When Gene Roddenberry first pitched his "Wagon Train to the Stars," he envisioned a utopian society without war, hunger, or want. Star Trek was an optimistic look at humanity's future in which reason, mutual respect, intellectual curiosity, and the pursuit of personal excellence reigned supreme. In short, it was about a humanity that had matured.

"We're roommates, bra!" —A thing actually said in a Star Trek series

Yet, despite this grandiose legacy and decades of established canon, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy manages to be an unholy mix of space Harry Potter and The OC set in Idiocracy's 32nd century. It's a silly place where pizzicato music underscores physicians making poop jokes and students babysit buckets of space snot while trying to "hook up" with one another. (None of that is hyperbole — everything stated is something that happened in these two episodes...more than once.)

To put it plainly, Starfleet Academy is rotten to its core. Once again, Alex Kurtzman has delivered a Star Trek series that shows zero respect for what has come before, trading reverence, intelligence, and continuity for cheap, lazy nostalgia nods and neon lights. This is not Star Trek.

Even the most basic Trek canon is jettisoned out the nearest airlock to build a narrative handicap ramp for glue-eating writers, palmar-grasping their crayons, and scribbling their nonsense on colorful construction paper. Unable to pick a lane, the initial two episodes mix tones with a Sherwin-Williams paint shaker as mediocre actors espouse high-minded-sounding, copy-and-pasted rhetorical white noise from a ChatGPT thesaurus prompt.

Academy Award-winning actress (4x nominee), Holly Hunter, turns in a career-worst performance. Playing a centuries-old Starfleet veteran, Hunter lacks any sense of command authority or gravitas and even seems to revel in it as she spends scenes lazily curled up in her captain's chair on the bridge, reading Emily Dickinson.

Returning Star Trek alumn and fan favorite, Robert Picardo, reprises his role as "The Doctor." However, after twenty-five years, Picardo, now 72, seems uncomfortable slipping back into the photonic shoes of one of only two characters that made Voyager watchable.

While the character was always good for a dry laugh, he was never a clown. After a thousand years, a character whose entire arc was self-improvement and personal growth has devolved into a punchline, and Picardo, while seemingly enthusiastic, appears unable to deliver the drek that's been written for him with any emotional cohesion. Small wonder.

Another usually brilliant performer, Paul Giamatti, whose fish-headed villain dominates many of the program's various trailers, has very little screentime in these initial episodes, but what time he is given is spent breathing life into a villain that makes The Next Generation season 1 Ferengi look like serious opposition by comparison. Against all good sense, Paul goes full Giamatti in a rudderless performance consisting of thin-lipped, toothy screaming and wide arcing hand gestures better reserved for the stage. One wonders how many cameras his wild gesticulation destroyed throughout the season.

There's very little to praise in this overproduced nightmare fuel of juvenilia, and neither the cinematography nor the visuals writ large are among them. The camerawork consists of a Frankenstein's monster of uncomfortable Sami Rami zooms and closeups, and shaky-cam action. The end product looks like an overly ambitious, heavy-handed film student who thinks Guy Ritchie is the second coming.

Star Trek has always been on the cutting edge of sci-fi design, giving the world its first glimse of cellphones, laptops, tablets, and so much more, but Starfleet Academy's sets are distractingly over-lit with miles of neon mood lighting, it has a bridge design that makes less sense than attempting to make Tim Walz the face of masuclinity, and an interior more reminiscent of a 2000s mega mall than a spaceship or building of higher learning.

Even the costumes and makeup are second-rate and imaginatively null, sporting some of the ugliest uniforms since The Motion Picture.

However, even at their worst, classic Trek, The Next Generation, DS9, occasionally Voyager, and even Enterprise, got more right than not. Each one boasted a cast of interesting and engaging characters (ok, Voyager only had the two) that seemed to manage balancing the high-minded ideals and thought-provoking adventures with just the right amount of whimsy. Conversely, Starfleet Academy is filled with immature and unlikable adult-children and their even more unlikable adult-adult counterparts, all of whom vomit today's lowbrow vulgarities as though 1100 years aren't supposed to separate us.

Starfleet Academy doesn’t merely misunderstand Star Trek — it actively rejects it. Where Trek once trusted the audience to engage with ideas, this series panders to the lowest common denominator, mistaking arrested adolescence for relatability and chaos for energy. It confuses noise for momentum, irreverence for wit, and nostalgia references for meaning. What remains is a hollow simulacrum of a franchise that once believed humanity could grow up, now repackaged by writers who plainly haven’t.

If Star Trek was ever aspirational television — a vision of what we might become — then Starfleet Academy is its embarrassing reflection in a funhouse mirror, giggling at bodily functions and mistaking cynicism for sophistication. This isn’t the future Roddenberry imagined. It isn’t even a thoughtful parody of it. It is content, aggressively designed to be consumed and forgotten, leaving behind nothing but the faint hum of a broken transporter and a popped warp bubble.

It's like a magic trick. I know it's cliché at this point, but how do they manage to make it worse with every scene? Starfleet Academy is a black hole of suck.

Here's my review. I'm out.

I can't.

IT
IS NOT
POSSIBLE
TO
HATE
STARFLEET ACADEMY
ENOUGH

I wish bad things for everyone involved in its creation and distribution.

Starfleet Academy is the AIDS of Cancer. pic.twitter.com/IyIKejWm9F

— Worth it or Woke? (reviews) (@worthitorwoke) January 22, 2026