For a very long time, Star Trek’s secret narrative weapon has been self-reflection. Scholars love to hold up the Federation and Starfleet’s ideals as aspirational, but paradoxically, some of the most interesting and timeless tales about Trek are when the notion of Starfleet’s altruism is put to the test. Whether it's Q (John de Lancie) putting all of humanity on trial at the start of The Next Generation in 1987, or the Maquis challenging Starfleet colonialism in Deep Space Nine, the Trek franchise loves to tell a story about the good guys being painted as, potentially, the bad guys. And, in the Season 1 finale of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, “Rubicon,” the franchise once again, quite literally puts the entirety of Starfleet and its high-minded ideas on trial, in front of the entire galaxy.
After nearly a century of taking questionable actions to survive the cataclysm of Burn, the contemporary version of Starfleet in the 32nd Century has emerged as being closer, ideologically, to the Starfleet of the past. But Nus Braka (Paul Giamatti) and the Venari Ral aren’t having it. The finale finds Nus putting all of Starfleet on trial, in front of the whole galaxy, not just for alleged warfare crimes, but negligence, too. Did he have a point? And in putting Starfleet on trial, was Starfleet Academy also putting the ideals of the Trek franchise itself on trial, too?
