4 out of 5

Created by: Gaia Violo

covers season 1

I have a personal policy of only reviewing TV shows once. If I’m doing reviews of physical releases, or there’s really some massive demarcation between seasons (like Twin Peaks versus The Return), then yeah, that merits a couple reviews, but as long as the first season of a show feels representative of what I later watch, I’ll generally not return to the review.

Star Trek Academy is a good show. Is it a great show – “great” being some fuzzy line that bumps a review to a four out of five instead of a “good” three out of five show? Maybe not. It’s on the line. But I need to give it an edge over the preceding “good”-rated Discovery, which is a review I’m tempted to violate my personal policy on because some seasons /episodes of that show are straight up awful, and it became a “just gotta get through this” watch because something something Star Trek… But, I exasperatedly must admit that, overall, Discovery was consistent in what it was doing, and there was definitely enough good in there to mostly balance the not-good, By that metric: Academy’s first season was never not-good, and perhaps more importantly: I think it really nailed its m.o.: to make a teen-centric Star Trek show.

That is essentially the gist, though I appreciate that Academy gives us an in to that via the half-Lanthanite (read: long-lived) Nahla Ake, played by Holly Hunter, who, in a Federation capacity, is responsible for splitting up a mother and child during a court case; years later, when invited to be a cadet trainer for Starfleet Academy, Nahla finds that one of her students-to-be is that child – Caleb, played by Sandro Rosta. That connection is a clever hook-in to the kids vs. adults vibe necessary for any show of this nature, as it makes it more than just a surface level rebellion. Additionally, the writers / creator Gaia Violo takes steps to make this sequence of events reasonable and paced: it’s not just complete happenstance that Caleb runs into Ake again, nor is their relationship black and white acrimonious or, alternately, something that takes one event to turn into a relationship of trust. Instead, Caleb’s past is wound in to his whole personality, including how he interacts with his classmates.

The classmates are where Academy both shines and stumbles. It makes sense to vary the cast greatly in terms of races – that’s a Star Trek staple – and I like that we get shades of Next Generation Riker, Data, Worf-proxies and etc; I also think Academy gives Disco a big ol’ deserved raspberry for showing how to do diversity without making it cringey. However, Karim Diané’s Klingon Jay-Den is a kind of misfire of juxtapositions, aiming to make a member of a warlike race the most sensitive of the crew, which is an interesting idea but unfortunately kind of crumbles behind Diané’s abilities in the role, and the voice he chose / had to use to sound Klingon; similarly, the android spin for this show comes via Kerrice Brooks’ SAM, of a holographic-esque race who have chosen to purposefully craft SAM as a hyperactive teen, thus making for the juxtaposition of the overly analytic character being the wildcard. Brooks is pretty charming, but the show pushes on this dynamic way too hard to the point where it’s difficult for SAM to fit well into the show’s pacing and tone, kind of ramping up specifically for her scenes. Interestingly, there’s a late season reset of sorts for SAM that corrects for this really well; I wonder if there was feedback from the actor (or taken from forums…). George Hawkins’ Khionian Darem plays a good jock; the quirk here is that the creators ran out of ideas on how to make the stock white guy different, so they added in some nonsense about glitter vomit that feels pointless. Bella Shepard’s contributions as Genesis are great, and she plays off of Rosta (who is also great) very well. Zoë Steiner’s Betazed Tarima is another character – somewhat like SAM – that it feels like the writers couldn’t quite get a read on her place. She’s essentially placed as the love interest for Sandro, forming one of the other requirements for a teen show – relationship dramatics – and though I think Steiner does a good job of balancing what she has to work with, justifying her appearances beyond Love Interest are unfortunately always a bit stiff.

The crew has its own ups and downs. Hunter is a lot of fun, but, oddly, with her captain’s defining trait being how un-captain like she is – she walks around in bare feet, gasp! – and with the show’s primary focus being on the kids, she never quite carries much authority in her scenes. Tig Notaro is a wonderful return from Disco, and I will spoil one thing – Mary Wiseman from Disco also pops up, and Tilly was a character who came to really annoy me over the course of that series, but her one guest turn here brings back all the charm she initially had, and is one of the more affecting, smartly-written episodes of the season. Robert Picardo’s Doctor, ported from Voyager, is another wonderful addition. I suppose the only real “down” here – besides my comment on Hunter’s Ake – is that the crew ends up feeling pretty superfluous. That is the main challenge to Academy: you can’t really fake out the audience each week that somehow the same group of kids would be involved in Federation-threatening events, meaning you have to have some low(er) stakes episodes. Thankfully, the decision was made to make Academy in the more classic Star Trek format of bottle episodes – with some ongoing subplots – which makes that a lot easier, as you can just zero in on interpersonal dynamics and whatnot, and we spend some time doing character-focused episodes in that regard. But the show isn’t squarely written for teens, with Paramount / Violo understanding this isn’t Prodigy, i.e. something clearly targeted towards a younger demo – it is positioned as the next entry in the Star Trek franchise. And so we juggle larger politics with the way it affects the students, and yeah, often / sometimes they insert themselves in the middle of the larger political matters, making episodes walk the line between smokescreen distraction and actually relevant happenings, while the classmates’ dramas keep playing out. That line-walking is successful more often than not.

I think the make or break for most people will be how interested they are in those dramas. For the most part, though, I was really surprised: there are opportunities for Academy to lean in to easier distractions like love triangles, or ego square-offs, but they stay much truer to Federation principles than Discovery did in this regard: people tend to learn from what’s happened; people lean towards trying to find a resolution. It gives the actors a lot of room to fill their roles with real personalities, and gives the writing team a lot of grace in actually scripting out some well-considered dialogue, and episode themes that cutely back up whatever character arc they’re supporting.

Starfleet Academy felt like the next big gamble in the Trek universe. Picard has nostalgia; Strange New Worlds kind of appealed to the safer-bet side of Disco. Academy, as a mainline entry in the franchise, was risky: another Disco spin-off (the reception of which had been mixed), and focusing on a younger cast… I proceeded with hopeful, but careful steps. And I never felt led astray as it went on. There are some balancing aspects in the tone and crew, but these could have been so much worse, and on the flip-side – we get the return of much smarter writing, somehow mixed in to the soap opera elements that, admittedly, feel true to that younger cast. Hopefully this does bring in a younger audience as well as a returning one, because this is a series that deserves time to develop even firmer footing in seasons to come.