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Matt and Sean talk about keeping the momentum going (maybe?) in Starfleet Academy, Season 1, Episode 2: “Beta Test.”
Matt and Sean talk about keeping the momentum going (maybe?) in Starfleet Academy, Season 1, Episode 2: “Beta Test.”
- (00:00) - - Intro
- (02:04) - - Viewer Feedback
- (07:13) - - Today's Episode
- (08:44) - - This Time in History
- (10:14) - - Episode Discussion
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Creators and Guests
What is Trek In Time?
Join Sean and Matt as they rewatch all of Star Trek in order and in historical context.
Sean: Today, on Trek in Time, we're talking about speed bumps in space. That's right. We're slowing it down a bit. What does that mean? Well, you'll find out as we talk about Beta Test. Starfleet Academy Season 1, Episode 2 aired on January 22, 2026 welcome everybody to Trek in Time. This is of course, the podcast that takes a look at Star Trek in chronological stardate order. And we've been working our way back from all the way back in Enterprise. Remember Enterprise, Matt? Remember way back when? Yeah, yeah. And we've been making our way through the series in chronological order, dipping when we need to, when there are new programs available. So we're partway through the third season of the original series when lo and behold, Starfleet Academy drops. So we're gonna watch that and then we're gonna return to the original series. So here we are, episode two, Beta Test. This originally dropped on. I said January 22nd. It dropped on January 15th. Sorry, that was a mistake on my part. This dropped on the same day as the first episode. They did a double whammy. So we are a couple of weeks behind, but we hope you'll be interested in joining us on our watch through of this new program. And who are we? Well, I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi, I write some horror, and I write some stuff for kids. And with me, as always, is my brother from Undecided with Matt Ferrell. Yes, that's right. His name is Undecided. No, his name is Matt. Matt, how are you today? Got you off guard with that one?
Matt: Undecided. Yeah, Undecided. My middle name is Matt.
Sean: Yeah, we don't know what we want to call them. We know we don't want it to be Matt, but we did. We'll figure it out later.
Matt: My birth certificate just says Undecided.
Sean: Yeah. Before we get to the conversation around this new episode, we always like to visit the mailbag and see what you've had to say about our previous episodes. So, Matt, what did you find for us this week?
Matt: Yeah, there were some. Is the episode Spock's Brain, which before we started, before we hit record, I was having a little moment because I had put the wrong title in the little slides here and I just kept saying the words Spocks Brain over and over again.
Sean: I was getting worried.
Matt: We laugh every time I say it. Yeah.
Sean: Yep.
Matt: Anyway, we have a comment from Happy Flappy Farm who said, with the first and second watch of this episode, I was struggling with the goofy costumes and flimsy plot. But with your perspective and insight I can now appreciate the subtle message of warning to subcontracting out too much intellectual exercise to a machine. Yet another sci fi warning siren to the dangers of modern day technological potential pitfalls. I bring this up because there was another comment from Dan Sims along the same lines which I can identify with. Dan, when you were talking about how it's like Wall E and no reasoning. It reminded me of when I was working as an Apple phone tech support during training they only taught people how to use their internal database, how to search for solutions for problems, and not at all teaching people how to actually problem solve. They were people who passed through training for PC tech support who had never even seen the inside of a computer before. I blank you not as someone who had built and troubleshooted hundreds of Windows PCs before that point. It was unbelievable to me and sigh as you said the whole world is going in that direction now. We are so doomed. I totally get that. I am somebody who has built numerous PCs and I've come across so many tech support people that have clearly never seen the inside of a computer and it is endlessly frustrating. I feel your pain Dan. Any thoughts on that?
