Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Season 1, as well as for the following Star Trek productions: Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, and Section 31.
Alright, let’s talk about Starfleet Academy!
First of all, some general information. I chose not to write individual episode reviews week-to-week for Starfleet Academy this season. So this review is going to be a little different in terms of format. This article will detail my overall thoughts on the season, the characters, the storylines, the VFX, and so on. And in the days ahead, I will write a follow-up piece in which I share my thoughts on episodes 3-10 of Season 1. I already have a review of the two-part series premiere, and you can find that by clicking or tapping here.
Secondly, I went into detail about one of Starfleet Academy’s mid-season storylines – the one involving DS9 and Captain Sisko. I’ll touch on that this time, but if you want my full thoughts on the Sisko storyline and whether it was a good idea, click or tap here to check it out. Finally, I thought it would be interesting to return to the Academy’s first major on-screen appearance, which came during The Next Generation’s fifth season. I re-watched The First Duty, and you can read my impressions of that episode, in which I reference Starfleet Academy Season 1, by clicking or tapping here.
I share those articles with you in case you want to get some additional context for some of the things we’re going to discuss today – and even if you don’t care about that, I still encourage you to have a read if you’re a Trekkie, like me! I enjoy writing about Star Trek, and I think some of those pieces will definitely add to the conversation around Starfleet Academy’s first season, if that’s something you’re interested in.
So… what did I think of Starfleet Academy, then, as someone who’s been a Star Trek fan for some thirty-five years?
Cards on the table: I went into this series expecting to find that it wouldn’t be “my thing.” I tried hard to set aside my biases about teen/young adult drama shows, but the inescapable conclusion is that I wouldn’t have even switched on Starfleet Academy were it not for the “Star Trek” label. I asked myself the question of whether I’d have chosen to sit down and watch a similar programme in a different franchise; if this were “Star Wars: Jedi University” or “The Lord of the Rings: Bilbo Goes To College.” And the answer is “almost certainly not.” I showed up for the Star Trek name and the Star Trek name alone, hoping to find that the series… well, wasn’t as advertised, really, and didn’t have as strong a focus on teen/young adult drama as its promo material suggested.
Sometimes, having low expectations can be a good thing! And there are definitely aspects of Starfleet Academy that both exceeded my expectations and just plain *worked*, either as a Star Trek story or just a fun sci-fi adventure in a more general sense. I will absolutely give credit where it’s due for the series being significantly more episodic in nature than I’d feared; there are still serialised storylines and character arcs, but not quite to the same extent as either Discovery or Picard.
However, what I would also say is that Starfleet Academy doesn’t feel like an especially memorable addition to the franchise – at least, not for me. There are episodes from right across modern Star Trek that stick in my mind for one reason or another – positive as well as negative. There are characters with strong personalities or who got heavily-featured in big, impactful storylines. There are starship and uniform designs that I found visually pleasing – or, occasionally, so-bad-it’s-good! But Starfleet Academy… it had basically none of that, and I really can’t call to mind a single protagonist, antagonist, visual element, or individual storyline that I’d say will stick with me now that the credits have rolled on the season finale.
And I think at least *part* of the reason for that is because Starfleet Academy has been unlucky. Let me explain what I mean.
Discovery brought the franchise back to its small-screen home almost nine years ago, and since then, we’ve had more than 200 episodes of Star Trek across six mainline shows, as well as short episodes, animated mini-episodes, and a TV movie. The timeline has been chopped up, with different stories taking place hundreds of years apart, featuring new and returning characters, and there’s been so much Star Trek coming at us so quickly that I found myself dealing with franchise fatigue and burnout back in 2023, even as someone who’s a huge Trekkie.
Furthermore, modern Star Trek’s content, with very few exceptions, has been action-packed to the extreme and with ridiculously high stakes. Starfleet Academy’s over-the-top villain and Federation-ending threat don’t exist in a vacuum – they’ve come along after the franchise has repeatedly returned to those same narrative spaces, whether it was with Vadic and the Borg in Picard, Control and Osyraa in Discovery, the Gorn in Strange New Worlds, the Mirror Universe from Section 31, or the Diviner in Prodigy. Lower Decks wasn’t immune, either, with its Pakled story arc, and we can extend this trend back further, with a trio of nefarious villains in the Kelvin trilogy, and even Enterprise’s Xindi arc shortly after the turn of the millennium.
