Movies & TV Star Trek: Starfleet Academy What Was Left Behind — Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s “Series Acclimation Mil” “I loved this episode and it made me cry.” By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on February 5, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share In 2005, in advance of the series finale of Enterprise, Rick Berman and Brannon Braga described the episode as a Valentine to the fans. The episode that actually aired was, um, not that, and since then, many Trek viewers have come to view that phrase with understandable cynicism. So let me start by saying that, unlike “These are the Voyages…” the latest episode of Starfleet Academy is a genuine Valentine to the fans in general and to Deep Space Nine in particular. Having said that, the episode put me on a massive roller coaster, and may do the same for you, so let me just tell you to be patient and go all the way through to the end (including the closing credits). To be clear: I loved this episode and it made me cry. Keep that in mind as you read on. The roller coaster started upward when I learned of the episode’s title. Series Acclimation Mil, or SAM, is one of my favorite characters on the show. Magnificently inhabited by Kerrice Brooks, SAM is that quintessential Trek character, the unique outsider who is trying to understand the human condition. It’s the role played by Spock, Data, Odo, the EMH, Seven of Nine, T’Pol, Saru, and T’Lyn. SAM has the added entertainment value of being a teenager who was only created recently by the Kasq, a species of holograms. We learn a lot about the Kasq in this episode, including that they were originally created as a subject species by organics, but at some point the organics went away and the holograms took over. This episode focuses entirely on SAM, showing her attempts to integrate—and also the pressure being put on her by the folks back home (in the form of a non-corporeal and non-hominid hologram voiced by the great Chiwetel Ejiofor). Then the episode started, and we see SAM being pressured by the Kasq to take a class on Confronting the Unexplainable, and one of the unexplainable things is Benjamin Sisko, who has never been seen since he went to the fire caves on Bajor to stop the Pah-Wraiths in “What You Leave Behind.” Did he die in the caves or did he remain with the Prophets, or what? The image of Sisko on the screen doesn’t show his face. We later find out that the Bajorans forbid images of Sisko’s face for religious reasons. At this point, the roller coaster goes down. Avery Brooks (no relation to the actor who plays SAM) forced the producers of DS9 to make it clear that Sisko intended to return, not that he’d remain in the wormhole/Celestial Temple forever, and particularly that the one of the best fathers in science fiction television wouldn’t abandon his pregnant wife. The image of a Black man abandoning his family is not one that sat well with Brooks, nor should it have. The fact that they didn’t show his face indicated to me the possibility that they were unable to secure Brooks’ cooperation or get his permission to use his likeness. To be fair, it also indicated the possibility that they just didn’t ask. Indeed, in the post-finale DS9 fiction that Simon & Schuster published from 2001-2021, Sisko did return just in time for the birth of his daughter, in the 2003 novel Unity by S.D. Perry. (Your humble reviewer contributed several works of fiction to that post-finale DS9 slate.) So before the credits rolled, I’m already pissed off. Then we get through the credits, and I see who has written this: Kirsten Beyer and Tawny Newsome. Now the roller coaster’s slowly starting to creep back up. Beyer is a veteran Trek novelist (and also, full disclosure, a friend of your humble reviewer), who was brought into the stable of Trek fictioneers by Marco Palmieri, also the editor of that selfsame post-finale DS9 fiction. Newsome is a devoted fan, and also the actor who voiced (and in one episode of Strange New Worlds, portrayed physically) Beckett Mariner on Lower Decks, and is also a woman of color. So I had hope. SAM feels an immediate affinity for Sisko, because she, too, is an emissary. However, we’re already up to midterms, and joining the Confronting the Unexplainable class would be difficult. In fact, the class’s professor, Isla, who presents as Cardassian (and is played by Newsome), says it’s too late to sign up. But if she can solve the mystery of Sisko, she’ll let SAM teach the class. So SAM digs in. She tries to learn everything she can about Sisko, including visiting the Sisko Museum in Louisiana. This being the thirty-second century, she doesn’t have to go there, because a virtual version of the museum can be set up in a room of the Academy. At one point, she calls up a recording of Sisko’s son Jake giving a talk—and the roller coaster shoots right up because that’s Cirroc Lofton! They actually got Lofton to play Jake once again—and in a lovely touch, he’s wearing a Bajoran earring! He talks about how much he loves his father and what a great father he was and other nifty stuff. SAM also makes some missteps along the way, like going to the Academy’s Bajoran Club and making a pig’s ear out of querying them about a major religious figure. But she also gloms onto one very important part of Sisko: food. Isla pushes her in this direction by talking about tomatoes in gumbo, as opinion is divided on the subject. (It’s traditionally Cajun gumbo versus Creole gumbo, though that isn’t mentioned specifically. On the other hand, that particular distinction may have faded over the course of the next two thousand years. On the third hand, which we’ll borrow from Arex or Kelzing, it is Sisko’s Creole Kitchen, and Creole is the tradition that uses tomatoes, which is what Sisko did.) Since SAM can’t consume food, she instead prepares a mess of food from Sisko’s Creole Kitchen for her fellow cadets—who, of course, love it. Jay-Den’s description is my favorite: “My mouth is on fire—and I never want it to go out,” which is about the highest praise you can give to Creole food. She also wants to go to the Launching Pad—which doesn’t exist anymore centuries later, but there’s another bar on the same location called the Academy. SAM wants to go there because Sisko did, and famously got into a fight with a Vulcan there (as detailed in “Take Me Out to the Holosuite”). Caleb even is able to mess about with her source code so she can be drunk (with the added