The notion of portraying life in Starfleet Academy has been around the Star Trek universe for ages. It was first pitched as a movie back in the late 1980s and was seriously considered for the sixth movie following the lukewarm reception to The Final Frontier in 1989, going so far as to have a script by Harve Bennett and David Loughery, before deciding to do a last hurrah with Shatner, Nimoy, and the gang. Both Marvel (an ongoing series from 1996-1998 contemporary with DS9 and Voyager and using DS9’s Nog as a main character) and IDW (a 2015 miniseries telling stories set during the events of the 2009 Star Trek) have done Starfleet Academy comic book series. Simon & Schuster has done two sets of YA books focusing on the Academy, including a series from 1993-1998 that showed Academy tenures for characters from the original series, TNG, and Voyager, and another from 2010 that focused on the Bad Robot films. In 1997, there was a Starfleet Academy CD-ROM game (remember those?), which also had a novelization by Diane Carey, and the following year was Susan Wright’s Academy-focused novel The Best and the Brightest. The TV shows have done the occasional spotlight on the Academy, from TNG’s “The First Duty” to Discovery’s “All is Possible.”
With the diversification of Trek on TV that we’ve seen since Secret Hideout took over producing Trek stuff for Paramount+, an Academy series was almost a given to happen at some point. Additionally, they’re having it spin off of Discovery’s final three seasons, which was a masterstroke. The thirty-second century is ripe for further exploration—Discovery barely scratched the surface—plus, it’s explicitly a Federation that is finally back on its feet after being isolationist and devastated because of the Burn. Now the Burn is over and there’s a new set of cadets coming in. It’s a great era to set an Academy series in, as you’ve got lots of different species coming together, many of them leaving their home star systems for the first time.
Scripter/creator Gaia Violo has come up with a way of still doing shipboard adventures while doing an Academy series: the show primarily takes place on the U.S.S. Athena, a starship that is specifically designed to be a flying Academy. They will learn on the job, as it were, taking class and doing supervised shipboard functions on an actual ship. (And presumably also sometimes have unexpected adventures, as they do in this episode.) When on Earth, the ship docks at the Academy grounds in San Francisco, continuing to be the main campus building.
Two of the main characters are functionally immortal, so they actually remember when the Federation was at its height. One is our lead, Holly Hunter’s Captain Nahla Ake, who is part Lanthanite (the same species as Carol Kane’s Pelia on SNW), and is several hundred years old. Hunter plays her with a similar relaxed, seen-it-all attitude to Kane on the sister show, but she’s very much her own person, and much less eccentric than Pelia. (Which is good, as that level of goofiness works in a supporting character, less so in your lead.) Ake is a good teacher, a compassionate authority figure, and a canny leader, and Hunter inhabits the character magnificently.
The other immortal is one of two legacy characters in this pilot: Robert Picardo as the Voyager’s EMH, who still, centuries later, just goes by “Doctor.” He also added an aging subroutine five hundred years previous—the Watsonian reason is to placate organics, with the Doylist reason being that Picardo is very obviously three decades older than he was when Voyager was on the air. (Picardo also joins the swelling ranks of actors who have played the same character on three or more Trek television series.1) The EMH is, as ever, a total delight. Age has just made him even snarkier, and Picardo remains a treasure.
The other legacy character is Oded Fehr’s Admiral Vance, and he retains his cool demeanor and charisma from his appearances on Discovery. Fehr was listed with the main characters, not as a guest star, which means we’ll hopefully see lots of him, which is always welcome. (Mary Wiseman and Tig Notaro are also supposed to be recurring regulars, coming over from Discovery as, respectively, Tilly and Reno, but neither is in the premiere episode.)
The other characters are a bit hit-and-miss. I will give credit to director Alex Kurtzman (yes, Kurtzman himself directed this one) and the actors playing the various members of the bridge crew that they give each character a distinctive style of speaking and body language and personality. It’s not much, and I suspect that, as with Discovery, the bridge crew will only be occasional supporting characters rather than main characters, but “Kids These Days” gives me hope that they will stand out as individuals more than Discovery’s bridge crew did.
However, the remaining adult we see is magnificent: Gina Yashere as Lura Thok, who is half-Klingon, half-Jem’Hadar. Yashere plays the role with gusto, modulating hilariously from deferential when dealing with Ake and the other adults to drill-sergeant bluster when interacting with the cadets. While Lura is first officer of the Athena—Ake even calls her “Number One,” as we’ve seen Pike and Picard do with their first officers—her actual title is “Cadet Master,” as she’s more directly in charge of the cadets.
