Trailer: 'Star Trek: Starfleet Academy'

New blog entry now posted.

There's certain things they could do with this to make it genuinely interesting, and I don't know if they're going to do those things. Did they sit down as a writer's room and ask themselves what would a Starfleet Academy actually look like?

It would be another test of whether they really understand their fan base and their appetite for operational detail and real world translatability. Mock all you want, but Trek fans want to believe that what they see on the screen is achievable in our own world and a glimpse into our own future. That's why we geek out about ship classes and technobabble as much as characters and ideas. It makes it feel closer to reality. You don't even need Trek to see this. You can see it in procedural shows, from Bones and House to NCIS and ER. People love to learn. It's common to crave educational value as well as entertainment in modern shows. It's why Christopher Nolan has his following. You always walk out of his movies having learned things, having watched big ideas provocatively and intricately brainstormed. Or at least thinking you did.

That's also another reason Trekkies don't just drop everything and adopt the Star Wars milieu; Star Wars was never about inspiring 20th century human beings to enthusiastically tackle science and reach for the stars, but Star Trek was. When fans see the writers embracing this identity, they see the writers embracing THEM. It's just how it is.

So...Starfleet Academy. Did they do some homework? Did they get consultants from real colleges, scientists, survivalist, military experts, and game out a believable school for a diverse paramilitary exploration corps that young people in 2025 could see themselves joining, beyond just a touch and a collegiate-y term here and there? Or is this going to be Stardate 90210? Did they flesh anything out or are they just relying on flesh?

I'm not optimistic. This is the group that tells us to entrust our experience to Akiva Goldsman. I'm counting on more endlessly galling emotion along the lines of Discovery.

But this their best bet. Make it feel real. Sink their teeth into enough detail to really convince fans that the show is previewing the future. It isn't fantasy for all of us. Many of us WANT it to come to pass. That's been the whole point all along. Folks will be able to tell if the writers and producers have done real work on the show, and it will be interpreted as respect for the viewers.

By having an ensemble cast the hope would be episodes can approach different challenges utilizing the skills and experiences of those characters.

Hopefully this will avoid one of the main issues in trek since Voyager... That the captain is always right, and the right decision is right by virtue of being made by the captain .

Hoping for less trauma based back stories is probably a wish too far.

I think the concept of Starfleet Academy has a lot of potential. It’s a great setting for character growth and for exploring compelling technical and ethical dilemmas (Kobayashi Maru test!) without always needing to ground them in broader plot stakes or realism. That said, I’m skeptical that the current showrunners are the ones to pull it off in a satisfying way. My worry is it’ll end up feeling like "Discovery Lite: or "Degrassi in space."

I really wish this weren’t set in the 32nd century or whatever. It’s simply too big of a time jump from TNG.

@Gorn

It is, and it also robs any potential Legacy show of a great deal of interest because we know nothing major can happen. Zero suspense. Picard S3 suffered from the same problem, as good as it was.

Discovery hurt the franchise in so many ways.

This may seem out of left field, but they're using the same composer as in Discovery, and he looks like a hipster. I didn't like the scoring in Discovery, and the music sets the tone, if you'll pardon the pun. That's my review.

Some unrelated thoughts:

For a show that jumps so far in the future to presumably get rid of a bit of 23rd/24th century baggage, they sure have a lot of tie-ins to said baggage.

I'm not particularly keen on the 32nd century setting. It didn't interest me in Discovery because they did almost no world building (since everything was centered around Burnham), so I hope this show does something worthwhile with the timeframe.

And something miniscule I noticed in the trailer: it's the 32nd century, and the men still exclusively wear pants while the women choose between pants and skirts. Bring back the skant for everyone! You'd think there'd be gender equality a millennium from now.

The trailer shows evidence that they'll be leaning into fan service, with on-set references (in the background) to Kirk and Sisko.

It's possible to come up with a plausible backstory, explaining that they've got good reasons to be obsessed with studying heroic figures from a long-past "golden age" of Starfleet. I hope they will try. There is plenty of real-world precedent for it. Consider what an elite 18th or 19th century education looked like, and how heavily they focused on reading classical literature in Greek and Latin. Even in the military service academies, they studied Roman tacticians. It's like that, perhaps. That can be why in the 32nd century, these kids are driven to learn every available detail of the long-past glory days of the 23rd and 24th century Federation.

This is simply Discoverse slop of the worst kind. There is no best case scenario, unfortunately.

To paraphrase a source I can no longer find: 'This is what happens when people who know nothing write what they know.'

Correct me if I am wrong but I don't recall ever hearing any Star Trek fan say "Oh yeah, let's have an Academy series."
The threatened it a bit with the Kelvin era Trek but fortunately wound that in.