In a word… there have been *a lot* of Star Trek stories in recent (and not-so-recent) years that all used the same basic underlying premise: there’s an over-the-top villain whose evil scheme threatens not just these characters, but everyone else in the Federation, or even the entire galaxy. The fact that I’m bored to tears of that kind of storyline is not, in isolation, Starfleet Academy’s fault. But it is a factor that the show has to contend with, and unfortunately, it’s one of the reasons why I came away from this new series feeling that very little about it was unique or memorable.
Let’s play a game called “who am I describing?” I’m going to describe a Star Trek villain from the past decade, and you have to guess who it is. Ready?
This villain clearly has a connection to at least one of the show’s protagonists. The performance is hammy and over-the-top, trying to channel iconic villains like Khan or the Borg Queen, but doing so less effectively. Their plan involves using a magical macguffin of impossible destructive power to attack Starfleet and the Federation. And the only ones who can stop them are a rag-tag group of misfits who become a “found family” over the course of the season.
See, that *could* be Starfleet Academy’s Nus Braka. Or it could be Vadic, Lorca, the Diviner, Mol and La’ak, the super-synths, Nick Locarno, San, the Red Angel… and more.
This, in a nutshell, is Starfleet Academy’s problem. We’ve seen this story before, and not just once. Repeatedly, since Star Trek returned in 2017, we’ve gotten season after season after season where we’ve seen another over-the-top villain who’s mysteriously connected to a main character, and whose evil scheme is galactic in scope. One or two stories like that can work. And Star Trek can do big, Federation-threatening storylines pretty well. But this core concept is utterly, thoroughly burned out, so trying to return to it *again* didn’t work for me.
What’s more, Starfleet Academy didn’t even handle this story outline particularly well. I noted in my coverage of the premiere that giving the main villain a big defeat in his first-ever appearance seldom works well, and it set up the main cadets – Caleb in particular – as being too skilled and too perfect. It felt like we’d seen the end before it began; having seen how easily Nus Braka can be defeated, and how impossibly perfect Caleb is at everything from hacking and computers to hand-to-hand combat… it basically left neither character with anywhere to go as this storyline rumbled on across subsequent episodes.
More so than any other Star Trek show, Starfleet Academy needed to start with characters who had room to improve. What’s the point in someone like Caleb going to school when he already knows everything, and can do things better, faster, and more effectively than most of his teachers? It gave me “Wesley Crusher” vibes from almost the first moment, and it was tough to root for Caleb, sometimes, because of how impossibly perfect he seemed to be – at least in terms of his skills.
Where Caleb did find room to grow – at least for a while – was in terms of his relationships with his peers. I don’t think Caleb came *close* to nailing the “learning to play well with others” kind of arc that I believe was intended for him. But his relationships with Tarima, Darem, and Genesis in particular did evolve over the course of ten episodes, and largely in ways that felt natural and in keeping with this kind of teen/young adult series’ tone. There were some emotional moments in the mix, too, as Caleb clashed with – and later figured out how to befriend – his peers.
I try to review Star Trek (and everything else I review here on the website) without having exposed myself to other viewpoints; that’s just part of my process, and I don’t want to feel like I’m being influenced by the conversation around a film or TV series – I want to judge it on its own merit as much as possible. But, as a Trekkie who follows some fansites and social media pages, I haven’t been able to shut out *everything* Starfleet Academy-related for the last nine weeks.
One thing that definitely caught me off-guard was the negative reception in some corners of the internet to Captain Nahla Ake. I’ve seen fans criticising things like her preference for going barefoot and the way she sits in a chair… things that, frankly, give her a bit of depth and personality, and which I found in no way offensive or off-putting. Imagine criticising the (in)famous “Riker manoeuvre,” where Riker would swing his leg over the back of a chair before sitting down. Or Picard’s tendency to tug at the bottom of his tunic to straighten up his uniform. Maybe some fans did, back in The Next Generation era, genuinely hate those things… but I certainly don’t remember any of that being an issue. And to me, some of the criticisms of Captain Ake feel rather petty.
Captain Ake, for me, seemed to be channelling a bit of Strange New Worlds’ Pelia in the way she came across – and if you know me, you’ll know that Pelia is one of my favourite additions to that series! I like how Captain Ake takes a less-rigid approach, and it makes perfect sense for the role she has to play. She’s not a typical captain, who can afford to be concerned with strict discipline in front of trained officers. She’s a teacher, and most of her crew are cadets who are still learning what it means to serve in Starfleet. Of course she’s going to take a different approach; the best teachers find ways to get through to their students, and that can include taking a more casual or less-disciplinarian approach.
