I don’t just like Star Trek — I’ve lived with it and love it.
I grew up collecting every VHS tape I could get my hands on, hunting down those chunky cases, with the amazing artwork, in the local Blockbusters. When DVD arrived, I upgraded. Then HD-DVD. Then Blu-ray. Then 4K. Not because I had to, but because Star Trek was always worth it to me. These stories mattered. These ships and their crews felt like home. These captains taught me what leadership, integrity, and optimism looked like.
So, when Star Trek: Starfleet Academy launched on Paramount+ today, I sat down hopeful for some great new Trek.
Two episodes later, that hope has been replaced by a familiar sinking feeling.
This isn’t bad television, but it isn’t really Star Trek either.
Teen drama in a Starfleet uniform
Let’s get this out of the way: Starfleet Academy feels closer to One Tree Hill or Glee than it does to The Next Generation, Voyager, Deep Space Nine, or Enterprise.
The writing leans hard into teen-drama tropes: shallow rivalries, love triangles, quippy dialogue, and single-note characters instead of thoughtful growth and professional development. There’s the arrogant future-captain type. There’s the brooding mystery character. There’s already romantic tension bubbling away.
I could list all the character names… but honestly, I don’t remember a single one. That says everything about how memorable these characters are.
Compare this to Wesley Crusher or Nog. Their Academy stories were about discipline, responsibility, mistakes, and earning respect. These cadets are swallowing Combadges, slipping in goo, and firing off Marvel-style quips.
That isn’t Starfleet. It’s a CW drama wearing a delta badge.
Kurtzman’s delta obsession
Alex Kurtzman seems absolutely terrified that viewers might forget they’re watching Star Trek, so he puts Starfleet deltas everywhere.
On zippers.
On chair bases on the bridge of the Athena.
In the skylight of the Academy ship.
On walls, floors, screens, everywhere you look.
But here’s the thing: slapping a delta on everything doesn’t make it Star Trek.
It’s like waving a shiny object in front of the audience and saying, “Look! Look! It’s Trek, I promise!”
Star Trek was never about logos. It was about tone, professionalism, philosophy, and a specific vision of the future.
Nostalgia as a crutch
The show is absolutely stuffed with references: Boothby, Captain Kirk, humpback whales, Sato, Exocomps, even Ensign Kim — who, frankly, should always be an Ensign.
There are names on walls pointing to the fates of older characters, with winks and nods everywhere.
Some of it is fun when subtle, but it’s mostly as subtle as a shuttle pod to the face at warp speed.
Leaning this hard on nostalgia is dangerous. Long-time fans feel alienated and have walked away, and new viewers won’t know what any of this means. You can’t build a franchise on Easter eggs alone.
The Burn still breaks everything
Setting this show after the Burn — Discovery’s galaxy-wide disaster that never made a lick of sense — feels like self-sabotage. It poisoned the Federations legacy, and now Academy is built on top of it.
That’s baffling when Picard season three proved how much fans crave classic-era Trek energy. Even Paramount’s shiny new Star Trek 60 intro somehow forgot the Enterprise-G existed.
Meanwhile, Star Trek Legacy, the show fans are openly begging for, remains untouched. Money on the table Paramount.
A captain without command
The new captain is quirky, barefoot, slouched in the command chair, and painfully un-authoritative. Put her next to Janeway, Picard, Sisko, Archer, or Kirk and she’d disappear.
At one point she lectures a cadet about regulation haircuts while looking like she hasn’t brushed her own hair since the NX-01 launched. It’s not charming — it undermines her authority and she doesn’t look professional.
I mean, Starfleet captains don’t have to be stiff, but they do have to command a room.
She doesn’t.
Ships without soul
Despite being set a thousand years in the future, everything still looks like Discovery or Strange New Worlds.
Inside: dark, glossy, reflective.
Outside: programmable matter, floating hull pieces, disconnected parts.
I miss nacelles.
