‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ Team Breaks Down Caleb’s Search for His Mother & Tarima’s Major Decision

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Season 1 Episodes 1 “Kids These Days” and 2 “Beta Test.”]

Can Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter), as chancellor and captain, now rectify a decision from the past that she hated having to make? That’s her aim as Star Trek: Starfleet Academy begins, with the first two episodes streaming as of January 15.

At the start of the series, Nahla must make a tough ruling after Anisha (Tatiana Maslany) teams up with the Klingon and Tellarite villain Nus Braka (Paul Giamatti) to get food for her son; because an officer was killed in the process, she is placed in a rehabilitation camp and separated from her son. Nahla then quits. Fifteen years later, Admiral Vance (Oded Fehr) approaches Nahla about leading the academy as it reopens — and gets her to say yes by bringing up that kid, Caleb (Sandro Rosta). She can right that wrong, and she does so by recruiting him for the academy and promising to help find his mother.

The search for his mother will continue this season beyond the first two episodes, and we’ll also see Caleb continuing to warm up to Nahla, despite her being the one to separate the two. “It’s impossible not to warm up to Nahal because of who she is,” executive producer Noga Landau tells TV Insider. “It pays off in a really amazing way at the end of the season.”

As for how much we’ll see of Maslany, all executive producer Alex Kurtzman will say is, “We’ll see. That’s a very leading question.”

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Caleb does cross paths with Nus again when the villain boards the U.S.S. Athena, having tracked it via a message the young man sent to his mom, and wants the warp drive. He even taunts the cadet by telling him that his mother would be disappointed in him and claiming something happened to her after they broke out of prison together. Nus escapes before saying anything more.

But is Nus thinking that he could use Caleb against Nahla?

“I think he would take pleasure in messing with the kid and being like, ‘You’re corrupt, you’re bad. Don’t be a good guy. Be corrupt, be a bad guy,'” Paul Giamatti tells us. “I think he takes some pleasure in wanting to corrupt people and make them feel like he feels. So there is something of that. I think there’s some envy of him, too, though now that he’s like, ‘Oh, you’re part of this whole pretty lovely thing with your pretty uniform, and everybody likes you.’ And Nus doesn’t like that.”

Nahla isn’t concerned about Nus using him, though, says Hunter.

“You trust the kid will be stronger than that?” asks Giamatti.

“I felt there’s something implicit there that I didn’t feel — That could not really be ruptured. I didn’t go there,” she explains.

Now that Nus has gotten a look at Nahla in action as chancellor and captain and the way the academy operates, Giamatti says he’s not worried about them as his adversaries.

“I think he thinks they’re clowns, actually. I think that he thinks he’s smarter than everybody. And I think he’s playing the clown in some ways, which I think is … I find that very menacing in certain kinds of people when they play the clown. I find that a particularly scary thing when someone pretends to be, or you realize they’re just pretending to be — a clown is kind of creepy to me,” he shares. “I think he’s a narcissist and a sociopath, and so he thinks he’s smarter than everybody. He’s like, ‘That’s fine.’ His ship gets blown up, that sucks. But he’s had everything happen to him. Nobody can hurt him anymore than he already says has been hurt.”

John Medland / Paramount+

Elsewhere in the first two episodes of the series, Betazoid Tarima (Zoë Steiner) is introduced, and while she shares significant scenes with Caleb, she ultimately chooses the war college, not the academy.

“Tarima has a lot of shame when we first meet her about her empathic abilities,” Steiner says of that decision. “And we get to see her navigate that throughout the series and learn to accept it as a strength. But when we first meet her, that’s not where she’s at. On the contrary, she really feels like it’s something that needs to be corrected. It’s not a strength. It’s her Achilles heel. It causes other people harm when she doesn’t have control of her emotions, and it needs to be reined in, and what better place than the strict and restrictive architecture of the war college?”

What did you think of the first two episodes of Starfleet Academy? Let us know in the comments section below.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Thursdays, Paramount+