******STARSHIP-SIZED SPOILERS!******
Debuting on Paramount+ streaming this past January, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy was created by Gaia Violo under Star Trek executive producer Alex Kurtzman, and was recently cancelled just after its as-yet-unreleased second season wrapped. Kurtzman himself is also stepping down after this year. For the first time since the cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise (2001-2005) under executive producer Rick Berman, the Star Trek franchise’s immediate future is uncertain. Having seen other shutdowns in the franchise’s history, I think a creative break/reset might be exactly what Star Trek needs right now.
I’ve already given my season 1 report card for the first ten episodes, so I won’t review/rehash them for this column. Instead, I’d like to focus on the core characters as well as the strengths and weaknesses that may have led to the show’s–and franchise’s–most recent hiatus.
Characters
Starfleet Academy is led by Oscar-winning actress Holly Hunter as half-Lanthanite Captain Nahla Ake, who is lured back into Starfleet after she was forced to separate young Caleb Mir from his mother; an impoverished woman (Tatiana Maslany) with shady alliances whom Ake sent to prison. Years later, Caleb is found, and Ake is asked to head the reopened, post-Burn Starfleet Academy (the Burn being a 120-year warp drive blackout that tore the galaxy apart). Ake accepts, on the condition that Caleb be allowed to join. Once she finds Caleb, Ake acts as his commanding officer and mentor–filling a void she’s had since the loss of her own son, a Starfleet officer who died during the Burn.
Holly Hunter is the second actor named Hunter to play a Starfleet captain (Jeffrey Hunter‘s Captain Pike in “The Cage”), and she brings a fresh take to the standard captain role, giving Ake a more free-spirited quality, which includes going barefoot as often as possible. Ake has the wisdom and experience to know when to assert both strength and restraint, though I will never understand why she allows her ‘Academy’ to separate from San Francisco to become the starship Athena. Sending young recruits off on dangerous assignments across the galaxy is the worst idea of the series, and I really wish the Athena would remain permanently docked at San Francisco. However, now that the series has been cancelled, I suppose the matter has been rendered… academic.
The adult Caleb Mir is played with surprising strength from newcomer Sandro Rosta, whom I assumed would be a standard-issue ‘hunky guy.’ He has genuine acting chops. Caleb carries appropriate resentment of Academy life over prison, but he eventually grows close to his fellow cadets by the first season’s two-part finale. The character has a cocky vibe similar to the young James Kirk in the rebooted Star Trek movies, but with a brooding fueled by his missing mother, who’s trapped in dangerous space. The separation of Caleb and his mother is eventually resolved by the end of the first season, though a bit too patly–with Ake winning Anisha’s grudging trust after a pretty little speech about Starfleet values (uh huh…). Rosta’s Caleb is a standout member of the ensemble.
Caleb also begins a relationship with fellow cadet and First Daughter of Betazed, Tarima (Zoë Steiner), whose too-powerful psionic powers are dangerous if triggered (they accidentally cost her father his hearing). If I have any issues with the Caleb and Tarima relationship, it’s that I’m the wrong demographic for their “Beverly Hills 90210”-style teen romance shenanigans, though I get why the producers would try to lure that demographic into the fold. Steiner does an excellent job in the role, though I would’ve liked to see more of her character functioning outside her relationship with Caleb. It might’ve been more interesting if they’d permanently broken up in season 1, yet put that aside in order to work together.
Bella Shepard plays cadet Genesis Lythe, an admiral’s daughter who sees herself on a fast-track towards a future captaincy. Despite a ‘spring break’ episode with she and Caleb alone on campus together (“Ko’Zeine”), Genesis is arguably the least-developed of the core group by the end of season 1. Nothing about Shepard’s performance suggests she isn’t up to the challenge of a spotlight episode, yet she hasn’t been given much opportunity. Maybe we’ll meet her dad in season 2? At the end of the show’s freshman year, Genesis feels like a casualty of these shorter, ten episode seasons, with less time for all characters to get their spotlights. Her roommate, however, definitely got her spotlight…
Kerrice Brooks plays photonic (i.e. holographic) cadet SAM (Series Acclimation Mil), who assumes the form of a bubbly 17-year old human cadet, but has only been online for a matter of months. Her lack of life experience makes it difficult for SAM to fully understand human nuance, and also leaves her vulnerable to trauma (“Come, Let’s Away”), which physically damages her holographic matrix. The solution lies on her home planet with her fellow photonics, and with the Academy’s Doctor (Robert Picardo); the 600-year old Emergency Medical Hologram and veteran of the starship Voyager who becomes SAM’s de facto father.
