Starfleet Academy; The Review

Starfleet Academy (SA), the latest TV show in the Star Trek line, debuted this year with a lot of fanfare and a fair share of drama. The show almost immediately hit the news with cries of it being “too woke”. The Washington Times headline called it a “woke culture war casualty” and Outkick said the show hit “a new low” and that the franchise “just keeps getting worse“. Jonathan Frakes, best known for his role as William Riker in Star Trek: The Next Generation admitted that the show “focused too much on spectacle and not enough on telling good stories.” William Shatner, the iconic original series captain of the Enterprise, mocked the “woke backlash”. Regardless of the fandom, as the show was greenlit for season two the announcement it would be canceled after it. That has led to observation and criticism saying the decision was bad for the franchise.

As a 40+ year fan of Star Trek who has read many of the books and followed the franchise since, I wanted to share some of my thoughts about the series. It’s a mix of good and bad like most shows these days. Overall I think the show had as many problematic areas as it did for potential. One compelling thing about the series is that it is set far into the future of all the other shows except Star Trek Discovery, which vaulted the Enterprise into the new timeline. Note that past this there may be small spoilers, viewer beware!

One reason I was hyped to watch this show and waited until it was close enough to the end of the season in order to binge-watch it is because many friends had said it was really good. So I was particularly encouraged when I started watching it and realized it was set in the same time frame as Star Trek Discovery. Yes I’m a critic, yes I can tear TV shows apart like few others, but when it comes to TV and movies I desperately want to believe. To wit, I love Star Trek and Star Wars and Sci-fi, so I can very clearly suspend disbelief. At least, right up until there are obvious and serious contradictions as well as glaring oversights. By the latter I mean even if there were continuity people working on this program they didn’t look at it in the bigger picture and then they clearly didn’t look at it in the context of even the pilot episode. I started out taking notes about how much I liked things and by the end of the episode it was full of notes about all the problems too. Two hours later I found myself taking more and more notes about things that I recalled that didn’t add and where it was increasingly more difficult to suspend disbelief. Despite that, overall the series was enjoyable; it just suffers the same issues as many of the prior series.

For all of the people, including my friends, that talked about Starfleet Academy being so wonderful my obvious question to each is if they watched Star Trek Discovery or not, and which series did they watch before that. I think that Star Trek Discovery showed how inferior Starfleet Academy is in comparison, when SA they got a lay-up so to speak. Starting out in a timeline that far in the future just opens so many possibilities and the entire technological foundation is already done. All of this gives more creative license and hopefully avoids old well-known Star Trek tropes.That said realizing that said trope is what brought us to the future in the show.

A brief note on the show being “too woke” first. For anyone saying that, have you even watched Star Trek before?! The original series had the first scripted interracial kiss on television back on November 22, 1968. That was the tip of the iceberg for the so-called “woke” concepts that would come, with every series offering a more positive and inclusive look at humanity and beyond. It reminds me of the ‘fan’ of Rage Against the Machine that chastised the guitarist Tom Morello for the music being “too political”. Some of the following commentary will include aspects of the show that fall under the term “woke”, but I am not calling it such.

For a notorious Federation enemy with a society based on war, having a Klingon in the academy who is an outright pacifist was entertaining. Unfortunately, I think the producers used this twist and tried to make the contrast more prominent by having the actor talk in an overly deep voice. That wasn’t necessary. At first, I thought perhaps they did that because they didn’t want him to have a high pitched voice and watchers to think he is gay, because of stupid societal prejudice. But low-and-behold, the character turns out to be gay after all! My only nitpick with the spoken Klingon stands for countless shows before it. My mind immediately goes back to Jimmy Smitz in the show Cane in which he would over-pronounce certain Spanish words while otherwise having little accent. In SA they do it with Klingon food and other racial words based on society. I understand the language is guttural but there just seemed to be too much emphasis on many words, where the emphasis is an extra half second pause before saying it.