Sean: It's pervasive and a lot of our older, it's going to be really fascinating as we move forward in our rewatch of the older Star Trek programs. We are going to see more and more stories that that are the sci fi prognostication of what we're living through today. And it's I just watched another Star Trek YouTuber talk about the episodes where Geordie Laforge, in order to fix the ship, creates the hologram version of the engineer who helped design the engine of the ship and then he effectively falls in love with it. And then they had the follow up episode in which she shows up and discovers this hologram and the guy makes the very accurate point. This is what is happening with people who are falling in love with AI people who are saying I want to marry my AI girlfriend. That what they are doing is no different than, as he put it, what Tom Hanks did with the volleyball in Castaway. Yep, they are filling in the other side. They don't realize it's them. All that they're doing is talking to a mirror and it's a scary moment for us as a culture. So yeah, I completely agree. We are at the edge of a paradigm shift that we don't know what is on the other side and it's strange and it's scary and we are going to be talking about it through the lens of a TV show for the next probably 10 years. Yeah. So stay tuned.
Matt: The last comment I bring up is Mark Loveless. He had wrong answers only, but he did wrong answers only for there is no truth in beauty. And it's an episode we're not going to get to for a couple months because we're doing the new Starfleet Academy right now. But I wanted to read it here. Maybe I'll read it again when we do that episode. Plot of Is there no Truth in Beauty? While transporting an ambassador and her assistant named T’ruth to Andoria, the assistant plays a card gambling game with Scotty and some of the lower deck crew while drinking liquor. It is green. Things get a little loose. And when T’ruth misinterprets Scotty's comment to her after she loses a round that she's acting a little ugly as simply a comment on her looks, she is in fact nice looking, she freaks out. This leads to an all out incident with the ambassador, Kirk, Spock and McCoy. All involved is resolved ultimately by Uhura who comes in and counsels everyone and later setting up to T’ruth with Lieutenant Leslie. At the end of the episode, Leslie retires from Starfleet, madly in love with T’ruth. Nichelle Nichols stated to Star Trek conventions later that this is one of her favorite episodes since her soliloquies that bring order were extremely female positive. Again, Mark, not just painting.
Sean: That would have been a great episode.
Matt: He paints a universe.
Sean: Yeah. Thank you Mark. On now to our discussion. But first, that noise you hear, those lights you see, it's the read alert. Matt, it's time for you to tackle the. It's not a Wikipedia description. It's as close to a one sentence description as I could get.
Matt: Okay, Star Trek Starfleet Academy's Beta Test.
Sean: Good luck.
Matt: A hesitant cadet, Caleb, shows the daughter of a Betazoid leader around campus during tense negotiations for Betazed to rejoin the Federation. Finding his own path while helping bridge generational divides and diplomatic gaps as Starfleet aims to reintegrate the telepathic world after The Burn. That is the longest sentence I've ever read.
Sean: It is a terribly long sentence. It's terrible, terrible sentence. Episode number two, Season one of Star Trek Starfleet Academy. Directed by Alex Kurtzman, written by Noga Landau and Jane Maggs. This is the full cast. Holly Hunter, Sandro Rosta, Karim Diane, Kerrice Brooks, George Hawkins, Bella Shepard. We also have some guest appearances of Raoul Bhaneja, Romeo Carere, Stephen Colbert, Jamie Groote, Brit Marling, Anthony Natale, Scott Yamamura. And there are other people whose names I'm skipping because I don't want to keep reading for this long, including Tig Notaro. We will speak about her directly. And what was the world like at the time this episode dropped? Well, we've already talked about this, Matt. You were listening to Joe Decide on Spotify and the films that are dominating the box office right now. We've got the Bone Temple, which is a 28 Years later sequel. We also have a film called Mercy. This is a weird time for box office because January tends to be the. We don't know what to do with this, so just put it out. I'm hearing good things about the 28 Days, the 28 Years later sequel. But Mercy is showing up kind of as a. Huh. And on television, we have another Game of Thrones spin off, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. And the show Ponies are both premiering right about now. And we continue to talk about Greenland because why wouldn't we? That's right. The top story right now in the New York Times is the US well, we've always been Greenland crazy. I don't know about you, Matt, but I've always been saying, gosh, why don't we own Greenland?
Matt: We're trying really hard. It should be 51st state, Sean. It should be the 51st state.