As for our gaggle of cadets, they’re a mixed bag. I think my favorite is Series Acclimation Mil, who comes from Kasq, a planet populated entirely by sentient holograms, and who goes by SAM, “in the interest of not being mocked mercilessly by my fellow cadets.” Kerrice Brooks plays her as delightfully nerdy, and I just want to hug her. She also wants the EMH as her mentor, a job the EMH pretty much runs screaming from. SAM was specifically created to be a teenager who interacts with organics to build a post-Burn bridge between Kasq and the rest of the Federation.
My least favorite—by far—is sadly the one being set up as the main character among the cadets, Caleb Mir, played by Sandro Rosta. We spend the entire teaser with him and Ake, and I was pretty much sick to death of him before the opening credits even rolled. He’s introduced to us as a six-year-old (played by Luciano Fernandez) whose single mother (played with her usual brilliance by an underused Tatiana Maslany) is arrested as an accessory to a pirate, Nus Braka (played with scenery stuck in his teeth by the always-brilliant Paul Giamatti), who has killed several Starfleet officers. Ake is the captain in charge of sentencing both Braka and Caleb’s mother, and she hates that she has to separate a mother from her child. Then Caleb manages to escape.
We cut ahead fifteen years. Ake is a teacher on Bajor, having quit Starfleet after being put in a position to separate mother and child, and having failed to track down Caleb at all in those fifteen years. As for the now-twenty-one-year-old kid, we see him on the way to prison, but he manages to hijack the prison ship in an attempt to use the ship’s computer to locate his mother.
Prior to his breakout, they list his criminal record, and it pretty much starts the nanosecond he escaped from Ake’s custody. So he’s been living the life of either a prisoner or a fugitive for most of the fifteen years since he was six years old, yet he managed to become a wiz at piloting and making covert communications and astrophysics and operating systems on a starship, er, somehow.
That sound you hear is my disbelief gasping on the side of the road.
If Caleb wasn’t human, I might be willing to buy it, but unless we later find out he had some kind of mentor to teach him at least some of this stuff—a Fagin to his Oliver Twist, a Lob to his Modesty Blaise, an Achmed El Gibár to his Storm—I might like him better, but probably not. He’s the whiny rebel who thinks he’s too cool for the Academy, and he’s only going along with it because the alternative was a brutal prison sentence (the cutting off of fingers and hands is mentioned) and because Ake has promised to help him try to find his mother. (Hey look, a seasonal through-line!)
The rest of the cadets we meet are all similar types, some more clichéd than others (though none as clichéd as Caleb).
Bella Shepard’s Genesis Lythe is the pretty genius, daughter of an admiral, smart as a whip, clever with wordplay, and just generally annoyingly perfect, but charming enough so you don’t hate her. Intellectually I want to dislike her, but Shepard is so charming I’m willing to forgive it. (This is an acting trick that Rosta does not manage.)
George Hawkins’ Darem Reymi is the asshole child of privilege, the first Khionian in Starfleet. He’s an arrogant snot, complete with an entourage of sycophants. On the one hand, there’s (at least) one of these in every classroom. On the other hand, I’m already bored with his shit. We’ll see how this goes.
And then we have my second favorite of the cadets, Jay-Den Kraag, a Klingon who wants to pursue the sciences and loves bird-watching. I’ve been dying to learn the status of the Klingon Empire in the thirty-second century (Discovery avoided even mentioning the Klingons once they bounced forward in time), and I’ve similarly been dying to see a Klingon who isn’t cut from the warrior cloth for a change.
Not seen in this episode is one other main character, Zoë Steiner’s Tarima Sadal, a Betazoid. The Athena only just arrives at Earth at the episode’s end, so presumably she’s waiting for them there (along with Reno and Tilly).
The story itself does all the things a premiere episode is supposed to do. We meet the characters, we get the setting, and we get an unexpected conflict, as Nus Braka shows up to steal the Athena’s warp drive. The ship is damaged, it needs to be fixed, and the cadets need to bring their special skills to bear. And I have no trouble believing that these particular cadets come with existing skills and useful traits, as up until a year or two ago, they were more isolated and self-sufficient. These people didn’t expect to have the option of the Academy until Discovery showed up and reversed the Burn.
It all works nicely and we get enough to make me very interested in what happens next to most of these people. (I say “most” because I could give a damn about Caleb. I mean, we know what’s going to happen, he’s gonna try to find his mother and he may find her, he may not, but it’s not going to end the way he wants and snore.) Hunter plays Ake much differently than any of the other Trek captains, as you can tell that she’s, on the one hand, seen it all, and on the other, is still excited about the possibilities ahead of her and her cadets. She has the joy of learning that most of the best Trek characters (and best teachers) have, but she also has the accumulated wisdom of the centuries that we’ve previously seen in a few characters (Guinan, particularly; Pelia, occasionally), and it makes her nicely stand out from her fellow captains.
