Just like any young kid thrust out into the world for their first real taste of independence at college, Starfleet Academy has a lot on its shoulders. It is a brand-new Star Trek show, and that always comes with plenty of expectation. It’s the first in an inevitable phaser-barrage of celebrations in Star Trek‘s 60th anniversary year. It’s also, in many ways, a legacy sequel in its own right to the series that, occasionally with some controversy, reignited Star Trek‘s status as a TV legend, Star Trek: Discovery.
It’s also, thanks to Discovery‘s own bold choice midway through—to leap from a time before the original Trek to further forward in the franchise’s timeline than any show had gone before it—on the edge of the frontier in ways all enduring franchises should want. This isn’t just a new Star Trek show; it’s a chance for new Star Trek, an opportunity to engage with new ideas, aesthetics, stories, and advancements that push what Star Trek is and can be beyond echoes of its past triumphs.
But again, just like any young kid thrust out into the world for their first real taste of independence—Starfleet Academy isn’t much one for worrying about what other people’s expectations are of it. With the kind of reckless confidence that befits its young class of the next generation of Starfleet officers, Academy is a show that knows what it wants to be, knows that it will ruffle some of the old generation’s feathers, and gets on with having a bit of fun anyway.
Set nebulously around the time of the events of the back half of Star Trek: Discovery in the late 32nd century, Starfleet Academy follows the re-establishment of the titular institute in the wake of a cataclysmic galactic event called “The Burn,” the random inertia of all active dilithium, leading to the impromptu detonation of warp cores across the known galaxy, killing untold amounts of people and effectively rendering FTL travel across the galaxy extremely limited at best and impossible at worst.
While Discovery itself explored some of the aftermath of the Burn in its third season and onwards—and the solving of its mysterious causes—Starfleet Academy is more interested in examining what the universe, and its systems of power like the Federation, look like as they begin to slowly rebuild 120 years after the catastrophe.
It does so through the eyes of a motley crew of characters, united by the reopening of the Academy to the first class of students to attend the hallowed institution since the Burn. On the senior level, there’s the show’s primary authority figure, Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter, who aces the role with a devilishly playful streak), a long-lived half-Lanthanite—the same humanoid species as Carol Kane’s Pelia on Strange New Worlds—who returns to Starfleet after years away as both academy chancellor and captain of the ship the academy is based out of, the USS Athena.
As someone who has been around long enough to have seen the heights of the Federation before the Burn, its splintering and near-eradication after it, and now a major figure in its restoration on the galactic stage, she leads an old guard that includes faces familiar and new, like Gina Yashere’s comically shouty Cadet Master Lura Thok (one of several fascinating hybrids of Trek species on the show, a Jem’Hadar/Klingon), Discovery‘s Tig Notaro returning as engineer and professor Jett Reno (one of several guests from that show, including Oded Fehr’s Admiral Vance), and Robert Picardo reprising his role as Voyager‘s Emergency Medical Hologram, head of the academy’s medical studies (and delightfully hitting pretty much every beat from his time as the doctor as he can, opera singing included).
But while they play a major role in the show—and are much better fleshed out as characters in contrast to Discovery‘s own broad approach to its senior crew—Starfleet Academy‘s primary lens is through a handful of its new young students. Chief among them is Sandro Rosta’s Caleb Mir, a rough-around-the-edges human whose search for his missing mother ties him both to Ake’s past and the closest thing the show has to a primary villain, Paul Giamatti’s piratical Nus Braka (who, like Hunter, is clearly having a fantastic time, whether he’s chewing scenery like it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet or delivering some genuinely threatening menace).
Mir’s joined by Karim Diané as Jay-Den Kraag, the only Klingon student among the academy’s new roster; George Hawkins as the jockish pretty boy Darem Reymi, regularly paired with Bella Shepard’s Genesis Lythe, as two young aliens from new species (the Khionians and the Dar-Sha, respectively) with high familial expectations on their time at the academy; and Kerrice Brooks as the spunkily energetic Series Acclimation Mil (or Sam, to her new friends), a holographic emissary from her photonic creators studying if organic life is worth their world of sentient holo-beings reintegrating with.
It is on these kids not just to explore the typical rigors of life as young adults—grappling with their studies and hormones in equal measure as they push and pull of their various responsibilities and the expectations put upon them by their seniors—but to help Starfleet Academy answer a core question: given the chance to rebuild what Starfleet and the Federation at large can be to the galaxy from almost the ground up again, what should the future of Star Trek at this far-flung point in time, so distant from the bulk of the rest of the franchise, begin to even look like?