Sean: It should be the 51st State. All I think around 45,000 people who live there are clamoring to be part of the United States.
Matt: That's right.
Sean: They're not.
Matt: No spoiler.
Sean: They're not.
Matt: Nobody wants it.
Sean: Nobody wants this. On we go now to our discussion of Starfleet Academy. We talked last time about the pleasant surprise of a brand new Star Trek show that, while it doesn't feel like old Trek, certainly seemed like it was walking in Trek's footsteps for at least me and Matt. And then we move into the second episode. Here we are in Beta Test, and I have my thoughts, but I'm going to invite Matt for you to jump off. What did you think as you were watching this episode?
Matt: Okay. I have to summarize my thoughts on this episode by just recapping my thoughts on the pilot, because I liked the pilot. It was rough. It was a. Had its rough pilot edges, but I was very concerned about how they were going to do the balance between humor, because I know that one of the creators is the lower decks, was associated with lower decks. I was curious how they were going to handle the humor and the drama. And it felt a little like they might be on to kind of finding the right balance in the pilot. And then I watched this episode and was like, wow, this is a hot mess. What is happening right now? This is supposed to be funny, but I'm not laughing out loud. It's amusing, but it's not ha ha funny. And then it veers into what's trying to be dramatic, but it still feels like they're trying to be funny. And the tone of this entire episode was just awful. I couldn't find my footing in the entire episode. But taking that out of the equation, if I take the whole, oh, they're trying to make this a little more humorous or dramatic or whatever it is. The story that they're telling, I thought was an interesting story of trying to get Betazoid back into the fold of Starfleet because they're trying to rebuild Starfleet. And they did a good job explaining why Betazoid is so important to this because they have a consortium of other planets that once they all come on board, it's going to really shore up the Federation. It's a linchpin. And the explanation of what Betazoid did during the burn I thought was fascinating. That they basically walled themselves off with like a psionic like shield, essentially, which I was like, that's cool. Yeah, that's really hard sci fi kind of stuff. That's, that's really neat. So it's like the, the story itself they were telling, I thought was a good story and I enjoyed the story.
Yeah, it was just the tone of the show I thought was completely off. And I'm really kind of surprised that it got, it got all the way through to streaming to people like us to watch. And nobody was like, this episode doesn't feel quite right. Like, it doesn't quite have a. Like, it makes me very concerned for the episodes we're about to watch because they only do what, like eight episodes or something like that for the season or 10, maybe.
Sean: Yeah, yeah.
Matt: It's like they just blew like a huge percentage of their season on this one episode. And it's like you don't have the luxury in streaming, in the streaming area era to spend an entire like Next Generation took two seasons of some pretty rough episodes before they started getting good in season three. It's like you don't have that luxury in the streaming era. And so it's like the fact that they don't have this figured out before they started filming is concerning.
Sean: It's two seasons for Star Trek Next Generation of longer seasons, which would be the equivalent. It'd be the equivalent of five years of this show to get as many episodes. So, yeah. Do they have five years of this kind of thing to be able to make it work? I don't think so. My biggest dilemma with this one was it's all telling. I get what you said about, like, it's fascinating to think about, like, Betazed was like, we're pulling out and we're walling ourselves off, and that's the end of this for us. And that their current stance is not a cold war, but just an intractable gap. And I found myself thinking all of the pieces here would fit, but they're moving things so quickly. And I think you and I have talked about this before. Kurtzman's time at the helm of Star Trek is coming to an end, and this feels like a mad dash just to get anything on camera. It felt like at times people were reading the series bible to me, saying, like, here's what's happened with Betazed during the burn. I get what they're doing with the burn. They refer to the burn and they refer to a species that we do not know. They're being too cute with that they're withholding from the audience. At this point, I feel like this is. As a storyteller, you are cheating your audience if you're like, I'm going to keep this in my hip pocket and make cryptic references to it, but I'm not going to let them in on what it means when revealing that stuff. Now would be the way that you would have heightened tension in this episode. I felt like there were no stakes here because let's say these negotiations break down. Are you telling me that the Federation is not going to try and continue to talk? They were acting as if this negotiation had to happen in this long weekend. This is it. This is our one shot. What? In what world is that? How this takes place like that doesn't make any sense.