I just hope they don’t overuse the search-for-Mom plot with Caleb, and I especially hope they don’t overuse Nus Braka. The setting doesn’t really lend itself to a recurring antagonist, and besides, Giamatti’s OTT act works best in small doses.
[Editor’s Note: Keith will be back to cover episode 2, “Beta Test,” in a later post.]
- Picardo has played the Voyager EMH on Voyager, Prodigy, and now Academy. The others include Michael Ansara as Kang (original series, DS9, Voyager), LeVar Burton as Geordi La Forge (TNG, Voyager, Picard), John deLancie as Q (TNG, DS9, Voyager, LD, Picard), Michael Dorn as Worf (TNG, DS9, Picard), Jonathan Frakes as William T. Riker (TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, LD, Picard), Alice Krige as the Borg Queen (Voyager, LD, Picard), Gates McFadden as Beverly Crusher (TNG, Prodigy, Picard), Richard Poe as Evek (TNG, DS9, Voyager), Tim Russ as Tuvok (Voyager, DS9, Picard), Armin Shimerman as Quark (DS9, TNG, Voyager, LD), Alexander Siddig as Julian Bashir (DS9, TNG, LD), Marina Sirtis as Deanna Troi (TNG, Voyager, Enterprise, LD, Picard), Brent Spiner as Data (TNG, Enterprise, Picard, LD), Sir Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard (TNG, DS9, Picard), George Takei as Hikaru Sulu (original series, Voyager, LD), and Wil Wheaton as Wes Crusher (TNG, Picard, LD, Prodigy). ↩︎
Excellent review I say. Clear-eyed and careful to avoid the later Trek writers emotional spiderwebs. Gone are the days when speculation driven by what-ifs drove the episodes. Those stories were quotable and unforgettable- resistance was futile.
So how does this work for someone who hasn’t seen discovery and really doesn’t have an interest in going back to watch it?
It fills you in on what you need to know.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Awesome thanks! Will check this out then. Wish I had liked discovery more…
IKR. I was able to follow E1 but I don’t know what the Burn is, really. Aside from “bad thing that caused everything to shut down for over 100 years”.
Yeah, maybe that could’ve been explained better. In short, something caused most of the dilithium in the galaxy to explode, destroying every ship with an active warp core, so in the aftermath, dilithium was scarce and warp drive usage was limited (presumably people were reluctant to use it except when necessary in case of a second Burn, but that was never made entirely clear). The galaxy was thus fragmented and regions fell out of contact, and the Federation was greatly diminished, with most of its core worlds leaving the Federation and withdrawing into themselves, including Earth. Once Discovery found the cause of the Burn and ensured it wouldn’t happen again, regular warp travel resumed, and the Federation has been rebuilding.
They also chose the somewhat questionable, “We found a planet made of Dilithium” over an alternative non-dilithium drive.
I feel like centring the first (two) episode(s) on Caleb Mir is a mistake on par with first-season Voyager‘s obsession with Tom Paris, and I don’t understand why Darem Reymi doesn’t just look like a fish guy all the time (other than, you know, doing that Arrowverse thing where aliens spend most of their time looking human so that teenagers can more easily lust after them). Nus Braka is pretty two-dimensional so far, but with an actor as charismatic as Paul Giamatti, it doesn’t really matter. And I think that the episode’s message about Starfleet trying to do better after the exigencies of the Burn was rather undercut by the “blow them to hell” ending; whatever happened to “target their weapons systems?” Like most of the other Secret Hideout-era series, SFA seems to have a distressingly “video-gamey” attitude towards violence.
That said, I like all of the other cadets well enough, and I agree with you that Lura Thok is a great character. On the whole, I’d say I found this a pleasant surprise.
Darem seems to have an actual discomfort with his fish man look. Which I suspect we’ll see addressed.
He only seemed to be shy about being seen during his transformation, not once he was transformed. It made me wonder if the scene was scripted with him having to take off his clothes to transform, because he acted exactly like someone who didn’t want to be seen changing clothes.
I also thought he was going to have to disrobe in order to embark on that particular mission.
I think the important part here is “trying” to do better. I have not watched the episodes yet but even in the oldest star trek they did kill the people trying to kill them. Star Trek was never superman levels of not killing anyone. Next generation certainly wasn’t.
Self-defense is one thing. What bugs me is when they smirk and joke about it, or that time in TNG when Geordi did a fist-pump and “Woo-hoo!” in celebration of blowing up an enemy ship with thousands of people aboard. I’m pretty sure we never saw Kirk or his crew laughing or cheering about killing their enemies, except maybe when they were nonsentient things like giant space amoebas.
Good points – I would just counter that I doubt that human emotion would be likely to change not remembering the specifics of your Geordi mention I can’t comment on it directly.
I assumed that Reymi was able to adapt himself to different environments and that was his (relatively) vacuum-resistant form.
