Good Ol' American Small Town Aesthetic
Feb. 27th, 2026 04:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
agoodwinsmithStarfleet Academy - season 1, episode 8 - The Life of the Stars
SPOILER
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Okay. I confess that I am a captive of the very excellent characters created by the young actors of Starfleet Academy. I will now watch any plot-holey drivel the unskilled writers care to extrude for me.
When they threatened my SAM, I was ultimately just grateful that they left her alive, even though I disbelieve the solution so much. Soooo much.
So. There is the real problem that all the students are traumatized by the events in episode 6, where a War College instructor and a War College student lose their lives, and many others are wounded, physically and emotionally. Ake's solution is to bring in a trauma counsellor in the guise of a new instructor with a new course. Theatre.
As a method for digging into tender emotions, it is a reasonable ruse, and the reactions of the students are true and work at releasing some of the anguish.
The play that is chosen to be the catalyst is "Our Town" by Thornton Wilder. I was expecting it to be a straight up hurrah about good ol' american values - and it kinda is - but it is also surprising. Although it won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for drama, none of its runs have been longer than a few months, some only weeks. It has been restaged and the frequency of revival and adaption is increasing. It appears that it is a dramatist's play. By which I mean there is more interest in acting in it than watching it. I suspect it is popular with high school drama teachers because it explicitly states that there is to be no scenery and no props. Cheap to produce, yes/no? Same for Starfleet Academy.
There are two things that ruffle my feathers. Well, there are more, but I will speak of two.
One is that all the adults in this episode are people who are no longer in their own time. Two are genuine time-travel transplants and two are beings that continue to live and live, like proverbial vampires. Somehow, since we are not including the traumatized War College students in this thespian intervention, this feels weird. Okay, not precise, but it's kinda creepy, like flaneurs sampling a novelty, or overkill because the over compensations for previous traumas never end, or ... I dunno, but it's a thread I want to keep picking at.
The second is the lack of budget for makeup/prosthetics and so on. No Lura Thok, and Jay-Den excused for most of the episode because of "a cold".
I need Genesis to have her own story. We see her befriending and supporting everyone. She's being turned into the "mother" of the group, and while I love her tender persona, it seems in conflict with her take-no-prisoner approach to her own career. I was glad to see Derem damp-eyed for SAM because I really don't want him calcifying into an asshole. I also need Ocam to have his own story. He has been kind and easy going, and I suspect it is a lot of work. I can't decide whether I want Genesis/Derem or Genesis/Ocam, or Derem/Ocam, or charming happy thrupple....
SPOILER
.
.
.
.
Okay. I confess that I am a captive of the very excellent characters created by the young actors of Starfleet Academy. I will now watch any plot-holey drivel the unskilled writers care to extrude for me.
When they threatened my SAM, I was ultimately just grateful that they left her alive, even though I disbelieve the solution so much. Soooo much.
So. There is the real problem that all the students are traumatized by the events in episode 6, where a War College instructor and a War College student lose their lives, and many others are wounded, physically and emotionally. Ake's solution is to bring in a trauma counsellor in the guise of a new instructor with a new course. Theatre.
As a method for digging into tender emotions, it is a reasonable ruse, and the reactions of the students are true and work at releasing some of the anguish.
The play that is chosen to be the catalyst is "Our Town" by Thornton Wilder. I was expecting it to be a straight up hurrah about good ol' american values - and it kinda is - but it is also surprising. Although it won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for drama, none of its runs have been longer than a few months, some only weeks. It has been restaged and the frequency of revival and adaption is increasing. It appears that it is a dramatist's play. By which I mean there is more interest in acting in it than watching it. I suspect it is popular with high school drama teachers because it explicitly states that there is to be no scenery and no props. Cheap to produce, yes/no? Same for Starfleet Academy.
There are two things that ruffle my feathers. Well, there are more, but I will speak of two.
One is that all the adults in this episode are people who are no longer in their own time. Two are genuine time-travel transplants and two are beings that continue to live and live, like proverbial vampires. Somehow, since we are not including the traumatized War College students in this thespian intervention, this feels weird. Okay, not precise, but it's kinda creepy, like flaneurs sampling a novelty, or overkill because the over compensations for previous traumas never end, or ... I dunno, but it's a thread I want to keep picking at.
The second is the lack of budget for makeup/prosthetics and so on. No Lura Thok, and Jay-Den excused for most of the episode because of "a cold".
I need Genesis to have her own story. We see her befriending and supporting everyone. She's being turned into the "mother" of the group, and while I love her tender persona, it seems in conflict with her take-no-prisoner approach to her own career. I was glad to see Derem damp-eyed for SAM because I really don't want him calcifying into an asshole. I also need Ocam to have his own story. He has been kind and easy going, and I suspect it is a lot of work. I can't decide whether I want Genesis/Derem or Genesis/Ocam, or Derem/Ocam, or charming happy thrupple....
no subject
Date: 2026-02-28 01:54 pm (UTC)I peg Ocam for dying to further Tarima's trauma by the end of the season, so my guess is Ocam/Genesis. Which would be boring. My vote is for Genesis/Tarima anyway. Genesis and Ake continue to be the bright lights of the show for me.
no subject
Date: 2026-02-28 07:43 pm (UTC)I am conflicted about Reno. I really like Tig Notaro because I enjoy her caustic sarcasm in tiny doses as seen on talkshows. I find Reno's hostile rage poorly disguised as tough love to be really too much.
I am finding the whole photonic/holographic conceit to be harder and harder to believe. Especially in this last episode, where both characters show their distress by audible breathing and sighing - just like a real boy/girl. If the makers of such beings can get that complicated mimicry correct, for a species that truly does not need to breathe (why wasn't SAM out on the hull reading numbers from the programable matter, eh?), then why do they fumble other behaviour? While I like both actors very much, I am finding it harder and harder to fangirl my way past such blatant deal breakers.
I think the writers are depending on the natural likeability of their young actors to seduce us past any inconsistencies in the characters as they are written. And also on the actors' efforts to square the circle of these inconsistencies. I mean just thinking about the first episode, Genesis is shown as solitary but immediately responsive to SAM's efforts to connect - so why doesn't Genesis already have a crowd of friends around her? Derem is supposed to have come from a sheltered upbringing with an accommodating self-effacing personality, so where & how did he pick up a crowd of sycophantic followers? Is "frosh week" enough time to have transformed into a big-mouthed bully? Jay-Den was abandoned/freed by his family, so how did he get from a rustic outpost to Starfleet recruiting? Even if he is fed and housed from the moment he signs on the dotted line, it is more likely to have been as a non-commissioned redshirt than the elite command stream, unless Jay-Den has skills that we are not shown how he could have acquired. And he still has to at least feed and house himself on his way to the office.
All of our current recruits are some form of "the chosen one" and the audience is just expected to believe that each cadet's gifts are so extraordinary that each can do ten belief-busting feats before breakfast.
Ocam's will turn out to be not throttling his sister in the cradle. I haven't decided which one is older, or even if they have the same mother. Probably some miraculous simultaneous birth from identical twin sisters, who are Daughters of the House of Tragic Heroine, cursed by their duplicated fate. Or some damn thing.