To say that there has been a lot of Star Trek feels like one of the bigger understatements of all time. Celebrating its 60th year this year, the franchise has spanned eleven television series, thirteen theatrical feature films and one extraordinarily bad pilot that didn’t go to series. But none of them haves spent an appreciable amount of time exploring the one thing so many of these characters across the different show and eras in the show’s timeline shared – their training to become explorers of the final frontier at Starfleet Academy.
That’s changing with the newest live action Trek series, titled appropriately enough Starfleet Academy. Set about 800 years after a bulk of Star Trek canon, Starfleet Academy focuses on the first class of students to attend the Academy after it had been closed for over a century, following a galactic crisis that fractured the Federation of Planets. This gives a pretty clean slate to the show’s writers, allowing them to shake up what we know about certain alien species as things have changed over the ensuing eight centuries. It also makes a good entry point for new viewers who might not want to feel as if they need to know six decades worth of show lore.
The cadets themselves are made up of both human and aliens, with enough personality and personal baggage to create both friendships and friction, all the stuff of good drama. The campus is shared with the Federation’s War College, a more militaristic branch that was necessary during the recently ended galactic crisis, and this will bring out some rivalries between the two schools. Oh, and the Academy building also doubles as a starship, the Athena, so the class can go out into space for practical experience and lessons as well. But, young adults being young adults, the Academy students do find themselves engaged with some relationship drama and their ongoing rivalry with the War College cadets.
And yes, there are those who would argue that these kinds of shenanigans wouldn’t go on at the Academy. To them, I merely point them to a couple of examples we’ve seen across Star Trek where they have. Future Enterprise captain Jim Kirk not only had his (in)famous solution to the Academy’s Kobayashi Maru test, as seen in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, but we know he was mercilessly hazed by an upper classman named Finnigen (Trek original series episode “Shore Leave”). Cadet Jean-Luc Picard learned a valuable lesson in the aftermath of a bar brawl as seen in the Next Generation episode “Tapestry.” It would be ridiculous to believe that these were the only examples of such things in the institution’s centuries-spanning history.
But complaining that these cadets are not the polished starship officers and explorers that we’ve seen in other Star Trek shows really just misses the point of the type of stories Starfleet Academy is trying to tell. Starfleet Academy is a different kind of Star Trek, much like Deep Space Nine was the first big break from the franchise’s “explorers out on the frontier” format. Starfleet Academy is not about the voyages of scientists/explorers “seeking out strange new worlds, new life and new civilizations.” It’s about the people who will eventually grow up to be those scientists/explorers. The journey here is their coming-of-age stories.
So, how is the show doing in depicting that journey? Well, even with a full season having been aired, it feels like we have barely gotten out of drydock. Much of this initial season has been dedicated to laying the groundwork of most of the characters and their relationships. And in one case, resetting that characterization about three-quarters of the way through.
The show is trying to cover a lot of ground and it feels hampered somewhat by Paramount Plus’s standard ten-episode seasons that have been imposed on the various Trek franchise shows. The inter-school rivalry seen in t he first half of the season helps to set up some of the action in the season’s sixth episode, “Come, Let’s Away.” But after the Starfleet and War College cadets reach an understanding, if not a level of respect, between them, the War College cadets pretty much disappear for the remaining four episodes.
The foremost cadet character is Caleb (Sandro Rosta), who has spent most of his time growing up on the run after his mother was sentenced to a penal colony for being suckered into helping the criminal Nus Braka (Paul Giamatti). He doesn’t trust anyone, and much of his story that we have seen so far, is about him learning to let down the barriers that he has built up through most of such short life. Sentient hologram SAM (Kerrice Brooks) is in the classic mold of Leonard Nimoy’s Spock or Brent Spiner’s android Data. She is the outside character, looking in and commenting on humanity as she tries to understand it. Jay-Den (Karim Diane) is a Klingon cadet with ambitions to become a doctor rather than just embrace his culture’s warrior ethos. The rest of the core cadet characters have not been as fleshed out as much, mostly because the show hasn’t had the time to do so yet.
Probably the best character to come out of the show is Holly Hunter’s Captain Nahla Ake. A long-lived humanoid alien, she brings a casual wisdom to the role. She may have lived more than four centuries, but you get the feeling that she still remembers what it was like to be the age her cadets are at, and is willing to grant them the grace and space they need to learn the life lessons they will rely on in their future careers in Starfleet.
Tonally, the show has been a bit inconsistent. The pilot played things fairly dramatically, while the second episode, which focused on Caleb and introduced Betazed cadet Genesis (Bella Shepard), and possible love interest for Caleb, plays in part like a teen melodrama from the 1990s. Another episode focusing on SAM kept things light and somewhat goofy. True, various Star Trek series have always had episodes that varied from their overall tone in one direction or another. That elasticity is one of the things that has helped the franchise to endure all these decades. But with this short season, the show needs a bit more time to establish its boundaries before it tries stretching them.