Good point about the blow-up-the-bad-guys ending. The “teachable moment” quip was in particularly poor taste.
I thought this was very good. I haven’t really seen much that Holly Hunter has done besides The Incredibles, but I knew from that alone that she’d be fantastic here, and she was. I don’t dislike Caleb as much as Keith did, I’m more sort of neutral, but I can see the logic in making the viewpoint character someone who isn’t already sold on the Academy and needs to have its value revealed to him along with the audience. It also helps illustrate the theme of the series, the idea that these kids have grown up in hellish times and are now being given a chance to rebuild the Federation’s ideals.
I generally like the cast and characters, and the pilot did a good job letting them all contribute to solving the crisis. I’m not fond of the Cadet Master’s drill-sergeant treatment of the cadets, an approach I find abusive and cruel and incongruous in the context of Starfleet. But the actress is reasonably entertaining. I also hate it that they’re still perpetuating the myth of people freezing quickly in space. Vacuum is an insulator!!! Astronauts need cooling systems in their spacesuits, not heaters. Sure, if you’re in space long enough, you’ll eventually freeze, if you’re not in direct sunlight — or not standing on top of a gigantic spaceship that’s no doubt radiating a ton of waste heat — but it would take a lot longer than it does in air or water, which is why thermoses and vacuum-insulated windows work.
Giamatti’s character does nothing for me. He seems to be nothing more than a low-level pirate, a petty thug and bully, and his “comedic” personality is just annoying. Hopefully we won’t see much of him.
I’m disappointed that the 32nd-century cultures depicted are basically unchanged since the 24th. When I learned that the Klingon cadet wanted to be a doctor, I was hoping we’d learn that Klingon culture had outgrown its warrior mentality, maybe even had their own Surak and become pacifists. 800 years is a long time, comparable to the interval since the Magna Carta and the present. There should have been enormous cultural and political evolution in that interval, but so far Trek has failed to show more than minor incremental change.
Still, there are some nice touches. I love it that there’s an Exocomp officer wandering around in the background — called Almond Basket according to the credits, and if I read right, with the same voice actress as Peanut Hamper from Lower Decks. There also appears to be a Cheronian among the cadets, so evidently the species wasn’t extinct after all.
I’m unable to decide whether “Genesis Lythe” is the coolest character name of the year or the corniest one. From one angle, it’s got a certain elegance to it, but from another angle it sounds kinda like a porn name. (And I wonder if her middle name is “Torpedo.”)
My feelings are closer to Christopher’s than to Keith’s. I can tolerate all the cute and the impossibly smooth skin, but I have little tolerance for a bad guy who behaves so performatively. Didn’t he even rub his hands together like Snidely Whiplash? Not threatening.
I hate how militarized it all is even after supposedly separating out a War College — wearing uniforms and following orders? And mandatory haircut for humans, bah. Is that how you’d educate an “explorer corps” who are probably going to be relatively on their own when they travel?
At least we’ve gotten past the days when I said of NextGen, “not interested in the lives of a bunch of government employees with sticks up their ass.” (Yes, I know GR was a statist, really.)
I am already guessing Nus Braka is going to be a more performative villain than his actual personality. I’m going to take a wild guess that he deliberately took the heat for Caleb’s mom.
Interesting I mean Star Trek has always been almost a Military organization certainly with ranks and following orders. But then NextGen is my favorite of the series so …
I rather enjoyed the first episode of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. I plan to watch episode two tonight. First and foremost, I’m excited to see Trek looking forward instead of back. This is the furthest a show has been set in the post Discovery era. Welcome to the 32nd century.
I never pictured Holly Hunter as the captain of a starship, but she’s great here, especially playing off the equally amazing Paul Giamatti, who chews whole quadrants worth of scenery. Plus, you can’t go wrong casting Robert Picardo in pretty much anything. (Welcome back, Doctor!)
Shows set in colleges overuse annoying students. With a couple of exceptions, that wasn’t the case here. At least not in episode one. There were a few old tropes though, like the potential love triangle and the two cadets who both think they’re the biggest dick in the room (hint: they’re not) trying to show one another up. Caleb and Darem did nothing for me. They were my least favorite part of the episode.
Off to a good start. I’m excited to watch episode 2 tonight.
@Bobby Nash – The Caleb and Darem a.k.a. Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy thing was eyeroll city. But hey, they called each other “bitch” because that’s the edgy misogyny thing those kids these days say.
I hope recovering from The Burn isn’t just another pretext for lazy interpersonal conflict writing.
Men calling each other “bitch” is of much older vintage than that — it’s been attributed as far back as the 1500s. Of course it’s originally rooted in misogyny, but it’s been used in an ungendered way long enough that modern (or 32nd-century) users may not see it as gendered.
