Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

A year out but the first big preview story ran so...

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Then there's Paul Giamatti, who takes a prominent role as the main villain of the show, a piece of casting that quickly came together after the Oscar nominee started making the press rounds for his 2023 film The Holdovers. He expressed during interviews that his dream role is to play a Klingon in Star Trek. "We looked at each other and we went, 'Is he kidding?! Well, let's call his agent and find out,'" Kurtzman recalls. "Within, I think, less than an hour, [his agent] called back and said he would love to meet."

On a Zoom call, Giamatti explained how significant Star Trek was to his relationship with his father. The showrunners gave him the first five scripts of their show and offered him five different parts. He chose the villain.

https://ew.com/star-trek-starfleet-academy-first-look-photos-paul-giamatti-alien-exclusive-11778305

"If you're going to do a show about a young generation facing the future and you want it, as all Star Trek does, to be a mirror that holds itself up to the world as it is now, to situate the show in the halcyon days of the Federation would, in some ways, be dishonest,"

I hope that this does NOT mean we get more of the same half-baked grimdark in Picard where everyone in a Starfleet uniform doesn't know how to do their job. Buuuut, Tawny Newsome is on the writing staff, so there's maybe some hope?

New Star Trek - ooooh

32nd century - booooooo

We got teaser

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkBU8lvXm7M

Onscreen mention of Sisko? A Jem'Hadar officer?! OK maybe I can get a little excited.

Interesting detail here:

https://gizmodo.com/star-trek-starfleet-academy-sdcc-2025-panel-2000635137

Kurtzman stepped in at the end to offer a few parting insights to the crowd. “I’m sure there’s been some questions about the trailer,” he said, “(including) why is there a ship that’s landing in San Francisco? And the answer is, the school is a ship, and it’s part of the campus in San Francisco. So they go to class in San Francisco, in the ship. And because resources are lighter in the 32nd century, think of it like a teaching hospital: the ship gets deployed with the fleet in a real-life situation so they can learn in the field.”

“So this is not just theoretical classrooms. You’re going to see Star Trek episodes where we meet new species, episodes that are about diplomacy. You’ll see episodes where these cadets, who are not yet captains, are learning who they are and how they fit into Starfleet. They can make mistakes in ways that if you’re already a captain or if you are already in Starfleet, you really can’t. So these characters get to do unique things in that way.”

So this trailer's causing a bit of to-do on Reddit because of the "DUTY! SERVICE! HONOR!" shouty bit. I dont get it, personally - its a fecking military academy what do they expect? But I can see ppl being worried about Paramount's direction/the right/Colberts firing/etc. I think the worry is unwarranted, but I also didn't feel much joy from that trailer.

Also how was that a female Jem Ha'Dar?

I dont get it, personally - its a fecking military academy what do they expect?

Star Trek occupies an interesting space I think because it's easily the most progressive sci-fi franchise but it IS also the navy and various incarnations have been varying degrees of attentive towards distracting from that.

Love a submarine episode

https://reactormag.com/starfleet-academy-wall-of-honor-easter-eggs

get Wesley off there

evergreen

Okay so

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHDDzcyNWGs

Bemusingly, per io9:

It was also confirmed today that Stephen Colbert will provide the voice of Starfleet Academy’s Digital Dean of Students, providing daily announcements throughout the school.

First episode was really good!

Also to my eyes the logo looks like the DS9 font.

Not good but not as bad as Discovery in this era. Some bad CGI, bad nu-Trek speechifying, how did Earth rejoin the Federation so quickly etc.

how did Earth rejoin the Federation so quickly etc.

FBPF

i enjoyed this!

holly hunter was really good i thought - and i loved the way she sat (or didnt sit) in the captains chair, kind of a little kid Lily Tomlin/Edith Ann vibe

Giamatti chewed every scene he was in with relish but hey thats why you call him up, right? he was fun

the Klingon boy looked great but idk about that voice. it sounded like maybd they put a digital filter on him? really unnatural

LOVE the hologram gal, she’s rad & i hope she joins The Doctor’s opera club <3

i kinda wish they didn’t have to do ALL that actiony blockbuster movie stuff w the spacewalk & whatever - it’s that same thing as Disco where they just go too hard on effects & action & lens flares & whatever & its like - can we just put the camera down somewhere, anywhere & tell the story ffs

Red Letter Media covered this recently, albeit tangentially. One thing that stands out is that the viewing figures were apparently shockingly low - it debuted on YouTube for free, and at its peak had 1,300 viewers. Looking at it now it appears to have had 90,000 total views after one day.

