Posted by Joey Peters on Jan 29, 2026
So it’s time to inaugurate a new Star Trek series into the canon. Welcome, Starfleet Academy. Welcome to hell!
A lot of Star Trek fans are really up in arms about the theme and premise. For the most part, Star Trek fans will hate anything new. Trekkies hated The Next Generation when it first premiered. For the first half of the wilderness period after Star Trek: Enterprise was canceled it was accepted in Star Trek fandom that Voyager was the “good” one and Deep Space 9 was the “bad” one. Eventually the fandom for Battlestar Galactica pushed this into the reverse, which is good and correct. This is all to say, Star Trek fans don’t know what the fuck they want and you shouldn’t listen to them. Probably not even me.
I’ll lay my priors on the table. I think Deep Space 9 is the best series. I grew up with The Next Generation and frankly that set the palette for my morality. I aspire to be as much like TNG Picard as possible(the distinction between Dirty Bike Picard and Flanderized Robot Picard being important), but it is unfortunate that I probably map on better to a bizarre hybrid of Chief O’Brien and, somehow, Worf, of all people. I like TOS mostly, not in spite of it being goofy but because of its goofiness. The TOS movies are the only Star Trek movies worth watching.
I understand from a craft perspective First Contact isn’t a complete shit pile, but it doesn’t give me what I want from Star Trek. I don’t like the militarism and aggression. I love the hopeful look toward the best case scenario future. Look at my ongoing novel series! I love to see a version of mankind that has set aside all the bad things that prevent us from working together.
I am at best lukewarm on the modern Star Trek series. I think it’s bad that they tend to focus on one character as opposed to a large cast of characters. Discovery started off weakly mostly because it didn’t have clear direction and it seemed build on the bones of half-assed fan service. Hey Lois do you remember Harry Mudd? Well, he’s grim and gritty and doing mass murder now! Isn’t that serious! The second season felt largely like they took fandom response and panicked to turn the show into something new and different after a prolonged stupid grim and gritty story line.
From Season 3 onward it was an entirely new show, but it still didn’t have a clear idea of where it was going or what it was trying to do. Interestingly enough, the version from season 3 on was pretty much exactly what I wanted in a new Star Trek series, albeit some what questionably slapped together. A lot of the plot elements from that season going forward are very similar to my Star Trek fanfic with the serial numbers filed off, Starship Victory. I’ll get around to re-releasing that book at some point.
Star Trek: Picard started off with a mostly interesting first season, but they had no clear direction. They wrapped up the plot haphazardly so they could move on to a half-assed retread of Star Trek IV: The One With the Whales. Season three is the worst Star Trek has even been, it makes the Space War on Terror season of Enterprise look like DS9 season 5. It’s a bunch of incompetent fan service that sucks with one interesting character pointing out, “Hey, this is badly written, maybe you should do another pass on this plot guys!” And then he’s killed off and sent to Double Hell.
Lower Decks was made by people that actually love the franchise. I have nothing negative to say about it.
Strange New Worlds had a promising start, but ultimately the show is written by liberals who still want to do grim and gritty stories about hope but don’t know how these things work. It took a gigantic shit all over itself in season 3 as the writer’s strike rushed through badly undercooked scripts.
Prodigy was a perfectly acceptable children’s show.
So at best modern Star Trek is very hit or miss.
I think Starfleet Academy starts off fairly promising. We are presented with a mother and terrified child in a somewhat dystopian space scenario. They are rolled out to a trial where Paul Giamatti as a half Tellarite half Klingon is gloating about mercing a Starfleet ship to get food for them. Starfleet security jarheads have Paul Giamatti in those neck ring poles that zookeepers use to guide animals around. There’s a Starfleet captain who is very grim and gritty and sentences Paul Giamatti to a lifetime of slavery in a Federation mine colony and the mother to a lifetime of slavery in a less bad environment. The child is very upset that his mother is being taken away for the terrible crime of letting Paul Giamatti get her some food and then tricks the very stupid Starfleet captain and escapes himself.
It’s not explicit about when it was set but it seemed to be clearly in the pre-last couple seasons of Discovery era where all the dilithium crystals blew up for some reason and so most planets left the Federation and Starfleet was a grim-and-gritty shell of it’s former glory.
This could set up a really interesting conflict. In the time before starship Discovery returned to the future Starfleet had gotten all fucked up and dark. Indeed, Admiral Just For Men (from Star Trek Discovery) shows up fifteen years later (unclear what planet’s years, I have to assume Earth, which is weird because Starfleet and the Federation only would have returned to Earth in the last couple, but I digress).