The reluctant Doctor (who championed hologram rights) supplies SAM with artificial memories of a childhood to better cushion her against future traumas, though it also changes her personality a bit–making her more introspective and mature, to the surprise of her friends. Of these new characters, SAM is easily my favorite, and much of that stems from the charisma of Brooks, as SAM evolves from gushing Starfleet fangirl to traumatized battle veteran to the Doctor’s daughter. There’s something so utterly lovable about Brooks, and the energy she brings to the role could light up a city.
Less successful is the character of Darem Raymi (George Hawkins) a shapeshifting Khionian, who is the first of his species to attend the Academy. A scaly, fishlike being in his native state, Darem inexplicably assumes human form for most of his time at the Academy, and even among his own people, as we see during an arranged wedding episode (a tired Trek trope). Most of the time, Darem plays at being the obnoxious bully with a major chip on his shoulders. We later learn his relationship with his distant family fuels much of that arrogance and competitiveness, though he befriends Klingon classmate Jay-Den later on. Hawkins does his best with the material, though I gotta say I wouldn’t miss the character if he didn’t return for sophomore year.
Darem’s best friend is the Academy’s Klingon cadet, Jay-Den Kraag (Karim Diané), who joins Starfleet to pursue a career in life sciences–something generally frowned upon by his warrior race, who are on the verge of extinction in the 32nd century following the destruction of their home planet. Jay-Den goes against the grain of previously established Klingons in new and interesting ways. During the season, he becomes romantically involved with a rival War College cadet named Kyle (who’s little more than a walk-on, sadly), and he prefers wearing a skirt. Personally, I’m glad Jay-Den shows us a different side to the Klingons, which adds to that species’ overall lore. Actor Diané puts his vocal chords through the ringer to help create Jay-Den’s deeeeep Klingon voice, which also requires some subtle electronic manipulation.
Rounding out the core characters are Klingon-Jem’Hadar first officer and campus disciplinarian, Lura Thok (Gina Yashere), and her partner; the wonderfully snarky, 23rd century engineer from the starship Discovery and Academy instructor, Jett Reno (Tig Notaro). Thok is superficially similar to the drill sergeant played by the late Oscar-winner Lou Gossett Jr in 1982’s “An Officer and a Gentleman,” while her odd couple relationship with Reno is a delight. Comedian Gina Yashere acts right through her heavy alien prosthetics, while fellow comedian Tig Notaro effortlessly steals every scene she’s in with her uniquely deadpan wit. Notaro has some of the best lines of the season. Reno feels more essential to this series than she was in the crowded ensemble of Star Trek: Discovery.
What Went Wrong
There have been many issues plaguing the franchise (most of them self-inflicted) since the streaming debut of Star Trek: Discovery (2017-2024), the often-problematic series which brought Star Trek back to television (or computer, or phone–depending how you streamed it). One issue was an arguably misguided desire to make the post-2017 shows as big and glossy as the JJ Abrams-produced Star Trek reboot movies (2009-2016), which made the new shows prohibitively expensive (Alex Kurtzman cowrote/coproduced the reboot movies). These higher production costs let to increasingly shorter seasons, going from 15 episodes a year to 10 for later shows. The initially-promising Star Trek: Strange New Worlds just ended its five season run, with only six episodes for its recently wrapped final season.
With massive standing sets for Starfleet Academy filling the “Star Trek stage” at Pinewood Toronto Studios, a ten episode season ran approximately $100 million dollars. When adjusted for inflation, that’s still roughly $10 million more per season than a 26 episode season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Personally, I’d prefer longer and less-expensive seasons that focused more on character and story over spectacle, but that’s simply not how things are done these days. Money was clearly being pumped into the Star Trek franchise, and it showed. In fact, the sets for modern Star Trek are so sweepingly palatial that they lack the cozier, mildly claustrophobic vibe that used to help audiences imagine that these characters were aboard a starship.