View count obviously isn't the only thing. Ilxor has tiny viewing figures but the quality of the posts and the people is enormous. And perhaps VHS sales were awesome, but that's not a great return for something costing several million dollars an episode. On the other hand it raises the question of whether everything else on YouTube has enormously bot-inflated view counts, and for legal reasons Paramount weren't allowed to do that, and that YouTube is just a huge con, but who knows.

I have to say that as a non-fan and also a bewildered old man I wasn't aware of the show until a couple of weeks ago, and only then as something that might be released at some point in the future, and the plethora of Trek media confuses me.

I really enjoyed their Discovery parody some time back. Works as a "Stranger Things" parody, too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn4fW0EInqw

Seen ep1 so far and it's not too bad. It hits all the Disc notes, but unforch also some of the ones I found offputting (aforementioned FX/lensflare/everything is shiny and yet somehow dark at the same time).

I think I said it upthread but the klingon/jem'hdar no1, how is that possible, dont the Jem'Hadar reproduce in a lab from an egg or something? How could they breed with klingons? It felt like a handwavey way of explaining how she could be female. Why not just have her as a klingon?

Also did Giamatti say "don't take on a Klinarite" or something similar implying he's a klingon/tellarite cross?

Those nitpicks aside, the story was a good start, loads of action out of the gate, the usual "oh noes, first day out and we get into a spot of bother" plot, which is fine with me, allows for character setups.

I did notice a lot of what felt like the writers having a nod to fan complaints (a nod or a dig, who knows), such as making a point of introducing all of the bridge staff by name.

Agreed on the Klingon lad's voice. Were they *trying* to make him sound exactly like Worf?

Could do with less anachronistic banter. Its the 30something century, people arent saying 'you got this' and 'hangry' and 'i'm [blaspecies], bitch', cmon guys! I had the same issue with Discovery.

Which... ok I didn't mind that in Lower Decks. Its hard to put my finger on why the irreverence works in that and not this - because its intentionally a comedy I suppose?

I definitely do not like the intense reviewbombing the show is getting - heavy 1 star IMDB reviews, mostly complaining that theres too many women (saw more than one "gender imbalance" comment said with a straight face as if mostly-male casts up til now werent, ugh), too much diversity, too many POC, too much action, the usual bullshit. I don't know who does that stuff, because I feel like it can't be real fans.

I have enjoyed the two episodes and every future-set show has a question about vernacular language. As if there wasn’t a writer note saying not to say “groovy” or w/e during the original series. It’s all just a show, as long and they aren’t doing all new dialect, assume it’s translated from future language to ours. It’s highly unlikely they’d be speaking anything like english that far in the future, probably many polyglots

Yeah, I agree, if we did it "right" we'd theoretically need everyone to be speaking almost another language.

tbh that was one thing I liked about Firefly, the mixed english/chinese.

I think I said it upthread but the klingon/jem'hdar no1, how is that possible, dont the Jem'Hadar reproduce in a lab from an egg or something? How could they breed with klingons? It felt like a handwavey way of explaining how she could be female. Why not just have her as a klingon?

This being Trek, I just head-canoned this as someone in the intervening 900 years figuring out how to genetically engineer Jem'Hadar to let them have kids with other races as well as feeding them from their ketracel white dependence. The upside is all this is that we got this line from her: "My father taught me that victory is life. My mother, that today is a good day to die."

She totally stole the show. I feel like the instructors and bit players are going to run away with carrying the show from the main cast of younglings. Like that one cadet who ran away seems like she has a more interesting backstory and redemption arc coming up.

Now got round to seeing the 2nd ep, which was also pretty good. I could've done without the romanticals but I guess the show is skewing more YA? But it felt like it had Tawny Newsome's fingerprints all over it humour/fanservice wise (I noticed she was EP on this episode).

In fact it almost feels like they're making Caleb a bit like how Mariner was at the beginning of Lower Decks - arrogant, DGAF, and quite annoying, but then you start getting nuance and development. I hope that happens, bcs he's shittin' me up the wall right now lol.