Captain Ake also brings centuries’ worth of experience to the table as a Lanthanite, and that earns her a great deal of respect from the kids. As someone who remembers what Starfleet was like in the years before the Burn – something we’ll talk about more in a moment – Captain Ake is uniquely-poisitioned, within the world of Starfleet Academy, to instil old-school Starfleet values into a new generation of cadets. Her approach may not be rigid and adhering to the letter of the rules, and she may not always keep to a strict uniform code… but she’s clearly a good captain, a respected teacher, and a great leader.
I think some of the criticism of Captain Ake – and of Starfleet Academy in a more general sense – is coming from folks who would never have been interested in the series to begin with. There are some “anti-woke” folks crawling out of the woodwork to pick on Starfleet Academy, as well as people (like myself) who are way outside of the target demographic. And some of these criticisms of the way Captain Ake sits on a chair stem from that; they’re indicative of a portion of the fanbase who couldn’t go into the show with an open mind and who want to pick on anything they can find to criticise.
Starfleet Academy isn’t going to be right for every viewer, or even every Trekkie. And if the show’s low streaming numbers hold… well, it doesn’t look like it’s having as much success as I’d have hoped when it comes to connecting with new viewers. But that isn’t because it’s “woke,” or because Captain Ake puts her feet on the seat. There can be many factors behind a series failing to connect with audiences, and I’d posit that franchise fatigue and repetitiveness are bigger deals in this case than any individual performance or storyline.
That being said, I saw nothing across Season 1 that, to be blunt about it, changed my mind on Starfleet Academy’s future prospects. With the series seeming not to make a huge splash for Skydance/Paramount on streaming, and given that the corporation has already cancelled every other Star Trek series that had been in production at the time of the merger, I very seriously doubt whether a third season renewal will happen.
The show doesn’t have any huge strong suits in its corner, really, and it feels like it’s in the same kind of position as Enterprise was some twenty-plus years ago – it just may not have been Starfleet Academy’s moment, coming after so much Star Trek has been on our screens over the past few years. If the show doesn’t get renewed, and hasn’t done enough to demonstrate to Paramount’s new owners that it’s a solid investment… I don’t think we can lay the blame for that exclusively on Starfleet Academy itself and its production team. As I said above, the series feels like it drew the short straw, in a sense.
I criticised Discovery, from Season 3 onwards, for not making more of the Burn – the giant apocalyptic event that *should* underpin everything about this 32nd Century setting. Discovery’s writers wanted to make a drama series; it felt like the Burn very quickly disappeared into the background, serving as little more than the backdrop for other, generally less-interesting stories to play out in front of.
Starfleet Academy did more with the Burn that Discovery had done, and for that I’m grateful. But I still feel like this brand-new setting, this brand-new narrative idea for Star Trek, something huge and transformative for literally *the entire franchise* just… isn’t being used very well. Or very often.
There were *references* to the Burn and the state of the galaxy in dialogue. And some storylines and settings reflected this event and its lingering aftermath more than others. But the main characters, with the partial exception of Caleb, could’ve really been from any pre-Burn era, and even when references were made to the Burn and its post-apocalyptic after-effects… it just didn’t stick the landing much of the time.
Let’s take episode seven, Ko’Zeine, as an example. The cadets get a break from their classes and head to different places. Jay-Den and Darem get the A-story, visiting Darem’s homeworld for what felt like a bit of an Amok Time homage. And Genesis and Caleb got the B-plot, getting into hijinks back at the deserted campus. Literally *nothing* about either storyline would have changed if this episode had been set before the Burn. Despite getting an opportunity to do so, with the introduction of a brand-new alien race in the Khionians, there was absolutely no mention of the Burn at all. Did Khionia just… not notice?
Star Trek has always used its sci-fi lens to take a look at real-world issues. And as a series focusing on younger folks that’s being broadcast in the mid-2020s, there was scope to take the Burn as a starting point and view it as an analogy for the disrupted post-pandemic world that kids today are growing up in. To use the Burn as a metaphor to examine what it might mean for young people whose education and formative years were massively disrupted in unprecedented ways. I didn’t want or expect that to be a constant presence, hammered home in *every* story. But I did expect it to be present more often than it was.
I’ve said this before, and I daresay I’ll repeat myself again before too long, but I don’t like what the Burn says about the future of the Star Trek galaxy, and how it challenges and alters how we interpret stories set in the 23rd and 24th Centuries. But, if Discovery and now Starfleet Academy had been able to find stories to tell in that setting, really leaning into what it means to live and grow up in a “post-apocalyptic” galaxy… maybe it would have at least felt justified. But after three seasons of Discovery and one of Starfleet Academy… we’re still stuck with stories and characters which, at best, pay lip service to the Burn and its decades-long aftermath without really exploring what any of it means.
