Despite what you might have heard or deduced from that truly unfortunate poster Paramount released late last year, I’m here to tell you that Starfleet Academy is not a bad show. It’s also not a good show. It’s actually a very frustrating show with some serious tonal issues, particularly in early episodes. But when it’s on the top of its game (such as in its exceptional fifth episode), it’s put down your phone and pay attention good. And when it’s not, well, it’s not really worth your time. Which makes it really hard to write a review. So, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to tell you what works – and tell you when things start to transition from a CW teen drama knock-off into something more – and then let you make the choice whether or not this is something you want to spend your time on. Because I was ready to pan this whole thing after the first few episodes, but now I’m intrigued enough to see where it’s going to take the rest of its first season.
The story being told here is a bit of a shell within a shell. We’re first introduced to Captain Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter, great when she’s asked to be a Captain, less successful when she’s asked to be the not-so-strict head of the Academy) when she’s asked to pass sentence on a pirate, Nus Braka (Paul Giamatti, easily the strongest and most consistent performance in the series), and his co-defendant, a mother with a young boy (Tatiana Maslany, who does a lot with very little screen time). It’s a tragic moment, one that will cause Ake to step away from Starfleet entirely and one that will set that little boy on a path that will eventually lead to him attending Starfleet Academy – kicking and screaming all the way.
So, the show kicks off with three exceptional actors sharing the screen in a tense sequence, acting the hell out of things. And then the wheels start to come off the wagon. Thanks to a time jump, that little boy is now a young adult with a rap sheet longer than he is tall (and he’s pretty tall). Caleb Mir (Sandro Rosta, fit, attractive, and the perfect lead for a teen drama – less so for what this series needs him to do) cuts a deal with Ake (who sees him as a little boy lost that she has the ability to save) to attend the Academy instead of going to prison for his latest escapade. Angry and closed off, Caleb will need to learn to open him up to others, be vulnerable, and trust someone other than himself in order to succeed. Hardly an original character arc, but there are only so many arcs that work within a school setting like this one.
Caleb classmates slot nicely into the typical archetypes you would expect from this type of story. There’s Genesis Lythe (Bella Shepard, the strongest actor in the student crew, who doesn’t get enough to do), the daughter of a Starfleet admiral who is attempting to prove herself and step out of her father’s shadow. Jay-Den Kraag (Karim Diane) is a Klingon who eschews violence and desperately wants to be a doctor – which of course puts him at odds with his family. Darem Reymi (George Hawkins, another actor who I wish got a bit more to do) is the cocky pretty boy who also has some parental issues but who has a heart buried under his prickly exterior. And then there’s SAM (Kerrice Brooks, very energetic), a hologram who has been sent to the Academy by a planet of sentient holograms and who is so incredibly peppy that she will make you cringe more than once. It’s a motley crew – with several more recurring characters popping up to flesh out the key players as the early episode unfurl – and not a one of them has any real character depth to speak of (outside of parental issues – they all have those in spades).
Once we start watching the goings on at the Academy, it’s as if that initial dramatic confrontation between Ake, Braka, and Caleb’s mother didn’t happen. Sure, there’s one additional sequence where Ake and Braka go toe-to-toe (and Hunter and Giamatti are absolutely spectacular whenever they’re asked to play off one another), but it’s like a balloon is popped and the entire tone of the series pivots to hijinks. Instead of watching the cadets learn about how Starfleet fits into this particular era of the galaxy*, we get sports try-outs, a prank war with the War College that shares the grounds with the Academy, and various chances for the cadets to learn Very Important Lessons about themselves that will serve them well on their development. The episodes feel more like syrupy family dramas – something like a 7th Heaven – than Star Trek, with a lesson to be learned and laid out for us to understand in clear terms by the close of the episode. Everything about these initial episodes feels more CW than sci-fi. And, I suppose that’s not particularly surprising – this is a story about young adults in school. There’s hormones, jealousy, worries, feelings of inadequacy. But when the main internal conflict gets resolved by episode’s end, it starts to feel more trite than character driven. More of “here’s the lesson we want taught, let’s pick who gets to be the focal point to learn it” and less “this character needs to tell us this story.”