Once again, not enough Jett Reno!

2nd episode was ok, didnt like it as much

Starting to find everyone’s line readings/delivery a little OTT — the performances arent very naturalistic? Like
HI I AM IN A SPACE (pause for drama) SHOW

maybe its just me

also has a bit George Lucas prequel disease of 7 cgi things happening in the background simultaneously — very “busy” which i dont like much

I think I spent my entire supply of background attention on the Almond Basket exocomp cameo in episode 2.

yes! voiced by same actress too!

Episode 3: completely frivolous and tropey plot beats, I loved it.

Also anyone who has a Holly Hunter foot thing is eating well.

ugh my enthusiasm for this show is quickly waning

ep3 was on some harry potter shit in a bad way

also the director needs a lens flare intervention jfc

Ep 2 was terrible

I don't mind that they're fumbling their way to becoming Community:2999 but they need to fumble faster.

Damn I thought if anyone would join me in the cheesy depths of teen slop it'd be you, Veg (complimentary).

how dare u (jk)

yeah i think this felt too much like all the YA movie slop of the mid 2010’s, your mazerunners & your divergents, attractive 20yr old gym rats in futuristic workout gear shouting OK GUYS WEVE GOT TO WORK TOGETHER [insert quip] in front of a green screen

its boring to me, i hate it

GUYS WE'VE GOT TO WORK TOGETHER is sooooo Trek though. I think maybe the fact that I have very little exposure to teen media (I've never read the Potter books, only watched the first movie, never read/watched the Divergents, etc.), I find Academy to be novel, especially since this is a style that Trek hasn't focused on before.

It also helps that I've found the humor pretty good in a post-LD world.

But I've also heard/read that things get less teen-soapy around episode 5, which is Tawny Newsome's episode and is purportedly a love-letter to DS9.

well bring on THAT for sure

Uffda, I was not a fan of ep3. I get it, this is a show set in an Academy but do we really need the Animal House "college v college" frat bs? That midnight fight in the atrium made me piss-mad, and I'm not sure why. Maybe because they broke stuff and it didnt even get stopped til it was basically over anyway?

This kind of shenan has a place in something like LD but, for me anyway, it doesn't feel like it works in live action, unless they start explicitly making it a comedy, which they haven't.

(That all said, the "shenan" joke was funny and as always, Thok and Reno are hilare)

at this point i’m jusy here for Tig lol

*just

Also also. In a lot of past Trek, anything sporty was usually fairly future-ey (to the point of absurdity at times tbf, eg that battle thing Rikerdid with the sticks with his dad). But jogging and Sisko's baseball obsession aside, I dont recall seeing them play any current-timeframe sports, but in the 31stC theyre back to things like basketball and hackeysack?

Bring back more weird futurey stupid sports and boardgames!

amen!

Lucky they didn’t have them play Holo-Quidditch

Hmm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BM6-1rD5i3Q

That video makes some decent points about Trek's overall failings but for whatever reason pins a lot of blame on SFA. The title is definitely clickbait.

For sure. All titles and thumbnails seem like clickbait these days, lol. The gist I gathered was that under Alex Kurtzman Star Trek has had less of a philosophy that reflected the current times from a futuristic vantage and instead has been coasting/coattailing on the past, with discordant/distracting results. Which isn't new for reboots and IP recycling, but I thought that video did a good job describing what older Star Trek was often up to and current Star Trek has been doing less of (especially in light of the RLM "Re:View" of Deep Space Nine, which this video and that video point to as something of an outlier show in the franchise).

and just for clarity/continuity, this is not a show you currently watch, correct? :)

So episode 4 is about Jayden, and tonally a change of pace, and very classic 90s. I teared up, though as established ITT, I have bad taste, but I do think it has something to offer the skeptical.

Also re the video Josh linked, I agree with its point about how Starfleet as an analogue for America deserves serious critique, I don't think a show about Star Trek will ever dare to upset the status quo of "Starfleet = good guys" in the way the US will probably never reckon with its own failings.

Nah you’re right on this one: I agreed this was actually a decent episode!