Beyond the crippling economics of it all, I actually enjoyed Starfleet Academy more than I expected to, though my expectations were tempered after the downward spirals of both Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (and its substandard third season) and Star Trek: Picard (2020-2023), both of which quickly regressed after their promising starts. One of the easiest targets for those who don’t like the past decade of Trek is to blame the writing. Yes, that’s low-hanging fruit, but it’s also a legitimate complaint.
Too many episodes of Discovery, Picard, and more recently Strange New Worlds saw characters in the midst of various crises with their hands at their sides discussing their personal issues. Exposition dumps are often clunky, as well. One of the issues is that production on each 10 or so episode season is wrapped a full year or so before it’s streamed to the public. This negates opportunities for vital audience feedback. In the Gene Roddenberry & Rick Berman eras, negative audience responses sometimes compelled staff writers to aim higher.
This also ties in with the shorter seasons issue. With 10 very expensive episodes a year (roughly $10 million apiece), it’s more difficult to overlook the occasional bad episodes than it might’ve been with 26 episode seasons. Shorter seasons means there’s less room for swing-and-miss ideas, such as broad farce (a malady currently afflicting Strange New Worlds) or flat-out duds. Under Roddenberry, classic Star Trek certainly wasn’t perfect, but with 26-30 episode seasons, even a third of them could be terrible, and it’d still leave nearly 20 that were middling to excellent.
Serialization is also an issue, since modern Star Trek’s season-long stories (usually involving galaxy-wide cataclysms, or rogue AIs, or combinations of both) rise or fall on the strength of their resolutions, and too often, those finales are disappointing. This is one of the reasons I don’t rewatch modern Star Trek as much I do the older shows: I prefer a complete story over a single chapter. Standalone storytelling is part of Star Trek’s DNA (“to seek out new life and new civilizations…”) and it should be embraced, not eschewed. Star Trek wasn’t about galaxy-wide cataclysms each season. Its stories usually focused on the fate of a single planet, culture or character.
Modern Star Treks seasons are too fixated on solving labored, pointless, puzzle-box mysteries over tried-and-true allegorical storytelling (Gulliver’s Travels in space). Starfleet Academy seems to have broken out of the puzzle box, serving up A & B plots (TNG-style) while maintaining season-long threads (à la Deep Space Nine).
Unfortunately, the two-part finale of Starfleet Academy (“300th Night,” “Rubincon”) brought back recurring big-bad Nus Braka, played by a wildly overacting (Oscar-nominee) Paul Giamatti, who suddenly creates an impossibly large, 1000+ light-year forcefield which somehow barricades the entire Federation (completely ignoring the fact that outer space is three-dimensional). Granted, some fans like Nus Braka, but I can’t stand him. He was perhaps my greatest issue with Starfleet Academy, which otherwise showed a lot of promise.
What Went Right
As of this writing, there are no new Star Trek TV series (animated or live-action) in production for the first time since the last Star Trek TV dry spell, which ran from 2005-2017. Alex Kurtzman is officially ending his reign as the franchise’s showrunner, too. Some fans might be dancing like the evening’s entertainment at an Argelian night club over this, but I believe Kurtzman’s often troubled, decade-long reign of Star Trek also got a few things right.
One promising newer Star Trek show that maintained high quality over two seasons was the animated Star Trek: Prodigy (2021), which had juuust the right mix of legacy and new. The show featured a group of young labor camp escapees who find freedom with an advanced, seemingly-abandoned prototype Federation starship. As the crew came to learn the ship’s operations, they became a Starfleet crew as well. Prodigy made Star Trek feel fresh again. Naturally, Paramount+ cancelled it as a ‘cost-cutting’ measure. Its finished second season was then sold off to Netflix. This is why I still collect physical media; I own both seasons of Star Trek: Prodigy on Blu-Ray, without worrying if they’re still streaming.
Beyond the high production value of modern Star Trek (those cavernous sets, the visuals, etc), it was nice to see greater diversity in the casts (a staple of Star Trek since 1966). This inclusivity finally extended to sexual diversity as well; an audience that was consistently (and unforgivably) ignored during the Berman era. Unlike Star Trek: Discovery’s often awkward handling of its LGBTQ+ characters, Starfleet Academy simply included them without any fanfare. We see Jay-Den and Kyle dancing together in their off-hours. We see Thok and Reno bickering like an old married couple. It’s also implied that Darem is pansexual. That is how diversity has been done in Star Trek since the beginning.