*While you don’t need to have watched Star Trek: Discovery to understand the goings on in Starfleet, the Federation, or Earth in the series, it would certainly help. The key pieces of information from Discovery do get doled out to the audience in a quick exposition dump – the Burn, Discovery jumping far into the future, the fracturing and rebuilding of the Federation – so you won’t be lost. I never managed to finish Discovery (I quit after Georgiou left the series), but I managed to follow things easily.
But here’s the kicker: When the series starts to let the actual adults lead the story, well, things get a lot better. Among the various instructors we meet are Jett Reno (Tig Notaro, just wonderful), who’s hopped into teaching from her stint on Discovery because her partner is also working at the Academy and The Doctor (Robert Picardo, who settles nicely back into the role) from Voyager, who seems to be teaching way too many courses for his particular knowledge base. Notaro’s biting sarcasm cuts through a lot of the cloyingly emotional stuff with the kids – bringing both a dose of reality to their spiraling worries as well as offering some sound advice when needed. And The Doctor doesn’t suffer fools, which is what most of these kids are at various points in the early episodes.
That’s all well and good, but the best moments of the series (out of the six episodes critics were offered) come mid-season when the cadets get off the planet and into space, allowing the petty squabbles between the War College and the Academy to peter out when things go terribly wrong and everyone needs to work together. It’s classic Trek in the best ways – how a seemingly disparate crew learns to work together to try to get itself out of a seemingly impossible situation. It’s the first time since that opening sequence where the series has any real stakes (whether or not you make the sports team or get a date aren’t stakes no matter how important it seems at the time). But you have to slog through some pretty rough episodes to get to the point where things start to feel at all worth while.
This isn’t a case of needing to learn who these cadets are to understand how they fit into this sweeping change in the tone of the series, either. Watching frivolous jokes, antics, and posturing tells you next to nothing about who Caleb, Reymi, or any of the others are under pressure. And it’s not limited to the students – Ake spends the bulk of the season flouncing onto couches, wandering around the campus barefoot, and indulging some pretty bad behavior without batting an eye. And then, suddenly, we’re no longer in a YA story and into a real stakes situation and suddenly everyone is focused and ready to rock. It’s a jarring switch, albeit a very welcome one.
I’ll admit that I nearly threw in the towel and didn’t finish the screeners – I was that disappointed with the series as it spun its wheels and tried to offer us a version of Starfleet Academy that was less about seeing how these cadets were learning to interact with the political realities of their current universe and more about who liked who and whose parents were the harshest on them. But I’m glad that I ultimately didn’t, because when given the chance to tell a complex story that relies on the cadets working together under duress to prove that they can be a shining light for the future of Starfleet – while being guided by some fine officers – this series works. When it’s a CW drama, where crass jokes are tossed around (including by Stephen Colbert in a voice over as the AI dean of students), it’s a confused mess. This series has heavy hitters like Hunter and Giamatti at its disposal. Once it starts to use them – and use them effectively and correctly (meaning in scenes with each other) – the show becomes something truly special.
Strafleet Academy isn’t a miss, but it is a mess. One that has a chance to figure itself out in the back half of the season and become a compelling story about working together to try to protect those who need protection. There’s a mid-season episode (a strong showcase for Brooks’ SAM) that is essentially a love letter to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a series that famously started out rocky before finding its footing and turning into one of the best sci-fi series ever made. In addition to causing me to tear up a bit (it’s got some shameless fan pandering, but you know what – it works), it reminded me of a clear lesson from that series: first seasons are hard. It takes time to figure out what you have in terms of character, setting, and story. And Starfleet Academy definitely isn’t there yet. But there are threads of what this series could be – if it lets itself be more than Animal House.
Starfleet Academy premieres on January 15. Six of the ten episodes were provided for review.
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