Anyway, no one wants this in the same way no one wanted a Kraven The Hunter or Madame Web movie. But some out of touch producer and studio execs thinks this is a good idea.

The trailer looks meh, exactly what I expected it to. I'm kind of loathe to say I hope it bombs because there are people that I like in this program. What I would like is for it to go away quickly.
I wont be watching it.

31st century ayy? Lol. Why not just make it the 115th century? Wouldn't that be even cooler?

Ohhhhh. It's because they need Michael Burnham to be in it, isn't it?

Nobody was clamoring for a Star Trek series set on a space station either. I remember that was the biggest knock on DS9 at the beginning. People couldn't wrap their heads around "Star Trek" with no ship. But DS9 turned out pretty well.

So, potentially... it could be fine. Although a space station can be part of a complex deep space mission intersecting many species, interests, and cultures. That easily translates to compelling stories.

It is a bit harder to see what a school setting can really contribute on that front, but we'll see.

Best case, they explore the characters and species deeply and do some world-building. There will still be lots of divergent cultures and species present, and if you develop those adequately you could get some really good stories. Interstellar politics could affect life at the Academy in interesting ways. In the 32nd century, even established species may have very different attitudes than we are familiar with, and different relationships than we are used to which can be explored. It's been 1000 frikkin' years. Maybe the Bajorans and Cardassians are allies, the Klingons have evolved a pacifist attitude, or other things like that which would make things really fresh to explore the same old races and universe in surprising new ways. Learning about that stuff through the interactions of cadets could be interesting.

Or they could just make it be about relationships and high school drama schlock, with some stereotypical bad guy/race. Starfleet 90210 as someone above put it. Then, somehow the cadets at the Academy become the absolute center of the interstellar political world and they save the Universe as we know it against all odds. Maybe the hero/heroine of the season turns out to be Michael Burnham in disguise all along!

I might wait till the season is over before I watch this one and read some reviews.

was that a female Jem'Hadar I saw in the trailer? Do the writers for this Academy show not even understand what the Jem'Hadar are? Or maybe they can explain away anything given this Academy series takes place in the 31st or 32nd century or whenever... that's not promising.

What’s drawing me to this series is The Doctor. He was the best character on Voyager. I hope, though, that his role isn’t kept to a level where he appears only sporatically and briefly, giving some extra the chance to say "Hi, Doc" as he passes by. I’d like to think that Picardo wouldn’t have taken the role if that was what his character was reduced to. I’d also like to hear about what he did and what experiences he had, like meeting Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Sisko et al., and Picard et al. I’m not expecting him to be the central character.

I hope to God they don’t bring in some random woman and try to pass her off as Janeway's (or whoever's) current-century descendant.

Oh man, I didn't even register that. Good catch, @Rahul. Hopefully that is not what it looks like.

Large but plausible cultural shifts within a society that make the political and cultural landscape unfamiliar and fresh for the audience is one thing.

A completely bio-engineered race that did not exist naturally and was not sexually reproducing developing a second gender is... well, something else.

Ugh. Hopefully just a similar looking costume on a background character.

I was wrong about Strange New Worlds so maybe I’ll be wrong about this show, but this could only work for me if it were a Berman-era TNG spinoff and even then I’m not so sure.

Female Jen Hadar?

@Rahul:
'was that a female Jem'Hadar I saw in the trailer?'

It very was.

'Do the writers for this Academy show not even understand what the Jem'Hadar are?'

No, they do not.

Don't think. Just chug the memberberry vinegar. What – you don't like it? Bitter and unpalatable, you say? Hater!!! THIS IS FOR THE FANS!!! You are making the executives sad.

While I'm not enthused about this show, the trailer leans into the Star Trek element, more than the teen drama. Sure, we see the "kids" paling around, and a bit of romance, but this really doesn't feel like they're going for the "CW demographic" to me.

I'm a bit let down that so many of the background characters seem to be human. Yeah, I know that it's canonical that there are lots of functionally indistinguishable alien races in Star Trek, but the existence of Starfleet as a 90%+ human organization has always rankled me, and it's even less excusable in the 32nd century when it's just returned to Earth.

There's a ton we still don't know about the show. Even the basic functional elements, like whether it will mostly be plot of the week with ongoing character arcs, or attempt to tell a big serialized story like DIS and PIC. I'll stay cautiously optimistic for now.

These Jem'Hadar are hundreds of years away from the Jem'Hadar in DS9. So they're most likely evolved, or been gengineered or emancipated in some way.

