Jim Moorhouse

For its season finale, Starfleet Academy passed with flying colors, meeting the ultimate year-end assignment head-on and finding a way to perfectly encapsulate everything we love about this show into one final hour of gripping, edge-of-your-seat, coming-of-age Star Trek.

The YEAR’S END graphic that opens “300th Night” might as well scream SEASON END as the amazing first season of Starfleet Academy begins to wind down with an episode that quickly sets itself up as a “Part 1” — in everything but name — only for a dynamic two-part season finale to close out the show’s initial 10-episode campaign.

For an episode about processing trauma, Starfleet Academy really hit the nail on the head with “The Life of the Stars.” With a myriad of barely disguised allegories on display between this thoroughly detailed and beautiful script and its inspirational source material (the 88-year Thornton Wilder play Our Town) this week’s ‘real life’ journey for our Starfleet Academy cadets and one 800-year-old photonic Emergency Medical Hologram really did the work.