Yes, I’d heard all of the responses. Dawson’s Trek. One Trek Hill, a reference to the Paramount promotional photo for this new series and its near-remake of the same for One Tree Hill. I watched the Critical Drinker episode on the new Star Trek series at Paramount Plus, as well as Nerdrotic’s even more acerbic review.
However, when it comes to Star Trek, my roots run deep. I may never have attended a convention, but I loved the original series, enjoyed The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, and saw almost all of the movies in the theater, up to First Contact. I even went to the theater to watch the J.J. Abrams reboot, although other longtime Trek fans warned that it mainly used the IP and the characters to deliver a more generic space-opera action movie.
And so, even with all of the bad reactions emerging from Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, I felt it necessary to watch both new episodes to decide for myself. And now I can truly say that the Star Trek IP is dead, Jim, really really dead.
The truth is this: We are not watching new recruits dealing with the trials and tribulations of entering Starfleet. Alex Kurtzman and Paramount instead have enrolled the audience in Woke Academy, and it’s as tedious and excruciating as you’d imagine. This isn’t the Star Trek universe, but instead a diversity-obsessed lecture series dressed up in Star Trek’s skins.
NOTE: Some spoilers ahead.
First off, the concept is absurd as a sustainable television series. The stakes are so small in focusing on a training college that the creators, led by Alex Kurtzman, have to put the newbies on a starship in the first episode for some reason and have it disabled by a space pirate, played by Paul Giamatti, who is the only actor delivering an enjoyable performance. I guess Starfleet needs to send its engineers back to the Academy, eh? That Episode 1 plot basically steals The Wrath of Khan while Holly Hunter’s Captain Nahla Ake sits like a child in the captain’s chair, obsessing over her sense of guilt in separating a child from his mother, who participated in a crime that ended up killing someone. Ake recruits the child, now grown, to attend the academy despite a life of crime up to that point in order to atone for her “unconscionable” decision to jail a woman who committed what would be seen today as felony murder.
Um … okay?
Episode 1 has some watchable moments, but almost all of them involve Giamatti. Sandro Rosta as Ake’s recruit Caleb Mir has some good action scenes, but only in the beginning, when his character had an interesting personality. The moment he passes through the uniforming and barbering portal – no, I am not kidding – Mir’s personality changes to that of a whiny, angsty teen with some hacking skills. The rest of the cast exists to check diversity boxes and cliché fulfillment, with an emphasis on neurodiversity. The interpersonal exchanges between the students reflect the worst of the Saved By The Bell genre. The further one gets into the episode, the worse it gets, rather than improving.
The science that always served as the core of Star Trek is laughably disposed for plot convenience. Starfleet Academy can’t decide whether holograms have physical forms that can manipulate objects. One interesting concept involves a holographic entity (named SAM) given a created physical form, but (a) she’s supposedly given a teenage personality with nearly none of the social intelligence earned by that age, and (b) seems to be no different than Dr. Picardo in an ability to physically interact with the environment. (Picardo helps carry a wounded crew member at one point.) If Picardo can do that, why bother with SAM?
Also: the climax of this episode involves sending a recruit into space without a containment suit and surviving. The show makes a quick reference to this person’s species being able to withstand the environment of the vacuum and temperature of space, but it doesn’t explain how Darem Reymi can hold a conversation in space where there is no air. I laughed out loud and said, “Come on, man,” during that sequence. Apparently, no one in Kurtzman Trek understands how speech and sounds work.
Anyway. At the end of this predictable resolution, complete with Giamatti’s maniacal laughter promising more to come from his piracy arc at some point, the starship finally chugs into San Francisco with its recruits. Guess what song gets dragged out for what seems like an hour-long sequence? Three guesses and the first two don’t count. Hint: Although the song never gets to its bridge, it might have been rewritten to be: All across the Federation, it’s a new generation … people in motion …
Unbelievably, Episode 2 is even worse. The problems begin at the end of the credits, when a title card lands with a dramatic percussion sound effect, announcing: FALL SEMESTER. (Oh no, not … FALL SEMESTER!!) It’s your first reminder that Star Trek: Starfleet Academy should be a side quest at best, perhaps a game for generating user characters for a Star Trek gamer universe with higher stakes. Rather than give us some character development after Episode 1, we get lectures in classes where all the girls are bosses, all the boys are problematic, and all of the lectures focus on diversity and activism.
The plot itself is ludicrous. In an attempt to inject some actual stakes into fall semester – excuse me, FALL SEMESTER!!1!1! – The Federation decides to hold extremely sensitive diplomatic negotiations with the Betazed government in the Academy lecture hall, with students filling the seats as observers, a profoundly stupid setup for the kind of negotiations taking place. And in fact, none of it matters, because the fate of both worlds will rest in the almost childlike romance between Caleb Mir and Tarima Sadal, the Betazed leader’s daughter. Will Caleb fall in love with Tarima? Will she fall in love with Caleb? Will a misunderstanding put everything at risk? Will an earnest profession of affection fix everything, including galactic relations? In Dawson’s Trek, you better believe it, because near-adolescent yearning is the strongest force in the universe.
The plot is hardly the only thing that’s off here. While I love Holly Hunter as an actor, she’s utterly unbelievable as a character who literally spent centuries as a member of a military organization. Her affectations are entirely bohemian, including being out of uniform and walking around barefoot while on duty as the chancellor and commander of the academy. She sits in her command chair like a child, wanting nothing more than a cup of cocoa and a hug. None of the young adult males act as though they made it past their first shave, while all of the young adult females are on hand to correct them – despite both groups being in a military academy by their own choice. The Betazed leader is deaf, which one would think would be treatable in the 33rd century where this is staged, and Hunter’s character wears glasses despite the whole Retinocs thread in Wrath of Khan and The Voyage Home films.
Why bother making a Star Trek series if you want to ignore the Star Trek environment and canon?
Some of these same criticisms could be and were applied to the J.J. Abrams’ films too, especially the idea that Stafleet handed Kirk a starship as a cadet and let him keep it, but at least some of the military bearing and discipline remained. In this case, it’s basically a Berkeley struggle session with better tech, attached at some points to teenage-dramedy clichés. Only with difficulty did I watch Episode 2 to its conclusion, which ended with the introduction of yet another neurodivergent character and bed-making 101. I kid you not.
This is not Star Trek; this is Kurtzman Trek, a more pernicious version of Abrams Trek without any of the latter’s entertainment value or acting chops. Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is so bad that it practically parodies the urge of Hollywood to skin old IPs and wear them as dressing for didactic lectures that are completely divorced from storytelling, coherence, and entertainment.
Using the Hot Air scale for films already on home theater platforms, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy gets a 1:
- 4 – Buy the film/subscribe to the service
- 3 – Worth a rental price or pay-per-view
- 2 – Wait for it to come on a TV channel you already get
- 1 – Avoid at all costs
And it only gets a 1 because there is no lower score possible.
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