As for "Starfleet Academy", Kurtzman keeps comparing it to the "Harry Potter" franchise, which has recently produced a series set at the Hogwarts School of Wizardry. So knowing how Kurtzman's brain works, "Academy" may be another case of him chasing trends:

KURTZMAN: "What popular scifi/fantasy stuff can we rip off next?"

AKIVA: "Marvel and 'Star Wars'?"

KURTZMAN: "We're already doing that."

AKIVA: "'X-Files'?"

KURTZMAN: "I already made an 'X-Files' ripoff with 'Fringe'."

AKIVA: "'Lord of the Rings'?"

KURTZMAN: "I already put Legolas in 'Picard'."

AKIVA: "'Buffy'?

KURTZMAN: "Have you heard mycharacters speak?"

AKIVA: "'Alien' franchise?"

KURTZMAN: *points to Gorn*

AKIVA: "Harry Potter?"

KURTZMAN: "Finally! New Star Trek!"

The Starfleet Academy idea goes way, way back to Harve Bennett, who wanted the sixth movie to be a reboot with young Kirk, Spock, etc. If ST5 hadn't tanked, he might have gotten his way.

CANCEL THIS CRSP AND BRING BACKNDISCOVERY..I. EED EXPLORATION AND AWE AND WONDER AND NEW KIFE FORMS AND NEW PLANETS...NKT TEEMAGE ANGST AND WHISTLING HALF BREED KLINGONS!! And seriously is thus set in Discoverys future..since Tig Notaro and Ohded Fer whats hjs name are in it..then WHY NOT JJST KEEP DISCOVERY OM THE AIR..SAME TIME PERIOD SAME AMOUNT PF BUDGET..Isnt it a lie then theybhad budget isssues if they can afford something that clearly costs at least as much as Discovery or close?? Or better SAVE THIS MONEY TO MALE THE PICARD LEGACY SERIES AND A VOYAGER AND DS9 LEGACY SERIES..

Stridently put as ever by @Leif but you can't deny he's right.

I'm going to chime in here as someone who's been a reader since I was a teenager but who also went through a bit of culture shock when I discovered the Star Trek corners of the internet (circa 1999) and realized how incredibly hypercritical the fanbase can be. I also want to say that reading Jammer's Reviews was one of the influences that led me into a career where all I do is write—though not in media criticism. Just wanted to offer my bona fides before saying something positive.

I'm actually very excited for this show. I feel like the TNG era has been closed out in a way that was honestly miraculous and satisfying, especially considering where things stood after the Nemesis debacle. I really welcome this show and the 32nd century in general because it's placed beyond established canon. I want to move forward and feel like there's nothing ahead of us. I also appreciate how the passage of time and the burn reshaped what's possible by putting the Star Trek universe through a blender.

I've seen some anxieties about this not being in the TNG era, but aside from a general nostalgic check-in with the lore, I'm not sure what we really gain by staying in that timeline. We could endlessly revisit familiar characters and settings, but I don't really see Star Trek as a lore spreadsheet to check off (though I love the lore). I see it more as a platform for telling stories from a certain perspective. The Kurtzman era, for all its mixed reception, has been defined by emotional openness and healing, which really resonated with me. I'm looking forward to something completely new.

I also think science fiction as a genre is pretty mature now, and there's not a lot of truly new conceptual ground left. I see this in literature too. Sure, there are still idea-based stories to tell, but I think there are just as many stories worth telling about the human mind and heart, especially as science reveals more about the mind-body connection. Learning more about ourselves can help us understand more about the universe.

(Small rant: You can add me to the probably very small group of people who thought the Burn was a fascinating concept. I thought Su'Kal was a great sci-fi episode and basically a Star Trek exploration of the ideas in The Body Keeps the Score. Also, not to gripe, but Discovery is often dismissed as unrealistic or anti-science, and yet it rarely gets credit for when it does incorporate theoretical concepts, like time crystals, which come from real quantum mechanics research, or the depiction of conical waveforms in Face the Strange which the physicist Carlo Rovelli researches.)

They had a good show with a young cast learning what it means to be Starfleet officers. It was called Prodigy and it got cancelled.

I see the writers struggling to make this show good. They are having to introduce an external threat which has a connection to one of the young cadets. This is a red flag to me.

Sometimes you need your long suffering sporting team to get so bad that new ownership takes over and does something totally different with the franchise.

Such is the case with Kurtzman era Trek for me.

This show prompting an overhaul of Trek 'ownership' is the best case scenario for me.

A fat female Klingon/Jem'ha dar...

Yikes

Wrong casting choice for the Chancellor of SFA.

I didn't want this series, and I want it less now.