In the interest of reading time and brevity, the next sections will be bullet-point notes:

General Observations & Nitpicks

• Episode 1×01 immediately hit me in the feels, but, a lot of that may require knowledge of star trek lore as well as the callbacks were frequent.
• An entire ‘race’ of holograms is a slick idea and I am glad they followed this in subsequent episodes.
• Having the academy half on ship, half in San Fran is good, as it gives more versatility in episode settings.
• The cadet females wearing skirts yet ST:TNG had officers including males wearing ‘dress’ uniforms, literally. Yet all male cadets don’t wear them in the same circumstances.
• For the Khionian, a race that can survive eight minutes in open space, they shouldn’t have him with human teeth given all the other features that are so different and that they hail from a water-based planet.
• It’s odd that Starfleet, some seven hundred years in the future from the original series, still uses ‘menial labor’ as punishment. That seems primitive and out of scope given the numerous cleaning bots around. It only took one scene, even early on and basically one line, with someone telling the bots to stand down so the cadets could do the work. But why not have them spend hours cataloging species or something that is more inline with learning while also getting punished?
• At one point there is a fairly epic monologue, and from it: “I can be a part of this world without forgetting where I come from.” Despite being set so far in the future, note it is still “world”, singular. Not “galaxy” or “universe” or anything indicating the scope of the universe. But it gets worse during the same scene basically, where another character says “Red. Like a match in a tinderbox.” Said when talking about the color something burns. Is a tinderbox really something we’d expect to see so many centuries in the future on developed worlds, using modern (for the times) technology?
• The amount of callbacks to prior series is incredible. Some are subtle, others are not. An example of the subtlety, I think, is a callback to Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok” which has become an iconic episode.
• You may never realize until you read this, or Google something about the series… but Stephen Colbert is credited for all 10 episodes of season one. Yep! He’s a voice actor, for those in-the-background announcements at the academy that are comical.
• Having The Doctor aging a bit since we last saw him was in the context of the show 20 years ago, yet in the timeline 400 years prior. So why age himself 20 years not 200 or some larger number.
• Not just for SA, but in general actors with ear piercings;  when did they stop covering them up? What happened to the old baking soda from 30 years ago to cover the visible holes? Have makeup departments become too  giddy over making people green and having spines, while forgetting the basics?
• There are still a lot of humans, too many in my opinion, in the background shots compared to the central initial cast. But there are a few fun throwbacks including the Chenon, as well as Orions.
• Star Trek in general: with new races it’s always the foreheads and ears, there are so many variations. Only in recent years did we get more than “different color skin” even. But even in Starfleet Academy, why do alien races still grow classic beards? Why not have hair off the side of the head, forehead, cheeks only, around eyes only, neck only… anything different? 
• It would be only slightly more cliche, but using the random background characters to display new and odd races, and sub them out here and there as needed. Simple, lends to SA being more inclusive of more races and then the main cast tap into that array of students as needed. It would allow them to save the day, but add variety.
• Why does every species have a wedding ceremony with the same rituals including drinking? That’s boring.

Plot Holes

• In one episode, the bad guy escapes on an escape pod and the Athena doesn’t pursue at all, why? Oh right, it would effectively end the overarching plot.
• The series is full of a common trope where a main character (a new kid) saves the day over all the seasoned people, and then a perfect combination of other students that have abilities specifically suited for the situation make it all happen. Why bother with the rest of the academy, they saved half a world basically in the first episode. Episode 1×06 had the same thing, only by having 3 cadets with specific abilities did the episode work at all as far as plot and ‘saving the day’
• In one episode a ship has their first chance to fire back and immediately destroys an entire ship because… it had zero defenses? Despite being more technologically advanced? 
• The Khionian goes home during a “ritual kidnapping” which prefaces the marriage and they have their wedding ceremony on a moon devoid of water .. because of course, a water-breathing race would?!
• Back to “only these cadets can save the…” trope. Where a Betazed, even a powerful one, can now sense things in another galaxy across a ridiculous amount of light years of travel. Then only ‘SAM’ can do the next part. Then the Federation magically jumps in, full fleet, in seconds … without Discovery’s spore drive somehow. Forgetting that “Warp 9”, the max, still takes considerable time.
• In one scene where the ship takes serious damage, The Doctor helps someone with many others wounded waiting for care. Why aren’t there hundreds of copies of himself helping everyone else?

Finally, I am serious when I say this! TV and movie studios, please “hire” me to be your continuity sanity checker. I’ll work simply for a visit to the set, access to the catering table, and that’s it. No money or fees, just an airline ticket and food.