And the result? Unfortunately, I’m still of the opinion that, somehow, we should find a way to push this “post-apocalyptic” far future out of the prime timeline.
That being said, there was *more* of an effort to explore the state of the galaxy after the Burn in Starfleet Academy than there was in Discovery. I appreciated getting a look at the Klingons in this era – though I’m still curious to learn what the Klingon survivors would make of the knowledge that the Burn was caused by the Federation! And seeing Betazed’s accession back to the Federation, and the changes the organisation was willing to make to accomodate the Betazoids, made for a fun and engaging story, too.
Sam was an interesting character, and I particularly enjoyed Kerrice Brooks’ enthusiastic, wide-eyed performance. She really captured Sam’s nature as a “newborn;” someone experiencing the world for the very first time. But unfortunately, Sam also got two of my least-favourite storylines in the entire season – and two stories that felt pretty repetitive, too, if you think about it.
Let’s play another game: this one’s called “which episode am I describing?” This episode, from Season 1 of Starfleet Academy, sees the character of Sam making a connection with a major character from The Next Generation era. She comes to see this character as a major influence, or even a father figure of sorts, and the writers go out of their way to draw parallels between Sam and this legacy character. The legacy character gets an epilogue to their story from The Next Generation era, which – many fans will argue – detracts from their original story or even actively harms their characterisation.
So… was I talking about Series Acclimation Mil or The Life of the Stars?
I said a lot of what I wanted to say about Starfleet Academy’s treatment of Sisko in my standalone piece – click or tap here to read that. But to very briefly recap: despite being a well-intentioned effort to celebrate the legacy of Star Trek’s first African American captain, the episode ultimately was an awful ending for Sisko and his legacy, turning him into the very “absent black father” trope that Avery Brooks had argued against more than a quarter of a century earlier. Starfleet Academy asked a question that didn’t need to be asked about Sisko’s survival (because it was already perfectly well-explained in Deep Space Nine), and then set about answering that question in just about the worst conceivable way.
And then, a couple of episodes later, we get a remarkably similar story involving Sam and the Doctor.
I don’t want to linger for too long on legacy characters in this review, and if you join me for my episode breakdown in the days ahead, I might delve into the Doctor a bit more when we discuss The Life of the Stars. But again, this was a story that felt… well, tacked-on, in one sense, but also became one that painted the Doctor in a really negative light.
The Doctor, it turns out, was not terribly moved by outliving his friends aboard the USS Voyager, nor the cadets of the USS Protostar. He didn’t miss Janeway, Tuvok, or Neelix. But he *had* spent almost a millennium pining for the holographic family he created in the Voyager third season episode Real Life. Not only were these holograms *non-sentient* as defined by the show, but it also paints B’Elanna as a major villain, since she was the one who edited the Doctor’s family holoprogramme, “killing” his holographic daughter.
As above with the Sisko storyline, I think there were good intentions and at least parts of an interesting idea at the story’s core. But the way it came across, with the Doctor not even acknowledging his friends – the people he spent years of his life with and who first helped him explore what it means to be a sentient life-form… it left a bad taste in the mouth. If the plan was always for Sam to view the Doctor as a father figure, why not simply start from that point? Or else find a different route to get there.
I’ll shelve this for now, but stay tuned, because there’s more to say about this element of The Life of the Stars.
Visually, Starfleet Academy was pretty okay much of the time. There were things the show did well, like using a proper 16:9 aspect ratio instead of the weird letterbox that other shows of the streaming era have employed. I also greatly appreciated getting episodes that all felt sufficiently long: not a single episode was under the fifty-minute mark, which made them feel all feel quite meaty! Compare Starfleet Academy’s ten-plus-hour first season with something like A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, where the entirety of Season 1 barely cracked the three-and-a-half-hour mark.
Set design was more hit than miss, but some of the misses were… well, they were pretty dire. In my review of the series premiere, I talked about one sequence involving a low-poly, horribly pixellated “whale” when Caleb and Tarima went to the aquarium. And while I’m pleased to say that nothing else in Season 1 sank quite so far as that awful CGI misfire, there were a few other unimpressive visual moments, unfortunately.
