Star Trek: Starfleet Academy tries something different, and I don’t hate it

Ake accepts the job, and to atone for her mistake of separating Mir from his mother, she joins him at the academy as a new recruit. Oh, she’s also a Lanthanite (technically a human-Lanthanite hybrid), and 422 years old, which means she remembers working for the Federation pre-Burn. She’s not the only academy instructor in Starfleet with pre-Burn experience. Jet Reno (Tig Notaro), who arrived in the 32nd century with the Discovery, teaches physics to the cadets. And the Doctor (Robert Picardo) is the chief medical officer.

I expected this to result in a deeper cut into an episode of “The Living Witness.” sailor Set in the 29th century, where a copy of the Doctor has been restored to a museum in the Delta Quadrant. At the end of that episode, that Doctor departs for Earth, and showing him would be a nice finale; Instead, he probably burned to death, which makes me sad. As Chief Medical Officer, the Doctor is apparently constantly monitoring the cadets’ biosciences – he ends an early fight after detecting students with elevated excitatory neurotransmitters. This seems a little too offensive to me, although she later gets a taste of her own medicine from Starfleet’s first holographic cadet, SAM (Keris Brooks).

I have a bit of a problem with Cadet Master Commander Lura Thok (Gina Yashere), a female Klingon-Jem’Hadar hybrid.

Apparently, a female Jem’Hadar Sure Be canon, because it’s right there on the screen, and that’s how Trek canon works. But the Founders bred the Jem’Hadar into tanks, and they lived short, dangerous lives as warriors. What use would sex organs or sexual reproduction be to a species that has been genetically engineered to perform a specific function by a race of despicable changelings who treat their servants as nothing more than tools.