And I don’t see them as Harry and Draco — more maybe Peter Parker and Harry Osborn (initially in the comics). They’re probably going to grow past their initial conflict and become fast friends. Heck, given that one of the head writers here is from The Magicians, I wouldn’t be surprised if they ended up as lovers.
@ChristopherLBennett – Men calling each other a misogynistic slur is not ungendered, it derives its supposed zing from being an unmanly insult.
I’m not saying it is ungendered. I’m saying that not everyone is an expert in etymology or history, and the word has been used against men often enough that some people might use it without realizing its misogynistic underpinnings. Especially 1200 years from now when historical prejudices have presumably been long forgotten.
Words sometimes get divorced from their origins. I doubt many people today know that “punk” originally meant “prostitute,” or that “golly” is a minced oath for “God’s body” that was seen as a serious profanity in Elizabethan times, because referring to God having physical form was blasphemous.
Thank you as I was about to say similar things here. As someone who as a student was the “competitive go getter” this is actually how things usually went. Respective competition – I don’t talk to many people from law school still – except the ones who I saw as competition. Sometimes tropes exist because they are real.
I’ve never been the competitive go-getter type, but my best friend in high school was someone I initially butted heads with, so I guess that’s a common enough pattern. (Although other people I butted heads with continued to be adversaries, because they were just bullies or jerks.)
I can imagine that Admiral Lythe is hyper-protective of his daughter when potential suitors come around: “Genesis allowed is not!”
I mean what is the status of Christianity in Star Trek – I am not sure it has really ever been explicitly mentioned anywhere. Would any biblical connotations even exist? Someone saying I knew Genesis biblically and wondering if they mean the book or the character here would be funny … but likely not work.
Probably dramatically changed but still in existence in various forms. Star Trek implies that traditional religion isn’t as popular as it used to be but many people have some sort of spiritual beliefs.
There was a lot of Bible-quoting in the original series, like Spock likening the tribbles to the lilies of the field, as well as other Christian references like Khan referring to Milton’s “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” Heck, Carol Marcus naming her terraforming technology Genesis was an obvious Biblical reference on the face of it. As McCoy said when he learned about it, “According to myth, the Earth was created in six days. Now, watch out! Here comes Genesis, we’ll do it for you in six minutes.” Not so much in the later series, though, I think.
Then there’s Genesis’s kid sister, Exodus Lythe. She was always running away from home.
And their siblings, Levi(ticus) Lythe, the stickler for the rules, and Numbers Lythe, the mathematician.
And their grandmother, Old Deuteronomy, who’s a crazy cat lady.
I never knew I needed Star Trek bible puns … but I did. Thanks! These were great.
all that being said, love the new series. Love her energy as captain. Her curled up in the captains chair reading a physical book is a visual I didn’t know I needed.
Good start I think. Nice note that discovery was being retrofitted so it couldn’t make it in time. That’s the problem with a ship capable of instant transmission, I guess it will “being retrofitted” or “on its own important mission” a lot this season.
Felony Murder is a uniquely American law and generally the rest of the world views it as insane.
I think they meant “Felony Theft” in the context that her charge of receiving stolen goods became a felony when murder was involved.
Which is indeed a very different but real law.
After World War III and pretty much the end of most nations as we know them today I expect law went through a LOT of changes.
Now new shows I didn’t know I needed. Law and Order Star Trek … CSI Star Trek … FCIS (Federation Criminal Investigative Services) ;) ok I’ll stop before everyone here pulls all their hair out – though I have recently discovered that NCIS and Law and Order are better than I remembered now. (or maybe its just because I am in middle age…)
As you say, it’s far future Federation law, so there’s no reason to assume it’s based on the same parameters as the American felony murder charge.
Judging from episode 2, it looks like this may be more a college drama than a starship action show (at least I hope so), so there may not be many episodes where Discovery‘s availability would be an issue.
I agree that Hunter is great while the pair of aggressively masculine cadets, Rosta’s Caleb especially, are grating in all-to-familiar ways. On the whole it works for me so far and feels more like a Star Trek series focusing on characters at the Academy than a YA drama shoehorned into a Star Trek series. Which is a huge relief.
The complete destruction of Braka’s crew was far too casual, yes.
Ake goes over to Yashere’s Thok, puts on her reading glasses to assess the info at that station, and then hands them to Thok when she’s done. I thought maybe it’d be a running gag but — warning: extremely mild spoiler for the next episode — not so much.
I knew that was Rufus Wainwright a couple of notes into the questionable song choice at the end, and his typically nasal, overwrought delivery ruined any sense of wonder the visuals might have elicited by themselves.
The spatial awareness that Braka’s hologram has walking around the bridge of the Athena is maybe the most egregious iteration of that conceit yet, although since we don’t see the actual Braka’s end of things it’s at least technically possible that he’s casting from some kind of setup where in turn the Athena’s bridge is realized holographically around him.
