(courtesy IMP Awards)
There’s a peculiar thing that happens to some people when they love something for a long time.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a religion, a food or, as is pertinent here, a TV franchise, what was once fresh, exciting and new for them, a place to explore and learn and feel, to be challenged and grow, suddenly becomes an orthodoxy so rigorously inflexible that no amount of clever new storytelling or innovative approaches can shift them.
They want what they love as they once loved it and it is not allowed to change, not even over decades where change is, of course, all but inevitable unless you want the object of your unyielding affection to wither and die and simply become a museum piece trading on old glories.
Star Trek is just the latest in a long line of things people get mercilessly and inflexibly devoted to, and the latest show to suffer the ire of damning fans who want Kirk and Picard and nothing but Kirk and Picard is Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, newly released on Paramount+ and already signed up for a second season.
The irony is that while Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is very much of the Young Adult (YA) here and now, it is a devoted tribute to the franchise, much like Star Trek: Discovery, which also attracted the condemnation and virulent hatred of the “true believers”.
Set after the events of Discovery‘s “The Burn” storyline which explored the effects of a “galaxy-wide cataclysmic event that occurred circa 3069, in which most dilithium mysteriously went inert, causing the detonation of every active warp core.”
This just about destroyed the United Federation of Planets and led to the galaxy retreating to very fixed safe lines with dilithium in very short supply and every alien race and civilisation out for itself.
The good news is that after a century of destructive isolation, the crew of the Discovery ended the galaxy’s death spiral into ghettoised self-interest and the Federation was able to begin rebuilding.
Enter a revived and renewed Starfleet Academy which is introduced in the first episode of the series, “Kids These Days”, which takes us onto the USS Athena, captained by the woman who will become the new chancellor of the institution, Captain Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter in goofily authoritative form), a 422-year-old half-Lanthanite who live a long time and who have a ton of perspective on just about everything.
But before we meet the person who will head the revived academy and the ship which, rather wonderfully, drops into earth orbit to become an integral part of it, we’re taken back a number of years to when a human mother Anisha Mir (Tatiana Maslany), who only wants to look after her five-year-old son, Caleb (Sandro Rosta), is sentenced to serve time in a Federation labour camp because she desperately threw her lot in with a man who, unbeknownst to her, turned out to be a pirate (Paul Giamatti as Nus Braka).
This piece of heartrending exposition proves pivotal with the officer doing the sentencing, one Nahal Ake, after promising to take care of Caleb while his mother serves time, finds herself spending 15 years trying to find him after he flees into the depths of the industrial colony on which the events take place.
Well over a decade later, Ake tracks him down and whisks him off to become one of the first intake in a century at the Academy and it’s this sometimes fractious, somewhat parental relationship between the two that forms the emotional backbone of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.
While the series is, so far at least, episodic in nature, exploring how the core group of students – Caleb, his frenemy Khionian Darem Reymi (George Hawkins), Admiral’s daughter and chronic over-achiever Genesis Lythe (Bella Shperard), pacifist Klingon and birdwatcher Jay-Den Kraag (Karim Diané) and hologramic Kasqian Sam (Series Acclimation Mil), played by Kerrice Brooks – fit into their demanding new world, this link between Ake and Caleb is an arc that continues on as the latter is given help by the former to find his missing mother.
Not only is this relationship key to the storytelling of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy but it also gives us a chance to go behind the scenes of the action, so to speak, as Caleb is able to have the sort of relaxed, chatty relationship, though it’s fractious at first since Ake did after all, did first separate Caleb and his mum, with Ake that none of the other candidates can manage.
Every series of Star Trek has had this sort of cross-hierarchical at its core and it means that we get to hear about and see all kinds of things that cannot be talked about or displayed in the more formal relationships that by necessity in Starfleet govern how people interact with each other.
While Star Trek: Starfleet Academy can get a little melodramatically YA-ish at times, it’s worth remembering that it’s taking us into a world full of young people trying to find their way in a place where their “big-fish-small-pond” personas and approaches to life are having to make a pretty severe change.
They are just one of many brilliant, talented, young recruits and as the first people in a century to be training to be Starfleet officers, there’s a lot riding on people who are still figuring out who they are as people so, yes, sometimes, they will behave immaturely or stupidly and very un-Star Trek-like but that’s to be expected at their time of life and it’s great to see the show reflect that.
But while their experience of Starfleet may be nascent, the franchise behind the show they’re in is anything but, celebrating sixty years of existence this year, which means Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has a lot to draw on to honour a considerable legacy which it does in ways obvious to not-so-obvious.
From the names on the honour board at the Academy to the name of the institution’s memorial garden through to cast member the Doctor (Robert Picardo) from Star Trek: Voyager to characters popping up from Star Trek:Prodigy, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has a ton of Easter eggs which is not only entertaining but which underscore how deeply and sincerely this show honours the franchise’s history and how misguided the “true believers” are in dismissing it as a flimsy, woke travesty (and worse, sadly).
What Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is is a wondrously good and hugely enjoyable fresh take on a venerable franchise, which well and truly pays homage to all 11 shows and the many movies that have come before it but which also acknowledges that the times they are a-changing and that Star Trek must change with it.
It balances the past and the 32nd century (21st century for that matter) present beautifully, and while some people may not think a captain should be as goofy or sit as creatively as Ake does (it’s never at the expense of her fierce intelligence or insight so what’s the issue here?) or that people like the students should be as sweary and melodramatically inclined, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy acquits itself beautifully, giving us great action, richly buoyant humour, touching moments and a sense that, if this is the future of Star Trek, that it’s in very safe and hugely enjoyable hands.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy streams on Paramount+