Review by C.J. Bunce
Personality, youthful banter, and optimism for an uncertain future takes the place of the trademark stilted technobabble and just may be the secret to success for the next Star Trek series. This past week saw the arrival of the pilot and second episode of Star Trek’s twelfth series, Starfleet Academy. Despite underwhelming trailers, showrunner Alex Kurtzman’s first episode did what no one has done before: He made a compelling, exciting, promising pilot that didn’t only retread on past ideas, it replaces stilted dialogue of more recent live-action series with the freer dialogue of Lower Decks and delivered a series opener that bests the rest with an interesting set-up, fun cadet players, and a variety of ship personnel. To top it off it provides a captain who is going to go her own way–instead of sitting back in her chair like the typical captain she is listening, leaning in as she seeks to propel forward the next generation.
The first two episodes of Starfleet Academy are now streaming on Paramount+, with the first episode available on YouTube free for a limited time.
Nobody could have guessed what to expect, since viewers have seen Star Trek’s Starfleet Academy in different forms for years, including a young Jean-Luc Picard in a Q-induced alternate timeline in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Wesley Crusher and others interacting with the infamous Boothby, the groundskeeper/mentor played by sci-fi legend Ray Walston, Admiral Janeway discuss her travels with students there in the distant future in Star Trek Voyager, in the J.J. Abrams movies we see Cadet Kirk go head-to-head with Spock as a teacher at Starfleet, and without a story to back it up even Playmates Toys had a line of Cadet Picard-era Starfleet Academy action figures in the 1990s. You may even have read the comics from IDW Publishing or played the Kirk era video game. But finally, after stops and starts with other attempts centered on the oft-mentioned San Francisco training grounds, here we are–the idea made it to an actual ten-episode series.
It’s no surprise that a couple Oscar-league actors should be able to get the job done. That’s Holly Hunter as Nahla Ake, a 422-year-old woman who is long-lived like Carol Kane’s fellow Lanthanite alien Pelia. Away from Starfleet for years, she’s been recruited as the new Chancellor to bring back Starfleet Academy, which hasn’t been around for the past century after everything was wiped out from a galaxy-wide devastation called the Burn. The series takes place in the 32nd century after the events of Discovery. But it doesn’t look like watching that series is a prerequisite for following this show. A freer spirit like Kane’s character, Ake’s personal attention to one character is similar to Captain Janeway’s efforts to guide younger crewmembers like Ensign Kim, B’Elanna Torres, and Seven of Nine back in the days of Star Trek Voyager. So this isn’t so much a pilot of all-new concepts, but one that corralled the better ideas and tropes of past start-ups and fit them together smoothly.
The first villain out of the gates is Paul Giamatti’s Nus Braka, a part Klingon, part Tellarite with an Xs and Os game etched on his head. Member of the Venari Ral crime syndicate, he has sparred with Ake before, specifically involving an accomplice played briefly by Tatiana Maslany. In the past Maslany’s character was sentenced to prison, leaving behind a son, who quickly escaped Ake’s custody. Flash forward 15 years later and Ake apprehends the boy, now a young man: Caleb Mir, played by Sandro Rosta, who took on the path of small-time criminal ever since. Ake convinces him to return to Earth to be one of the first students of the new Academy, accompanying her aboard the new educational ship, the Athena.
Easter eggs are at a maximum, but fan service a minimum. It’s a nice blend. We meet Ake’s executive officer, Lura Thok, an exquisitely made-up Jem’Hadar/Klingon played by Gina Yashere who harnesses every great drill sergeant vibe to keep the cadets in line. She sets an immediate, high bar for all the new ship and school personnel. She’s also more “military” than we’ve seen in Star Trek–a theme that will seem both disconcerting and intriguing to regular Trek viewers. The bridge crew looks good in a round of quick introductions, with some alien designs that finally catch up Star Trek with the myriad designs we’ve seen over the past decade from Doctor Who. You won’t need to listen too hard to recognize Stephen Colbert as the overhead voice of the dean of students, Colbert doing his best, humorous impersonation of Jim Rash’s Dean Pelton on Community.