If you had simply had one person at that conference who was trying to undermine. Would have ratcheted up. It would have ratcheted up the tension. It would have given it some sort of dramatic push. I kept waiting for that. And when it didn't happen, I found myself distracted by the fact that I was like, oh, I thought the head of the military wing of Starfleet Academy. I thought he was going to be, like, quietly working in the background to undermine this whole thing.
Matt: Yeah.
Sean: Out of some sort of xenophobic sentiment. There was a statement earlier in the episode from a Vulcan teacher who said, there was a point in time where we were all out there rushing around the galaxy trying to find out what was in the universe that we didn't know, as opposed to what we do now, which is try to protect ourselves against it. And it was almost a throwaway line. And I'm like, was that planted here? Because we're currently in a moment where that seems to be the overriding tone? Were the. Were the parent company fingers working their way into the writing room and getting a sentiment like that put into the show? Or was that the show pushing back against the moment by saying the current place that the Federation and Starfleet are in is not a good one and that they have to start learning how to build bridges again? Which is what I think the ultimate goal of this episode was. But it was all.
Matt: That's how I interpret it.
Sean: But it was all told as opposed to being shown. And I found myself thinking this is just boring. Because when they.
Matt: That's the thing. But that's the thing, Sean, that I think is the distinction here is like, there was all the stuff we're talking about that the interesting story was the B plot. It's like, it doesn't matter. The main story was this love story between Caleb and the Betazoid girl. That was the story. It's about the kids. And so the ancillary stuff is all the stuff that they're talking at us. And it didn't bother me because it's like, how are you gonna show us that? Because it's the adult world. It's like, we're with the students. We're stuck in an academy, and so it has to be about the kids.
Sean: I think you show it to us by using the model of. Remember the episode where Wesley Crusher comes back to the Enterprise and he's still in Starfleet, and he stumbles upon the conspiracy to take the Enterprise, and he and his romantic love interest are the ones that are, like, piecing together the pieces of the puzzle. There needed to be something from the adult world that was intruding upon the young world. There should have been somebody there that they began to be suspicious. Like, this person is not who. Who they say they are. They're doing something here that's cryptic. And they start to chase that. That mystery. And you still then have the romantic storyline, which I found fine. Like it was. It was fine, but it didn't have the heft of anything. And I felt like it was one of those. Everybody was acting. Caleb in particular was acting a certain way because he was being forced out as an actor to portray the extreme of who his character was supposed to be. And it didn't feel like it followed organically from the previous episode. I just didn't. I felt like there was too much on display here of this was like a first draft and I didn't feel like it had gone through any refining process. I found myself thinking, okay, the two worlds need to collide more. There needs to be some sort of dramatic tension that could actually say the leader of Betazed is in danger or somebody is going to do something to upset this apple cart in a way that is going to be irreparable. Like Betazed, has a condition they will not do X. And then somebody plants evidence that the Federation is doing that exact thing. Like that's the kind of thing that I felt like it would have upped the stakes. And if you tie the young adult love story into that, then it all starts to pull together as it was. I feel like they're name dropping this villainous species.
