There are two main types of antagonists in Star Trek. Sometimes an entire alien race, such as the Borg, the Romulans or the Dominion, becomes the sworn enemy of the United Federation of Planets, kept at a distance via treaties, neutral zones or wormholes. Occasional descents into all-out war are a clear and present danger.
The other flavor is the solo villain, a species of independent combatants who’ve generally developed some kind of beef with Starfleet, and will stop at nothing to ensure their destructive schemes — which may or may not have galactic significance — come to fruition. These grandstanding lone wolves often have a penchant for supervillain-style monologues, and are more traditionally associated with the Trek movies than the TV shows.
The original Khan is the most famous villain — and the baddie against which every member of “Trek”‘s rogue’s gallery shall forever be judged — but Commander Kruge (“The Search for Spock”), Vadic (“Picard” season 3) and Krall (“…Beyond”) are all worthy of a mention. The less said about Sybok (“The Final Frontier”), Ru’afo (“Insurrection”), Shinzon (“Nemesis”) and Khan 2.0 (“…Into Darkness”) the better.
Paul Giamatti’s Nus Braka is clearly making a bid to join “Star Trek”‘s legion of doom in “Starfleet Academy” but he got off to such an inauspicious start in premiere episode “Kids These Days” that it felt like a waste of the Oscar-nominated guest star’s considerable talents. In the latest episode “Come, Let’s Away”, however, Giamatti’s barnstorming performance does enough to suggest that Braka’s going to be an extremely disruptive influence on the students’ ongoing education.
Up to this point, “Starfleet Academy” hasn’t gone overboard on peril. As we’ve said before, the high school hijinks of “Vitus Reflux” may be the lowest stakes “Star Trek” episode of all time, while the “save the Klingons” “Vox in Excelso” and unexpected “Deep Space Nine” sequel “Series Acclimation Mil” also kept the fireworks at a minimum. At no point did we feel any of the cadets — or even the faculty members — were in danger.
That all changed this week, and it’s mostly thanks to Nus, the Klingon/Tellarite face of pirate cabal the Venari Ral — an organization that seems remarkably similar to “Discovery”‘s Emerald Chain, and wouldn’t feel out of place in “Star Wars”‘ galaxy far, far away.
Admittedly, the cannibalistic Furies initially appear to be the more significant threat here, especially when they launch an unprovoked attack on the drifting USS Miyazaki (an abandoned vessel powered by a prototype “singularity drive”). Caleb (Sandro Rosta), SAM (Kerrice Brooks), Jay-Den (Karim Diané) and several of their War College counterparts — on the ship as part of a training exercise — are subsequently lined up as the Furies’ next meal. (Although strangely reminiscent of “Serenity“‘s Reavers, the Furies actually predate “Firefly”, having originally appeared in “Star Trek: Invasion!”, a non-canonical series of books from the mid-’90s.)
But as the episode plays out, we learn that the Furies are essentially just space-faring attack dogs, and that Nus Braka is the guy holding the leash.
In hindsight, making the character so toothless in the debut episode was a masterstroke. There Braka really was all talk, a criminal with a conveyor belt of cruel insults — “Malnutrition really brings out your cheekbones” — but little sustained threat. There’s clearly no shortage of history with school principal Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter) and Caleb — expect the mystery surrounding the fate of his mom to come to the fore before the end of the season — but in the moment, he proved remarkably easy to defeat. Incapacitating a state-of-the-art Starfleet vessel like the USS Athena is one thing, but it turns out that holding onto it is quite another.
This previous failure, however, ensures that nobody sees the real Nus coming. Despite Nahla’s skepticism, recruiting the pirate to save the hostage kids is an entirely reasonable play, a Hannibal Lecter-esque, quid pro quo transaction from which both sides stand to gain. We have no reason to question the idea that our enemy (the Furies) is also the enemy of our enemy (Nus Braka) — even when Nus goes hardball in negotiations by demanding that the Federation stop supplying dilithium to a planet he’s doing his best to extort.
But Nus is a bad guy through and through. First off, he capitalizes on his newfound “consultant” status as an opportunity to belittle Nahla, going on and on about her decision to sacrifice her son to protect the ship under her command — and how the guilt for her actions now manifests in her protectiveness towards Caleb. But really this is just a game, a chance to taunt an opponent before his real plan kicks into gear.
Because telling Starfleet that the Furies are part Lynar, and particularly susceptible to high sonic frequencies, is just an ingenious ruse. He knows that when the USS Sargasso arrives to clear out the Furies with a sonic weapon, it will leave the experimental Starbase J19 Alpha entirely unprotected. He doesn’t need much time to board and ransack the station to recover everything he was after. “They took the bait,” he tells the Furies in an encoded text message. “Bon appetit.”
The lives of the kids on the Miyazaki mean nothing to a man who’s played Nahla and Admiral Vance brilliantly, using his understanding of Starfleet protocols — and the psyches of his opponents — to get exactly what he wants. Far from the snarling clown he initially appeared to be, he’s a “Trek” villain with teeth, a bad guy now in possession of some experimental technology that’s unlikely to be good news for the Federation he despises with all his heart. Sound anything like the vengeance-obsessed Khan, relishing the power granted by the Genesis device sitting in the bowels of his ship?
“I still owe you something,” he tells Nahla in his cutting parting message, “and believe me. It is coming with a big red bow, a special gift just for you.”
On the evidence of “Come, Let’s Away” — not to mention Giamattii’s gleeful performance — suggest that Nus Braka’s return to “Starfleet Academy” will be something worth waiting for. He may not be Khan, but Star Trek’s newest show may have just found a worthy descendant of the franchise’s greatest ever villain.
New episodes of “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy” debut on Paramount+ on Thursdays.