One annoying element for me was the insistence that the Earth-human male get his hair cut. The Klingon cadet gets to keep his hair, as do all the Earth-human females and female presenting aliens so it doesn’t seem to be safety related. 200 years ago many military personnel would have long hair, 300 years ago they certainly would, so why might it not have changed 1000+ years ahead?
Wasn’t quite convinced by the Exocomp and Brikar who wandered through. Looked almost as if they’d been drawn in by hand and didn’t quite match the rest of the look.
The “regulation haircut” thing did bug me. It doesn’t make much sense in such a diverse society. But maybe it’s like Ensign Ro’s earring — since Caleb’s basically a criminal on probation, he’s under more restrictions than other cadets and has to earn the usual liberties.
Caleb isn’t “Earth-human,” though; he’s never been to Earth before. I don’t think his mother had either; presumably their part of space was cut off from Earth during the post-Burn century when warp travel was rare.
Given the Doctor’s examination of him later on, it also seems possible that he was given the haircut because it was the easiest way to get rid of lice or the like.
Earth-human instead of Vulcan-human or Kilingon-human, more a generic intelligent creature term rather than personal planet of origin. Had brain-failure at thinking of a better term while writing.
Generally we just call that “human.”
Also, “human” comes from the same Latin root as “humus,” meaning earth or soil, so technically “Earth-human” is redundant.
I can’t believe this thing I’ve been hearing about as a Star Trek fan for for at least thirty years is finally happening, but I’m not planning on giving the Ellisons any of my money to watch it. My local PBS station needs it more.
My life has been crazy, and I emailed my review of “Beta Test” too late for it to go up today. Look for it Monday, probably.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
(Or Tuesday, maybe. Monday is a holiday…..)
—KRAD
While I agree with much of your review, we disagree about SAM. I found her ebullient and effervescent personality to be too similar to that of Sylvia Tilly’s personality in the early seasons of STAR TREK: DISCOVERY and I’d have preferred a character who’s personality was more of, you should pardon the expression, an undiscovered country.
Oh and Paul Giamatti didn’t just chew the scenery, he may be the first actor I’ve ever seen who ruminated the scenery.
Between SAM, Tilly, and Tendi, it’s now an archetype.
I don’t see them as the same type, exactly. Tilly was a nervous talker, naturally cheerful but insecure. Tendi is just a natural ray of sunshine, though it’s something of a cover for her Mistress of the Winter Constellations past. SAM seems to be trying too hard at everything because she’s a brand-new life form trying to define herself and gain acceptance.
And insofar as it is a general character type, wouldn’t Rok-Tahk fit the category as well? She’s more of an eager 8-year-old child, but SAM is barely 8 weeks old, I think. For that matter, SNW’s Uhura might fit too.
I had forgotten Rok’Tahk!
But yes, I think super enthusiasm for Starfleet and cheerfulness dates all the way back to Wesley Crusher.
A cynical reviewer might suggest how the characters have been received being influenced by the characters’ genders.
I dunno — I had a lot of peers who found Wesley annoying.
Yeah, I was actually going with the reverse that the idea of female exuberant bubbliness is more socially tolerated among nerds.
There’s long been speculation if Wesley had been Wendy that she’d have been more popular (which I don’t think so).
As I’ve always understood it, the original idea was, in fact, for the character to be Leslie Crusher, Beverly’s daughter. But Roddenberry changed it to Wesley (his own middle name) because he wanted the character to be a surrogate for his younger self (or his perception thereof). I think Roddenberry making Wesley too precocious and privileged as a sort of Gary Stu self-insertion had more to do with the negative reactions to the character than his gender.
If Lower Decks counts toward portraying a character in a TV series, shouldn’t Star Trek: The Animated Series count?
I think Keith counts TAS as essentially seasons 4-5 of TOS. Which is more or less what it tried to be. (It was originally called just Star Trek, the TAS suffix not being officially added until the DVD releases.)
“….yet he managed to become a wiz at piloting and making covert communications and astrophysics and operating systems on a starship, er, somehow”
Somehow Palpatine returned…
Somehow Maz has Lukes lightsaber….
Sounds like the JJ schooll of storytelling
I admit, I was surprised that Braka didn’t become his mentor but I suppose that would have just made him Star Lord.
Not the only Star Wars on my mind, watching today. He basically escapes a Star Wars reality on his way to the Federation. There’s even Star Warsy music. And he’s acting like Anakin or something. *shrug*
The only reason things remind people of Star Wars is that Star Wars was itself a pastiche of all the pop culture George Lucas liked as a kid, and is consciously built around universal mythic archetypes. Star Wars was completely unoriginal by design, its only innovations being in visual effects. Nostalgia dressed up with cutting-edge effects was its main selling point to 1970s-80s audiences. So it’s ironic that people today assume it’s the original archetype of the tropes it was explicitly copying from elsewhere.
