The Star Trek franchise celebrates sixty years in 2026, and the first part of this year-long celebration is the debut of the ninth live-action Star Trek series, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. It stars Holly Hunter as Nahla Ake, the centuries-old Captain of the U.S.S. Athena and Chancellor of the newly reopened Starfleet Academy in San Francisco. How can she be both things? Don’t worry, we’ll get to that. But what you want to know most is the following. Does this show succeed, or does it fall into the trap so much modern Trek often does, which is trying super hard not to be “too Star Trek?” Well, yes and no. But mostly, yes. For better or worse.
Let’s start with something we like first. And that’s the great Holly Hunter as our Captain. Hunter is an Academy Award winner, who has been fantastic in film after film for decades. And she gives the show the right amount of spunk and verve. Standing at 5’2, she’s a tiny powerhouse, who uses her physicality as part of her character. She’s so short she can literally curl up in her Captain’s chair like a cat, something Captain Picard and Captain Burnham couldn’t get away with. But it gives her Captain a “signature” trait right away. It tells us she knows how to lead, but has been around too long to care about formality.
Hunter plays her character with her trademark sassy Southern drawl, but with a steely resolve in more serious moments. She’s hundreds of years old, so it’s nice to see she’s not going to lose her cool the second a bad guy (or an uppity student) tries to get under her skin. Although a little offputting at first, she grows into the role over the course of the pilot. Or, we simply become used to her. Less impressive is another Oscar nominee, Paul Giammati, as the recurring half Klingon villain Nus Braka. He’s very cliché and annoying in the first episode, but is far better when he appears later in the season.
The series is technically a spin-off of Star Trek: Discovery, which, in its final seasons, fast-forwarded from a pre-Original Series late 23rd century to the 32nd century, a whopping 800 years past the last canonical Trek installment Picard. In this future, Starfleet has been greatly reduced by an event called “the Burn,” which crippled almost all the warp speed capability of Starfleet. Alien species were separated from each other and it took the Discovery crew to fix it all. By Discovery‘s end, Starfleet announces that the Academy is enrolling new students for the first time in 120 years. And thus ushering in a new era of exploration. This is where our new show begins.
The pilot episode opens interestingly enough, with Holly Hunter’s Nahla Ake having to make a horrible choice as a Starfleet officer. This haunts her for years, and she even quits Starfleet because of it. Years later, once Starfleet Academy has started up again, Admiral Vance (Oded Fehr) from Discovery recruits Ake to run the Academy as Chancellor. Since Ake is half Lanthanite (a long-lived species introduced in Strange New Worlds), she was around for Starfleet’s glory years. She reluctantly agrees when she finds out that with her new post she can make up for some past sins.
That biggest past sin involved the now-grown-up child once forcibly separated, Caleb Mir (Sandro Rosta). He provides Ake a chance at redeeming her greatest mistake, as she promises Caleb help in finding his long-missing mom. And she enlists him in the Academy as a means to do so. Starfleet Academy tries to have it both ways, being a show set on a space-bound starship, as expected in Star Trek, as well as being grounded on Earth in San Francisco. We learn that the ship is the campus, at least part of the time. It’s a cool enough concept, even if this glorious starship (and the Athena is indeed beautiful) is grounded way too often.
Starfleet Academy has been rumored for literally decades and Trek fans always seemed to revolt against the idea, often in a knee-jerk way. The go-to complaint was always that it would be “Star Trek: 90210.” And oddly enough, that’s often what the show is. For viewers of a certain age, there is one duo that just screams Dylan and Brenda from Beverly Hills: 90210. Both actors are almost supernaturally pretty, but neither is compelling enough to make this young romance an interesting hook. We couldn’t help but roll our eyes at all their romantic back and forth. It’s a repartee that took up way too much real estate in the early episodes.
Another negative rears its head around episode three, which has to do with the Academy’s competing school-within-the-school, the “War College.” It’s clear the creators are going for a “Gryffindor vs. Slytherin” thing here, but it’s actually kind of annoying. Much of the appeal of Star Trek is that by the 23rd century, humanity has evolved past sexism and racism. That’s the Gene Roddenberry ethos. But apparently school bullying is still standard in 1,000 years? That feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of Trek. Characters can be flawed and have arguments, of course, but this kind of bullying feels out of place. Especially as these cadets supposedly represent “the best of the best.”
The other weak point for the series, from a Trekkie viewpoint, is how much it feels like the Federation has stood still for centuries. Yes, the Burn happened, but are you telling us Starfleet has had no major advancements in the previous 700 years before that? Discovery introduced the biggest 32nd century advancement, which is that everyone has personal transporters now, making folks move about like the X-Men’s Nightcrawler. That’s cool, but why not think more outside the box a bit? Trek was always about pushing technology forward from series to series. This shows how Starfleet has been standing still, technology-wise, for hundreds of years, and it’s just not very inspiring.
So what’s good about Starfleet Academy then? Around episodes four through six, we start to focus more on the other cadets in the cast. Jay-Den Kraag (Karim Diané) is a Klingon who is different from the rest of his kind. Yet he still carries many of the traits we love about the honorable warrior race. Sam (Kerrice Brooks) is also a delight as a being from a holographic species. She’s only weeks old, but programmed with the mind of a teenager. That’s actually interesting in the way the Doctor on Voyager was. She’s the character who is just happy to be there. And when she’s on screen, we are happy to be there with her, too. The other main cadets, Darem Reymi (George Hawkins) and Genesis Lythe (Bella Shepard), have promise but don’t make a huge impression just yet.
Speaking of the Doctor, Robert Picardo returns as the holographic Emergency Medical Hologram, now 800 years old and a teacher to the students. Picardo plays the character the exact same way, yet with a touch of wisdom and sadness that comes with seeing generations of your friends die and so much galactic upheaval. And he has to remember every second of it. Along with the Doctor, the rest of the Academy faculty are also highlights of the series, especially Lura Thok (Gina Yashere), the half Klingon, half Jem ‘Hadar first officer of the Athena and the cadet master at the Academy. Yes, she plays a version of the tough-as-nails drill sergeant (with a heart of gold) we’ve seen in so many projects, but she does it with style. We liked her right away. Another welcome return is Discovery’s Tig Notaro as Engineer Jett Reno.
Right now, Starfleet Academy has potential, but it needs to be less soap opera and have some bigger sci-fi ideas as part of the mix. By the way, this is a problem with modern Star Trek overall, not just this show. It leans into the YA of it all, hoping desperately to lure in those covered younger viewers by being more about romances and “ships” than a group of characters coming together to solve an interesting sci-fi problem. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a story about young cadets in a new era. But this show needs bigger ideas and bolder statements if it’s going to stand out in a universe filled with big-budget sci-fi projects all trying to get our attention.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy begins its first season on Paramount+ on January 15.