With the fantastic Star Trek: Strange New Worlds back for season three, the potential for the franchise feels so strong. As opposed to back in January when Section 31 came out, and the potential for the franchise felt desperately weak. That’s Star Trek: as good as its last outing. So where will the forthcoming Starfleet Academy series leave us? Hints arrive with the first teaser trailer for the show. But can something this po-faced and “uplifting” offer anything compelling?
You know what? I’m left with no idea at all. What a strange trailer, telling us absolutely nothing substantive whatsoever. Lots of things to say, “Ooh look, he’s back!” but if someone asked you what it’s about, you’d be pretty stumped.
Set in the 32nd century, a thousand years after the original Star Trek, this is very much a spin-off from the dismal final seasons of Discovery. In that show, once a lovely story about a ship equipped with a unique means of instantly transporting itself anywhere in the galaxy, things got so out of control that it ended up sending itself 900 years into the future and then not knowing what to do when it got there. However, on arrival it did discover that Starfleet still existed, albeit in a much reduced and fragile form, with its Academy still up and running. Thus, Starfleet Academy as a series.
So, in the trailer, we see a few familiar faces. There’s the fantastic Tig Notaro reprising engineer Jett Reno—one of the few characters you were always pleased to see in Discovery. Oded Fehr will also guest as Admiral Charles Vance, a character with the personality of a plank of wood in the previous show. And there’s Robert Picardo as the Doctor, the holographic medic from Star Trek: Voyager, now over 900 years old and still teaching nearly a millennium later after he began the role in kids’ cartoon Star Trek: Prodigy.
Then there are some even more well-known faces from outside of Trek. Holly Hunter is in charge, playing Captain Nahla Ake, who is half-Lanthanite (a long-lived race of aliens who were apparently living on Earth long before first contact with the Vulcans), Bob Hearts Abishola creator Gina Yashere as an as-yet unnamed first officer who is apparently a Klingon/Jem’Hadar hybrid (?), and right at the end, Hollywood A lister Paul Giamatti looking like the series’ cartoon villain. And joining the hybrid gang, he’s Klingon crossed with Tellarite.
Notably absent, however, was Mary Wiseman, who played Sylvia Tilly in Discovery. Her character was endlessly away at the Academy during the final seasons of the show, making it incredibly odd that she’s not a main character here. She is, instead, lined up as a guest star, and didn’t even make the cut for the trailer.
And the rest look like a sickeningly pretty bunch of starry-eyed hopefuls, all smiling and dancing and I already hate all of them equally. Especially the mopey Klingon Jay-Den Kraag. Gosh, what fun we’ll have learning about how hard it is for him to control his Klingon aggression in Starfleet by having him endlessly fucking mope about it.
Honestly, I don’t have high hopes, but I would sure be glad to be proven a big, stupid wrong-face. Alex Kurtzman’s so-called “expanded Star Trek universe” is so wildly variable, and there’s no pattern to it. Kurtzman is showrunner on Academy, and it was his taking over Discovery in its third season that began that show’s descent into dreadfulness. It’s tempting to therefore credit Strange New Worlds’ showrunner Akiva Goldsman with delivering better Trek, and his name isn’t attached to Academy. But then he was also a showrunner on Picard, a series so abysmal people should probably have gone to prison. So who knows! Holly Hunter is always compelling, so that bodes well. Paul Giamatti as a possible villain is also a fantastic thought! But there are so many factors that could be a problem.
First and foremost is the setting. Discovery’s 32nd century was a very silly place, with a bizarrely claustrophobic galaxy across which it tried to portray both impossibly futuristic god-like tech and ancient, cobwebby mysteries. Starfleet by this point has technology so advanced as to be inseparable from magic. They now have “programmable matter,” nano-molecules that can be altered into anything, to the idiotic degree that it’s used for things as mundane as having platforms and bridges extend out in front of people as they walk, while spaceships can reconfigure themselves on a molecular level while in flight. So, er, anything is possible. Every single storyline is going to have to not only be about why transporter technology can’t be used because, um, it’s a bit windy, but also why they can’t just reprogram any old coffee cup to be whatever MacGuffin is needed.
“We need a recoupling manifold upgrade-integrator or the whole station will blow up?”
“Why did this have to happen on a No-Reprogrammable Matter Tuesday?”
But more than anything else, it’s Starfleet itself. It’s just so insufferable. It’s Life Lessons University, where everyone strives to be the lovely-best they can be, and that’s going to be tripled down on by its newfound underdog position in the galaxy. I’m finding it so hard, following that teaser of wide-eyed gleeful positivity, to imagine anything other than the modern equivalent of a He-Man cartoon, where everyone learns an important message by the end of the episode.
Please let me be wrong. Please let the completely superb lessons of Strange New Worlds have been learned. Those being: episodic stories are where Star Trek shines, not long, meandering arcs, and that it’s possible to have a lot of fun if you’ve got a ground cast with believable relationships. I want a Starfleet Academy that’s capable of sustaining its own equivalent to SNW’s musical episode, or a Lower Decks crossover, or whatever this puppet-based episode set for season four is going to be!
Or, and again the trailer doesn’t betray anything close to this, a new Deep Space Nine situation, with deep intrigue taking place in a fixed location, allowing huge, spiraling stories set in new sectors to take place. Anything other than watching a bunch of adorable cadets learn to not think for themselves, like Star Trek’s true Borg mind, Starfleet.
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