Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Premiere Review – A New Era Begins

This article contains spoilers for the two-part series premiere of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.

A new era of Star Trek is upon us. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has officially wrapped filming on its fifth and final season, and although we won’t even see its fourth until later this year, there’s already a distinct sense that this moment marks a sort of passing of the proverbial torch.

Strange New Worlds has been the most critically and culturally successful installment of Paramount+’s larger Trek streaming universe. As it begins to wind down its five-year mission, it’s up to Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, the newest member of the franchise and only series currently guaranteed new episodes for the foreseeable future, to step into its shoes. Whether it will be able to do so successfully remains an open question, and one that’s not immediately answered by its series premiere, a pair of episodes that are full of equal parts genuine potential and deep frustration. 

In many ways, Starfleet Academy’s first episodes suffer from having to serve too many masters. The series must introduce something like a dozen main characters, sketch out the basic structure for the titular organization and the reasons behind its reopening, catch everybody up who doesn’t remember what The Burn is or why it matters, name-check a bunch of franchise history, and set up some initial stakes for several of its primary leads. And in all honesty, it really does succeed on multiple levels.

The show certainly looks great. The teaching vessel U.S.S. Athena is both creatively built and visually stunning, even if its interior atrium does evoke the worst sort of ’90s shopping mall excess. The series’ core group of students is comprised of an intriguingly eclectic mix of species and personal histories. And it’s certainly hard to dislike anything led by heavy hitters like Holly Hunter and Paul Giamatti, who are both the sort of actors who automatically lend heft and gravitas to any scene they happen to be in. But it’s also clear that Starfleet Academy hasn’t quite yet figured out what kind of show it wants to be, and has more than a few kinks to work out as its first season progresses.

If you were also hoping that Starfleet Academy might focus more broadly on its titular institution as an organization or perhaps tell an ensemble-focused tale about what it means to be a young person deciding to make boldly go where no one has gone before into a career path, you’re probably going to be disappointed in these initial episodes. “Kids These Days” and “Beta Test” largely follow the story of a cadet named Caleb Mir (Sandro Rosta), whose traumatic upbringing, extensive mommy issues, and complicated history with Commander Nahla Ake (Hunter) drive much of the premiere’s initial plot.

We first meet Caleb as a young boy whose life is thrown into chaos when his mother is sentenced to prison for helping pirate Nus Braka (Giamatti) steal food to feed her starving family. It’s Ake who sentences her, an event that ultimately leads to her own resignation from Starfleet. When Ake finally finds Caleb again, 15 years later, she essentially bribes him into attending the newly-reconstituted Starfleet Academy as a kind of cosmic payback for her previous sins— she’s been tapped as chancellor and presumably can help him find out what’s become of his mom. 

This is a whole lot of sturm und drang for the first 15 minutes of any pilot, let alone one in which the supposedly rakish lead turns out to be kind of a huge jerk. Caleb is cocky and rude and angry from his first moments onscreen, and while it’s evident that life has not been kind to him since his mother’s arrest, he’s also not exactly what you might call a particularly sympathetic protagonist. Yet, for better or worse, he is also the lens through which we are apparently going to experience the bulk of this story, which means almost every subsequent character we meet is filtered through his perceptions of and reactions to them. 

In these first two episodes, the rest of the students are essentially ciphers who — with the possible exception of Sam (Kerrice Brooks), whose sole personality trait at this moment is simply being a hologram — are largely defined by their relationship to him. Jay-Den Kraag (Karim Diané) is a Klingon who longs to become a healer and Caleb’s first accidental friend. Darem Reymi (George Hawkins), a Khonian, is his biggest rival and unwilling roommate. Both the Dar-Sha Genesis Lythe (Bella Shepard) and Betazoid Tarima Sadal (Zoë Steiner) have influential fathers and carry big familial and cultural expectations on their backs, but are thus far most notable for attracting Caleb’s potential romantic interest. And, of course, there’s Ake, who’s stuck constantly making excuses and bending rules for this boy, seemingly unable to let go of her guilt over her involvement in his separation from his mother and still heartbroken over her own son’s death during The Burn.

It’s hard not to wonder what a more immediately accessible version of this show might have looked like, one with about 60 percent less Caleb and a greater focus on why it matters that these kids have chosen to set themselves on this path in the first place. Starfleet Academy’s first two episodes occasionally manage this — see Ake’s stirring speech about what it means to be relaunching this particular institution at this precise moment in Federation history, Sam’s hilariously effusive reaction to meeting the infamous Doctor (Robert Picardo) from Star Trek: Voyager, or the young Betazoid activists who want to reopen their now-insular world to the larger galaxy. But it’s often derailed by the show’s need to place Caleb at the center of anything that’s happening, in ways that are not always to its benefit. 

However, its larger cast is excellent across the board, which is reason enough to be hopeful for the series’s future. Hunter’s prickly yet strangely ebullient academy chancellor is fascinating, from her clear disregard for things like rules and precedent to the fact that her part-Lanthanite heritage makes her one of the few characters (who didn’t travel to this era on the U.S.S. Discovery) who remembers both life before The Burn and the Federation in its heyday. Giamatti’s clearly having a ball playing Braka as though he’s a Shakespeare villain, and he and Hunter have some very intense Sherlock-and-Moriarty-style eternal enemies chemistry that hints that the pilot isn’t the first time they’ve met since he was sentenced. And the young actors who form the primary group of Academy cadets are incredibly charming, playing characters who certainly have lots of potential, if only they could get a little more focus.

The most exciting part of either episode comes during an unexpected attack on the Athena by Braka and his squad of nameless pirate hooligans, when the barely-admitted students must work together to save the day in ridiculously over-the-top ways, from performing lifesaving surgery on their own to taking unsupervised space walks and hacking alien programmable matter. Should they all be capable of doing these things? Probably not. Is it still super satisfying to watch them join forces in this way? Absolutely. That’s what a lot of us (read: me) probably want to see from a show like this — cadets of different species, backgrounds, and lived experiences, finding that there’s more that unites them than divides them. That’s what Star Trek is all about — or should be, anyway. 

Whether Starfleet Academy will find a way to tell more of those kinds of stories is a question that only the rest of its first season can answer. So we’ll have to wait and see. 

New episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with the finale on March 12.