The self-determination stuff was really moving

*agree

ok caught up now and have battled through my early skepticism - tentatively on board, kind of dig the YA tone, Lower Decks in there for sure but I thought maybe a hint of Cobra Kai as well with all the (gloriously) dumb teen stuff

feels like the hallmark of this show is totally contrived inter-character conflict moments, like I know that is how TV drama works but the gear grinds from "pals getting on swimmingly" to "profound disagreement that will fuel remainder of episode" are brutal

The gist I gathered was that under Alex Kurtzman Star Trek has had less of a philosophy that reflected the current times from a futuristic vantage and instead has been coasting/coattailing on the past, with discordant/distracting results

Kinda related but I feel SFA is totally not interested in appealing to viewers outside the Star Trek bubble - the premise feels tailor-made for trying to snare new audience but it is so mired in continuity and canon that you need a pretty reasonable amount of franchise knowledge just to know which way is up... maybe they know that there are half-a-mil Paramount Plus subs that keep rolling over due to 40 weeks of Trek a year and that's enough to balance the books?

anyway! ready for 6 more episodes of corny Trek goodness in my Australian summer

Are we saying that paramount plus is becoming the Big Finish for Trek?

well maybe just that current Trek seems to be happy to service an existing audience rather than aspire to a new one - which I guess is a trap for every long-running franchise - and particularly in the paywalled studio streaming era

have I got it wrong? would be glad to hear if the show is capturing hearts and minds beyond the Trekosphere

I have heard some people who say their first Trek was Lower Decks, which still kind of sounds me, so I don't think it's entirely out of the question that Star Trek Super Furry Animals might also be able to rope in new viewers.

I think you a word there.

Doh, I was supposed to say astounded, not sounds.

I have heard some people who say their first Trek was Lower Decks

I love to hear this!

Its a good in! But, I am one of the rare weirdos who actually enjoys watching TAS.

I dunno if it's a budget/scheduling thing but they missed the boat by not making Giamatti's character the War College Provost. "Surprise, kids!"

Am a little conflicted about Tawny Newsome self-inserting as a legacy canon character. It's such a cheesy move from a viewer POV but if I were in the writer's room I would totally be goading her into doing just that.

It was goofy but not as goofy as it could have been. They could have had another character pop out of the celestial temple during the episode.

Tawny talked about how she felt short changed on the LD episode where they visit DS9 but Mariner spends nearly the whole episode trapped on board her ship, because she's a huge DS9 nerd, so I feel that making herself the latest Dax is entirely justified.

It took me a few minutes with her character to clock that she plays a Cardassian (in sort of the same way that I didn't realize the War College lady cadet is Romulan).

i think i liked this episode in spirit more than I liked the episode itself? idk. this show just has me a little wrongfooted. i find the emotional moments very heavyhanded.
but as a DS9 fan & a Tawny Newsome fan, i loved the intent & i’m not at all mad about it

- Tawny’s effects makeup was soooo weird. It looked like a plastic mask! i wasnt feeling it at all

- the Chancellor dinner rehearsal scenes were quite funny I thought!

I actually thought the rehearsal dinner killed the episode for me, so awkward and unfunny and irrelevant to A plot (unless I missed something), and the cringe sort of infected everything else.

I felt like any episode featuring super earnest hologram girl was going to be rough but they did a decent enough job of walking the line

hrrm

thanks i hate it

- Tawny’s effects makeup was soooo weird. It looked like a plastic mask! i wasnt feeling it at all

I know it is pointless to complain about prosthetic foreheads in star trek, but i struggle with the boss of cadets woman on this front, her hair coming out the back of her mask is just too strange lookin

(I reckon my kids would probably watch and enjoy show with me except they would scoff and check out immediately on seeing someone in dodgy alien forehead make-up) (sorry they are not good IDIC kids)

Things I liked about this episode:
- the fact Tawny turned out to be hosting Dax! So cool.
- Cirroc reprising Jake, and the sweet coda at the end from Avery Brooks (I read that was an already extant spoken word thing he'd done that he gave permission to use which was a nice suprise)
- blobfish farts
- SAM getting a backstory
- the DS9 loveletter generally

Things I really did not care for:
- the entire bar/SAM drunk scene. Loud, flashy, and mostly pointless, I felt.
- Like VG said, Tawny's makup. I didn't even realise she was Cardassian til I went back and looked at screenshots after. Her hair comes out ofthe prosthetics in an odd way.
- The dinner party scene. It was amusing, and I liked Holly's silly "stoned queen victoria" voice but... what was the point of that scene? To get Kelric to loosen up?

