Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

The latest Star Trek television show, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, just debut today (January 15, 2026) via Paramount+. As you may already know, I am not a fan of “NuTrek”, the badly-written shows under the Alex Kurtzman rule.

To me, Star Trek has always been about hope. This is a future where money doesn’t exist, where humanity ended hunger (through food replicators), ended racism, and every problem that exists in the modern age have been solved in the Star Trek universe. At least that’s the message of my Star Trek, when I started watching Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987. So, the Final Frontier is that what is left for humanity to do – to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before. Star Trek is about helping worlds, as they explore the universe, week after week.

All those things that I’ve listed, NuTrek undid. In this Kurtzman vision, Star Trek isn’t about exploring new worlds – it’s all about war and fighting over money, food, racism, haves-and-have-nots, etc. Unlike all the previous Star Treks, none of these Kurtzman shows are stand-alone, meaning it won’t make any sense to you if you randomly pick an episode to watch. To appeal to the modern audience, there are unnecessary “action” fight scenes and action-type sequences.

With Star Trek: Starfleet Academy it is about inexperience students enrolling in their first year at Starfleet Academy. Think of it as a college TV show – in space. The character we’re following is about a boy (named Caleb) separated from his mother and self-taught himself hacking and thievery to survive – until he’s caught as a teenager. That’s when the Starfleet captain (played by Holly Hunter) that gave judgement to his mother, shows up to take Caleb to the USS Athena – the Starfleet Academy ship.

On enrollment day, we meet all the main characters: the Number 1, the Klingon doctor, a “17-year-old” hologram, an admiral’s daughter, and a bully. We also see the return of Star Trek: Voyager’s holographic doctor – only he’s much older. He explained that he wrote a subroutine to age himself. Kind of stupid, but I will forgive the writing because I like seeing Robert Picardo return to the role – he was a shining light in Voyager.

On the first day, the USS Athena is captured by a “Klingite” – a mix of Klingon and Tellarite. Since he’s played by American Splendor’s Paul Giamatti – I just can’t take him seriously. He just makes me laugh, just by looking at him. To make him as a dangerous villain, it just doesn’t work for me. Just like seeing Holly Hunter in a role of a captain, as she’s sitting yoga-style in the captain’s chair, reading a book, with her non-regulation Starfleet hair style… I also don’t like her in the role.

The pilot ends with our cadets teaming up together to save the USS Athena. While as silly and unbelievable as this sound (some kids saving a galaxy starship instead of the adults in charge), it was entertaining and I thought was a good pilot.

I do have some gripes about the pilot, besides from making the experienced adult Starfleet crew look stupid. One of problem I have is the fire explosions in space. For fire, you need oxygen – which you don’t have in space – so seeing fire in space is ridiculous. It just bothers me that these writers don’t understand basic science – let alone Science Fiction.

The worst character in this lineup is the hologram girl. Her character’s dialogue and actions are just the worst. There is also the hot girl in this cast. She’s a Betazed princess who immediately falls in love with the main character. Since she’s Betazed, she can read mind and emotion… so, to me, she’s probably way overpowered when it comes to superpowers in the Star Trek universe. I think it’s a mistake to have someone so powerful in the series.

The love-thing and teenage-drama-thing are the message of the show’s poster… which many fans have pointed out to look like the romance/teen drama CW show One Hill Tree.

Wow, Fallout continues to be running on all cylinders. I briefly mentioned the show returning after watching the first episode of Season 2: “The show starts off the introduction of a mysterious man, who you think is Mr House, or related to House, sitting in a bar, observing men in a bar. The atmosphere is that robots are putting people out of work, so people are desperate for money… which House does offer someone, if they put this experimental chip in the back of their neck. You soon find out that it’s a mind-controlling device that causes heads to explode if they fight against it. So, already the new season will be about House and this mind-controlling chip that is the true threat.”

As of this writing, we’re a little more than half-way into the new Season. We finally got to meet the real Mr House. He’s already predicted that the bombs will drop, causing the world to end, and he’s trying to figure it out. It’s not Mr House, and it’s not the corporate board of Vault-Tech. He thinks there’s a third unknown party that is behind this. I already have some theories of what is going on. I think it’s the Synths. It makes sense, the Synths aren’t affected by radiation sickness, so wiping out the organics will enable them to exist. Of course, that’s just my own theory, I have no idea where all this is going.

New to me, is that the Deathclaws existed before the bombs. I say new to me, because I’ve always thought the radiation caused the mutation of the Deathclaws from lizards. There are other things new to me (although I had my theories on this) that Mr House uses a decoy. That’s really cool, and it makes sense that they hired two actors to play Mr House.

I love that Lucy is becoming addicted to drugs. That’s a thing in the game, if you use chems too much, you will become an addict. It’s very funny, especially because of her naivety.

There is a subplot of the waterchip of the Vault 33 that seems to be going nowhere. That’s based on the first game, where you’re sent out in the world to find a waterchip to save your Vault. There’s also another subplot about the FEV (Forced Evolution Virus) storyline that I think will introduce us to the Super Mutants into the show. All this is very cool, but I feel there’s just too much going on right now, if we can just focus on Lucy and the Ghoul, that would be better.

Earlier in the season, we got to quickly see the Ceaser’s Legion, we got to see the Khans, we got to see the Securitrons… They’re so fun to see on television, and I really hope to see the return of the Legion or perhaps see more reoccurring factions from this Fallout universe.

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