More likely that's a genderqueer Jem'Hadar.

You mean a Them'Hadar.

Dear God, please make it stop.

@wolfstar

'Them'Hadar' ought to be a series.

After all, The Founders were gender-fluid.

Best case scenario? I think that's already happened with the canceling of season 2. It will take some rave reviews to get me to watch any of it. SNW's third season is starting to drag me down.

@ "The Queen" - The "cancelling of Season 2" of Starfleet Academy is just an unverified *rumor*. And, due to Paramount's current contract with "Secret hideout", it really can't happen. According to many reports, that contract goes through August 2026.

This is why both SNW Season 5 and SFA Season 2 are going into simultaneous principal photography next month.

What the merged Paramount/Skydance *can* do is choose not to put the completed Season 2 on Paramount+. At that point "Secret Hideout" is free to shop the completed season to Netflix or Prime Video. This doesn't seem likely since Skydance actually wants a modified extension of the contract with "Secret Hideout". Not releasing a completed season of an expensive live-action Star Trek show is not a particularly good way to initiate negotiations.

@Brandon Your description of what Star Trek can be seriously moved me. Well said!

I'm mildly excited for this new outing. The trailer was fine and I love Holly Hunter, so that's something. But I couldn't make it through more than 3-4 episodes of Discovery, so I'm not too hopeful.

For me to like a show, I have to connect with the characters, and that's why Voyager is my favorite. Discovery didn't have any characters I connected with, except for Michelle Yeoh, so I lost interest very quickly once they killed her. (I know she apparently came back, but mirror universes don't interest me at all, so it wasn't enough incentive to try it again. I also couldn't get past those damn Klingons)

I also love Strange New Worlds. This third season has been somewhat underwhelming but I love the characters, so I'm still in.

So this new show will hinge on the likeability of the characters to me. I'm sure ready to give it a shot.

I'll probably watch but out of obligation. I'll turn on P+ for a month and binge. The less I have to pay for this dreck the better.

I don’t think this female Jem hadar is a big deal .

No idea what sorry they will tell, but is pretty Trek to think Odo/ Federation would have mercy on them and not have a passive genocide and watch them die out . It’s reasonable they could rig the creation process to make females and find them a home world and let them build their own society without the drug addiction and manipulation.

I just don’t think it’s out of line for something like that to happen instead of letting them go extinct .

@Dave-

I guess I think that is basically just creating an entirely new race while letting the traditional Jem Hadar passively die out. Why not just let them die out if that's what you are going to do anyways? Why bother to replace them, especially if they didn't exist in nature to begin with?

Allowing a genocidal sociopathic race to independently co-exist with other species is not a generous thing to do for anybody. And my understanding was that they were specifically bred to be that way, with empathy specifically selected against. They were so maniacal and radical and the white was the means to control them so they didn't go marauding through the galaxy on their own.

You'd have to genetically re-engineer this species so much as to be unrecognizable as "Jem Hadar". What would be the point?

I think it’s also kind of strange to genderize the jemhadar at all. They’re technically not male so to speak, but rather a genetically mass produced fighting animal whose masculine traits are simply coincidental to their function. They’re bred to be strong and aggressive, so they appear generally male, but really they’re non-gendered, more like neutral drones in a hive. So why not let them be that way as a species going forward? If one were so inclined to try to salvage such a dangerous creature.

From DS9 'To the Death':

'DAX: You people are no fun at all. Glad I'm not a Jem'Hadar woman.
VIRAK'KARA: There are no Jem'Hadar women.
DAX: So what do you do? Lay eggs?
VIRAK'KARA: Jem'Hadar are bred in birthing chambers. We are able to fight within three days of our emergence.
DAX: Lucky you. So let me get this straight. No food, so sleep, no women. No wonder you're so angry. After thirty or forty years of that, I'd be angry too.'

Star Trek: The Next Generation Z

The Academy could be an interesting take on post-Covid reopening of college campuses, and what Gen Z has had to endure. The Burn provides a similar framing. They are returning to the Acamdey in San Francisco after more than 100 years.

The cast is spectacular - The Yale duo of Paul Giamatti and Robert Picardo. Modeling The Academy after Yale isn't such a bad idea. Throw in Holly Hunter from CMU. Plus in the fantastic Admiral Vance (Vance too seems to be a common Yale name these days...), and all the ingredients are there.

But TPTB have such a bad track record, going back 25 years, to Enterprise, through the re-boot movies, through Discovery & Picard & all the other drek, that it would be shocking if The Academy is any better than mediocre.

The show runner last made Nancy Drew for the CW. They'll be going for a similar vibe here.

