this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2026
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I think the debate club is exactly the place for the conversation - Vance and Starfleet are following the PD. They've made the offer, been declined, and are...well, not respecting it, but obeying it. The worst you can say about them is that they're being persistent, trying to convince someone in the Klingon leadership structure to change their mind. That may be a little obnoxious, but I don't think it violates any Starfleet principles to give it a shot.
That leaves the cadets to debate whether respecting the Klingons' wishes is a good thing in this case, and I don't think there's any indication that the debate has any weight to it - it's not going to affect Federation foreign policy.
I liked that "good" debaters tended to fall back on Federation law and Starfleet regulations, whereas the message is to continue to treat people with respect to their culture and identity (even if that identity is sometimes muddled).
I do agree, but (a) Starfleet's pretty out of practice with this stuff, and we saw in the premiere just how black-and-white they became during the Burn, and (b) if it doesn't work out...well, you've got a botched "Vulcan Hello" on your hands, which isn't great.
But given how recently they've dealt with Klingons, and especially given Nahla's relationship with Obel Wochak, how much sense does being out of practice actually make? It's not as if the Burn expunged all records of Klingon-Federation relations and the Federation had to rebuild from illuminated manuscripts copied by monks.
Don't get me wrong - I liked the focus on the Klingons and it answered a lot about what happened to the Empire after the Burn. I've had a soft spot for the Klingons ever since John M. Ford's The Final Reflection and the work that Ron Moore put in during TNG and DS9 and I was feeling really sad at seeing how far the Empire and the Klingon people had fallen.
I just think that the episode put too much heavy lifting responsibility on that last twist, because really, the solution was that obvious.
Now, I don't profess to be a writer (not anymore), but maybe the structure could have been different. Of course the debate isn’t supposed to affect policy, but the cadets could have debated it differently, and the adults watching to see if they reached the correct solution which was obvious (to them) all along.
I remember when I was in the equivalent of my junior year of high school, and coming up with what I thought was a brilliant insight into Shakespeare's Henry V, Part 1. All excited, I went to my English teacher and started blabbering about it. He listened patiently and let me finish, then said, "That's great. You know, it's been said before, but the important part is that you came up with it on your own."
A possibility could be centering the core of the cadet debate not so much on whether or not they should force a solution on the Klingons (which as I said is a non-starter because the PD should have settled the question very quickly), but how to get Faan Alpha into the hands of the Klingons without violating their autonomy.
Then you could still get Caleb to take the side of "fuck it, what's so good about the PD anyway?" and Jay-Den says, "But we have to remain who we are!"
And when Jay-Den has his epiphany, then the adults go, "Excellent. So this is what we're going to do." Because the adults have always known what had to be done but wanted the kids come to the conclusion on their own.
Then it doesn’t look like anyone is being an idiot.
No, but I don't think there's any era that we've seen in which the Federation would stage an act of aggression as a diplomatic overture. Even in this episode, no one seemed sure it was going to work (and it may not have, were it not for Ake's personal connection to Obel).
I do agree - they probably telegraphed it a little too hard.