The sets used for parts of the Academy could feel cluttered, at times, with an overabundance of holographic signs and interfaces. The end result was an environment that looked too busy, with too many things on screen at once. I also felt that some choices, both for outdoor filming locations and using the AR wall, weren’t particularly impressive, and just didn’t leave me with much of an impression at all. I’d call out Jay-Den’s Klingon encampment from Vox in Excelso and Darem’s homeworld from Ko’Zeine as examples of the latter.
In fact, Darem’s homeworld looked an awful lot like a copy-and-paste of the Vulcan set that we’ve seen extensively in both Discovery and Strange New Worlds, which just felt profoundly odd for the Khionians – a semi-aquatic race. I get that we were technically visiting their desert moon, not their watery planet, but that just raises the question of… why? I guess it was an effort to spend less money on prosthetics, or to keep Darem in his humanoid form so he could better emote? Either way, it’s a bit of a shame; I’d have been genuinely quite pleased to visit Khionia and spend more time with this brand-new alien faction.
I think, on balance, my favourite episode of the season was Come, Let’s Away – the episode where Braka returns and scores a big win at the cadets’ expense. It was well-paced, action-packed, and its emotional moments generally hit the mark. But the major caveat I have to give is that this *kind* of story – where the villain gets a big win, and sets up the next phase of their nefarious scheme – shouldn’t come when we’re past the halfway point. And it shouldn’t have come along *after* we’ve already seen the villain being defeated by a bunch of untrained cadets on their first day at school.
I mentioned this in my review of the premiere, but Nus Braka was not an entertaining villain. The performance was ridiculously hammy and off-putting, and I’m so disappointed that a genuinely wonderful actor like Paul Giamatti – whose performances I’ve enjoyed elswhere, and whose name felt like a big coup for Starfleet Academy when his role was announced – could be reduced by the show’s producers and directors to being so genuinely awful. Braka was, for the most part, a one-dimensional pantomime villian; the antagonist from a direct-to-video kids’ movie who’s “evil for the sake of it” and turns everything up to eleven for no reason.
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When a series commits to a serialised arc, it’s important for that arc to stick the landing. In Starfleet Academy’s case, Nus Braka was the show’s overarching antagonist, and even in some episodes where he didn’t appear in person, his influence loomed large and he was discussed by other characters. But when a villain is so weak, so one-dimensional, and so uninteresting… it really takes a lot away from that serialised story arc. For me, unfortunately, Nus Braka is firmly in that category, and feels like one of the Star Trek franchise’s least-interesting villainous characters. I don’t doubt that Giamatti had fun playing the role, and I’m also certain that a way could’ve been found for a character like this to have been handled better. But the way Braka came across in the finished product? I’m afraid it’s one of the worst individual elements of the season.
One character I criticised in the two-part premiere (and in the buildup to Starfleet Academy’s debut) was Lura Thok. I felt Gina Yashere’s performance was really… well, amateurish, especially in the opening two-parter. I’m not going to retract that statement, but I will amend it to say that, over the course of her subsequent appearances in Season 1, Lura Thok managed to grow on me, and either I got used to Yashere’s take on the character, the cadence of her speech, and so on, or… maybe she grew into the role somewhat. Either way, I ended the season with more of an appreciation for this Klingon-Jem’Hadar hybrid than I had at the beginning.
One of the really odd, left-field announcements going into Starfleet Academy’s premiere was that Stephen Colbert – a late-night talk show host in the United States – was going to have a voice role as the “Digital Dean of Students.” I said at the time that this felt like little more than stunt casting; an attempt to garner some interest for the series based on nothing but the name of the performer. And so it turned out to be. The Digital Dean had a couple of funny lines here and there – the recurring Talaxian fur-fly bit being one – but overall, I didn’t get the impression that the former Paramount corporation needed to recruit someone so well-known (presumably for no small amount of money) for this complete non-role. Colbert’s voice work was *fine*, but would anything about the Digital Dean have changed if it had been a newcomer? Heck, *I* could have done no less of a job in that kind of voice-only role, for all the impact it had.
When the cadets were first introduced, ahead of the show’s premiere, I thought it was at least noteworthy that we were going to meet a Klingon named Jay-Den – a name that sounds, well, human. And I wondered if there might be a reason for that in-universe; maybe it was indicative of the Klingons having joined the Federation centuries earlier, or Jay-Den’s family having an appreciation for human culture. But, as it turns out, the name “Jay-Den” has a meaning in Klingon.
Someone who speaks Klingon will have to answer this (I can barely manage English), but… does “Jay-Den” really mean “he who crosses oceans of fire,” as he claimed in Vitus Reflux? I’m gonna go out on a limb and suggest that it doesn’t.