I'll be watching. But this won't be the Andor/Mandalorian revival of Star Trek. It won't even be Buffy.

It'll be, at best, the electric Jaguar mid-level trim of Dawson's Creek.

new Star Fleet Academy trailer just dropped, and in the immortal words of Captain Archer, "oh boy" .....


https://youtu.be/rHDDzcyNWGs

There's a new poster just released. Who is this shit for exactly? I think we've reached the point where it's some kind of tribalism thing or pure contrarianism. There is no way that anyone can look at these promos and be excited about this show. But, by God, you better believe there's going to be chunk of fandom that eats this shit pudding and swears it's ice cream.

Cue a couple of years of:

"You're old. TNG sucked at first. I'm going to see how the season plays out. I watch it because it pisses off the right people. Next year will be better!"

Yeah... not sure, @Black Oatmeal.

I was going to at least watch an episode or two and see if it interested me, but the more they advertise it, the more clear it is that they aren't targeting me at all. And while I am not egotistical enough to think that I am the only person out there that they should be trying to attract, I just... don't see this being a hit with any crowd.

Granted, I am not a TV exec, but this has flop written all over it. It's possible the advertising is way off and the show itself has a very different tone, but it's down to a crapshoot if I even watch the pilot at this point. I can accept that whatever might hook the next gen of fans may not be 100% appealing to me, but....

I think Trek is uniquely poorly suited to attracting that audience using a teenage school drama format. Even if it worked, it's not really a great entrance point for the rest of the canon. So... yeah.

In any case, most of us older fans became fans when we were younger. But I became a fan BECAUSE it wasn't "Friends" or "Seinfeld" or "Cheers" or any of those other mass popular contemporary shows. They made some cursory attempts to appeal to kids in TNG with Wesley and Alexander. I remember even my ten year old self thinking they were the worst parts of the show. What attracted me to Trek was seeing a cast of professionals. Solving problems. I loved seeing intellect and initiative get rewarded, not denigrated, bullied, or dismissed. And seeing a team of powerful people deliberately choosing to solve problems without using that force if it all possible, just because that was the right thing to do.

Those were things a nerdy smart kid like me valued, and I didn't really see those things being appreciated in many other media. And it was set in space with fun space adventures that were awesome fantasy!

Trying to turn that into a bubble gum show that will attract tons of 12 year olds seems a fool's errand. Just make Trek, for crying out loud! I don't care if it is the "Legacy" idea, the Admiral Bacula idea, or something else entirely. Just do it like Trek.

And if you aren't going to do that, at least give us old school fans the dignity of letting it die without mutilating the corpse first. Strange New Worlds is the only thing that has come halfway close, but they can't help themselves but to shoehorn in a bunch of high school drama behavior into a professional environment where that should have no place as a main theme.

Then again, it seems that maybe Star Trek 90210 is the show they've really wanted to write all along, so maybe they just finally got the right genre of show for the stories they want to tell.

Review Andor Jammer.

"it seems that maybe Star Trek 90210 is the show they've really wanted to write all along, so maybe they just finally got the right genre of show for the stories they want to tell."


Excellent point.

The new promo evokes Dawsons Creek, Vampire Diaries, 90210, that sort of thing. Teen dramas about growing up that probably were able to discuss sex and relationships in more mature ways than Star Trek has ever managed in sixty years. Soap opera shows about men and women learning from each other, frowned on for being feminine and therefore weak, that Star Trek fans viewed as somehow inherently inferior. Shows for supposedly lesser people, whom our online community convinced ourselves we were so much smarter than. While we isolated ourselves in allegory, women in catsuits and argued about Klingon foreheads, fans of these soap operas were opening themselves up to each other.

Toxic masculinity may be Star Trek's true final frontier.

Oh, I guess we've found the target audience - people who hate Star Trek.

LOL All fans do is hate on Star Trek all day.

Academy is for people who hate Star Trek fans whose toxic masculinity is so deeply rooted that a picture of six young people chillng in the grass unravels them.

The Star Trek online community has a deep unearned feeling of superiority to shows popular with women and younger people. Fans have long confused isolating themselves with the feeling of being "better" and "smarter" than the "popular" kids.

Some of us were being inspired by Star Trek to put in the hard work to become astronauts. Others wasted many hours losing themselves in fantasy, giving Star Trek an overblown sense of importance, and became deeply uninteresting and unapproachable and blamed others for our unhappiness.

Rex, this site is replete with real-life losers. Just look at the post count for some of these people. The sad thing is that many of them are intelligent. But, for one reason or another, they cocoon themselves in this ST fantasy world. Pathetic as it is, it would be an interesting case study for our times.