'Completely unacceptable'

'How are you going to enforce your edict?'

WBD has repeatedly rebuffed Paramount’s efforts.

Movies & TV Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Mind Games — Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s “Beta Test” The Athena returns to earth, where Admiral Vance negotiates with the president of Betazed… By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on January 20, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share One of my favorite episodes of Discovery is “There is a Tide…” which has several scenes of Oded Fehr’s Admiral Vance negotiating with Janet Kidder’s Osyraa, the head of the criminal organization the Emerald Chain. The scenes between the two of them were brilliantly written and just as brilliantly performed, and established that Vance is an intelligent, canny negotiator. The plot of “Beta Test” involves Vance leading negotiations with President Sadal of Betazed for them to rejoin the Federation. After the Burn, Betazed—like Trill, Earth, and other worlds, as established on Discovery—isolated itself from the Federation. We learn here that Betazed put up a psionic wall, which was to defend themselves against the Venari Ral (the pirate gang that Paul Giamatti’s Nus Braka is part of). The push to rejoin the Federation has come from a coalition of young Betazoids, who are tired of being isolationist. The group is led by Sadal’s children, Tarima (Zoë Steiner, the one person in Academy’s promotional poster we hadn’t seen in the premiere) and Ocam (Romeo Carere), and the fact that it’s kids pushing this is why the negotiations are being held at the Academy. My only issue with this end of the plotline is that these negotiations shouldn’t be led by Vance, aided by Ake, they should be led by President Rillak. Rillak should at least have been mentioned at some point, but the best we get is Vance mentioning bringing Sadal’s negotiating points to the Federation Council. Trek has had this problem before, most notably on DS9, with Starfleet taking the lead on things that should be the purview of the civilian government. Still, the basics are good, and I particularly like the end result, which is that the seat of the Federation government will be on Betazed. I was surprised and disappointed early on in the episode when Ake and Lura were talking about where they were going to put the Federation’s seat of government, with Namibia mentioned as one possibility, and then later establishing that they’d decided on Paris, which is where it was in the past (as established in The Undiscovered Country and DS9’s “Homefront”/“Paradise Lost” two parter, and which your humble reviewer made copious use of in the novels Articles of the Federation and A Singular Destiny). My thought was, why? Earth only just recently rejoined the Federation (at the end of Discovery’s fourth season), why is it automatically being made the capital again? And then the episode pays it off with the revelation that it won’t be on Earth. And it shouldn’t be. Moving it to Betazed is a good gesture, if a bit excessive, but one that moves the Federation past the human-centric entity it’s often portrayed as, which is at odds with the large membership. In a nice touch, Anthony Natale, who is Deaf, plays Sadal. Betazoids are telepathic and if they’ve been isolated for a century, then it makes sense that they don’t use verbal communication much, so casting an actor who doesn’t speak verbally symbolizes that nicely. The kids with him do speak verbally, but that serves to symbolize the generational divide. For the negotiations, Sadal wears a device on his neck that interprets his words into English (voiced by Piotr Michael, who also has provided computer voices). Previously, I complained that Caleb Mir was my least favorite character on the show and that he was the one I was least interested in learning more about, so it was rather disappointing to find that he was the primary focus of episode two. He’s barely paying attention in class, he’s still trying to escape, and he’s generally being an insubordinate snot. Now Star Trek has a long