I miss silhouettes you can recognise in a heartbeat.
I miss ships that feel like characters.
The Enterprise-D bridge feels like home.
The Athena feels like a dimly lit Hollister store.
And who decided Starfleet bridges should be this dark? It’s not practical and these poor cadets must have to eat a lot of carrots.
Robert Picardo: wonderful… and wrong
Seeing The Doctor again was a genuine pleasure. His sarcasm, bedside manner, and opera are all still there.
But again, it’s another “look over here!” nostalgia pull. And story-wise, it makes no sense. He wanted to be more than a doctor. He became the Emergency Command Hologram. He evolved.
A thousand years later, he’s… still the chief medical officer?
He should be leading holographic civilization or shaping Federation AI ethics — not stuck in the same job forever.
Big names, little material
Paul Giamatti is clearly here for the paycheck and the fandom, much like Michelle Yeoh in that dreadful Section 31 movie from January 2025 (A review for another time). These are Oscar-level actors being given soap-opera sci-fi material.
It’s honestly painful to watch that kind of talent wasted.
Lore breaks and weak characters
The Klingon cadet is painfully un-Klingon — no fire, no honour, no warrior spirit. Fans want Bat’leths, bloodwine, and “Qapla’,” not moping and bird watching.
And the female Jem’Hadar? That isn’t bold, it’s lore-breaking. The Founders engineered Jem’Hadar to be male, non-reproductive soldiers that were addicted to Ketracel-white to keep them in line. There is no reason for females to exist. It makes no sense.
A mother, a son, and nobody else
The mother-and-son storyline only meaningfully serves one cadet: the son. Every other character has virtually no backstory or substance. They exist to make quips at each other or stare longingly across rooms.
And that raises a worrying question: is this plot going to drag across both seasons?
Because yes — somehow this show was greenlit for a second season before a single episode appeared on Paramount+, and it’s already filming. There’s no time to course-correct based on critic or audience reaction. That feels like another mistake.
A concept that never should have left the whiteboard
There’s a bitter irony here. Brannon Braga and the Berman-era producers were pitched or were toying with a Starfleet Academy show years ago, and they said no. They understood that an Academy-based series traps Star Trek in classrooms and small personal drama instead of exploration, diplomacy, and big ideas.
Braga was right.
And Paramount just spent a fortune proving it.
Final Verdict
I’ll watch the season. I always do. Trek deserves a fair chance.
But two episodes in, this show feels like it has no identity. It doesn’t know whether it wants to be a teen drama, a mystery box, a nostalgia tour, or a prestige sci-fi series. It throws everything at the wall and hopes something sticks.
That’s not confidence.
That’s panic.
Like Discovery, if you stripped away the Star Trek name and replaced the species and ships, this would be a perfectly decent generic sci-fi drama. But Star Trek is supposed to be more than that and deserves better.
Reshoots Required Score: Major Reshoots Required.
If it were up to me, I’d scrap the Academy show entirely and give fans what they actually want: Star Trek Legacy or a true 25th-century continuation. Real officers. Real ships. Real exploration. New worlds, new life, and new civilizations — not boldly staying in school and only exploring surface-level emotions.
And I think Paramount knows this show won’t hit with fans, so the marketing has leaned towards capturing new fans which won’t appreciate the real Star Trek, therefore making them non-Trek fans that won’t come back to the older and far better shows or buy those Blu-rays, merchandise, and convention tickets. They even put the first episode on YouTube for free – wreaks of desperation if you ask me.
Buy some of the best of Star Trek on Blu-ray here:
https://amzn.to/4qPvAAi – Star Trek: Enterprise (Complete Series)
https://amzn.to/3ZcUHRN – Star Trek: The Next Generation (Complete Series)
https://amzn.to/3NnjkJ6 – Star Trek – Ten Movie Collection
https://amzn.to/4jMnwy3 – Star Trek: Picard (Season 3)
These are Amazon affiliate links. If you click and purchase, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you.