star Trek series takes a while to settle into a groove and work out the ideas that work from the ones that don’t; “Vitus Reflux” is definitely one of the latter examples. This episode is an attempt to wrap the trappings of Trek around a story of rival college football teams pranking one another, which is honestly precisely what I had expected Starfleet Academy to be like. The results are watchable, but also quite tedious in places and more likely to inspire eye rolls than smiles. Hopefully the writer’s room learns the lesson here, and tries for something a little closer to Star Trek than Varsity Blues next time.

Darem (George Hawkins) and Genesis (Bella Shepard) compete to be captain of the space football team, which the script takes as an opportunity to flesh out and expand on Darem’s back story and character. The first two episodes left him as a fairly predictable rich kid in private school. After the efforts of writers Alex Taub and Kiley Rossetter, he remains a predictable rich kid in private school – only with some typical angst about his parents not caring about him. Better work is done settling the other regular cast members into their characters and roles.

Holly Hunter continues to delight as Captain Ake, whose ongoing disregard for shoes and sitting sensibly is so over-the-top this week that I swear Hunter foresaw the indignation among one particularly toxic sliver of Trek fandom and decided to troll them. She, and Gina Yashere as Commander Thok, are fast proving to be the series’ best assets. Regarding the latter, I am happy to see her character has toned down a little – although I am not sure I quite buy her newly revealed relationship with Jett Reno (Tig Notaro).

Fake science fiction sports never work well, much like fake science fiction swear words, and that continues to be the case with whatever laser tag derivation the characters are playing here. It is a perennial problem with Star Trek that goes back for the whole 60 years of its history. Things always wind up looking stupider than one expects, and if there is any slight praise afforded to this episode is that its made-up sport is less embarrassing than Parrises Squares or Anbo-Jitsu.

That is worth considering for a moment, because one of Star Trek‘s biggest challenges in the 2020s is that it has to contend with social media and right-wing fan overreactions. There have been a lot of shrill complaints over different elements in Starfleet Academy, and even if one accepts any of them as legitimate flaws they are flaws that have appeared in earlier Star Trek series in less heightened and argumentative times. “Vitus Reflux” is a poor episode, but that does not mean Starfleet Academy is a failure. It just means that hopefully next week’s episode will be better.