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Paramount+
Nus Braka (Paul Giamatti) is a Klingon-Tellerite pirate. I expect we’ll be seeing more of him this season.
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Paramount+
Ake takes the job and, to make up for separating Mir from his mother, forcibly signs him up for the Academy as a new recruit. She’s also a Lanthanite (technically a human-lanthanite hybrid) and 422 years old, meaning she remembers serving the pre-burn Federation. She isn’t the only instructor with pre-burn experience at Starfleet: Jett Reno (Tig Notaro), who arrived in the 32nd century with Discovery, teaches the cadets physics. The Doctor (Robert Picardo) serves as chief medical officer.
I’d hoped this might be a nod to “The Living Witness,” an episode of Voyager set in the 29th century where a copy of the Doctor is restored in a Delta Quadrant museum. In that episode the Doctor heads to Earth, and his appearing here would have been a tidy bit of closure; instead he likely perished in the burn, which is unfortunate. As chief medical officer the Doctor apparently continually monitors the cadets’ biosigns—he breaks up a brewing fight after detecting students with elevated excitatory neurotransmitter levels. That strikes me as somewhat intrusive, although later he gets a dose of his own medicine from Starfleet’s first holographic cadet, SAM (Kerrice Brooks).
I have reservations about Cadet Master Commander Lura Thok (Gina Yashere), presented as a female Klingon-Jem’Hadar hybrid.
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Paramount+
Lura Thok (Gina Yashere) and Jett Reno (Tig Notaro).
Credit:
Paramount+
Obviously, a female Jem’Hadar must be canon, because it’s shown on screen, and that’s how Trek canon operates. But the Founders bred the Jem’Hadar in tanks, where they led short, hazardous lives as warriors. For a species engineered by a disdainful race of changelings to perform a specific function and treated as little more than tools, what purpose would sexual organs or sexual reproduction serve?
