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The Weight of Expectations — Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s “Ko’Zeine”
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Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
The Weight of Expectations — Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s “Ko’Zeine”
The Academy closes for mid-year break, and the students scatter…
By Keith R.A. DeCandido
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Published on February 19, 2026
Credit: Paramount+
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Credit: Paramount+
One of the complaints I’ve seen in online comments about Starfleet Academy is that it supposedly doesn’t feel like Star Trek. Some of those are from people who have that same knee-jerk response to all the Secret Hideout shows, mind you, though some are legitimate criticisms from folks who don’t like the show. Which is fine, but I was mindful of those comments while watching this particular episode, because it feels exactly like a Star Trek show—indeed, it sounds like a lot of specific Star Trek shows, where a main character returns to their home planet for the first time in a while and go through some stuff that could result in their leaving the main cast, but instead has them returning to the status quo. We’ve seen it with Spock in “Amok Time” and Worf in “Sins of the Father” and T’Pol in “Breaking the Ice” and Billups in “Where Pleasant Fountains Lie” and after a fashion with Kim in “Favorite Son.”
And now in Academy with Darem.
The episode opens about a month after the horrific events of “Come, Let’s Away.” Tarima is recovering back on Betazed, and we start with Caleb making an attempt to send a letter to her. He winds up deleting the letter before sending it, but at least it brings the viewers up to speed: there was a memorial service and everything is starting to get back to something like normal.
It’s also spring break, apparently, so everyone gets to go off and relax for a week. SAM is going to a holographic “spa” in Denver, as she is still glitching after being shot by the Furies last week, and the folks there will be trying to fix her up.
Indeed, the Academy itself is being locked down, with only Reno and Lura doing occasional spot checks. (We only hear Lura over comms bantering with Reno, so Gina Yashere is able to be in the episode without having to wear a crapton of latex.) Caleb, however, does talk Ake into letting him stay on campus rather than stay with a host family. Caleb is also pissed that Ake didn’t ask Braka about his mother when they were negotiating last week. (“He was right here!”)Ake points out that (a) they had more immediate concerns, (b) Braka doesn’t even necessarily know where his mother is, and (c) even if he did know, he wasn’t likely to tell the truth about it to her under that circumstance. (Hell, he didn’t even tell her the truth about what they were negotiating about.) This nicely addresses why Ake didn’t discuss Caleb’s mother with Braka last time and also goes some way toward explaining why Ake lets Caleb stay on campus.
Genesis gets a nice kudo from Ake also: after her excellent performance during the crisis with the Miyazaki, the chancellor is recommending her for the pre-command track, which she tells her right before she buggers off to spend her break with her father the admiral (or her “Dadmiral,” as Caleb keeps calling him). But she sneaks back into the Academy also, ostensibly because her father is speaking at a symposium, which she finds boring. The truth comes out after she and Caleb engage in various bits of tomfoolery on campus, culminating in their breaking into the bridge.
But Genesis has an ulterior motive: she needs to alter her references, because they all talk about how much she fears following in her Dadmiral’s footsteps, and she’s concerned that that will have a negative impact on her ability to get onto the pre-command track.
Meantime, Jay-Den is on his way to spend the break with Kyle in Ibiza when he sees two people grab Darem and seemingly kidnap him through a spatial rift. Jay-Den jumps through the rift right before it closes, only to find himself on the Sunset Moon in Khionian space. Darem has been kidnapped because he’s getting married.
Khionian royalty/nobility have arranged marriages, and the original plan was for Darem to marry Kaira (Jaelynn Thora Brooks), the daughter of the monarchs, after he finished at the Academy. But her mother had a health scare and her parents decided to abdicate sooner than planned, so Kaira and Darem have to have their sealing now rather than later.
(Side note: there’s a tendency in far too much science fiction to come up with unnecessary synonyms for things to make seem more sci-fi—calling it a “seating unit” instead of a chair, that kind of silliness. However, you have to watch out for homonyms when you do that. Every time the Khionians talked about the sealing, I kept thinking they were talking about the thing on the top of a room…)
When Jay-Den shows up to “rescue” Darem, the latter quickly says that he’s his ko’zeine, which is basically the best man. Jay-Den is not thrilled at the fact that Darem is leaving Starfleet, nor at the fact that he’s been drafted to be ko’zeine, especially since it involves making a toast.
However, when the moment arrives, Jay-Den proceeds to talk about all the selfless and brave things Darem has done since joining the Academy, from walking on the hull to save the Athena to helping Jay-Den get over his stage fright.
What’s impressive about this scene is how well Brooks plays it, as her facial expressions darkens as the toast goes on. Darem has been her best friend since childhood, and hearing about all these heroic acts stuns her. She realizes that Darem is thriving as a cadet, and it’s the first thing in his life he’s done for himself rather than other people. Indeed, he has spent his entire life doing his duty to Khionia, but Kaira doesn’t want a husband who is only doing it because he’s expected to. She wants a proper partner—or no partner, which is what winds up happening.
In the case of both plots, we see the weight of parental expectations warping the actions of two of our main characters. Just last week, we saw Darem and Genesis kicking ass on the bridge of Athena, figuring out and implementing a method of tracking the cloaked ship. This week, we see the other side of that uber-competence for both of them.
Genesis is scared to death of the expectations of the captain’s chair, because there will always be the shadow of her father being cast over everything she does. And she fears that fear being known. Darem has always done what’s expected of him—except, apparently, go to Starfleet Academy.
It takes outside perspective to get them to understand. For Darem it’s both Jay-Den’s toast and particularly Kaira’s lovingly angry request that he abdicate and divorce her. She’s pissed, but it’s from a place of caring: she wants him to be happy and to thrive, not to be obligated. For Genesis, it’s Ake whupping her upside the head and pointing out that fear can be healthy, and the committee that approves pre-command track candidates would not have held that against her.
However, her and Caleb breaking into the bridge is being held against her. Genesis fears expulsion, but Ake doesn’t go quite that far. But she isn’t going to recommend her for pre-command anymore, either—and both she and Caleb have to do menial service as punishment.
After the high-stakes drama of last week, we return this week to the more low-stakes drama of the difficulties of growing up and finding your place in the world, which is fine. This is a show about young people trying to find their place in the galaxy, and one of the show’s strengths is that they’re keeping it mostly low-stakes on a macrocosmic level, even if it’s all quite important to the individual characters on a microcosmic level.[end-mark]
The post The Weight of Expectations — <i>Star Trek: Starfleet Academy</i>’s “Ko’Zeine” appeared first on Reactor.
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