We never saw Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) stand up during her shift to announce that she was a proud Black woman–she simply was. Uhura was a command-level officer on the bridge of the Federation’s flagship. That alone was the statement. Same with Sulu (George Takei), an Asian-American series regular only two decades after World War 2. Granted, Chekov (Walter Koenig) was a boastful Russian (usually for comic relief), but the fact remains that Star Trek featured a Russian on the bridge during the height of the Cold War. Credit for trying.
Given the post-merger conservative leadership of Paramount/CBS, I was worried such inclusivity might be on the chopping block–and it might still be going forward–but for the time being, it was refreshing to see Star Trek openly embracing its roots as a diversity trailblazer.
With Starfleet Academy’s greater emphasis on standalone episodes over single-season story arcs, as well as its colorful characters and steady embrace of diversity and inclusivity, I found myself enjoying this series at least as much as I enjoyed the earlier episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Unfortunately, the show has been cancelled, due to low streaming numbers and high production costs. The former is questionable, but the latter is indefensible; modern Star Trek simply costs too damn much, and it doesn’t have to.
Going Forward
With Star Trek currently facing a production lull, I would hope that the franchise cools its impulse engines for awhile. Don’t rush back into the fold and make all of the same mistakes. Not that my opinion matters any more than anyone else’s, but I do have some changes I’d like to see in modern Star Trek, if and when it returns.
I’m not certain what current Guild rules are for TV writers these days, but I’d love to see a return to The Next Generation’s old policy of open speculative script submissions. I’ve read some amazing pieces of fan-fiction, and I’ve seen fan-made series such as Star Trek Continues that are on a par with some of the best episodes of Star Trek, past and present. TNG’s spec script policy gave the Trek franchise such luminaries as Ronald D. Moore, who submitted his spec script for TNG’s “The Bonding” to Gene Roddenberry’s assistant Richard Arnold during a tour of TNG’s sets (!). Decades later, Moore became showrunner for the brilliant reimagined “Battlestar Galactica,” as well as AppleTV’s “For All Mankind.” That policy also gave breaks to future TV writers/showrunners such as Brannon Braga (“The Orville,” “COSMOS”), René Echevarria (“Deep Space Nine,” “Teen Wolf”) and Jane Espenson (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer” “Battlestar Galactica”). Opening Star Trek’s doors to fresh minds and talent certainly couldn’t hurt.
Cutting the budgets might also be a wise move. As a fan of Star Trek since the 1970s, we didn’t give a damn about movie-quality visual effects or multi-tiered sets with banks of functioning LED screens. Our love for Star Trek was fueled by its engaging characters and clever stories. I realize that massive sets and feature film-quality visual FX are commonplace for modern streaming shows, but I’d rather see 26 lower budgeted episodes focusing more on character and story than 10 episodes committed to some boring, galaxy-wide cataclysm that’s averted by gathering pieces of a damned puzzle, or by stopping a maniac hellbent on revenge.
With the current flood of big-budgeted streaming content, Star Trek could go back to being the scrappy, low-budget underdog that relies more on wits and imagination than fancy new digs. Seeing what fan-made films have done with crowd-funding (or their own money), it’s a shame that deep-pocketed, studio-made Star Trek is so consistently disappointing. Granted, Star Trek has always been a mix of excellent, average and awful, but that mix would be more forgivable without such massive production costs, and with greater focus on story and characters (see: Braga’s “The Orville”).
In the meantime, I think Star Trek should take advantage of this unsought hiatus. Jumping right back in without first addressing what went wrong would only repeat the same mistakes that led to the downward spirals of Picard and Strange New Worlds, as well as the premature cancellation of Starfleet Academy. Here’s hoping this hiatus might give some objectivity and clarity to the mistakes made since 2017. I’m also hoping the next stewards of Star Trek have genuine passion for substantive storytelling, rather than simply copying tropes and chasing feature film spectacle.
I have no doubt that Star Trek will rise like a phoenix from the ashes someday. Just hoping it emerges scrappier and smarter, free of the baggage from this prolific, yet uneven era. Perhaps then, Star Trek will live long and prosper anew.
Where to Watch
For the time being, “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy” is still available to stream on Paramount+, and might soon come to DVD and Blu-Ray if past seasons of other Star Trek series are any precedent.
