I know exactly how popular this opinion is going to be here, but after watching the whole first season, I genuinely think Starfleet Academy is the best Star Trek series they have made.
Not “pretty good for modern Trek.” Not “better than I expected.”
The best.
And one of the biggest reasons is that it actually does something new with Star Trek instead of spending all of its time trying to remind me how much I liked Star Trek 30 years ago.
I love TNG. I love DS9. I love Voyager. But those shows already exist. I don’t need another show whose main purpose is giving me slightly different versions of Kirk, Picard, Data, Spock and the Enterprise.
Starfleet Academy finally moves Star Trek forward.
Setting it in the 32nd century was one of the smartest choices they could have made. For once, the writers have room to build instead of constantly worrying about whether something contradicts a line of dialogue from an episode made in 1991.
The Federation has been through a near-collapse, Starfleet is rebuilding, and the Academy isn’t just a school. It’s part of rebuilding the entire idea of the Federation.
That is an incredibly Star Trek premise.
In fact, I would argue that it gets closer to the basic point of Star Trek than a lot of the shows people here consider untouchable.
Star Trek has always been about the idea that people can become better. Starfleet Academy actually makes that the entire subject of the show.
Most Trek series introduce us to people who are already elite Starfleet officers. Picard is Picard from the moment we meet him. Sisko is already an experienced officer. Janeway is already a captain.
Academy asks a much more interesting question:
How do people become those people?
The cadets screw up. They’re immature. They argue. They fall in love. They’re competitive. Sometimes they’re selfish. Sometimes they’re annoying.
Of course they are.
They’re cadets
I’ve seen people complain that they don’t behave like experienced Starfleet officers, which might be the strangest criticism of this show. If Caleb walked into Starfleet Academy in episode one already behaving like Jean-Luc Picard, there wouldn’t be much point in making a show about him learning anything.
And that is why the character development works for me. Starfleet values aren’t just speeches delivered by people who already believe them. We get to watch young people who grew up in a damaged Federation figure out why those values are worth believing in.
That is much more interesting to me than another bridge full of perfect professionals demonstrating lessons they learned 20 years before the episode started.
I also like that these characters actually feel young.
Yes, they talk differently from Picard’s crew.
Good.
The 32nd century should not feel like everybody is doing an impression of a 1990s syndicated television character. Star Trek has always reflected the time in which it was made. TOS certainly did. TNG certainly did.
Pretending that older Star Trek somehow descended from heaven completely untouched by contemporary culture is pure nostalgia.
And I’m going to say something else that will probably go over wonderfully here:
Holly Hunter’s Nahla Ake is one of the best authority figures Star Trek has ever created.
She’s weird. She’s informal. She’s funny. She’s emotional. She doesn’t carry herself like Picard.
Again: good.
We already had Picard.
Hunter gives Ake a completely different kind of authority. She can be warm one minute and intimidating the next, and her relationship with the cadets feels much more like an actual teacher dealing with young people than a captain addressing interchangeable junior officers.
Paul Giamatti is also having an absolute blast, and when you put two actors at that level opposite each other, the show immediately has something most franchise television would kill for.
The show also does something modern Star Trek has struggled with: it uses old Star Trek without being completely dependent on it.
Bringing back the Doctor works because he has a reason to still exist in this time period.
The DS9 material works because it actually means something to the story. The connections to older Trek feel like history rather than the show repeatedly elbowing me in the ribs and yelling, “REMEMBER THIS?”
And when Academy really gets going, especially with episodes like “Come, Let’s Away,” it shows exactly why moving this far into the future was worthwhile. We get new history, new consequences, new cultures and a Federation whose survival isn’t guaranteed just because we already know what happens 100 years later.
That is something a prequel can never give you.
I’ll go even further: the much-mocked “teen drama” part is one of the reasons the show works.
Star Trek has done military drama. Political drama. War drama. Exploration. Comedy. Time travel. Spy stories. Westerns. Courtroom episodes. Gangsters. Musicals. Holodeck adventures.
But apparently young people dealing with friendships and relationships at Starfleet Academy is where some fans suddenly decide Star Trek has gone too far.
Really?
We can have Captain Picard turn into a child, Janeway and Paris become salamanders, Spock’s brain get stolen, the Enterprise crew play Robin Hood, Quark undergo a sex change for a Ferengi business scheme, and an entire episode of Voyager revolve around going faster than infinity.
But cadets flirting is the point where Star Trek loses its dignity?
Come on.
And yes, the show is diverse. Star Trek featuring people who don’t all look, think, love or behave exactly alike should be the least surprising development in the history of Star Trek.
If strange aliens, unconventional gender presentation, different sexualities and people challenging old social expectations bother somebody, I genuinely don’t know what franchise they thought they were watching.
To me, the best Star Trek isn’t the show that most perfectly imitates old Star Trek.
It’s the show that takes the basic idea of Star Trek — that different kinds of people can learn to understand each other and deliberately build something better — and finds a new way to tell that story.
That’s Starfleet Academy.
TNG showed us the Federation near its height.
DS9 tested whether its ideals could survive a war.
Voyager tested whether Starfleet values could survive without the Federation around to enforce them.
Starfleet Academy asks what happens when a battered Federation has to teach those values to a generation that never got to grow up taking them for granted.
I think that’s a fantastic idea for Star Trek.
And I think the fact that the characters are messy, young, emotional and sometimes irritating actually makes the idea stronger, not weaker.
So yes.
Starfleet Academy is the best Star Trek series ever made.
And before somebody tells me that I need to go watch TNG or DS9:
I have.
That’s why I’m saying it.
