As the cadets of Starfleet Academy finish their first year, here’s our review of season 1 — “Could Do Better”

A franchise as long established as Star Trek has its long history and its many fans. This inevitably means many opinions. The latest (and possibly last for now) new title is Starfleet Academy — it’s a curious hybrid of high-school / young adult and Star Trek action. If Rotten Tomatoes is anything to go by, it’s popular with critics (88%) and less so with the audience (51%). Given a niche audience, longer standing fans have (perhaps) not felt well served by a show aimed at a younger demographic. If you haven’t the time, we liked the show, but felt it really required many more episodes to develop.

This is a long piece, so grab a drink or bookmark for later. Quick review —it could do better. We’ll certainly watch the second season, and in the absence of any other new arrivals would be more than happy for a season 3.

We don’t intend to get drawn into a shallow argument about the show being woke (whatever that actually means) nor the fashionable (in some quarters) railing against the current showrunner. We do wish to note almost as many complaints about Holly Hunter’s Chancellor (and technically Captain) Nahla Ake disrespecting the chair by sitting “strangely”. Yes, it’s a bit odd but clearly part of her character — she’s a Lanthanite with centuries of experience behind her and a mixed relationship with the Federation (and remembers it in its heyday). There’s also the “it’s not Star Trek” complaint. We’ll spend some time on that before getting to the core of the review.

Is it Star Trek?

This depends on your definition. We’ll suggest Roddenberry’s original concept of Wagon Train to the Stars covers a ship, exploration and the ability to tell a wide range of stories exploring character. The original series clearly valued what we would term a diverse set of characters with Sulu, Chekov and Uhura placing non-standard characters centre stage. They were then replaced with regular villains, notably the Klingons and Romulans. This trend has continued and is perhaps more to the fore in more recent productions.

There’s no doubt of the science fiction setting in all cases and while Academy makes the campus building part of the starship (USS Athena), there’s little in the way of travel, let alone exploration.

To counter that, let’s recall Deep Space 9. Less mobile even than the USS Athena, the show attracted criticism for its static location, and the need for stories to come to it. In the end it carved out a space in Trek history and in the hearts of many fans.

The show is clearly rooted in Trek lore. One of the stronger episodes is all about Cisco (another nod to DS9). Buildings are named for key characters in the show’s history, with many (most? all?) others popping up on a board of honour. A little OTT, but we do have crossovers from other shows with the Doctor (Robert Picardo) taking us back to Voyager and Jett Reno (Tig Notaro) linking neatly to Discovery. On the subject of Discovery, we have Mary Wiseman back as Tilly in another standout episode — we hope for much more in season 2.

The show is set post-Discovery and we do have to wonder how often that ship can be in dock for refit instead of saving the day with its spore drive.

The actual Starfleet Academy review

With extensive preamble out of the way, here’s our actual Starfleet Academy review. Bottom line, a season of ten episodes is too short to allow the show to work. Expense of production means a lot of shows have short runs per season, compared to the broadcast era. In those ten episodes there’s a need for each of the six main cadets (pictured) to have time in the spotlight, the college year has to happen (we suspect the intention is for three seasons), and we need an arc as well. Being Star Trek, that means a villain and a storyline with at least an intro, minor conflict, twist, things looking bad and heroic resolution. That’s a lot for ten episodes.

The show took episodes 1-3 to get everyone together then add a team-bonding tale. Having a rival War College was one complication too many and the story arc of Caleb Mir (Sandro Rosta) searching for his mother (an excellent performance from Tatiana Maslany in the final episode) drove a lot of episode 1 then became downplayed as soon as Caleb had his hair cut.

We suspect the pilot led to changes. A romantic interest for Caleb (Tarima Sadal played by Zoë Steiner) is dropped into episode 2, they become lovers then she has to use her psychic superpowers to save the day. This all leads to a distance emerging (and to be fair the strong Tilly episode) during which she remarks Caleb and episode 1 fellow cadet Genesis Lythe (Bella Shepard) work well together and could be a couple. We can easily see the show could have worked that way and simplified the challenge of fitting ten episodes.

While truncated, the season does have a fantastic villain in the form of Nus Braka (Paul Giamatti) who we learn isn’t in season 2. Even with the constraints noted, the final episode does bring together many of the elements from earlier episodes, have the young cadets save the whole Federation (and a vast number of star systems), some soul searching, pious speeches and declarations of love. There’s even some backstory and elements of reconciliation. What’s not to like.

Ultimately

We can image a simpler version of the same season with more reasons to travel, explore the future galaxy and learn of Braka’s history, building a great arc and still with side episodes for cadet character exploration. Many episodes would work with the ship in space still serving as a college — we wonder if budget is the problem. We suspect it’s as simple as that — following a standard (and successful) formula for high school drama developed for hows with longer seasons left unsatisfactory jumps as the ten episodes also had to serve as a vessel to allow the Federation to be saved by the few. Sounds like Star Trek to us.