Matt: And what's funny is you're hung up on the villainous species. It was such a throwaway line. I didn't even think about it even for a half a second. It like went in one ear and out the other. It didn't matter because that was not the point of the story at all. It's like it was just trying to get Betazoid back into the fold. And so it's like this is where I come back to the lack of focus on what the hell the tone of the show is. What is the point of the show? Is it a comedy or is it not? Are you making lower decks or are you not? I wish they would just make lower decks go all in on the humor because when you do it right, it is hysterical. And it would be fun to have a Star Trek show that is a little different than other things we've seen. Just make it a full on comedy and then just the drama can still come in, can seep in. But instead of having a drama with some humorous moments, make it a comedy with some minor dramatic moments, which is this Betazoid species thing that's happening and like all that kind of stuff is bubbling in the background and you can still have the humorous stuff of the characters of these students that are just like barely making it through school and they're unfolding some kind of conspiracy by accident, you know what I mean? Like they're stumbling into it and you could have comedy coming out of that. Like that's how they do lower decks. I don't understand why they're not doing that. And I think you're. You're hitting it spot on. I think they rushed this show and it's feeling it to me, because this does feel like a first draft to me too, that the lack of tone. It felt like there was somebody who came up with the idea for the love story and the humorous elements of the story. And then somebody from the brand Bible that was like, well, we have to shoehorn the dramatic sci fi Star Trek stuff on top of this now. And they just slammed them together and were like, okay, it's done. Let's go, let's go shoot it. And it was like you didn't refine it. You didn't figure it out at all.
Sean: Let's talk about some of the.
Matt: Go ahead. I was going to say I want to talk about. There are some elements in this. There are fan service y that I liked. There are some humorous moments I did like. It's not like this was a dumpster fire, but there were some moments I did enjoy. I watched the show Star Trek Prodigy, which is the animated show, enjoyed it. I thought it was pretty good. And it was fun to see Krebs from that show. It was the giant rock creature that showed up in a couple of shots. Krebs is this genius young engineer. And it was cool to say, oh, Krebs made it to Starfleet again. It's awesome. So seeing her kind of like stomp around, she's a great character. So I kind of geeked out at that. I almost wish they actually did. Did something with her, like actually make her a character on the show. Like have her. Don't have her in the background, actually have her as a character. But of course that'd be crazy expensive because.
Sean: Right.
Matt: She'd have to be 100 CG. But there was also other aspects of the humor I thought was really kind of. This is where it was like the tone again, the. The Doctor and the self replicating mucus, which had me flashbacks being into like, you know, elementary school or high school where we had to either carry around an egg or like there were students had to carry around a bag of flour for a week and take care of it like a baby. And I was like, oh, this is great. It's like they're doing that exact thing, but it's this self replicating mucus that can actually potentially kill you. I thought that was a great humorous slant on it, but they basically did really nothing with it other than making like a slime joke when it explodes on Caleb later in the episode. Yeah, but they could have made that a running gag through the entire thing, and they did nothing with it. It was like, is this a comedy or is it not? If it's a comedy, you have to do callbacks constantly. All the kids should have been walking around with their slime the entire episode, and there should have been, like, some kind of running gag. Like, one of them has named their slime. And, like, it could. You could have made it a whole little, like, C plot. That would have been hysterical. And they did nothing with it. Why even set it up? Yeah, why do it in the first place?
Sean: It's, you know, like, I know our viewers are familiar with us putting on our rewrite hat, but I couldn't help but think, okay, you give us the nefarious person at the conference who's trying to undermine everything. You still have the love story and you can have all those love story beats. Zoe Steiner was introduced in this episode as Tarima Sadal. I thought she did a really good job. She wasn't given a lot other than kind of, you know, romantic mooney eyes for most of it. But I felt like she was doing a good job of demonstrating the challenge she has. She has some sort of condition that makes her empathy, her ability to read emotions is somehow dangerous. That clearly will play a role in future episodes. We're going to see what that looks like, I'm sure, but I thought she did a really nice job. We could have the nefarious person. We could have the plot to undermine the conference. We could have the science experiment. Carry around your jugs of goo. And then you could have the. Well, what if we lay a plot, a trap involving the goo, to identify who the nefarious person is? The person who walks into the dinner party and has that snot on their back will now be identified as they were the one who went into that room and did that thing. Like, something like that would have pulled it all together. I found myself challenged by the episode because I liked a lot of the performance that was presented on screen. And as you said, there's fan servicey stuff.
Matt: The Boothby Park.
Sean: Boothby Park.
Matt: Did you see that?
