First broadcast 12 March 2026.

The season finale of Starfleet Academy is a surprisingly straight-forward thing, built on big emotional pay-offs and largely embracing Star Trek‘s much discussed ‘reset button’ to keep things neat and tidy for next year’s second season. While less innovative that I might have preferred, it does hit some satisfying beats, and the most impressive parts are the small moments I did not expect or see coming.

Nus Braka (Paul Giamatti) and his coalition of mercenaries have effectively mined the entire border of Federation space, locking Starfleet inside its confines and trapping the USS Athena outside and alone. While Braka puts Captain Ake (Holly Hunter) – and by extension the whole Federation – on trial, Commander Reno (Tig Notaro) leads a skeleton crew of cadets to save the day.

I honestly do not think it is a spoiler to reveal that the dreaded omega mines do not get activated, and that billions of lives are not lost as a result. It was a gaudy, big play cliffhanger to end the previous episode, but clearly was never going to eventuate. The focus of “Rubincon” is therefore a three-way trial scene between Paul Giamatti, Holly Hunter, and Tatiana Maslany over grief, loss, and personal responsibility, combined with the more tactical scenes of the Academy cadets repairing the Athena and getting to a place where they can defuse the millions of mines.

The former is a rather theatrical affair, and not particularly realistic, but it allows three genuinely world-class actors to perform against each other. That is never a bad thing, and while it may be a slightly ridiculous set-up and execution it is excellently performed and entertaining to watch. I had been expecting some sort of character-based twist or revelation that would make the season’s over-arching storylines more complex, but this is Star Trek: it really does not go in for that sort of thing. Director Olantunde Osunsamni does a great job of repurposing the vast atrium set for dramatic effect.

Where the episodes excels is in Jett Reno’s command of the series’ key cadets in repairing the Athena and saving the day. Tig Notaro’s deadpan delivery has always been somewhat comedic – she is, after all, a professional comedian – but here it grants her character authority and gravity. The entire galaxy may be in peril, and the future of Starfleet in the balance, but Reno simply slips into a calm instructor mode and treats the entire crisis as a teaching opportunity. It is tremendously warm, watchable stuff, and works as a means to tie up character arcs for half of the cast in the process.

Maybe the episode is not as complex as I would have liked, and perhaps it does pack its toys back into their boxes a little too easily. At the same time it resolves the season’s story threads in a satisfying manner, and ties all 10 episodes together into what has become one of the best iterations of Star Trek that we have. It is a series that is not afraid to innovative or take narrative risks now and then, which has boldly (excuse the pun) extended and transformed the Star Trek universe, and if this concluding two-parter has felt a little too neat and old-fashioned then perhaps it is simply proof for those applauding the new creative angles and those nostalgic for the 1990s/2000s heyday of The Next Generation and its sequels that you can have your cake and eat it too.