I don’t even see the parallel. Star Wars, in the movies and many of the shows, is about living under a pervasive galactic government, whether a democratic republic or, more often, an authoritarian empire. The post-Burn situation is the opposite, a time of relative anarchy after the effective collapse of galactic civilization. If anything, the closer archetype would be Asimov’s Foundation trilogy — which is one of the things Star Wars has copied heavily from.
I don’t think there also has to be any shame also that there’s an overlapping Venn diagram of the kind of places the two space opera franchises meet either. There’s places in Star Trek where things are seedy and crime filled (the one part I liked about The Final Frontier) and there’s places where big epic political speeches are given in Star Wars. Certainly the two will influence each other even if neither would ever acknowledge it publicly.
But I agree, I see the Burn as more of an attempt to “revert” the galaxy ala Fallout and the destruction of Shady Sands. Before the Burn, TNG and DS9 had made it seem that the Milky Way or at least Alpha Quadrant had become too known and civilized. The Burn returns it to the Wild West of the TOS era.
Everyone talks about how gritty Star Wars‘s look was, but it was a mix of gritty, run-down stuff for the less well-off and clean, sterile futurism for the powerful elites.
And really, gritty futurism has been the norm for so many movies over the past few decades that I’m surprised people are still associating it with Star Wars. It’s just generic by this point. “X reminds me of Star Wars” is the “tastes like chicken” of sci-fi.
This has been such a collection of cliché so far, that i’m seriously surprised by any positive notes on this, except for the captain, the Doctor and the klingon bird watcher guy. But everyone smiling like morons during speeches? A story so predictable with literally nothing new? The villain guy, who is soooooo evil? Rebellious guy who is given a second chance? Cadets need to save the ship on their first day because everyone else is totally incompetent to do almost anything? This is just terrible, sorry…I really hope it’s just a setup for something more originals, but with three likeable characters and nothing else, the setup is extremely thin for me so far…
Gonna agree that the script is pretty dorky, but the look and feel and performances save it. The show is fun so far, and my expectations are low enough that I hope to enjoy it, but they will stay low :)
I’m commenting a lot today because this is probably the first time I was ever this close to timely reading and writing on a krad review. I’m chuffed.
the look and feel, visuals, music, directing are all fine, the actors are also ok, but i’m very sensitive to recycled scripts and characters, i think the most important goal of anything with a story in it should be to have a decent story to tell. If a story is just forced around an idea, visual effects etc, that just annoys me.
So i really hope that the next episodes will show that they do have some decent ideas and they can build up original characters.
I don’t think anyone was shown to be incompetent; the bridge crew all contributed usefully. A lot of the regular crew, including Thok, was injured, and others were probably killed. And it happened that these cadets had special knowledge or skills that proved relevant, and they had the initiative and creativity to apply those skills. That doesn’t mean the others are incompetent, just that these ones are extra-competent and thus worthy of our attention as the series leads. That’s just how most series storytelling works, since there has to be a reason we’re focusing on one set of characters and not the other people around them.
That was probably the most minor point of my complaints. However it gave me some Wesley-vibes still. And for me storytelling needs to tell a story I can believe – this was really a stretch to take it seriously for me.
The difference from Wesley is that this is explicitly, specifically a Starfleet Academy show, so of course the kids are going to be the main characters, and of course the stories it chooses to tell are going to be the ones where the main characters are in a position to make a key difference. Is it any different from Prodigy centering on an even younger group of lead characters who are crucial to saving the day?
I think what actually works really well for Starfleet Academy is that this is a bunch of adults (I hate calling them children) who have grown up in the post-apocalypse era of the setting. These are people who haven’t grown up in the shadow of the Federation’s stability and while Caleb is basically just Star Lord (orphaned misfit who grew up in a performative bad boy), everyone else is from cultures that are bouncing off one another as well.
This isn’t a collection of students from worlds that have centuries of peace but people taking a risk on reviving a galactic community that hasn’t existed since their grandparents time.
Let’s say “young adults.”
And Caleb is far closer to Kelvin-timeline Kirk. Lost a parent, grew up delinquent, challenged by a Starfleet surrogate parent to join the Academy and fulfill his exceptional potential, goes in cocky and convinced he can do it better than anyone else, has to learn humility and cooperation. It’s practically the identical character arc, although Caleb grew up in a dystopia without any parents, and thus has more of an excuse for his attitude problems than Kelvin Kirk, who was raised by his mother and uncle on a peaceful and prosperous Earth, although his uncle was implicitly at least verbally abusive.
