WHY WE LIKE IT: Nus Braka is back.
WHY WE DON'T: Plot holes.
REVIEW: Seems you can't take these kids anywhere without pirates jumping them. On their first official training exercise in space - a COMBINED exercise with the War College - the cadets enter a derelict ship, must restore its power, and so on, so when an attack happens, you may initially wonder if it's all part of the test. It isn't. The War College will end up losing an instructor and a student, and only through combined efforts of the away team and the crew back aboard ship (which was the point of the exercise), will the situation be resolved. But at a greater cost than anyone realized at the time. So some nice jeopardy throughout, despite the action feels a little limp to me. Something about how it was filmed or edited just didn't hit hard enough.
The dead ship used for the training mission is the USS Miyazaki (nice!), which suffered catastrophic engine failure due to its unique singularity engine (so... a Romulan design?), and made famous, in-universe, for the long-running comic series that mythologized its adventures (for some reason, the crew is pictured in TOS-era uniforms, but it's clear from the tech inside the ship that it can't be that old). How long before IDW starts making the comics for real? The Vulcan War Cadet is a big fan of these, and claims they inspired him to enlist, but that begs the question as to why he frowns on Starfleet and joined the War College instead. The comic will eventually be used to catch the computer up, and it would be silly if the Vulcan didn't also get killed protecting Caleb. Too bad, I rather liked him.
But all the techno-babble the cadets have to complete is really set dressing to a new confrontation between Captain Ake and Paul Giamatti's Nus Braka. His pirates aren't the culprits here, however. Instead, we have the cannibalistic Furies (singular, according to the credits: Furie. I'm not sure I can go along with that) who seem to be temporally displaced in some way. Maybe part of their selves is still in the Firefly universe where they came from ;-). There's mention that the Furies think being a Furie (oof, this hurts, guys) is a curse, but nothing about any kind of dimensional or temporal problem, which is weird. We can't really trust what Braka says about them (their stated ancestry doesn't track), and maybe we'll find out more later, but at this point, it's like the effects are doing one thing, and the dialogue is doing something else. Bit of a missed opportunity. But they're not really important because they've been manipulated(?) into attacking the cadets so Braka, on record for once defeating them (collusion?), would be called for help. He and Ake have this big mental chess game - both acting powerhouses are riveting - in which the winner can only really be called at the end, but Braka often has the upper hand. He's trying to trigger her PTSD about her lost son, and though she claims she was playing for time until he made a mistake, it doesn't mean it didn't hurt. And in the end, he DID play Starfleet, drawing a key ship away from a weapons facility that his fleet then attacked and pillaged. Plot hole alert: That ship, the USS Sargasso, a take on the Voyager design, is EASILY put out of action, so why couldn't the pirates just attack it directly with the same effect? Regardless, Ake blames herself, though Admiral Vance puts the blame on his own shoulders. I tend to agree, insofar as I always wonder what Vance is even doing on the show. It's as if we'd had an Admiral on the bridge in all those other Star Trek shows making the big calls. Whenever it happened, was always a disaster. I guess, here, too. Except we don't have that moment where the Captain shoos the pesky Admiral away and does what has to be done.
And there's another casualty. The episode ends with Tarima in critical condition after unleashing the Phoenix Force on the Furies (exploding their brains, apparently). We'll also learn that her father is deaf because her uncontrolled power as a child blew out his senses. We actually start the story on her telepathy slipping, as her relationship with Caleb grows closer. He's not her Imzadi (yet), but we get a sense of what the Troi-Riker connection might have been like (though Deanna was many degrees less powerful). There's some of that CW angst that seems to crop up whenever these two are together - she invades his memories, more or less accidentally, but somehow HE'S unreasonable and somehow racist/rejects who she IS, if it upsets him. Girl, get over yourself. One could argue he should drop her like a hot psionic potato, but their connection helps save the day as she transmits key information to him when coms go down. But it comes at a cost, and to sustain the link, she rips her inhibitor out and goes into a coma. More to come. As for the other cadets, Kraag as a good moment or two. We discover that SAM can be damaged by certain kinds of weapons (not the deus ex machina she seemed). And it's lovely to see Darem and Genesis work as an agreeable team - they've learned something in past episodes.
LESSON: The enemy of our enemy is another enemy.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium-High: I have a number of complaints, but the show getting serious after a number of comedy episodes makes this one a must-watch.
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