tradition of characters being insubordinate and not suffering consequences, which goes all the way back to the first season of the original series (Spock committing multiple crimes in “The Menagerie,” and only being explicitly exonerated for one of them, thus showing that he got away with kidnapping, assault, impersonating a senior officer, and theft; Data taking over the ship in “Brothers”; the entire DS9 senior staff disobeying orders in “The Die is Cast”; and so on). But still, Caleb pulls all kinds of shit here, and not only does he suffer minimal consequences for it, he gets to flirt with a pretty president’s daughter and actually gets to negotiate what he gets in exchange for being her tour guide! (That whole scene is absurd—Ake should just order him to do it, and that should be the end of it.) Credit: Paramount+ To be fair, Caleb’s bad behavior does cause him problems. They don’t get him kicked out of the Academy and sent back to the Torothan prison where he was going to get his hands cut off (something SAM reminds him of at the top of the episode), but he does get covered in mucus, get saddled with a roommate he hates (yes, he has to room with Darem, which you just knew was going to happen precisely because they don’t get along), and get publicly humiliated in class by Jett Reno. Yes, Tig Notaro is back! She’s teaching a temporal mechanics class—fitting for someone who was born a thousand years previous and leapfrogged forward in time—and when she discovers that Caleb isn’t paying attention in class, she makes sure to stand him up and embarrass him repeatedly. It’s a joy to behold, mostly because Notaro remains fabulous and because Caleb really deserves it. Still, this episode does nothing to make me like Caleb more, and a lot to make me like him less. Part of it is that Sandro Rosta is playing him way too much like a whiny teenager. There’s only one scene that works, and that’s when Tarima confronts him about why he didn’t tell her that he was trying to find his mother. (Caleb has been having a hard time finding the planet Braka said his mother was at, and Tarima gives him access to Betazoid star charts, which does have it.) At that point, Rosta’s face hardens and he points out that he’s known her for all of five minutes and wasn’t about to let his trauma out for her to see. It’s a well-constructed scene because Tarima is from a culture where it all hangs out, as it were, and Caleb is someone who has suffered horrendous trauma and has a hard time trusting people. That scene also proves that Rosta can play the traumatized person when called upon to do so, but he’s being written and directed to be the whiny teenager way too often. The episode sets things up nicely. We got the Athena as a ship last time, and now we get the Athena as earthbound campus. The teaser gives us the EMH’s xenobiology class, with the kids being given a jar of alien mucus to care for (the thirty-second-century equivalent of giving them an egg to care for, I guess?), Lura’s tactics and defense class (in which Gina Yashere channels R. Lee Ermey), a comparative xenomythology class taught by an appropriately sassy Vulcan (played just right by Scott Yamamura, and I hope we see more of him), and Reno’s temporal mechanics class. In addition to teaching xenobiology, the EMH provides entertainment during a reception, singing opera with an alien played by Jamie Groote (in a nice touch, there are subtitles providing translation of the lyrics in both English and what is presumably the Betazoid written language). My favorite two things about the entire episode, however, are the presence of both a Brikar—who looks very much like Prodigy’s Rohk-Tak—and an Exocomp named Almond Basket who—like another Starfleet Exocomp (who went rogue) named Peanut Hamper from Lower Decks—is voiced by Kether Donohue. Good for them using stuff from the animated series! (This also happened last week when SAM was talking about the EMH’s career and she mentioned the crew of the Protostar from Prodigy.)[end-mark] The post Mind Games — <i>Star Trek: Starfleet Academy</i>’s “Beta Test” appeared first on Reactor.

