What Frustrates Me About Braka

 

So, I have been watching a lot of the new Starfleet Academy show and I've found it overall pretty good! Having a whole episode about meeting cultures on their own terms & as equals rather than like children meant to be commanded was good! A new show in the post burn world where The Federation has fallen short for over a century so we are looking at a reset of the status quo that we can't call? Great! Bunch of new interesting characters and villains to explore this world with who are doing interesting things we haven't seen before? Also cool! 

But after last week's episode Come, Let's Away, I kind of want to talk about Braka, and why I am in this weird place of frustration with him, where I don't like him because he's so close to being a character I love. 

So, to recap, Nustopher "Nus" Braka or Braka, is a *checks notes* klingon-tellarite pirate in the post burn Star Trek universe who operates some sort of large multi-planet, likely multi-system enterprise of smuggling, raiding, and general piracy, both within & without of Federation controlled space, and likely within territory formerly within the federation that has officially left, or technically still a part of it but practically unregulated. He's tried to rob the federation on multiple occasions, and when we first meet him he's on trial for murdering an officer during the Burn years in a robbery to feed starving people gone messy. He's angry, aggrieved at the Federation and carries himself as manipulative dude and card carrying member of the villain club. This is largely the character as we know him coming into and throughout ep.6 Come, Let's Away and where we leave him by the end of it, with mostly a series of outstanding monologues by Braka, a better understanding of why he's angry at Holly Hunter's character, and the Federation broadly, they cut into his business & call him a crook for doing what he sees as the same job, and some of his tactical maneuvering playing out before us. 

And I love all of this, but swear to god, I wish he wasn't pitched as such an obvious villain. 

See, what I like about the 3100's/Burn Time period is it's a diminished Federation, a century plus of time where this great beacon of hope & prosperity was wracked by a galaxy wide infrastructure crisis and failed to help all its members, and after receding and causing a lot of harm, has finally come out of that crisis and is looking to get back onto the stage and right it's wrongs of the past century, but is now living in a galaxy that has had to fill that vacuum itself. It's like the poster child for great restorative justice stories about what happens when the perpetrator of harm goes looking to make amends, and what one finds, and how part of that process is respecting the needs of your victims first. And it's a great starting point for stories about the failures of a state and what happens when those vacuums happen and what can arise in them, not just dictators & pirates but mutual aid collectives, radical progressive communes, new positive forms of organizing that couldn't exist, and do not want to exist, under the control of this state that left them behind & let them down. 

And Braka feels like half of that story, alongside Caleb. The problem is, Braka can't really be interesting in that narrative position if he's constantly portrayed as obviously evil, obviously untrustworthy, and obviously wrong at every turn. Like, he's supposed to be, in my reading, something akin to an organized crime leader, who's outfit has come into being due to the failures of the state and a need for something to fill the role of basic social services when those collapse. You want food? We got it. You want work? I'm hiring. You want community? Well, I have food & jobs and the things that buys so come celebrate with me, which makes community. 

That's compelling. We've all seen these last few years & especially the last few months the power of community action and know how desperate people can get when food is scarce and work scarcer, and how when presented with the choice between legality & starvation, people will do illegal things to save themselves & their loved ones overwhelmingly. This makes Braka a great starting point to showing us what cultures and economic lifeways grew in the places where the Federation left people to the wolves, and how there are going to be a lot of people in this galaxy who the Federation calls criminals & pirates but who the citizens of their territories call heroes. But the problem is that Academy seems too enamored with letting Giamatti tap his fingers together maniacally to really let him be this villain who's got real grievances with the Federation and is owed some form of recompense, or represents people who are victims of the Federations failures who deserve justice, while also being a criminal who does criminal shit. 

He feels like they want him to be both difficult to hate, someone with real reasons to dislike the Federation and good reason to act against them, while also someone who's just evil & not sympathetic, and I really want them to go with the former. Give me pirates who are pirates because no one else was helping so this is what they had to do to live, who had to invent their geopolitics from the rubble left by the Federation and neither respect the Federation or have any reason to, someone who says, "Why should we listen to you now when you abandoned us when we needed you and then left us for over a century? There's no way in hell we are giving you back the reigns of power after spending so much time calling our heroes villains when they were the ones feeding & housing us when you left!". 

Cause that feels like something A LOT OF THE GALAXY WOULD BE SAYING! And I think maybe the reason is they either don't feel comfortable with a complicated villain like that or they don't know how to make him bad without the big villain energy, but I can see how you could make a great story about this kind of guy and still make him a sympathetic victim and the greater community he is representing interesting. If you want to keep him bad, show how he's right about his people being victims of neglect but how he's becoming irrelevant as the return of fuel is making his power base not a source of liberation through smuggling goods no one could get, and becoming a new protection and shake down racket as he clings to power, make the good guys those in his community who see the power being in their community, self determination, and other skills they have amassed in the century+ of struggle they built it in. Like there's a real anarcho-collectivist vs. authoritarian capitalism story waiting right here, and my problem is that Braka is SO CLOSE to setting that up and a host of other stories we never get to see, and they just can't so long as he stays so cartoonish in his malevolence. 

So, here's hoping that they dial back the "ties women to train tracks/steals candy from babies" energy, and ramp up the aggrieved victim of empire looking to take a piece of it portion, and give us more members of his pirate kingdom who might maybe have more of his thoughts, but less empire and more anarchist thinking. Give me more enemies of the Federation who are rivals but not evil, and who might through their own progressive ideas, force the Federation to have to compete to be the best option in the galaxy.