In Space, No One Can Feel You Ache
The first time we meet Darem Reymi, he is a complete dick.
Starfleet Academy is, at its heart, a high school ensemble show (despite the Academy being, to the best of our understanding, a university and not a high school). Darem is given to us early as the most prototypical of teen content tropes: the hot jock bully. The first thing he does is steal a pair of binoculars from a student who's just dropped them, and when he goes to return them, yanks them away at the last second (seriously: what are you, twelve?) before handing them off to a guy behind him who is probably in the "lackey" position (a bunch of them start throwing the binoculars back and forth amongst themselves, even!).
Maybe that's not true anymore, but in the 80s and 90s when I was growing up, this was like... the trope for showing someone is a stupid, arrogant bully but who has the power of cultural capital -- and sometimes, as we find out about Darem later, political and financial capital too -- behind him.
I really expected to hate Darem from the jump. By the end of the pilot I didn't exactly like him, but he had walked onto the hull of a starship without a spacesuit, thanks to his species' usually-hidden reptile-like appearance and enhanced abilities, risking his life and indeed almost dying in order to save everyone on the ship.
The plots to come with Darem, though, in the first few episodes of the show to follow, were not particularly innovative either. There's the archetypal "who will be captain of the football team" episode where he tries too hard and is too hypermasc which is why he ends up not being captain of the football team (a valuable lesson for all, especially since the other choice is a high-achieving smart young woman). The image we get of Darem in eps 1-3 does not stray too far from what the genre would have you expect.
In many ways, despite his apparently-unconventional character concept, the student that Darem stole the binoculars from, a Klingon named Jay-Den Kraag, is also up to genre expectation. Tall but a little willowy (by Klingon standards, anyway), Jay-Den does not want to be a warrior; he wants to be a healer. He is there to study science and medicine, which are not exactly highly valued in Klingon society (which we learned way back in the TNG days, via Kurak). His voice is extremely deep, and he is physically imposing, but he is gentle, smart, and a little sardonic; again, consistent with the "gentle smart giant" archetype of teen film/TV, which isn't as common as Darem's jock jerk, but was still a thing.
Compared to Darem, Jay-Den spends episodes 1-3 being largely a background character, though he is clearly considered part of the group of "core" students that lead the ensemble: Caleb Mir (the "protagonist," if there can be said to be one), Darem, Jay-Den, a holographic young woman going by Sam, and Genesis (who beat Darem out for football captain).
Then episode 4, "Vox in Excelso," happens.
In this episode, a Jay-Den focus episode, we discover a lot is going on under the hood of the laconic Klingon would-be healer. For starters, Qo'nos is gone -- Klingon clans have been reduced to being nomads or refugees, now a widely-scattered diaspora without a home. Jay-Den was one such refugee, living in the wilderness on a planet with his mother, two fathers (queer poly Klingons, whaaaaaaaaat!), and an older brother.
He also has a serious fear of public speaking, which he is being forced to do for debate class as part of the episode's A plot, and that leads, unexpectedly, to a scene between Jay-Den and Darem in the former's quarters. Darem, in his inimitable way, wants to help Jay-Den feel more confident, and tries to teach him a Khionian technique called "battle-breathing." It's just that this process involves them standing mere inches apart, chanting breathily at each other.
Y'all. Y'all.
This transitions from the chanting to Jay-Den starting to deliver his speech, while Darem closes his eyes and listens, clearly... well, pleased. He mutters "yes" "mmhmm" "go on" as the Klingon stutters through things and it is so incredibly, unbelievably erotic. The entire thing comes to an end when, with both of them literally pressed against the other, Jay-Den breaks contact and goes to sit down, while Darem gives a face I can only call "pensive" because there's not enough context to call it "heartbroken."
I truly was not anticipating this happening, because by the time episode 4 rolled around, I had more or less decided I was giving up on Starfleet Academy. I want to like the show, but at 47 years old and a college professor, I don't want to watch teens be teens for fun. I can do that at work, for free. On top of that, the show's uneven writing and identity confusion -- is it a Trek show? A high school show? Is the language modern or sci-fi? Is this for fans or new audiences? It wants to be all of these things at once -- was a headache.
"Vox in Excelso" changed this for me, and not just because that Jay-Den/Darem scene haunted me for days afterwards. It was a surprisingly nuanced look into what it's like to be Klingon, and really our only look into Klingons in a post-Burn (i.e. Discovery season 3) world. Klingons, with their Tolkien race stand in-ish origins, have been one of the most monolithic of the "major" on-screen Trek races, and Jay-Den's story in the episode pokes a lot at giving it some of the nuance that's often been missing.
Really, though, it introduces Jay-Den as a queering of what it means to be Klingon, in both a figurative and a literal way, and that is what caught my interest.
I don't really care about golden boy Caleb Mir or his tortured comphet romance with Betazoid princess Tarima; I find both of them to be utterly uninteresting characters. Sam and Genesis are okay, but it's really Jay-Den who captured my eye in episode 4.
The characters have an ongoing rivalry with the War College, which shares their San Francisco campus; we discover that in the post-Burn collapse, Starfleet Academy closed, and the War College -- a much more militaristic school -- rose in its place. Of course, in teen media tradition, the College has a rival group to our hero friend group. But in episodes 5 and 6, we discover a few things about Jay-Den, and the first one is that he is interested in, and then begins dating, a guy named Kyle from the rival War College group.
