Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

Hi, friends! Welcome to 2026! I’ll be resuming my weekly schedule in just a few days, but I’m in a situation I’ll call “have screeners, will review”. That is to say, my Star Trek podcast, Antimatter Pod, got access to the first six episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, and I kind of accidentally binged them in a couple of days — and now I cannot wait to talk about it. Here’s a general review of the whole series with minimal spoilers, as per the terms of the embargo.

Anyway, I think Starfleet Academy is good

I’ll be honest: I went in with some trepidation, because the last few offerings from Star Trek — season 5 of Lower Decks, Section 31 and season 3 of Strange New Worlds — have disappointed me. “Is it time to take a break?” I wondered. After all, it’s been eight years since Discovery premiered and warped me back into the fandom of my childhood — almost the same amount of time between becoming a Trekkie as a kid and then hitting Enterprise and realising I needed to move on.

Don’t worry, you’re stuck with me for a while yet.

There are a handful of moments in the first two episodes of SFA that feel like a gentle rebuke to Strange New Worlds and Star Trek: Picard.

One is Holly Hunter saying, “To separate a child from his parent is reprehensible.” (This is also, of course, a statement on contemporary American politics.)

Another is Oded Fehr talking about the value of youth activism, and the sterility of a culture that does not value its young people. It’s a justification for the existence of this very series, of course, but both moments feel like they’re chiding SNW (which has a violent, frequently homicidal approach to children of all species) and Picard, which abandoned its diverse cast of young actors in favour of a story about how kids need to get out of the way and let the old heroes save the world.

Another moment: Fehr’s Admiral Vance remarks, “People say they want progress, but they don’t want to change.”

If Strange New Worlds and Picard were Star Treks made for Reddit — aimed at the reactionary side of fandom which wants stories about familiar characters doing familiar things, ideally filmed as if it’s 1995 — Starfleet Academy feels like it’s made for Tumblr. The stakes are frequently low, the focus is on characterisation over plot, there is some (unintentional?) sexual tension between two male characters, and there is a character who may have been engineered in a lab to appeal to Tumblr’s WLW monsterfuckers. There is a whole episode about how you’re due for a Deep Space 9 rewatch.

SFA has the sincerity and wide-eyed optimism of Prodigy and Discovery — it is specifically a sequel to Discovery, and has some characters in common, but it is very consciously walking in Prodigy’s footsteps — and the emphasis on character and shenanigans of Lower Decks. Crowd scenes include a wheelchair user and a hijabi; two regulars have mild lisps. There are multiple queer characters.

The third episode has no stakes whatsoever, and feels like an homage to DS9’s “Take Me Out To The Holosuite”. It’s a little cosy for my taste, but hey, it’s a big, cold universe out there; we can let the kids find their feet before things get serious. And when the stakes do appear, we know these characters well enough to care. Deeply.

The cast — a mixture of young, attractive actors with very short resumes, seasoned veterans and two whole lesbian comedian-actors — is impressive. Holly Hunter, playing Captain Nahla Ake, is a huge get for the series, and she plays a type of captain we’ve never seen before: Ake has experienced both loss and personal moral failure, which makes her a protective and thoughtful mentor with a taste for chaos. Following the rules led her to make a grievous error; now she follows the spirit of the law, her principles, and her own whims.

Sandro Rosta, whose only other screen credit is for a 2021 short film, matches Hunter’s presence, playing a young man who has grown up relying on his wits and intelligence to survive. Equally outstanding are Karim Diane, who plays a Klingon smol bean with anxiety, and Kerrice Brooks, whose character is the Data figure, learning about humanity for the first time. And let me tell you, seeing a curvy young Black woman in that role made me feel good about the world.

I’m not going to say the series is perfect. I don’t mind the contemporary dialogue, but some people will find it grating. Oded Fehr’s role as (d)Admiral Vance seems to involve delivering exposition and explaining the subtext. Paul Giamatti’s performance in the premiere is so broad that he sucks all the oxygen out of his few scenes; a later apperance is equally bombastic but more watchable. A storyline around a rival school raises worldbuilding questions, and I would like to see Bella Shepherd get to do more.

I am also terrified that Captain Ake is going to be killed off, because “hero’s journey” and “wise old mentor” and “Gandalf and Obi-Wan”. I simply cannot be normal about her, and will not try. Someone is going to call her a manic pixie dream captain, and I am going to roll up my sleeves and fight them.

But those are quibbles. This is a great introduction to the Star Trek universe for the prospective new viewer, or an opportunity for a casual fan to make a return. It’s “Star Trek as allegory” in the biggest way: a story about the aftermath of environmental catastrophe and imperial decay, about a generation of young people who have suffered from isolation and institutional failure, and about the adults who want these kids to have better lives than they did. You know. It’s a story about the 2020s.