"Starfleet Academy — midterm results: promising" Topic

I came late to the ‘Star Trek Starfleet Academy' party & , for me, it's been a pleasantly surprising watch.

I'll be upfront: the main cadet protagonist doesn't really land for me. He feels a bit too much like a standard "entry point" character rather than someone with a strong or distinctive screen presence. However, the ensemble around him does a lot of heavy lifting and that's where the series starts to work.

The premise itself is solid Trek material — academy life gives the writers room for both character development and moral/ethical dilemmas without needing a weekly "save the galaxy" reset button. At its best, the show feels like it's tapping into the same strengths that made earlier Trek series grow into themselves over time: young characters, institutional pressures and the slow shaping of competence and identity.

What I've found most enjoyable is the tone. It has moments of humour and lightness that keep it from becoming overly earnest, while still delivering enough drama to give weight to the stakes. It doesn't always fully connect and some characters are more compelling than others but there's a workable foundation here.

Interestingly, the Doctor figure is one of the stronger presences so far — sharper writing, more defined personality, and a bit more edge compared to the cadets. And is a link to "Voyager": the second best Star Trek series. That helps balance the ensemble & create resonance.

Overall, I think it's a stronger first season than most Trek series managed out of the gate, even if it hasn't quite clicked for everyone. It feels like a show aimed at a younger audience and that may explain some of the mixed reception, but for me it remains engaging and watchable. I'm curious to see where Season 2 takes it, even knowing it's the end of the road after that.

Interesting to see a positive review.

Indeed.

Interesting and, to say the least, unusual for a nonprofessional reviewer.

I made it thru the first two episodes before I took the escape pod. It could well have been a passable teen sci-fi show on CW, just not with the Star Trek fig leaf.

Definitely, not in the same class as Brave New Worlds or The Orville.

It's all personal taste, of course.
I find ToS hopelessly "cheesy", which is a view many would not endorse.

My point about dire first seasons is perhaps worth consideration. I do think this particular first season is decent compared to most of the ones from other shows in the franchise.

I would also said TOS was served with a cheese tray. That said, it remained optimistic and the characters were "The Right Stuff".

I can't think of a single character in the Academy that was either. More like the colony crew from Hitchhikers Guide – they put all the useless people on one ship and crashed it into earth.

I suspect part of the difference is that TOS benefited enormously from charisma doing the heavy lifting. Kirk could swagger into a room, ignore regulations, kiss an alien diplomat and somehow still be presented as the embodiment of Starfleet virtue because Shatner sold it with absolute confidence.

A lot of modern Trek characters are written less as mythic "Right Stuff" archetypes and more as recognisably flawed young people. Whether one prefers that is entirely fair enough — but I'm not convinced smug certainty automatically equals optimism.

Also, if we're talking about crews made up of maladjusted oddballs blundering through space, one could argue that describes about half the original Enterprise senior staff on a stressful week. McCoy spent years one argument away from mutiny, Scotty solved diplomatic incidents with whisky, Spock communicated with normal human beings as though he'd been forced into an unpleasant anthropology experiment and Kirk regularly treated the Prime Directive as a polite suggestion.

I was not one who bemoaned Star Trek for being cancelled after "only" 3 seasons. Meh.
The Gorn (?) T-Rex was just ridiculously silly. Can you acknowledge that?
And there was the episode where the Klingon stabbed someone, because "that's what Klingons do". Yangs vs Coms? Hairy natives?
Tribbles? Seriously??? 🙄🤷

So Shatner went on to be beefy cop, and insult Trekkies on SNL. Deservedly.

At least KHAN!!! was pretty good.

"The best diplomat I know of is a fully loaded phaser bank."— Lt. Commander Montgomery Scott.

Scotty used whisky for purposes other than pleasure in exactly ONE episode of TOS. And it wasn't about diplomacy— it was about drinking an alien into a stupor as part of a plot to retake the Enterprise from alien control. Worked, too.
Most of the time, if Scotty had to negotiate anything, he stuck to his guns. Literally.

Saw the first episode of Strange New Worlds. It was so unbelievably stupid that I gave up then and there.

Modern Hollywood can't make Star Trek because modern Hollywood doesn't understand what Star Trek is about.

Let's not leave out Uhura.
After one season, she wanted to move on. Dr King talked her out of it because he felt that she was a positive role model for Black girls.
This praise for the show coexists with my pointing out the silliness above.

I never got into the later shows, just because.
But at least TOS was entertaining. Preachy? Only in that it embraced "nice liberal" thought of the 60s.

"Modern Hollywood can't make Star Trek because modern Hollywood doesn't understand what Star Trek is about."

I'm assuming this sentence is meant as satire?

"Let's not leave out Uhura."
John: I would *never* leave out Uhura. Great character, great actress & the best thing in a hopeless;y cheesy show.

No, not satire.

Star Trek is about what it says it's about: exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life forms and new civilizations— to boldly go where no man has gone before!

Hollywood is self-centered and sex-centered. It's about personal narcissism, not sacrifice. It's all about telling everyone else what they're supposed to believe and allowed to believe. It's all formula and style. Originality unwelcome.

The first episode of SNW was nothing but a retelling of A Taste of Armageddon, with less finesse and not really understanding what that classic episode was saying. It also looked visually stupid and overblown.

This is the best iteration of Star Trek ever:

YouTube link

Based on this review I watched the first episode. It was mildly enjoyable, but nothing great. I was turned off by the fact that at the start (actually after the lengthy prologue) we are introduced to a handful of cadets (among hundreds) and gosh, a short time later there is a crisis and by an amazing coincidence those same cadets just happen to have the exact set of rare skills needed to avert the crisis and save the ship. Just a bit contrived.