The answer that begins to unfold across the first six episodes of the debut season provided for review, is a work in progress, much like its young students are. Starfleet Academy is—only rivaled by the likes of Prodigy and Lower Decks—brimming with a youthful energy that will charm some Star Trek fans and deeply infuriate others. While not explicitly a comedy show like Lower Decks (although it does count Tawny Newsome among its producers and writers), it is a show that likes to have fun and has a lot of dumb young adults regularly doing dumb young things.
There’s plenty of things the cadets get up to that aren’t exactly becoming of officer material, like getting smashed at the local bar, playing pranks on each other, getting into high-emotion scraps over relatively inconsequential disagreements, or figuring out who’s into whom. On that note, while the show does have a “primary” romance plot between Caleb and fellow student Tarima Sadal, a Betazoid played by Zoë Steiner, this is also where the series explores a lot of casual queerness that builds nicely on Discovery‘s own exploration of LGBTQ characters.
While Lower Decks could defend itself from die-hard Trekkie consternation by matching its shenanigans with a sincere, nerdy adoration for Star Trek at large, Starfleet Academy adopts a different kind of sincerity that exudes throughout its cast: even in the face of dark and uncertain times, these are people having a ton of fun, exploring who they are and who they want to be, and the messiness that comes with that journey of self-discovery.
It’s all classic Star Trek ideas—a curiosity for the world and peoples around it, messages of diversity and community in the face of division—rooted in the perspective and centering the stories of a cast of young adults who, metatextually or otherwise, are yet to really grapple with the long legacy of what Star Trek has been before they came along.
Starfleet Academy doesn’t always do that with grace—there’s an occasional jarring fumble where its more lighthearted tone and contemporary voice will bristle with preconceived notions of the decorum of Star Trek characters and no doubt restart the kinds of “not true Trek” arguments that plagued Discovery throughout its run. But Starfleet Academy does take this tone with that aforementioned sincerity and a level of confidence that it’s worth riding out the occasional bump in the road to get to know, and be endeared by, the slow growth of this cast of characters.
But while that youth-driven fun is key to Starfleet Academy‘s heart, and its stakes are by and large on a much smaller scale (while the show borrows a lot from the emotionality of Discovery, it’s much less burdensome than it could be in that series because the entire galaxy is not under devastating threat every week), that’s not to say that the show is incurious in more typically serious and familiar Star Trek fare and its place in its legacy.
After the initial dust settles on establishing its young crew, several of the episodes provided are about advancing the current status quo of the Star Trek universe forward as the Federation begins rebuilding in earnest, engaging with broader stakes that see Starfleet Academy‘s young heroes start to reckon with a bigger world beyond themselves that isn’t all fun and games. These are kids training to be Starfleet officers after all, and occasionally that means politics and conflict occasionally come crashing down upon them to see if they can rise to the occasion, and Starfleet Academy does a great job of balancing the tension between its more lighthearted stories and its dips into more seriously existential matters.
There’s some real meat here for longtime Trek fans willing to engage with Starfleet Academy‘s perspective, in both how the series starts to really reckon with the Burn and its ramifications—in a way that Discovery largely stopped doing after it was the arc of its third season—and what it really means for this show and its characters, so far removed from stories and characters of much of the rest of the franchise, to engage with them as moments of a history from long before them, and how they can continue to impact Star Trek even as it charts a new status quo in this farthest future setting.
While Starfleet Academy is very much about charting a new path and perspectives for Star Trek through its young protagonists, it is never about doing so at the expense of ignoring where the series has been before (without going into details, one episode in particular nails this synthesis in such a way that it stands out not only as an early contender for one of 2026’s best TV moments, but as one of the best episodes of Star Trek we’ve had in the last few years).
It’s that that makes the series easy to forgive for its occasionally messy stumbles. It is, after all, just like its students, still trying to figure out what it is and what it can get away with—and doing so while trying to honor what Star Trek has already done to endure and challenge itself over the last 60 years. There couldn’t really be a more fitting series to launch for such a special anniversary: Starfleet Academy clearly has a lot of love for what has come before it, and how that history will shape this next generation. But it also loves Star Trek enough to keep trying to push it forward, too, and keep its legacy humble as it looks hopefully to the next 60 years beyond it.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy begins streaming on Paramount+ January 15.
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Source: gizmodo.com
