Starfleet Academy: S1E6 – Come, Let’s Away

Structurally, “Come, Let’s Away” is doing a lot. You’ve got Tarima and Caleb’s relationship fracture at the top, their unresolved tension hanging over the mission; the Miyazaki away team trying to bring a dead ship back to life; the Athena bridge crew juggling support and surveillance; Ake and Kelrec wrestling with strategy and politics; and Braka playing his own long con underneath it all. On a whiteboard, this is exactly the kind of layered A/B/C plotting that Trek can thrive on. On screen, you can feel the episode straining to keep everything in orbit.

Some beats get exactly one scene when they really needed two. Tarima discovering the truth about Caleb’s mother via telepathy and the resulting fight is a strong character pivot, but the episode moves past it so quickly that it becomes just another item on the “raise the stakes” checklist. Likewise, the escalation from “routine exercise” to “furies boarding action” to “call in the pirate we hate” is effective conceptually, but transitions are often abrupt. It works, and this is one of the more cohesive scripts so far, but you can see the seams where the story is being hurried along to hit its big moments.

In terms of crisis design, this is the most convincing “no-win” scenario the show has tackled yet. The cadets are trapped on a gutted ship with an enemy known for killing hostages even when deals are honored, and the adults’ best option is a criminal they know they shouldn’t trust. That’s the right kind of ugly for a mid-season gut punch. The fact that the cadets’ ingenuity (Caleb using programmable matter, SAM reactivating systems, Genesis and Lura tracking the cloaked ship) still isn’t enough to secure a clean win underscores that this isn’t a training sim anymore—it’s the universe being unfair in a very Trek way.

Where it still falls short for me is in the interpersonal conflict. The situation itself is harrowing; the characters’ reactions don’t always match that intensity. There are flashes—panic on the Miyazaki bridge, the dread when Tomov is spaced, Ake swallowing her disgust to deal with Braka—but I kept waiting for someone to truly crack under pressure, or for a real philosophical argument to break out on the Athena bridge about whether to keep trusting Braka. Instead, most disagreement gets smoothed out in a couple of lines, and the episode moves on to the next tactical beat. The crisis is well-conceived; the character-level friction still feels undercooked.

On paper, this should be a major character showcase. Tarima overstepping with her telepathy, Caleb’s family secrets, B’Avi’s rivalry and sacrifice, SAM taking permanent damage, and Ake being dragged back into a past she’d clearly rather keep buried—it’s all there. The problem is that the show still doesn’t seem fully comfortable letting these characters own scenes for more than a moment or two at a time. Tarima’s decision to rip out her implant and push her powers past the safe limit is a huge, defining choice, but because her perspective is relatively thin across the episode, it lands more as a plot device than a culmination of her arc.

B’Avi’s death is the clearest example of the series’ character issue. The script gives him a noble, textbook Trek sacrifice—shielding Caleb from the furies’ attack—and the War College funeral tries to frame him as a major loss. But we haven’t spent enough time with B’Avi as more than “the competitive one” for it to resonate the way the episode clearly wants. Ake, ironically, fares better. Her scenes with Braka and Vance hint at layers of guilt, rage, and compromise that could make her one of the more compelling figures in modern Trek if the show leans into it. As for the rest of the cadet ensemble, they’re starting to differentiate, but we’re not yet at the point where a single expression from any one of them tells us something new.

Thematically, “Come, Let’s Away” is aiming squarely at the intersection of principle and pragmatism. Ake and Vance know Braka is a snake, but they convince themselves they can manage him because the cadets’ lives are on the line. When that calculation explodes in their faces—Braka’s partnership with the furies, the ambush on the Sargasso, the slaughter at the station—it’s a pointed reminder that Starfleet’s optimism can slide into self-delusion. That’s a very Trek idea: belief in the better angels of sentient life can be a strength, but it can also blind you to the realities of people who simply don’t share your worldview.

There’s also a quieter, more personal theme running under all the carnage: what you risk in the name of connection. Tarima violates boundaries with her telepathy, then nearly dies weaponizing that same connection to save Caleb. The cadets’ emotional bonds, still a bit underwritten, are presented as both a liability and a source of courage. SAM’s damage, meanwhile, is a dark twist on the “observer learns to care” arc: when she chooses to be part of this world, she also becomes vulnerable to its violence. The episode doesn’t fully unpack all of these threads, but it at least gestures toward a more complex view of Starfleet’s ideals than we’ve seen earlier in the season.

From a pure “put it on and watch” standpoint, this is one of the most engaging episodes yet. The Miyazaki sequences have a strong haunted-ship vibe, the furies are legitimately unsettling, and the tension around the sonic weapon plan and the Sargasso’s arrival builds nicely. The space-side chess match — Athena, Miyazaki, the cloaked fury ship, the Sargasso, and the unseen station – feels like Trek in its tactical mode, even if the logistics sometimes get hand-waved in favour of pacing. It’s the rare Starfleet Academy hour where I didn’t find myself getting a snack mid-episode.

That being said, the same issues that have plagued the season remain. The young cast is still uneven; some of them find honest, grounded reactions in the chaos, while others seem to be delivering “genre-appropriate” panic rather than something specific to their character. The veterans, again, walk away with the episode; Ake’s brittle composure, Braka’s smug cruelty, Vance’s exhausted professionalism all feel instantly believable. Direction and editing mostly keep things moving, but a few emotional beats are sacrificed to keep the plot engine humming. The net result is an episode that absolutely works as a tense genre hour, while still leaving me wishing the show had just a bit more confidence in slowing down when it really counts.