In the ensuing years the stupid captain has become a manic pixie dream girl but the admiral arrives to hire her back, for some reason. She is reluctant because it turns out she’s a Space Wandering Jew (Star Trek has a thing about weird Jewish stereotypes*) and the whole imprisoning people in slavery thing didn’t sit well for someone who was alive before Starfleet became all fash coded and militaristic. The admiral convinces her to become the chancellor and captain of Starfleet academy… but she’ll only do it if the little boy whose mother she sold into slavery gets to join.
Captain Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a weird character. She has a special captain’s chair so she can sit autistically on it. My culture is not your costume, lady. Most of the time she walks around barefoot and explains some fake crank science to justify it (that real idiots really believe, I guess this is like in earlier iterations of Star Trek where it is taken as obviously true that ESP is real). She is deranged and makes decisions in a manner that doesn’t entirely make sense.
Yeah, Starfleet Academy is a ship. It looks like the neck of a Galaxy class with it’s nacelles a laurel wreath wrapped around it for when it needs to travel around the universe. It evokes Starfleet really well. It looks stupid and that’s why I love it. It’s frankly a bizarre idea to have the main setting of the show be a school that sometimes goes into space.
The scale of ships in modern Star Trek is even more fucked up than it used to be. It feels huge on the inside and looks tiny from the outside. We do get a scene in the first episode of a crew member crawling around on the exterior, and it is a setting throughout the series.
Right from jump we are introduced to the Starfleet War College, which is where the Starfleet cops are trained. While Starfleet was all grim-and-gritty this is what had replaced the academy, but now that Starfleet can do interplanetary travel again they’re looking into letting pop stars hand them a Pepsi cola.
This new Starfleet academy is a ship and the second in command under Captain Manic Pixie Dream Girl is the lesbian lizard from Doctor Who. She is evidently half Klingon half Jem’Hadar and a strict taskmaster over the students. There’s a weird issue with the tone in that the show tries to make her R. Lee Emery but she’s simply not aggressive and cruel enough. And it’s not a problem with avoiding vulgarity, elsewhere the show is not shy about that. Both of those things are weird choices, to have the second in command at the supposedly peace and diplomacy institute be a minor jerk aspiring to be a giant asshole, but also a show that feels like it’s mostly trying to appeal to a younger audience with dirty language. The more I see of Lesbian Lizard the more I dislike her. And calling her Lesbian Lizard isn’t just a jerkish swipe, there’s a character from Doctor Who that is basically the exact same character.
We get a more proper introduction for Caleb Mir. He is a gritty cool action hero type who has been looking for his mom. He’s a good fish out of water for Starfleet academy in that he’s an outsider in the academy and only there because the captain of the academy feels guilty for fucking him over when he was young.
Other characters include a Klingon Med Student who is great as a background element in every scene he’s in. Unfortunately, he is criminally underutilized and shows up in the deep background of most episodes.
There is also Sam, who is one of two fat girl characters who are “comedy relief.” She mostly follows The Doctor from Voyager around who is mostly there to look directly at the camera and say in a perfect Peter Griffin voice, “Hey Lois, remember this thing from a previous iteration of the Star Trek Franchise?” The narrative purpose of Sam is to be annoying and do weird things. I think it’s unfortunate for this role to be given to the only fat girl character.
Darem is introduced as a bully from an alien race that looks exactly human but can also turn into a lizard described as a fish somehow, and can also survive in hard vacuum for several minutes at a time. His initial rivalry with Caleb gets shifted over to the final cadet, Genesis, and it fleshes him out and gives him a character arc.
The final cadet character is Genesis, who is playful and sarcastic, but not too annoying. She is the daughter of a Starfleet admiral and so she’s a try hard, but also actually competent.
While returning back to Earth the USS Starfleet Academy discovers a weird space mystery.
Every actor playing a villain on Star Trek wants to be Khan. Ricardo Moltolban didn’t even crew the scenery, he swallowed it whole and he was great for it. Pretty much nowhere else in the franchise has this worked as a strategy for creating a compelling villain. Okay, Christopher Plumber in Star Trek VI did pretty good, but villains aren’t the thing that makes Star Trek good. Christopher Lloyd as Kruge sucked. Malcolm McDowell as Soran sucked. Alice Krige, F. Murray Abraham, and Tom Hardy all played shitty villains. These are not low rent hacks, they can make bad material work, but they could not chew the scenery hard enough to make their villains compelling.
All of this is to say that Paul Giamatii chews the scenery like crazy and is very annoying and not particularly threatening.