Books SFF Bestiary Space Lions With Cattitude: C.J. Cherryh’s The Pride of Chanur A classic work of science fiction, told from the viewpoint of spacefaring hunters and explorers — who just happen to be lions. By Judith Tarr | Published on January 20, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share C.J. Cherryh has been one of my favorite authors for a long time. She writes beautifully, her characters are always memorable, and she is a master of intricate plots that grab you and pull you along to the very end. She’s particularly fond of writing from alien viewpoints, and she loves to throw a lone human in among the aliens. Often the aliens are female or female-ruled, and the human is male and very much out of his comfort zone—literally and figuratively. The Pride of Chanur is a classic example. The title is the name of the spaceship captained and crewed by felinoid aliens called hani, but it also points to their terrestrial model: a pride of lions. As with lions, hani females (she calls them women, and so going forward will I) are hunters and explorers. They’re the starfarers, while the males stay at home on their native planet. Captain and protagonist Pyanfar Chanur is the captain of the ship. She’s a woman of a certain age and a considerable degree of confidence. Her crew of six includes her adolescent niece, Hilfy, who happens to be her brother’s favorite child. Hilfy has to grow up hard and fast as the story progresses, and Pyanfar has her own escalating series of obstacles to overcome and personal and professional crises to deal with. It’s all very relatable to this human female of a certain age—even more so now than in 1982 when I first read the book. The universe they live in is an interstellar version of our hypercapitalist present. Multiple species claim different sectors of space; the Compact unites them, to a certain degree, and regulates them, also to a degree. From Pyanfar’s viewpoint, the Compact adds up to a set of trade agreements. She’s a successful trader; she runs cargo around various stations. She’s comfortable with her place in the universe—until a being of an unknown species tries to stow away on her ship and throws her into a set of conflicts that could break the Compact wide open. The hani are not a highly technological species. They were discovered by the large, dark-furred mahendo’sat and introduced to space travel. The only species in fact that propelled itself into space, as far as we know in this first volume of the series, is the kif: tall, grey-skinned, long-snouted, black-robed persons with a distinctly villainous vibe and a tradition of intractable blood feud. Everyone else seems to have taken the same trajectory as the hani. That’s as much as we, through Pyanfar, can know. Pyanfar’s assumptions drive her actions through the novel, and they’re not always correct. One thing she persistently does is focus on the oxygen breathers and treat the methane-breathing species, particularly the many-legged, incomprehensibly singing/screaming knnn, as an ongoing nuisance. Knnn ships are always around whenever things get complicated, getting in everybody’s way and singing incessantly on the com channels. Nobody can control them. They don’t follow traffic laws. Everybody else keeps an eye out for them and tries to stay out of their way. They’re like a form of sentient space debris: you can’t do anything about them, and you have to hope you don’t crash into them, or they don’t crash into you. Pyanfar is not interested in understanding them. She doesn’t care what they may be doing or saying, until she has no choice but to try. I had figured long before she did that there was more going on with them than Pyanfar takes time to notice. Part of the fun of the latter part of the book is waiting for her to figure it out, and then find out what it all means. Pyanfar’s priority throughout the book is the protection of her pride—both the crew of her ship and her family back home on Anuurn. Everything she does revolves around that. She is herself a matriarch, the leader of her family, in conjunction with her brother who, like all hani males up to this point, has never traveled offworld. Male hani are considerably larger than their sisters and daughters and wives. They’re regarded as far too emotionally volatile to trust outside of a very narrow sphere. Their function is to prove themselves in single combat (which can be to the death), and once they’ve done that, to make babies. They’re heavily protected and much indulged. One of Pyanfar’s late realizations is that her cultural conditioning might be wrong about male incapacity; that it might be nurture more than nature. It’s part of her ongoing development as a character, though it doesn’t feature prominently in this first volume of the series. There’s too much else to worry about before she gets to that. As for what hani look like, Michael Whelan’s beautiful cover (along with the covers of the sequels) gives us a good idea. They’re bipedal, humanoid-shaped, browny-bronze, short-furred except for their manes and beards, with strongly leonine facial features and mobile, expressive ears. Both hands and feet have retractable claws, though they also seem to have opposable thumbs: they easily manipulate various tools, weapons, and tech, including the charmingly Eighties-vintage pagers that they carry at their belts. They have color vision—they love to dress in bright colors, with plenty of jewelry, notably earrings that signal a hani woman’s achievements and status. It’s not clear in this volume if they’re mammalian, though their resemblance to lions and their affinity with the mammalian mahendo’sat (and for that matter the humans) indicates they probably are. They seem to produce single offspring or maybe twins rather than multiples, though again, that’s not addressed in this particular story. We know Pyanfar has a son, and Hilfy is one of her brother’s (apparently multiple) daughters; some of her crew are sisters, but whether they’re twins or born separately, we aren’t told. Part of the fun of the book is that because we’re living in Pyanfar’s head, we’re getting information as she would perceive it. She doesn’t give us chunks of exposition. She assumes we know because she does—and the same for what she doesn’t know. When she meets the all but hairless biped with the weird pale coloring, who doesn’t speak any language she or anyone on the crew knows, we pick up from context what he is, but we learn the why and how along with her. We never get the human viewpoint. That’s clearly a deliberate choice, and it works for me. Pyanfar makes sense as a person, and also as a cat. Her concerns are very human in some ways and catlike in others. It’s especially evident in her interactions with the men in her life. She cares deeply for her husband and her brother, but she’s much less emotionally involved with her son who challenges the latter for supremacy. She is prepared for one or both of them to be defeated in combat and probably killed. It may cause her grief, but it’s the reality of life in a hani family. She’s tough with her crew, too, and with her niece. Hilfy is a future matriarch, but she has a long way to go, and a lot of growing up to do. Part of that education involves being literally smacked upside the head. It’s cat discipline, with claws out if and as needed. We don’t even need to visit a safari park to see it: it happens right here at home, with our own small feline housemates.[end-mark] The post Space Lions With Cattitude: C.J. Cherryh’s <i>The Pride of Chanur</i> appeared first on Reactor.

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