Apologies in advance if these spoiler tags dont work, I'm not sure how they go with bullet points.

Oh and looking at the IMDB I did *not* clock that SAM's Makers voice was Chiwetel!

There was also Jackie Cox in the episode.

I had no idea who that was, had to look it up. Never seen DragRace, though I could've guessed at it from that bartender in the scene.

Very drag queen of her to deescalate a potentially violent situation between hormonal teens using booze.

yeah that was cool to see her! she’s shorter than I though lol

*thought

I keep forgetting that Dan the Automater is doing the music for the show!

i wish they’d swap the conceit & make Tig the main character & the muppet babies the secondary characters

What the hell is going on with this show, I dont know. Not enough Thok or Reno, too much of the main guy, who has turned out to be the most useless of the kids crew as well.

Even the Doc/SAM episode last week did not move me in the way I could tell was meant to be happening. You know why? Because it *didn't feel earned*. For Doc it did, I guess, if you remember that sad story in Voyager where he made his own fam and the daughter died, but like they did in DISCO, they threaten the life of a main charater we've seen for five minutes and it doesn't feel like it holds any weight.

i was away for 5 weeks and thought i'd catch up when i got back. i was on the fence, and then ep3 i think starts with future-jocks with their abs out calling each other "douchebags", in the 325th century or whatever . i bailed. life is too short

OK having just seen the last 2 eps I reverse my opinion - great wrap up! Finally, some stakes, some action!

My sense is this got better as it went along, and is moreorless worth the effort?

As long as it's better than the last few seasons of Discovery, then fine

I'll have to bootleg it though, I can't be paying towards Skydance

Look it isnt great for a large chunk. And I am pretty lenient, and liked Picard and Discovery. first ep and last 2 eps were good, a lot f the rest was meh. But tbh, it depends what you want out of Trek I suppose because it wasnt a bad show, just (for me) a bit too slow in parts.

i really dug the finale after being mostly blah about the season. way better ep than i expected!

I actually thought the finale was kind of limp, and the moral resolution felt pretty cheap (and, if we're going by the Starfleet = USA analogy, self congratulatory), but it had its moments. Agreed with Trayce that we could've used way more Lura.

The thing that kept me going through the season was that the show felt like watching a TTRPG with chaotic characters fooling around in weird scenarios, which I can see being not everyone's tea if you're expecting something that's more polished. It's definitely a shaggy show.

It was kind of cringe but got at the main Star Trek ethos, that no matter how lofty your goals you’re still beholden to the fact living beings are not robots carrying out that ethos, and no static set of moral imperatives survives completely intact against reality

On the other hand, one of the most amazingly dead-end near-leftist podcast hosts had an opening episode I listened to years ago where she was naively missing that entire point and was saying that government should be like starfleet, to the extent she missed that the moral quandaries were the entire basis of the series. I was thinking, yeah, she would like this ending (derogatory)

They should have written it where the embattled starfleet *did* fire a single shot at the weapons emplacement and it still was catastrophic due to the weapon’s construction. Keep it morally ambiguous

I was a little bothered with how deus ex machina the Doctor was in solving how to just magically deactivate the omega particles, when its been made clear this is something even the borg couldnt work out? Reddit ppl speculated maybe the Doc was told something by Seven when she glimpsed the perfected Omega in Voyager. I guess that works, but it isnt clear if that was meant to be inferred.

i go stuck for ages in the booooring wedding episode which felt like a makeweight midseason episode of a particularly flat season of voyager

but i thought the last three were great and ep 9 in particular had me cheering “yes this the dumb space show with contrived emotions i like”

overall i think it was good and set out its own stall pretty convincingly, 7/10 will be back for more

holding out hope the throwaway holly hunter line about "academy anthem is a good idea!" means they commission a cadet to write the TMP/TNG theme for graduation and not um... IT'S BEEN A LONG ROAAAAAAAAAAAAD...

Holly Hunter standing next to Caleb gives me the biggest giggles. She’s so tiny! <3

xp it'd be such a brutal joke if they said "we found this earth classic in the vaults!"

xp yeah that last shot in ep10 kind of felt weirder than any prosthetic head aliens - like they were from planets with different aspect ratios and the poor DOP was trying to make it look normal but not quite getting there

*last shot of them together