This series is billed as featuring the first class of Starfleet Academy students in over a hundred years. But I thought the Academy was already up and running at least as of the Discovery episode “All is Possible” where Tilly led a few cadets through a mission? So were those cadets part of some unofficial class or does that Discovery episode take place during the first season of Starfleet Academy?
It’s the first class of Academy students in San Francisco in over a hundred years. The Academy in DSC was on the Starfleet Headquarters space station.
Oh, I see. I wonder if we’ll see those cadets from the DSC episode featured again but I doubt it.
Really, the Academy should have many campuses. If Starfleet is as large as it’s presented to be, there’s no way a single campus could be remotely enough to train all its personnel.
We’ve already established the War College is doing most of the heavy lifting for Starfleet anyway.
Which I’m interested in and hope it doesn’t turn into, “War College=Bad, Starfleet Academy=Good.”
I do fully expect it to be dueling academies like Police Academy, though.
We should save that conversation for when the episode 2 review goes up, which I guess will be Tuesday, since tomorrow is a holiday.
Indeed!
I wonder if the rather clever notion of making the academy a mobile starship that lands and docks in San Francisco – always ready to take off for deep space missions/lessons as needed – was a way to placate studio executives who might be a bit wary of a Star Trek show that is NOT starship-based. The main plot in this pilot episode is essentially Trek’s greatest hits 101. Getting caught offguard by Nus Braka’s ship, having the ship’s weapons disabled, and having the cadets science their way out of this predicament is as classic as it gets. It’s no secret half the reason DS9 was treated as a second-class show by studio (and many fans) was because it was set on a station. Without getting into spoilers, I imagine episode 2 is more indicative of how the show will play out. We’ll see.
I can see some clear parallels between Caleb Mir and Prodigy’s Dal R’El. The big difference is that Prodigy wasn’t afraid of letting Dal be a big doofus out of his depth – he clearly had no clue how to operate a starship despite his claim he had to be the captain. Caleb on the other hand is clearly experienced. Since finding his mother is apparently a season-long thread, I imagine we’ll be getting some more context and flashbacks, especially in regards to Braka’s role. While Braka was a bit hammy, I get the impression they’re trying to position him as a bit more nuanced with clear gripes against the Federation and Starfleet – and Giamatti visibly tried to play up that part. We’ll see.
As for the new characters, I’m already on board with Ake and especially Lura Thok. There was always common ground between Klingons and Jem’ Hadar, which DS9 touched upon a few times. It makes perfect sense to get a mixture of the two and drill instructor is the perfect role for her. And it’s a delight to see Picardo’s EMH snarkier than ever, and SAM is brimming with potential – presumably this show’s Data.
The rest of the student cast has yet to shine, but there’s still time. Trek pilots rarely bring the entire cast fully formed from the start. Just look at DS9: Sisko, Kira and O’Brien were the only ones who grabbed our attention on that pilot, while Odo was stuck with that blunt character infodump. It took a while for the rest of them to catch up.
Lastly, as a longtime fan of TMP’s Enterprise reveal sequence (derided by many as overly long), I absolutely adored the ship landing sequence in San Francisco. Between that and the massive academy sets seen in the second episode, I can’t begin to fathom how expensive this show is. I imagine way pricier than Picard.
Even the non-ship-based DS9 had runabouts and eventually the Defiant so that it could do stories away from the station from time to time. Presumably the thinking is the same here, the creators wanting the freedom to tell both kinds of stories — but the sets are so huge and expensive that it was more feasible to double them up and use the same sets for both school and starship.
I haven’t seen anyone address the background music themes, so I just want to drop in and say I *hate* it when the sound track tells me what I’m supposed to be feeling. Both the first and second episodes do exactly that, over and over again, using swelling volume or overt nostalgia (or both) as well as visuals that mean nothing to those trying to come to the show as newbies. This musical approach both throws me out of the story completely AND makes me almost unwilling to continue following along.
I was a little surprised to see what looked like someone from Cheron when Bele and Lokai were supposedly the only survivors of their species, but it’s fairly explainable that if they managed to leave Cheron, possibly others did as well.
Yeah, it stands to reason that if the species was capable of interstellar travel, there would’ve been more than two survivors. For that matter, both Bele and Lokai were still alive at the end of the episode, so they could’ve managed to survive and procreate somehow (though not with each other, obviously). For that matter, they claimed to be 50,000 years old, so it’s conceivable that one or both of them are still alive in the 32nd century. (Or maybe Cheron just has really short years. Some red dwarfs have habitable zones so small that their years are measured in Earth days.)
There was also a Cheronian named Virgil in the Section 31 movie, and it’s been pointed out that both of them, concerningly, belong to Bele’s ethnic group, so we don’t know if Lokai’s ethnic group survived.
“Some red dwarfs have habitable zones so small that their years are measured in Earth days.”
Our years are measured in Earth days… ;^)
Not in single digits.