Sean: Kirk Pavilion? The moment when the Doctor makes his joke about the slime and the holographic student bursts out into laughter in the back of the room. Like, I like her as a charming character. Like, the things that they want us to like, I like. The difficulty comes with not just some of the plotting elements that I talked about, the. That they didn't recognize some of the stuff that they had and putting forward earlier in the episode. Like, for me, the episode was saved, I kid you not. In the last scene. Can we talk about the introduction of the brother?
Matt: So this is another thing. This is another aspect of. Are you making lower decks or are you not? Yeah, because the final scene is lower decks.
Sean: Romeo Carere as Ocam Sadal. Yeah. Joined Starfleet Academy. He's going to be the third roommate in that triumvirate with the two guys who hate each other. And Caleb walks into the room. The two guys are weightlifting. When it closes with them making a bed, which I thought was.
Matt: When they started making the bed, I.
Sean: Was like, that's really charming. That was.
Matt: I was that.
Sean: And he goes, bros helping bros make beds. I love it. Just like, that's an ad lib. Obviously it's an ad lib. But I was just like, why wasn't this guy in the episode starting at the very beginning, why was he only doing sign language with his sister and having brief moments as like this kind of like he had a moment with her where he's like, yes, he's a weirdo. Go get him, go get him, go get him. And he, like starts poking her. And I'm like, this actor is bigger than this role. He's like, he's got his shot and he's taking it. And this actor, he's pushing at her and the way she laughed. I'm like, this guy's off script. He's doing stuff. He's playing with. He's developing a character around this kind of older brother. Teasing. I loved it. The sequence in the final shot of them making a bed, two guys making a bed. And I was just like, where was this? I would have watched 45 minutes of this. The three of them learning to get along with each other. The fact that he's like, I break everything I touch. And then 30 seconds later, you know it's coming, but he breaks something. Like, it's okay. It was my grandmother. It's irreplaceable, but it's fine. Yeah. Like I. I find myself, like, scratching my head. Like, did they not know what they had? And I don't think they did because I think this is, like I said, I. It felt very first drafty. That's why I reference to this episode at the top. I'm like, this is like a speed bump. I felt myself coming from the first episode feeling like, hey, this has got good momentum. And then this episode just completely made me say, oh, they don't know what they're doing yet. And that's not great.
Matt: It makes me very concerned.
Sean: Yeah.
Matt: It's also concerning because they released these two first episodes together on day one. So you watch. We didn't watch them together, but it's like if we had, I'd been like, oh, the pilot, okay, I'm feeling it. And then the second episode, oh, maybe I don't want to watch this show. It's like you're leaving the audience on a really bad note on episode two. So I'm a little concerned as to where this is going.
Sean: Yeah. So ultimately it's after the first episode. We're now in a much more mixed bag scenario than I anticipated we'd be in. Because I went into this with looking forward to watching this episode and then ended it with, I still like all. It's a little bit like eating a meal that had all the best ingredients, but it's not well put together. Exactly. And I feel like, okay, I'm very on board with giving this show time to cook. And Matt and I just, at the beginning of this conversation laid out the Next Generation was not great until partway through season three. And it takes time to have these things gel. But in a streaming model, we aren't given shows with an opportunity to have that time to bake. So I'm hopeful that first they can pick up the pieces in a way that is stronger than this episode would demonstrate, but also that the show is given time to actually let the cast gel, let the characters start to step forward. I think that there's opportunities here to do that. Viewers, listeners, do you agree? Do you think that this is worth giving time to gel, or are you already tapping out because you didn't quite like this one? Jump into the comments and let us know. As always, your comments are appreciated. Liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends. Those are very easy ways for you to support the podcast. If you'd like to support us more directly, you can go to trekintime.show. Click the join button there. It lets you throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts. And then we get down to the heavy, heavy business of saying that the best part of the episode was the scene in which they made a bed. Not great. We will talk to you next time about episode three of season one of Starfleet Academy. Until then, thank you so much for taking the time to watch or listen and we'll talk to you next time.