Hoping to settle the cadets’ nerves after the trauma of the USS Miyazaki training incident in Episode 6, “Come, Let’s Away,” that left the fledgling Federation officers mentally shaken, “Starfleet Academy” downshifted to Episode 8, “The Life of the Stars.” This meditative chapter served to reset the students’ psyches via the most unlikely of methods… by the reading of a classic 20th-century American stage play.
We connected with “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy” co-executive producer Noga Landau and series creator/ Episode 8 co-writer Gaia Violo to learn more about this throttled-back interlude before the season’s final two installments drop.
“For me on, a personal level, I’ve been wanting to bring literature into the show,” Violo tells Space.com. “I know we talk a lot about science. But my background is classics, Ancient Greek and Latin. You become a writer, hopefully, because you love reading and because it changed your life in some shape or form. That experience is always present. For ‘Our Town’ specifically, the writers’ room was brainstorming ideas for the episode. We went from wondering if we’d just have an episode of the week structure where we’d go on an adventure, and then that will launch us into the last two episodes.”
Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” was written in 1938 and centers around the lives of the residents of Grover’s Corner, a typical pre-war community in New Hampshire, representing small town life at its most intimate.
Those themes of community, harmony, love, mortality, and finding value and meaning in the simplest of things are used as a teaching device by a surprise drama educator in the form of “Star Trek: Discovery’s” Sylvia Tilly (Mary Wiseman).
“But we started to realize that all of us had not truly dealt with the aftermath of the Miyazaki and neither had the characters,” Violo adds. “It was a big deal for us to lose one of our own, even as writers. While all these characters have experienced loss, definitely Caleb and Jay-Den, losing one of their own in a place that’s supposed to be safe, really felt like it needed its space and time to breathe. And to do that through literature in the vein of the great classics felt right.
“‘Our Town’ in its simplicity — and looking at the human experience as this collection of small ordinary moments that become essential, placed against the backdrop of infinity and the eternal — felt perfect as a way to not just to explore our cadets, but also to look at Nala and The Doctor under a different lens. We’d been wanting to have those two connect for a long time. Just the two of them in a quiet space talking about their existence and how lonely it can feel to live seemingly forever and to see so many eras pass as you’re still standing.”
Landau furthers those sentiments regarding this reflective episode by reaching back to growing up watching classic “Star Trek” episodes, injected with the distinctive flair of theater.
“When I close my eyes, some of my earliest memories are these episodes specifically of ‘The Next Generation’ where people would be doing theater,” she recalls. “I remember Beverly Crusher doing theater. I remember Data doing theater, and everything Patrick Stewart does is basically theater because that’s who he is as a Shakespearean actor. An unfortunate reality of people on planet Earth nowadays is that they go to school and study Shakespeare and they study these plays, but they don’t really get what they’re about.
“We’re funneled through the system where we‘re taught how to write essays about the work, but we’re not taught how to feel the work. Taking everything we love so much about ‘Star Trek,’ that makes us feel nostalgic, and a huge part of that is how ‘Star Trek’ has incorporated theater into the canon, and then being able to say, ‘Okay, we’re about to have an insanely adrenalized ride these last two episodes. This is going to be ‘Star Trek’ action at its best. Before we do that, what is the downbeat? What are the emotions? How do we remind the audience of why we make ‘Star Trek’ in the first place?’
“And reminding a group of kids in the 32nd century that something was written hundreds and hundreds of years earlier, something small called ‘Our Town,’ that’s actually about the universal things of life and the reason why we go to the stars.
The message of the play, that life has a meaning no matter whether you look at it or not that way, is amazing and healing. It was definitely that downbeat we need before we’re about to go on a wild ride at the season’s end.”
