The fourth episode of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, “Vox in Excelso,” has a major reference to one of the most beloved episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. And it’s a quote from the Doctor, a fan-favorite character from Star Trek: Voyager, played by Robert Picardo. In this episode’s opening, the Doctor announces a speech and debate competition at the Academy. He speaks this quote to the gathered cadets, from “one of the greatest minds of the 24th century.”
With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.
Starfleet Academy Directly Quotes the Next Generation Classic, “The Drumhead”
Longtime Trekkers will remember these same words from a speech Captain Jean-Luc Picard gave in the TNG season four episode “The Drumhead,” airing in 1991. That episode remains one of the most celebrated from the show’s entire seven-season run. It’s a courtroom drama that focuses on the dangers of Joseph McCarthy-style witch hunts. Something which can even happen in the enlightened Federation of the 24th century. This episode also gave the world one of Star Trek’s most overused internet screenshot memes, which you can see below.
In “The Drumhead,” an explosion within the Enterprise’s dilithium chamber in engineering looks like an act of sabotage. Starfleet Command dispatches Norah Satie (Jean Simmons), a retired admiral from Starfleet’s legal division, to lead an investigation. She’s the same person who once uncovered a conspiracy of alien takeover in season one of TNG. Her father, Judge Aaron Satie, was an even more celebrated figure in Federation history. A pioneering lawmaker, Aaron Satie was someone Picard greatly admired as a young man.
“The Drumhead” Was the Star Trek Version of The Crucible
At first, Admiral Satie and Picard get along pretty well. Especially as she knows the Captain was a fan of her father’s. And the Admiral and her assistants uncover that there was indeed a spy on board the Enterprise. It was a Klingon transfer officer named J’Dan. But what they believed to be sabotage was actually just an accident. Unsatisfied with that truth, Satie begins a witch hunt aboard the Enterprise, placing suspicion on crew members based on circumstantial evidence. And in the case of one young crewman, simply his family lineage connecting to Romulans, a Federation enemy. Admiral Satie even gets Worf on her side in this investigation, playing on his distrust of Romulans.
Captain Picard, however, knows when things have gone too far. When he tries to end her overreach on his ship, she forces him to stand before her hastily put-together courtroom. She even accuses him, one of Starfleet’s greatest, of being a traitor to the Federation. And she does this on his own ship, in the presence of his own crew. In a spectacular piece of acting from Patrick Stewart, instead of losing his cool, Picard calmly recites the Admiral’s father’s own words against her. He hoped to remind her that her father would have been very much against this kind of bigoted inquisition. It’s also meant to evoke Arthur Miller’s celebrated play about the Salem Witch Trials, The Crucible.
“The Drumhead” Allowed for One of Patrick Stewart’s Best Star Trek Speeches
This move by Picard causes Admiral Satie to lose her cool in front of the court and Starfleet’s top brass, exposing herself as an overzealous and paranoid person, and ending her investigation. Worf tells Picard he feels shame for how easily Satie’s arguments swayed him, not realizing she’d turn against him the moment it became convenient. We should note that this is Worf actor Michael Dorn’s favorite episode of the show, and you can see why. It gave Worf great character moments that don’t rely on Klingon family drama.
This scene of Picard reciting Aaron Satie’s speech has become iconic and, in the modern era, has been posted many times across all forms of social media for obvious real-world reasons. And in the actual Star Trek canon, it’s nice to know that the judge’s powerful words (actually written by screenwriter Jeri Taylor, co-creator of Voyager) continue to live on centuries later. They are certainly words we all need to reflect on in our own real world in the 21st century.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy season one is currently streaming on Paramount+.