That doesn’t mean, by the way, that I didn’t enjoy Jay-Den. Karim Diané put in an exceptional performance, and I really enjoyed getting a Klingon main character who was a bit more complex, a bit softer, and who didn’t care only about honour and suffering a violent death. Jay-Den came from the same Klingon warrior culture that we’re familiar with from past iterations of Star Trek – regressed, arguably, by the impact of the Burn – but he was his own man with his own interests, and his desire to become a healer, not a warrior, added somewhat to his complexity as a character.
I also liked the way Jay-Den’s romantic life was handled. There was definitely a spark between him and Darem in the latter part of the season – a spark that, I would argue, either wasn’t fully justified or didn’t sit quite right because of their initial bully-and-victim interaction in the first episode. But I appreciated how they overcame that and built up a friendship.
I’ve always read the Klingons as being somewhat analogous to historical civilisations like the Spartans, at least in the way they were presented after The Original Series. Their warrior culture certainly feels like something Spartan, anyway. And if you know your history… you’ll know that the Spartans (and Ancient Greeks in general) were, to use some technical language from historiography, hella gay. *Hella* gay. So… gay Klingons just make sense, and the only thing weird about it, really, is how we’ve never really explored this aspect of Klingon culture and sexuality before.
At this point in the far future, being LGBT+ (whatever race you are) shouldn’t be a big deal, and Jay-Den’s arc and his relationship with the War College cadet Kyle was handled subtly, without much fanfare. It reminded me a little of Adira’s “coming out” as non-binary in Discovery; it’s something that everyone involved understood, accepted, and just rolled with without making it a big deal in any way. That’s generally how I like to see LGBT+ representation handled in Star Trek; I like the idea that, in the future, these things won’t be controversial in any way, and stories which set up that ideal as a plot point tend to go down well with me.
The Venari Ral, Nus Braka’s organisation, didn’t feel consistent across the season. When we met Braka, he seemed to be the captain of a pirate ship – or perhaps someone who might be the “commodore” of a small flotilla of ships. And that presentation carried through; Braka was a jumped-up petty criminal, or so it seemed. So it was a real surprise, then, when the Venari Ral, a few episodes later, began annexing entire planets to their “empire,” with Braka painted as the leader of an entire interplanetary faction.
This just wasn’t sufficiently explained within Starfleet Academy itself, and because the Venari Ral are a new faction, we had no frame of reference. If it had been, say, the Cardassian Union or the Gorn Hegemony, there’d be a foundation to build on. Even Discovery’s Emerald Chain could’ve fit the bill. In fact the Emerald Chain is a great point of comparison, because that faction also seemed to fluctuate between “criminal syndicate” and “interstellar empire” – though at least in that case, it never felt quite so small-scale as the Venari Ral did in their first couple of appearances. I think we’d have benefited from seeing a tiny bit more of the Venari Ral, somehow, in the first couple of episodes – something that could’ve nailed down how big, how powerful, and how intimidating the faction was *supposed* to be.
And then Starfleet Academy would’ve needed to stick to that. If the first episode seemed to show Nus Braka as the captain of a pirate ship, later episodes like Come, Let’s Away and 300th Night tried to present the faction as an empire capable of conquering entire planets, with a fleet of ships, a legion of soldiers and paramilitary, and the resources necessary to hold onto all of that territory. But then the season finale seemed to show only about half a dozen Venari Ral ships and a handful of troops.
This inconsistency was also present in the Venari Ral ships themselves. Kids These Days ended with Braka’s ship being destroyed… with a single volley of torpedoes. Come, Let’s Away showed a Venari Ral ship taking the fight to the Athena, and winning. Then Rubincon saw Starfleet massively outnumbering the Venari Ral, beaming through shields with ease, and arresting their troops and leadership. I came away from the season feeling like I *still* don’t know what the Venari Ral was meant to be: a pirate fleet, a crime lord’s militia, a proto-state, or a fully-fledged interstellar empire. And for the main villainous faction of the season… that’s a bit of a disappointment. How am I meant to be invested in a story when I don’t really comprehend who our heroes are facing off against?
I was a little surprised when it was announced that Tig Notaro’s Jett Reno would be one of the show’s recurring characters, making the jump from Discovery. Out of all of the Discovery characters, as much as I like Reno, she probably wouldn’t have been my first choice to take a significant role in a spin-off. But I greatly enjoyed Reno’s role this season, particularly in the finale when she was left alone with the cadets, and she really seemed to rise to the occasion – while retaining her usual deadpan style.
