ACA s1e8 "The Life of the Stars"
I'll take academy all day everyday, with its focus on friendship and chosen family, support and heart, and lower decks style lack of seriousness, over the Picard, eyeballs hanging by a knife closeup, too bright to be noir but really wannabe noir, only boomer tv watched "grit" can save us from the Nazis, hey remember this guy?, horseclops.
Nus, with his ridiculous XO haircut is the perfect tongue in cheek, TOS over the top, post story, meta villain I need. The focus on kids who don't have their shit together is so much better than old men who pretend they got their shit together. And Nahla is our much needed mother-mirror of Sisko's devout father figure.
It is exactly what was needed after the weekend at Bernie's decade of exploding, spooky, gritty, holywood junk they animated the universe with. Lower Decks was a full pendulum swing away from that, and Academy is an attempt at reconciling them both. Star trek is silly play, friendship, and social commentary, and Academy was closer to that than anything since DS9 and Voyager.
The next series should be the academy kids in a live action lower decks, while things slowly get more nonsensical as base reality and created reality merge. They should take the theme they have been working hard on since Data, of Datal people (androids, holograms, etc) asking "am I real?" and upend it with "natural born" species blurring the line and asking "am I real?" and the phildickian hole of "is real real?"