benefit of allowing her to be “dialed back” to sober afterward). She’s a hilarious drunk, and of course, a bar fight eventually breaks out between the Academy cadets and the War College cadets. (There’s a fabulous cameo by drag queen Jackie Cox as the bartender, and I really hope this isn’t a one-off, as I’d love to see her as a recurring character.) There’s a lovely scene in sickbay after that when SAM asks the EMH if he knew Sisko. He didn’t—which tracks, as Voyager didn’t return home until after Sisko went into the Celestial Temple—but he did meet Jake, and says he was a fabulous author. (Since the EMH is something of an author himself, as seen in “Author, Author” and other places, this is a nice touch.) The EMH also says he’s never read Jake’s most famous work, Anslem, which was apparently never published. (In the alternate future of “The Visitor,” the book was published; in the mainline timeline he started it in “The Muse.” This episode reveals that anslem is the Bajoran word for father.) Finally, Isla decides to give SAM a gift: a bound copy of Anslem that was apparently entrusted to her. SAM devours it, and then also interacts with a hologram of Jake. It’s not clear whether or not this hologram is an integrated feature of the bound book or SAM hallucinating or what. But it doesn’t matter, as the conversation itself is glorious. Jake talks about how his father did things his own way. The Prophets told him that if he married Kasidy Yates, he’d only know sorrow (as seen in “Penumbra”), but he went ahead and married her anyhow (in “Til Death Do Us Part”). At this point, the roller coaster shoots upward. Because it’s right there in the prophecy he was given in “Penumbra.” If he never returns from the Celestial Temple, that’s the sorrow he’ll always know, that he abandoned his pregnant wife. Is it a perfect solution? No, but it’s one that works with what’s been established, and at least retroactively justifies the ill-thought-out decision made in 1999. The roller coaster levelled off earlier in the episode when the computer gives Sisko’s background. I was wondering how this episode, written by two women (a gender not at all represented on DS9’s writing staff), would address the fact that Sisko was the product of a rape. As established in “Image in the Sand” and “Shadows and Symbols,” the Prophets possessed a woman named Sarah, paired her off with Joseph Sisko, and they had Benjamin. The Prophets stopped possessing her after Sisko turned one, and she left them. The computer presentation here, however, says that Sarah was both human and Prophet, which is not what was established, though it retcons away the rape, kind of. At least they made an effort, but I wish the episode had confronted that head-on, because the difficulties of being an emissary is the heart of the episode. The pressure being put on SAM by the Kasq back home is tremendous, to the point where they want to summon her home and go back to avoiding organics like the plague. It’s very hard for them to even consider trusting organics again. The problematic nature of Sisko’s birth could have been addressed front and center as another issue, especially since SAM was also created by outside forces to fulfill a particular function. SAM feels the pressure of her mission in every photon. She doesn’t want to leave the Academy, as she’s made friends here, and she really feels she can learn what the folks home want, but she needs more time, and she needs to do it her way. Eventually, she tells the Kasq off and tells them to leave her alone and let her do her job. She also realizes something: she found nothing about tomatoes or gumbo in any of her research. So how did Isla know about it? For that matter, how’d this Cardassian woman wind up with a unique book? First Isla brushes her hair back to show the Trill spots that indicate that she’s got at least one other species in her ancestry, then reveals her full name of Isla Dax. “Benjamin would have liked you,” she tells SAM in a vocal intonation that’s right out of Terry Farrell (and the earlier tomato conversation was right out of Nicole deBoer). “He loved people who got in trouble for the right reasons.” Yes, it’s another legacy character. Yes, it’s self-indulgent. Yes, the Dax symbiont should be on its last legs at this point. (Something the writers were fully cognizant of in Discovery’s “Jinaal.”) But I’m totally willing to forgive it, because I love the idea of Dax still being around and still guarding her friend’s legacy. Every performance in this episode is magnificent, particularly Lofton’s, but it’s Brooks as SAM who owns it. So many wonderful touches, from her learning the theremin (for reasons that are wonderfully multifaceted) to the fact that she has a different greeting for each of her friends among the cadets (my favorite is Ocam’s). Director Larry Teng did a lovely job by showing us SAM’s POV in many scenes, with little drawings and diagrams and notes on her thoughts (starting with her crossing out the “A CBS STUDIOS PRODUCTION” title and replacing it with “A STORY ABOUT ME”) as she provides a voiceover throughout. At the episode’s end, we learn that the voiceover is SAM talking to Sisko, wherever he might be. And then there’s a magnificent voiceover from Avery Brooks, a colloquy on love that is the perfect coda to the episode, and which they absolutely could not have done without his permission. Which shoots the roller coaster straight up into orbit and stays there. (Also: look at the cloud formation over San Francisco at the very end. Trust me.) The closing credits start with “Thank you, Avery,” and then plays, not the theme for this show, but DS9’s theme music. I haven’t said anything about the B-plot, which is another attempt by Ake to get Kelrec to trust her, in this case by assisting him with a diplomatic mission, aided by the EMH and Reno. Mostly, it’s an opportunity for more Felix-and-Oscar scenes with Raoul Bhaneja and Holly Hunter and for Tig Notaro and Robert Picardo to be amusing, both of which are fun things, and which are pretty much just there to justify Hunter’s place at the top of the opening credits (she does have a scene with SAM that mentions her time on Bajor, but that’s it as far as her involvement with the A-plot). It’s harmless fluff. And yes, it’s a Valentine to the fans, and a damn good one. And yes, I cried. Happily.[end-mark] The post What Was Left Behind — <i>Star Trek: Starfleet Academy</i>’s “Series Acclimation Mil” appeared first on Reactor.