Reno’s relationship with Lura Thok wasn’t a big part of Starfleet Academy, but it was another of those subtle, understated LGBT+ moments that I discussed above. It worked very well, and I liked how both characters gained a bit of depth and personality from one another. Notaro and Yashere played off each other perfectly in their moments together, and I felt their relationship went a long way to humanising (if you’ll excuse the term) Lura Thok in particular. I also liked what it said about Reno, and how she was finally willing to embrace new relationships after the loss of her wife – something we learned about in Discovery.
A ten-episode season won’t have time to do everything, nor focus on every single character – and for me, it was Genesis who seemed to draw the shortest straw this time around. Genesis got an arc of sorts, relating to her father and how she modified her references when applying to the Academy, but that was very much a B-plot in the episode in which it featured. It’s not necessarily a problem; other characters simply got bigger or more central storylines this time around. But, as I said several times in Discovery and Strange New Worlds, it would be nice if, next time, we could get an episode or two to make up for the characters who took a back seat in Season 1.
I liked what we saw of Genesis, though, and how she seemed able to push through her anxieties and fears to step up and become a leader. We saw this with her taking the captaincy of the Academy’s phaser-game team, and this carried through to later in the season, where she was finally able to take the conn of the Athena in the finale. It was never an arc that was centre-stage, but actress Bella Shepard did very well with the material she had to work with, making Genesis into a cadet who felt like she truly fit the Starfleet mould almost better than everyone else. Perhaps that’s a nod to her background, as the daughter of an admiral and who’d been raised around Starfleet from a young age. In any case, the series needed at least one character like this – and we got that with Genesis, even if she wasn’t as present as some of the others in key storylines.
Uniforms can be a contentious point among Trekkies! I appreciated Discovery returning to bold primary colours after Season 3, and Starfleet Academy stuck with a similar design – at least for commissioned officers. The cadets’ uniforms – their main uniforms, anyway – were a bit less interesting in a fairly drab grey. I did like, however, that Starfleet Academy introduced a lot of uniform variants: Jay-Den’s skant, the letterman jackets, away team armour, separate uniforms for the War College… all of these added a lot of depth to the series. None of the uniforms on their own really leapt out at me, but the variety definitely kept things visually interesting.
The USS Athena… well, it didn’t really grow on me, as I hoped it might after its introduction in the premiere. I don’t *hate* the design of the ship, but I don’t really find it as visually appealing as, well, almost any other hero ship from past iterations of the franchise. It feels a bit over-designed, if that makes sense, which is a criticism I’d level at a lot of 32nd Century Starfleet vessels. I did like, though, that the design of the ship was reflected in the design of the cadets’ combadges. That was a neat inclusion.
Darem got a potentially interesting arc across the season, but I think it was a bit of a mistake to set him up as being quite so unlikeable in the premiere. Darem had this whole “entitled, wealthy bully” thing going on, and it clashed with his *actual* personality. Part of this was in service to his abortive wedding in Ko’Zeine, but also it was done because – as I’ve said before when discussing Discovery in particular – Star Trek’s modern writers don’t always know how to do subtlety. Darem couldn’t just be overconfident or a bit of a brat – he had to be an aggressive, mean-spirited bully. And that beginning made him hard to root for, at times, even as we got to know the “real” Darem.
In my notes, I called parts of episodes three and seven Darem’s “dickhead to normal guy” arc, which was my way of saying this was the writers demonstrating his growth or his redemption from a poor beginning. And that kind of story can work; in Darem’s case, I think the results are a bit muddled. His spotlight – Ko’Zeine – was one of the season’s least-impressive outings, and his aristocratic background and cancelled wedding weren’t really mentioned again. I love a good redemption story, even for someone who seems unlikable, and there’s merit in doing something like this in a school setting, especially considering the show’s intended audience. But for me… I don’t think it came across as well as it should’ve. And, as mentioned above, I’d have liked to have seen more of the Khionians.
In my review of the two-part premiere, I said that I felt sure that Tarima’s condition – which required her to use a device to dampen her telepathic abilities – would turn out to be a “superpower” that would be really useful and end up saving the day. And who’d-a thunk it: I was right about that! In both Come, Let’s Away and Rubincon, Tarima’s magic – which she denied was actually “magic,” but let’s not mince words – turned out to be the only thing the cadets could use to save the day. Sometimes, setting up something in one episode to pay it off later works well and feels right. And sometimes, subtly foreshadowing something that will be important later can be a great way to keep the audience engaged. Tarima’s ability, for me, was neither of those things. It was patently obvious what was going to happen, I called it from the first moment she was on screen, and it played out beat-for-beat not once, but twice.
