Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
Starfleet Academy: its existence an obvious necessity within the United Federation of Planets, it has been referenced since the earliest days of Star Trek, James T Kirk commenting that he had been friends with Gary Mitchell during their time attending together, Jean-Luc Picard suggesting Wesley Crusher become friends with the gardener Boothby, the alternative “Kelvin” universe realigned to that it was there Kirk met and befriended Spock.
Producer Harve Bennet having proposed in the late eighties that the film series continue with younger versions of the known characters when he felt the original actors were too old, it is only now, almost forty years later, that the doors of Starfleet Academy are opened in full, the ninth live action Star Trek television series and the third tied with the Discovery universe and its time and dimension jumping backstory.
Developed by Gaia Violo and with oversight by Noga Landau and the current overseer of all things Trek Alex Kurtzman, beyond the opening scene the setting is the 3190s where former Starfleet Officer Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter) has been approached by Admiral Charles Vance (Oded Fehr) to reactivate her commission and take over as chancellor of the Academy, reopened after a century of turmoil following the Burn.
Ake hesitant, Vance forces her hand by revealing that he has information on the whereabouts of a young man missing for fifteen years since she sentenced his mother in a tribunal over the theft of food which resulted in the death of an officer, she regarded as an accomplice rather than instigator but Caleb Mir still to be taken as a ward of Starfleet until he escaped; now held as a prisoner, Ake sees this as chance to redeem both Caleb and herself.
Written by Violo and directed by Kurtzman, opening episode Kids These Days has a lot of work to do, building on the established universe but creating something new and exciting with a core cast younger than any previous version though with familiar faces to ease the passage, Voyager’s Robert Picardo as the Doctor, now nine hundred years old but still without a name, and Discovery’s Tig Notaro as engineer Jett Reno, both Academy instructors.
Klingon / Jem’Hadar hybrid Lura Thok (Gina Yashere) serving as Ake’s firm right-hand at the Academy and first officer aboard the training ship USS Athena, in her class are Cadets Genesis Lythe (Bella Shepard), a Dar-Sha, Jay-Den Kraag (Karim Diané), a Klingon medical student, the arrogant Darem Reymi (George Hawkins), a Khionian with his eyes on the captain’s chair, and SAM (Kerrice Brooks), a recently initiated photonic.
Celebrating the sixtieth anniversary since the first broadcast of Star Trek, it was once said that change is the essential process of all existence, and it is necessary to appeal to new audiences, offering younger viewers an entry point into an established and potentially daunting tangle of linked, overlapping and sometimes contradictory stories, but while as animated shows it could be argued that the prestige of Lower Decks and Prodigy would never rival that of a dramatic live action show, what does Starfleet Academy offer that those did not?
Caleb established as something of a prodigy himself, alone since he was a toddler yet proficient in advanced technology, like Michael Burnham whose lost mother was the Red Angel, it would seem that he is a “chosen one” in a narrative which already hews too closely to Harry Potter, taken to the Academy for honing and protection from scenery-chewing evil space pirate Nus Braka (Paul Giamatti), responsible for destroying his family.
Clarke having declared “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” it was during the run of The Next Generation that the accusation became frequent that solutions were often just “technobabble” but it was Discovery which unleashed that genie which has refused to be rebottled, ideas which once had a grounding in science displaced by incantations.
Caleb able to repel an influx of programmable matter impervious to the efforts of experienced officers which has disabled the Athena because he alone knows how to access the code, as with the ships of the later seasons of Discovery the aesthetic is more important than practicality, overcomplicated ships which could not exist outside of a digital environment and every frame tweaked, details and backgrounds and characters added in post-production.
An imagined fantasy rather than an aspired-for reality, Starfleet Academy is the first show to launch not with two discrete stories rather than a double-length feature of two linked episodes, though Kids These Days runs to over an hour, Beta Test reintroducing the Betazoids, now isolationists who withdrew following the Burn and feel they were mistreated by the Federation.
Caleb pushing boundaries which would have other students expelled but saved by his friendship with Tarima Sadal (Zoë Steiner), mystery girl introduced with backlit sun shining through her hair but later revealed as daughter of the president, written by Landau and Jane Maggs with Kurtzman again directing, it offers a diplomatic resolution surprising to nobody who has ever seen Bradward Boimler shout “compromise!”
Ambitions, biases, roommate rivalries, teen squabbles, pranks and awkward dating mistakes masquerading as drama, the Academy should be equivalent to a university where young adults who have proven their ability are able to hone those skills for a shared vision, yet instead it feels like high school, Jeff Russo’s heavy-handed soundtrack hammering home that cadets being hosed down with foam is childish rather than hilarious.
Duty, honour and service the pledge of Starfleet Academy, it is an unpromising start though one which may be embraced more by a younger target audience, but with both Lower Decks and Prodigy and their established characters and storylines abandoned in favour of this enrollment it is of little consolation to the followers of those genuinely beloved shows that these individuals are now the faces of the future.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is streaming on Paramount+
