And now for something completely different.
On January 15, Paramount Plus released the first two episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. I’ve only had time to see the pilot (‘Kids These Days’). And while I don’t know if I like this as much as Strange New Worlds, it has potential.
It is notable not for its cast of young cadet characters so much as the stellar cast around them, like Holly Hunter, Paul Giamatti and recurring Trek people like Oded Fehr and Robert Picardo as “The Doctor” (who as a hologram could feasibly exist for 900+ years in the Star Trek: Discovery timeline).
As with Discovery’s even farther-into-the-future than regular Star Trek setting, there are a number of alien-hybrid characters and a vast array of species on screen, one of which by canon really ought to be extinct by now.
Hunter plays Captain Nahla Ake, a very Holly Hunter-like character who rolls her legs up on her command chair while giving orders or facing off a villain. But the point-of-view character is named Caleb Mir, who is first shown in flashback from 15 years prior, when his mother (Tatiana Maslany) has been manipulated by the ruthless Nus Braka (Giamatti) into a supply raid that ended up killing Federation officers. Ake is the officer who pronounces sentence on the two which means separating Caleb from his Mom and making him a ward of the Federation. But he made his first opportunity to escape and had been on the run ever since. Ake resigned her commission over the whole incident, but after the “Burn” disaster is resolved (in Season 3 of Discovery) Admiral Vance, the head of Starfleet (Fehr) catches up with Ake and offers her the chance to run a new Starfleet Academy/War College to train the (ahem) next generation of officers as the Federation rebuilds. She demurs but Vance dangles the carrot of being able to trace the whereabouts of Mir. Mir (Sandro Rosta) turns out to be a roughened criminal escaping from one prison planet to land up in the next, but Ake gives him her own offer to use her resources in Starfleet to find out what happened to his mother.
And by the way, props to the producers for casting the male lead as a black person, in the tradition of Ben Sisko and Michael Burnham, and in the spirit of Whoopi Goldberg saying that when she saw Nichelle Nichols on the original Star Trek, it confirmed that Black people would continue to exist in the future. Cause right now, that’s kind of up in the air.
The two fly out to the starship Athena, which looks pretty impressive, at least from the overhead view. It is actually the nucleus of the campus building which is to fly itself to San Francisco and serve as the Academy’s new headquarters. In his first day or so, Caleb runs into other cadets, being a pacifist Klingon med student, a young culture student who happens to be the daughter of an admiral, an elitist jerk who is still capable of doing the right thing, and another culture student who is actually from an entire culture of sentient holograms.
And on the way to Earth, Nus Braka shows up to attack the ship, with a Tic-Tac-Toe game carved into his hairdo and serving up more ham than an Easter Sunday brunch. He uses “protomatter” to disable the Athena and try to steal its warp drive, but Mir with his own hacker knowledge of protomatter is able to devise a scheme to override his controls. But this leads to Braka teleporting on board to fight Caleb, in the course of which he tells him that his Mom helped him break out of prison, but doesn’t say what happened to her before he inevitably escapes.
This is yet another case of a Star Trek hero breaking protocols and getting away with it because it turned out to yield the right result. So Caleb gets to stay in the Academy on detention while Ake helps continue the search for his mother, and so the premise is set.
As you see, this isn’t treading that much new ground, with several Trek shows having aliens cast against type and Voyager having officers who were not just roguish but actual criminals. What intrigues me about the long term prospects of Starfleet Academy is that it potentially expands the setting of Discovery from Season 2, which the latter seasons didn’t really do much with. In particular, the rebuilt Starfleet Academy is set up to be part of a larger story in which a former “good guy” nation reduced to the Dark Ages rebuilds not only itself but the broader civilization that formed around it.
Which seems pretty relevant right now.