It’s a new dawn for the Star Trek franchise on TV and, possibly, a last ditch attempt to salvage its reputation after a rocky few years. Is Starfleet Academy the bright new hope? Our review of the pilot episode… You could write a book about the nascent genesis of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. In fact, ... Star Trek: Starfleet Academy episode 1 review | Efficiently going where many have tried to go before
It’s a new dawn for the Star Trek franchise on TV and, possibly, a last ditch attempt to salvage its reputation after a rocky few years. Is Starfleet Academy the bright new hope? Our review of the pilot episode…
You could write a book about the nascent genesis of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. In fact, I sort of did. Without getting bogged down in well-resourced details, Star Trek’s great bird Gene Roddenberry had the idea for a show or movie based around cadets training to be Starfleet officers as far back as the 1960s when the Original Series was on the air.
For the full potted history, give my book Lost Federations: The Unofficial Unmade History of Star Trek a read, but the cliff notes are that the latest entrant into the modern Star Trek stable has been longer coming than any project in the entire history of the series. Various writers across various decades have noodled over the approach before Trek’s current TV tsar Alex Kurtzman bit the bullet and opted for a series set in the era of the now-ended Star Trek: Discovery.
As you might deduce from my reviews of the final season, I was never much of a fan of Discovery, bar the first season. When it zipped forward 900 years to an uncharted future for the Star Trek universe, it chose to do as all Trek has done in eras past and reflect the world around it. The 32nd century was a post-Federation polity of shattered races, fractured alliances and decaying empire. The purpose of the show’s final three seasons was repairing the damage.
Starfleet Academy perhaps benefits from the hard yards that Discovery had to face to reconstitute the United Federation of Planets. Now, you can argue, Kurtzman and his crew didn’t have to destroy it in the first place, but writing that and the equally rather gloomy Star Trek: Picard during the first Trump administration and amidst the Covid pandemic didn’t leave them rolling in optimism for humanity’s future. A fallen Federation in need of rescue was perhaps an apposite approach.
Doing the right thing?
Gaia Violo’s new show, less a Discovery spin-off than set in the same hemisphere (as Deep Space Nine was to The Next Generation many moons ago), takes these ideas forward by presenting a Federation in bloom trying to do right by a new generation who grew up in the catastrophic after-effects of ‘The Burn’, a cosmic event that led to over a century of enforced galactic isolationism. If the children are our future, Starfleet Academy comes loaded for bear with haunted parents who want to make amends for their sins.
You see this in the series’ lead, Nahla Ake (played by the wonderful Oscar-winner that is Holly Hunter), who gave up her career as a Starfleet officer when she failed to ensure a young child stayed with his mother, an intended ward in Caleb Mir (Sandro Rosta) who turns into a wayward stray that she recruits during series pilot ‘Kids These Days’ for the new Academy she has been draughted back in to run as Chancellor.
Nahla immediately has strong shades of Kate Mulgrew’s Captain Kathryn Janeway from Voyager, indeed one of her first scenes is reminiscent of the first time we meet Janeway (herself recruiting a wayward guy who fell into crime). She is the most motherly Star Trek lead since Voyager came to air 30 years ago; strong, capable, clearly a leader, with centuries of experience behind her as a long-lived Lanthanite, but someone full of compassion and care. You instantly like her and understand the very personal charge that underpins her role here.
It cannot be understated what a boon Hunter, with her experience and gravitas, is to this show immediately. Once they killed off Jason Isaacs and shunted Michelle Yeoh into the role of a leather-clad sassy Space Hitler, Discovery suffered for seasons without anyone in command who could hold the same weight. Hunter is flanked by the wonderful Robert Picardo, reprising his role as the holographic Doctor from Voyager (and slipping back into the role like it was yesterday), who equally provides a sense of stable, quality performance and characterisation. They provide the flooring that our bright young things can walk on.
To the series’ credit, it doesn’t take long at all to introduce who seem a genuinely well-cast, fun, if in places cliche, assortment of cadets who form our main cast. Caleb is a solid, rather earnest, attractive anchor of it all, caught already in an almost certain love triangle between rival cadet Darem (George Hawkins) and spunky Genesis (Bella Shepard); noble, gentle Klingon Kraag (Karim Diane) is into things like birdwatching (imagine a Gen Alpha Worf, basically); Series Acclimation Mil aka Sam (Kerrice Brooks) feels like the avatar for personal and social discovery we saw through characters like Spock or Data or Odo in series past, in this case a newly minted hologram looking to understand human connection but who very quickly is portrayed with outwardly autistic variances. She could end up being the series MVP – though admittedly that might go to Lura Thok, the Miss Trunchbull-esque Academy instructor played by black British comic Gina Yashere. She is immediately great fun.
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The only character and performance who gave me pause was Paul Giamatti as pirate villain Nus Braka, a snarling and swarthy space baddie with a personal connection to Caleb’s search for his long-lost mother (played by Tatiana Maslany). Giamatti would be interesting reading the phone book but very quickly Braka grated on me; all sassy lines, booming laughs, he was precisely the kind of black clad villain Kurtzman cannot resist throwing in there and who feels indicative of this era of Star Trek. Villains of previous eras had greater nuance and subtlety. Braka is all theatrics and it feels too much too soon.
He provides the ample threat that allows the show to throw the cadets into a life or death situation, which is understandable for a pilot and establishing stakes. Starfleet Academy does at least give us some time introducing the crew and the ship that doubles as a campus, the Greek mythology designed USS Athena. That’s a neat idea that solves the issue that perhaps plagued previous attempts at this concept getting off the ground, given Starfleet Academy was always based in San Francisco. How do you get your characters out in the stars? Violo’s series allows itself a way to have its cake and eat it in that regard.
Foundations
Signs therefore are promising, but my enthusiasm is tempered with caution. Very few Star Trek TV show pilots are duds but the series that follow haven’t always lived up to or exceeded their promise. Discovery never did (although that didn’t have a conventional opener such as this). Enterprise and Strange New Worlds both took a while to match or go beyond theirs. Starfleet Academy therefore needs to find a rhythm and style its own before it can be fully judged successful, as right now it holds the visual and stylistic aesthetic very much of late season Discovery – down even no doubt to re-tooled sets and production design. It is very clearly retro-fitted for the Tik-Tok generation in terms of hot young things and a youth-oriented narrative.
Crucially though, I want to like this show after ‘Kids These Days’. That means it did its job and did it well. As someone whose enthusiasm for Star Trek has been scaled down to minimal, despite decades of genuine fandom, Starfleet Academy gives me hope again that Star Trek might stop trying to replay past glories or obsessively reference better told stories, and boldly go again. Let’s see what’s out there in the weeks to come.
Don’t forget to listen to Film Stories Podcast Network podcast We Are Starfleet for detailed coverage of this and episode two, ‘Beta Test’, which you can listen to now.
You can find AJ on social media, including links to his podcasts and books, via Linktr.ee here.