That aside, Tarima was… well, “okay,” is what I put in my notes. I don’t like to pick on young performers too much, because there’s always room to gain experience, but I felt that Zoë Steiner was the lesser of the main cadets in terms of her performance. Tarima felt stilted and wooden a lot of the time, and while some of that may be the fault of writers and directors as much as (or more than) the performer, it left the character in a weird space for a co-star and the main protagonist’s romantic interest. There were moments where Tarima managed to leave that behind… but overall, she wasn’t my favourite character by a long stretch.
Starfleet Academy was intended to reach new audiences and expand the Star Trek franchise beyond its current niche. From what I’ve seen of its streaming numbers (and even its performance through “less-than-official” means), I don’t think it’s doing that. Starfleet Academy, across all ten episodes of its first season, was routinely beaten by shows like The Pitt, Fallout, and even Bluey, and never once cracked the top ten most-streamed programmes of the day or the week. That should ring alarm bells for Skydance/Paramount… as well as for anyone who hopes to see the show continue beyond its already-produced second season. For context, shows like Picard and Strange New Worlds were regulars in the top ten most-streamed episodes of the week during their runs.
But audience numbers are not a measure of quality. I wish I could tell you that Starfleet Academy is a real hidden gem, something that the masses are unfairly overlooking and missing out on. But the reality is that… well, this isn’t my kind of show, really. And I knew that – which is why I’m pulling my punches, at least a little, when it comes to criticising some of the character arcs and storylines. There’s a ton of “teen drama” that I knew from the get-go I wasn’t going to enjoy… and I didn’t enjoy it. The Star Trek label could mitigate some of that some of the time, sure… but not enough.
This was the first Star Trek project of the current streaming era (well, after Scouts, I guess) not to hold any appeal for me. I watched it because… I don’t know. I guess I felt an obligation to keep up with live-action Star Trek. And I can say that I did genuinely enjoy some parts of it. But overall? It’s a teen/young adult drama set in the Star Trek universe, using the lore of Star Trek for inspiration and to set up some of its stories, but it isn’t really the kind of Star Trek show that personally appeals to me. I’m okay with that – I made my peace with it before the show even aired! But it does make it hard to recommend the series to someone in a similar position to myself.
I tried to keep an open mind, though. And I was pleased to see Starfleet Academy being a more episodic project than I feared it would be, as well as to see attempts to both harken back to older shows and expand the franchise with new factions and alien races. There are good moments, interesting ideas, and some characters and performances that are a lot better than some folks online would have you believe. But for a Trekkie, the measure of success for any show is how often I think I’ll be tempted to return to Starfleet Academy and re-watch it. I can tell you with certainty that I’ll show up for Season 2. But… I can really only think of one episode from Season 1 (Come, Let’s Away) that I might even consider re-visiting in the future. The rest of it just wasn’t my thing, or else didn’t leave much of an impression at all.
So that’s all for today.
In the days ahead, I’ll write up my thoughts on individual storylines from episodes 3-10 in a bit more depth, so I hope you’ll join me for some of that. I plan to touch on a few topics that I didn’t get around to on this occasion. Splitting up this review made sense to me – this piece is already running very long, even by my standards, so writing even just three or four paragraphs about each episode would be too much! But stay tuned, because that compilation of mini-reviews is still to come.
I hope this has been interesting, and I hope I didn’t treat Starfleet Academy too unkindly. I keep saying this because I think it’s important, but I know someone who’s the wrong side of forty isn’t the target audience for a series like this. I tried to keep that in mind while writing this review! I can say that I’m glad Starfleet Academy was produced, and I maintain that the Star Trek fan community needs a project like this to reach out to new, younger viewers if the franchise is to have a shot at surviving long-term. Unfortunately, however, I fear circumstances have conspired against Starfleet Academy, with the show coming along at a difficult time for Star Trek, after franchise fatigue has set in, and with a new corporate merger shaking things up. Even if the show was never going to be for me, I still hoped that it would find success with its target audience… but that seems not to have been the case. Maybe Season 2 will “grow the beard” and improve things… but whether you’re a fan or not, I wouldn’t bet on that third season renewal going ahead.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is available to stream now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the service is available. The Star Trek franchise – including Starfleet Academy and everything else discussed above – remains the copyright of Paramount/Skydance. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 