‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’: Holly Hunter & Paul Giamatti Break Down Major Nahla & Nus Scene (VIDEO)

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Season 1 Episode 6 “Come, Let’s Away.”]

When cadets run into some serious trouble on Star Trek: Starfleet Academy in the Thursday, February 12, episode, Nahla (Holly Hunter) and Vance (Oded Fehr) must make a deal with the devil, Nus Braka (Paul Giamatti).

With furies holding the cadets hostage and Nus having previous experience with them, it’s the best of their bad options, as the admiral puts it.

“It’s a little bit of going back to during the period of the Burn. It’s a little bit of going back to having to make hard, bad decisions. And the risk is high, and I think he feels that he is willing to risk it,” Fehr tells TV Insider of Vance. “It’s not something he wants to do. He doesn’t necessarily want to deal with Nus Braka at all, but sometimes you have to do the dirty deed in order to get something good happening and to do something you don’t want to be doing in order to save lives.”

He liked that decision. “I think the writers did just a wonderful job putting us at that risk of life and this wonderful bad guy who comes back into the picture and brings all of it,” he says. “We’re going to need to somehow close the circle of something that started early on or before the show.”

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What Vance especially doesn’t like is the position he’s put Nahla in, given their long history. “He has incredible respect for Nahla,” Fehr explains. “He just doesn’t want to put her back in a situation like he did with Mir [Sandro Rosta], where she was forced to make a very bad decision that then haunts her. So it’s more of a guilt thing. It’s more about him taking responsibility, him making right decisions and not going back on the promise that he made her, that she won’t have to face that again.”

Vance presents the deal: Help them and they’ll provide him with additional humanitarian supplies. But Nus counters; he wants the federation to stop providing dilithium to an area he used to control. With the admiral bringing that to the president, what that means is a series of scenes between Nahla and Nus that are simply dynamic. “My space boo, my solar flame, my interstellar bestie,” he greets her when he boards the ship.

“That stuff I thought was really, really wonderfully written and really fun,” Paul Giamatti tells us in the video interview above alongside Hunter. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be a good time.'”

Fehr also enjoyed those scenes. “It’s my favorite thing doing these kind of smaller scenes, and working with these two incredible professionals is a real blessing for an actor,” he shares. “They’re just so good at their craft and you just have to make sure you don’t go out of character just going, ‘Oh my God, they’re incredible.’ You’ve got to stay in character and just stay in the moment, but they make it very easy. They’re very giving, very respectful.”

When Nus wants to have a conversation, Nahla argues that can only occur when there’s fair exchange of ideas between equals and she doesn’t see him as fair or equal, but he argues that since he set the terms, her job is to figure out what he does care about. Nus hits her where it hurts the most, bringing up the son she sacrificed to save the crew of her ship and then Caleb, another child she should’ve saved a long time ago but didn’t and now, as he realizes, is one of the cadets in danger.

Of course, Nus ends up playing them, to get access to technology on a space station. He also leaves Nahla a message, noting that hating her makes him better at his job and know what he’s capable of and boasting about her losing because he sees her. He also warns her that he owes her something and it’s coming with a big red bow, a special gift just for her. He leaves her with thanks for being the best teacher he ever had and the difference she made in his life.

Brooke Palmer/Paramount+

Giamatti calls that a “really screwed up thing to say,” and Holly Hunter agrees. “It’s creepy,” she says. “It’s interesting to be 422 years old and still get taken. That’s hard. That hurts.”

As Giamatti sees it, Nus “likes to be underestimated, too. ‘I fooled you. You thought I was an idiot.'” Hunter notes, “Even recounting it now, he seems slightly gleeful.”

Executive producer Alex Kurtzman shares that it was “very challenging to craft” those scenes between the two of them because “Nus is really pulling a long con and she’s really smart.” Therefore, “It better be meticulously done.” What helped was knowing that having Giamatti and Hunter be the ones in those scenes would be “electric,” as it was.

As for that special gift that Nus mentions, “It’s everything,” teases Kurtzman. “The turning point in Episode 6 is first of all that the cadets realize what it’s actually like to be in Starfleet Academy and what the stakes are, but it sets in motion all the events that will take us to the finale.”

Watch the full video interview above for more from Holly Hunter, Paul Giamattai, and Alex Kurtzman about this episode.

What did you think of those Nahla and Nus scenes? What do you think of Starfleet Academy so far? Let us know in the comments section below.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Thursdays, Paramount+