He also changes his uniform; rather than the tunic and pants he started in, Jay-Den has begun wearing jacket and skirt combinations, instead. It's subtle; you could easily miss it in the episodes from 5 onward, but it's there.
On a fundamental level, "queering" something as a verb is to question its essential nature on every level. What does it mean to be [x], really? Jay-Den is undeniably Klingon in the traditional way -- he loves Klingon food, cares about honor... all the things we see on-screen Klingons do he does, with the exception of "stab people a lot." His physical build is similar to, but different than, most Klingons. He wants to heal, not harm. As his relationship to Kyle -- starting with flirting, then accelerating to "tandem vacation" in episode 7 -- proves, he's also literally queer, sexuality and possibly gender-wise.
So I really like Jay-Den, and was curious about Darem, but I felt like that was probably bait.
Then episode 7 happened this week.
In episode 7, all the students are headed off for what amounts to Spring Break. Darem planned to go home... but ends up being kidnapped(!) from the academy. Jay-Den sees this and decides to leap into the portal that the kidnappers used, thinking Darem is in trouble. The result is, well.
Let's step back a bit. Earlier in the episode, students are heading off to transporters or shuttles to go to their vacations. We see a great little vignette of Darem bro-handshaking other dudes and, in an almost adorably tryhard little gesture, saying to each of them "say hi to your sister for me":
Now, this is a tiny little detail, but it feels like it's more meaningful than you'd think, especially with the episode in the rearview and the benefit of hindsight.
It turns out that Darem was "kidnapped"... for his wedding. You see, Khionia is ruled by a pair of sovereigns, a king and queen, and the soon-to-be-Queen's parents have decided to abdicate early. She can't rule alone, so her long-arranged marriage to Darem, who will be her king, has to be set in motion; the "kidnapping" is just a cultural thing for them, though Jay-Den has no way of knowing this.
The other important detail here is that before the abduction, Darem and Jay-Den encounter each other in the hallway, and Jay-Den describes his impending trip to Ibiza with Kyle. Darem does not seem to like Kyle, and makes no attempt to hide it, which frustrates (and, if I'm being honest, seems to confuse) Jay-Den.
Now the Klingon is stuck on a far-distant, alien planet where Darem, improvising, claims that Jay-Den is his "Ko'Zeine" (the ep's title) -- "best man," essentially -- so that the guards don't shoot him on sight.
What Jay-Den begins to see, however, is just how little Darem wants to be here or to marry his queen-bride-to-be, Kaira. Doing so means giving up his life at Starfleet Academy and all his dreams, for the sake of Khionian tradition. Early in the series, we discover that Darem's parents have relentlessly hounded him, his entire life, to be "perfect" at everything because nothing less would be acceptable... and this future king-consort-ness is why.
In a fascinating turn on the events of "Vox in Excelso," we get a scene where Darem, overwhelmed with everything that's going on (including his unresolved feelings), starts to have a panic attack when part of his ceremonial garb develops a rip. Jay-Den begins to talk him down... and the blocking of the scene, the physical set-up, now mirrors Darem's "war breathing" scene from ep 4. This time, however, it's Darem who needs to be held, to be told to breathe, who is clearly vulnerable and confused:
This is when I knew that ep 4 was not only not bait, but long-term setup. The panic attack scene and the war breathing scene are almost perfect mirrors, right down to a silent moment of Darem and Jay-Den being achingly close, physically, before breaking apart awkwardly, the camera giving us an excellent shot of Darem's... crestfallen? disappointed? hurt? face.
Ultimately, Jay-Den -- despite his anger at some genuinely hurtful things Darem says, that he later comes to regret -- delivers a beautiful speech, appearing at the last second to do so, at what amounts to a rehearsal dinner. In said speech, he talks about Darem's self-sacrificial ethos of care: how willing he was to risk his life to save everyone in the pilot, the other self-sacrificing things he's done on the show so far, and even his marriage to Kaira.
The result is that Kaira realizes Darem (who has been doing his damndest to go through with this for her and the planet's sake) does not want to marry her, but instead to return to the Academy. She pulls Darem aside and breaks it off, though I was not thrilled with the framing; Kaira seems angry that he "lied" to her, which is... both frustrating, but also very realistic, if you read Darem's obviously queer-analog narrative here; rather than seeing the sacrifices he made for everyone else's sake that were at that very moment destroying him inside, she made it about herself.
The episode ends with Darem and Jay-Den re-encountering each other at the Academy, before being joined by a bright and cheery but deeply sunburned Kyle, who Darem is -- again -- mean to. Now we understand why, however; it's not school rivalry or personal dislike, but jealousy or envy. Darem, who's been used to subsuming everything that is a genuine desire of his own for the sake other people, finally has something or someone, Jay-Den, that he wants to pursue and can't.
If anything, the faces that Darem's actor George Hawkins make in the scenes where he's close to Jay-Den that then break off really sell a deep fear, or even resignation, that a connection to the Klingon student might be beyond him (and for different reasons in ep 4 vs. ep 7, besides).
I truly was not expecting, by episode 7, for Darem Reymi to be my favorite character on this show, but that's where we've landed. I still love Jay-Den, and I'm interested to see how far they take this concept of him as "queering the Klingon" over the course of the show.
Darem, however, with his longing living alongside a real fear that he will never be what others expect of him, and his willingness to sacrifice any personal happiness for the sake of the Right Thing... that really spoke to me.
I still don't think Starfleet Academy is a great show, but this is the first season, and almost no Trek show has a good first season. If they can land this queer plane they're flying, though, I will stick with it for that alone.