During the chaos Commander Lesbian Lizard is injured and the cadets are forced to recombooble the energymotron or whatever. They tech the tech, then Caleb has to have a contrived fight scene with Paul Giamatti. Everyone’s happy.
It’s not bad, just a bit underwhelming. I think the foundation could be used well. If they dig down on the conflict between the utopian wing of Starfleet represented by Captain Manic Pixie Dream Girl against the Starfleet Cops, this could be a good show.
Subequent episodes go both ways. Sometimes they work and sometimes they’re garbage.
In the second episode for some reason the president of formerly important Federation planet Betazed is coming to Starfleet Academy for a conference about potentially rejoining the Federation. The Betazoid president is Donald Trump by way of Gene Roddenberry and L. Ron Hubbard. He put up a wall around Betazed and made Space Mexico pay for it.
Oh Jesus Christ, are we really doing this?
This episode follows Caleb a lot more tightly than the first one, and it hurts. I want the Klingon Med Student to have more than one line. The plot of the episode is that Caleb regrets being stuck in Starfleet Academy when he should be out trying to find his mother. He runs into Betazoid Tiffany Trump while trying to escape the academy and they have a severe meet-cute. Meanwhile Beta Trump is trying to bully the Federation into buying him a golden space ship, which Admiral Just For Men and Captain Manic Pixie Dream Girl are reluctant to do.
It’s deranged that they are the ones negotiating this. There was a Federation President shown in Discovery, and even an Earth president. The “plenary sessions” shown are Beta Trump goes up to a lectern and says two sentences. Maybe the admiral or Captain Manic Pixie Dream Girl says two sentences, then they disband.
There’s a contrived fake conflict between Caleb and Betazoid Tiffany Trump but they resolve it two scenes later.
The plot is nothing.
Modern Trek’s approach to fan service sucks shit. For old Trek they give it a Wikipedia level overview and they are slavishly devoted to catching the details of modern Trek, even when it doesn’t make sense. A few case studies from the second episode: The Betazoids are an alien from Star Trek: The Next Generation who are identical to humans except for having black irises, but I guess contact lenses or a CGI punch up are too expensive for modern Trek. You can very clearly see Betazoid Tiffany Trump has brown eyes. They are also hinted as as being matriarchal in TNG, but it’s not explicitly stated. It makes Beta Trump weird to me in general. In another scene Betazoid Tiffany Trump looks directly at the camera and says in a perfect Peter Griffin voice, “Hey Lois, remember that time in Star Trek IV: The One With The Whales where Spock says Gracie [the whale] is pregnant, ehehehehehehe!” If they’re referencing old Trek, which they do too often, they’ll name something after a minor character from one of the old shows.
There’s a big wall of Starfleet heroes. If you zoom in on them at least half (probably more than that) served on the hero ship or station of a series; the NX01 Enterprise, Discovery, the 1701 Enterprise, the Big D, Deep Space Nine, or Voyager. This makes the universe smaller. You mean to tell me that half the important events that happened in the Star Trek universe happened from 800 to 700 Earth years ago and were the main things we saw in screen? At least with the Okudagrams of the TNG era they were filled with little jokes and references that made the universe bigger. The fact that TNG went out of its way to avoid referencing the original series unless absolutely necessary was one of the most important things that helped create it’s atmosphere and increased the lasting appeal of the franchise. It made the instances where DS9 or Voyager would dip into fan service more satisfying because they weren’t doing it all the time.
On the other end of the spectrum when they reference modern Trek they go out of their way to be correct in way too detailed a manner. In one of the sweeping opening establishing shots in the second episode we catch a view of a Brikian, a member of the same species as Rok-Tahk from Star Trek: Prodigy. Prodigy is an animated series with at least a modest twist of style to it. The Brikians are giant rock aliens. The Brikian that shows up front of frame in Starfleet Academy looks pretty much like a more detailed version of Rok-Tahk. I hate it. It sticks out like a sore thumb, this weird cartoony rock alien among all these other strangely colored people in garish makeup or with meatloaf glued to their faces. The CGI additions into scenes, characters too alien to have a human perform, or those horrible irobots, look like absolute garbage. CGI backgrounds and space scenes look alright.
With the third episode the show starts to lean into it’s premise. The Starfleet cops at the War College decide to do a prank war at Starfleet Academy. It starts off with the PG13 version of the shower scenes from Starship Troopers. Everyone is together in the coed showers and everyone is wearing underpants. It continues a weird theme in Star Trek of trying to be horny but being embarrassed about it and bizarrely chaste. The little fascists from Starfleet cop academy recombooble the Starfleet Academy cadets pants down and then make a digital announcement making fun of how tiny all the academy students hogs are.