With Caleb as the main point-of-view cadet, he has run-ins with the show’s key characters, similar to the core family-like group from the animated Lower Decks series. Bella Shepard plays Genesis (no, not that Genesis), a Dar-sha woman whose life with an admiral father means she not only has an appealing vibe but savvy to help save the day when the first crisis arrives. She and Caleb combine efforts on their first challenge and have some instant chemistry. Karim Diané plays Jay-Den Kraag, a new Klingon in the mold of Worf, who also distances himself from his Klingon warrior background. Kerrice Brooks plays SAM, a jovial hologram student from a planet full of holograms (a cool idea!) who is fixated on her hero, Robert Picardo’s medical hologram from Voyager who is still around and now a teacher following his stint on the Prodigy animated series (Picardo can be found everywhere chewing up the scenery like a “best of” album from his EMH past). Last up is George Hawkins as Darem Reymi, a Khionian cadet whose species allows him to do things other can’t (think Mordock the Benzite, but as shapeshifter).
Series openers or pilots–even if not technically a pilot (usually shopped to buyers to gain distribution interest) aren’t easy to get right. The 1960s Star Trek series pilot was re-used later in the series, and featured a look at early characters and uniforms. The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, Discovery, Lower Decks, and Strange New Worlds were all first-day arrival stories, and Picard didn’t skip the idea entirely. Starfleet Academy follows the first-day model, but the backstory mixed with the first ship attack all in the first episode somehow plays less like a new cast and crew and more like an established set of actors already comfortable in their roles. And they did it without any supernatural Q, or Kirk or Spock, or their relatives, although the college is riddled with memorials to past characters and crew from earlier Trek shows. Even what you’d think would have been a more obscure heroine, the brave, ill-fated Sito Jaxa gets her own memorial.
The second episode title is a play on Deanna Troi’s Betazed race–“Beta Test.” Here the series takes a side-step to show viewers it will be capable of delivering more of why fans keep coming back: good ol’ one-and-done alien-of-the-week episodes. This episode is primarily the script for The Next Generation episode “The Dauphin,” swapping Caleb for Wesley Crusher and young Betazed Tarima Sadal for Jaime Hubbard’s Salia, a tale of young love where the young woman is blocked off from exploring the larger world outside her culture (Caleb even takes her to see Stellar Cartography as well as some whales (there be whales here), similar to what Wesley did for Salia). Zoë Steiner–a ringer for a young Rachel Weisz–plays Tarima, who arrives with her brother and father. Romeo Carrere plays her brother Ocam, who joins the show as a regular (and looks like he’s going to be a hoot).
The siblings are proponents of opening up Betazed, which has been closed off to the galaxy for years, angry at Federation neglect following the Burn. Tarima’s story also borrows from the TNG Betazed episode “The Tin Man,” which starred Harry Groener (later more famous for his role on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as a Betazed with heightened telepathic/empathic abilities similar to Tarima’s, requiring some kind of dampener implanted on her neck. Add in the tried and true tropes of your standard First Contact episode negotiation and you’ll get the idea. Discovery’s Tig Notaro is back again as Jett Reno, joining Picardo as another teacher from the past. Together Notaro and Yashere provide a one-two punch suggesting that Starfleet Academy may be more like boot camp than college–a sharp contrast to Hunter’s easy going style.
The uniforms look great, especially a return to the Horatio Hornblower maroon naval wool uniform style for the captain from the Shatner crew movies. The officers have a wide variety of costumes, but the grey cadet designs are a nice progression from the look of the cadets in the final episode of Voyager and the later update found in the San Francisco scenes in the Abrams movies. Another throwback you may not readily notice is the overall effort to show the community at large, something found in an all-hands meeting in Star Trek: The Motion Picture and in both a bar (with Bones) and the denouement with alien admirals in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, where one could eye sporadic aliens in the crowd never to be seen again. Likely for cost reasons, the 32nd century is still a realm where more humans fill the screen than anyone else. Minor distractions include an over-use of digitally created characters, like a (cute) bright red exocomp flitting about where in the past a practical effect version did the trick. Other robots and drones zip about everywhere on the show, more Star Wars or The Jetsons than the typical Trek vibe.
Ultimately this is a breath of fresh air–a new start, fresh concepts, and young characters there to balance the seriousness of the mission with a sense of humor. Let’s hope they can keep it going. The first two episodes of Starfleet Academy are now streaming on Paramount+. New episodes arrive every Thursday. Note–you can watch the first episode now on YouTube for a limited time free here.
