Paul Giamatti’s New Star Trek Villain Just Made One Wild Thing Canon

The next big live-action series in the long-running Star Trek franchise is Starfleet Academy. And, at San Diego Comic-Con 2025, we finally got a look at what the series will be like. The vibe and design of the show is very much in line with the later seasons of Star Trek: Discovery, which makes sense considering the show is set in the same timeline of the late 32nd century and is basically a follow-up to that series.

But what’s this? At the very end of the trailer, Paul Giamatti‘s new, mysterious villain, Nus Braka, is walking down the corridor of a Federation starship—presumably the just unveiled USS Athena—while whistling the opening notes of the famous main theme from the original Star Trek. Does this mean that after roughly six decades, this music has finally been established as part of the canon? Do people in the Star Trek universe know the Star Trek theme music?

The original “Theme from Star Trek” was composed by Alexander Courage for the 1964 pilot episode of Star Trek, “The Cage.” Courage was far from the only composer who worked on TOS, and in terms of incidental music heard throughout the classic show, composers like Gerald Fried and Sol Kaplan are some of the best remembered. But Courage’s main theme was the primary theme music associated with Trek, so much so that even when the main theme was changed — like Jerry Goldsmith’s famous theme in 1979—those opening notes from Courage’s original theme were still reused. 

But have we ever heard this theme music as diegetic, source music within the Trek canon itself? 

Technically, yes, but not like this. In the TOS episode, “The Conscience of the King,” the classic theme music can be faintly heard in the background in a lounge. This version of the theme is barely recognizable, as it’s a jazzy remix of the original theme. In what was only the third episode of Lower Decks, “Temporal Edict,” Boimler (Jack Quaid) hums Jerry Goldsmith’s Motion Picture main theme, which was later (and more famously) reused in The Next Generation. 

But those opening notes of The Original Series theme? Do people in Starfleet actually view this as their own personal anthem? Well…

… not too long ago, in the Strange New Worlds episode “Spock Amok,” a very brief version of this main theme was included as a series of beeps when Una (Rebecca Romijn) and La’an (Christina Chong) were playing a round of “Enterprise Bingo.” This fact combined with Giamatti’s character whistling the main theme all but confirms that the anthem of Starfleet is almost certainly some version of the 1964 original and first theme song to the entire franchise.

According to Paramount’s press release, Giamatti’s Nus Braka is part Tellarite and part Klingon. This means that the one character who is whistling the main Trek theme is also connected directly to two of the most classic TOS alien species. On top of that, Holly Hunter’s new character, Nahla Ake, the Chancellor of Starfleet Academy, is a Lanthanite. This is the same species of very long-lived humanoids of which Carol Kane’s Strange New Worlds character, Pelia, is also a member.

If both Nahla Ake and Nus Braka have ties to the deep past of Star Trek, either through the music they listen to or not, it seems clear that Starfleet Academy might be looking backward into the franchise’s rich history, just as much as it appears to be leaping forward. 
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy hits Paramount+ sometime in early 2026.