This is a delightfully silly premise that builds on the foundational conflict between the Starfleet cops and cadets at the academy. Unlike the second episode, this one takes the entire ensemble, or at least Caleb, Genesis and Darem and puts them to use. The main conflict is between Darem, who wants to prove himself a capable leader in laser tag and Genesis, who also wants to prove herself a capable leader in laser tag.
In practice, this is a proxy conflict between Captain Manic Pixie Dream Girl and Captain Starfleet Cop. Through it all Captain Starfleet Cop keeps letting shaving cream fall of the back of a truck or he tells the little coplets where to do the most effective panty raid. This all comes to a head when dean of students is coming to inspect the schools.
The fourth episode finally gives the Klingon Med Student something to do. By now it’s starting to be clear how the format of the show operates. There are ensemble episodes and there are spotlight episodes. I think the ensemble episodes generally work better, but with a strong enough character you can make the spotlight episodes work. Manic Pixie Dream Girl summons the Klingon Med Student to her office because something something bad happened to a Klingon ship that I guess was carrying the Klingon Med Students family.
It turns out after all the dilithium exploded I guess Qronos, the Klingon home world blew up too? I mean, it had to be evacuated eight hundred Earth years earlier but I guess recovered. To be slightly fair, TNG didn’t seem to remember that Qronos had Chernobyl explode all over it like seventy years earlier. But now the Klingons are a diaspora, making them another form of Space Jew**.
Klingon Med Student is a really compelling character. He is not a warrior in any sense of the word and that’s why he came to Starfleet Academy. He struggles with being seen as a Klingon while mostly wanting to hide in a lab and do cell cultures, but also he has a responsibility to be a positive representation of Klingon culture. Before he came to Starfleet Academy he hung out on Planet Vancouver In Autumn with his family and he is shown to have issues relating to them. I think they end they portray Klingon society as a little inherently abusive, which is not great, but also in a strange way humanizes a somewhat deranged alien society.
The core conflict on the Federation side is that they want to gift the Klingons a nice juicy planet, but the Klingons do not accept gifts. Captain Manic Pixie Dream Girl porks the one white guy Klingon who is not in blackface (thank Kahless). The Klingon Med Student has to learn to be brave and do public speaking, and, with that battle won has enough honor to tell Captain Manic Pixie Dream Girl, “Hey bozo, Klingons don’t like gifts. They are emotional children that want to feel like they are conquering heroes.”
There are some weird implications in the whole thing now that Klingons are a diaspora. So to get them to settle or more to the point colonize a planet you need to set up a contrived conflict so they can invade? Hope the planet doesn’t have any indigenous intelligent species on it. It is also weird that the Klingons, a race that exists across a large span of space, would benefit from having one special planet. But it’s in service of having societies out in space that aren’t just monocultures so I’ll forgive that one.
Once you’re keyed up for noticing antisemitism it’s like turning a blacklight on in a hotel room. I don’t know how that coffee machine fit up someone’s ass but it clearly did. Do not touch it.
I am starting to warm up to Starfleet Academy. The first couple episodes were pretty weak but thus far subsequent episodes have done a better job of showing what the show is capable of.
But the problem remains that Paramount is currently owned by Trump administration allies. I can’t really suggest you pay them money to see it. As such, I’m keeping this review behind a paywall until the season is over. Eat it Paramount.
* - In Star Trek there are many species which end up downstream from weird Jewish stereotypes. Vulcans are unemotional aliens from a desert planet with an ancient conflict with their cousins who ended up becoming a diaspora. They are pretty much the positive Jewish stereotype aliens. Ferengi are pretty much all the negative Jewish stereotypes bundled up together and with the nose changed over to their ears. Lanthanites are a secret species hiding on Earth that look identical to humans who have been on Earth as long as human civilization and the main portrayal of them so far has been Carol Kane as Pelia in Strange New Worlds, where her entire characterization is being as Space Bubbe as possible. It reminds me of weird conspiracy theories about root races. Maybe they won’t turn out to be another form of Space Jews though, I guess. Hopefully Captain Manic Pixie Dream Girl has more going on for her.
** - Okay. Worf’s adopted parents are coded as Ashkenazi Jews and he celebrates lots of weird High Holidays. Klingon bar mitzvah is when monster guys zap you with pain sticks while you read the scrolls of Kahless. Perhaps I am reading too much into it. Or maybe all aliens sooner or later converge on being Jewish.