Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

Set over a thousand years in the future, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is the latest chapter in the once iconic franchise. It follows a fresh class of young cadets as they arrive at the legendary institution—reopening after over a century—to train as the next generation of Starfleet officers. Amid the challenges of rigorous academy life, budding friendships, rivalries, romance, and high-stakes missions, they confront personal growth and a looming mysterious threat to both the Academy and the recovering Federation.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Review (S1: E1-2):

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.

WOKE REPORT

It’s Ok As Long As You’re Hungry… and a woman.

• The A plot revolves around a white mother and her ethnically diverse son being separated from one another… after she is complicit in a theft that costs an innocent man his life.  You know, like murder. As a consequence, she is sentenced to a Federation rehabilitation center and, since she ain’t need no man and is a single mom, the State is left to deal with her young son.
  • Holly Hunter’s character (who is forced to pronounce the sentence) finds it to be so egregious that she quits Starfleet “in disgrace.”
  • This one takes a little backstory. Apparently, ruining Star Trek in the real world wasn’t enough for Alex Kurtzman; he had to canonize the ruination. At some point in the Discovery timeline (circa the 31st century), an alien becomes so sad that it triggers a chain reaction that renders all of the galaxy’s dilithium inert (the Burn). Aside from blowing up every ship with an active warp core, it caused such a disruption in the status quo that the Federation collapsed.
    •  The show’s moral alibi is that after the cataclysm, resources were so scarce that this woman had no choice but to turn to piracy to feed her son. Better still, she was tricked into it—by a white male pirate, no less. She apparently had no idea she was committing piracy. Who among us hasn’t stumbled bass-ackwards into buccaneering? On that basis, Holly Hunter’s character decides incarceration is inappropriate, because being an accessory to murder is apparently forgivable—so long as you’re a hungry mother.
  • Obviously, the whole thing is a not-so-thinly veiled metaphor for the current deportation narrative that the Left has been pushing.

All of the DEI, like All of It

• Generically diverse momma’s boy
• Wussified Klingon male raised by a single mom
• Fat black special needs holographic chick
• Space latina
• Snarky, butch, lesbian professor (who is also a terrible and wooden actress)
• Hobbit-sized yet rotund half Klingon, half Jem’Hadar chick who went to the Sam Kinison School of Acting.
• Fat lesbian navigator
• Starfleet is 90% women (half of those are fat)
• Butch lesbian quantum theory professor gives an honest to goodness DEI lesson during class. Among other things, she says, “Being a cadet in Starfleet Academy means being open to the people around you.” Again, this was during a quantum theory class.
• The fleet admiral gives a speech in which he says, “Progress is the acceptance of identity, not the negation of it.”
• The Betazed chick is handicapped (as far as Betazoids go).
• The Betazed president (or whatever) is deaf and uses sign language. Cochlear implants exist now, and, in-universe, artificial eyes existed a thousand years before this series is set. Yet, he’s deaf.
  • Why is the Betazed president being deaf woke instead of simply stupid? Because Kurtzman et al chose to fundamentally and arbitrarily change the well-established nature of a core species, retconning them from telepaths to empaths, for no other reason than to ham-fist someone who was handicapped in the program.

Its Continuing Mission… to Emmasculate

• The men are immature idiots or evil. It’s true that there are a couple of legitimately retarded female characters, but the men make out far worse throughout.
  • None of them have names worth remembering, but the one short, vaguely Latina-looking alien with eyebrow ridges is a girl boss who is always cool, calm, and collected and always knows exactly what to do in any given situation.
  • The two main male cadets are bickering goofs who find time to butt heads even amidst a deadly catastrophe. Why, you ask. Well, if they didn’t act like rams during mating season, there’d be no need for the strong and wise female cadet to break them up and rebuke their childish behavior.
  • The only clearly white (male) cadet is a jerk from the word go and is introduced picking on the special needs fat black hologram.

To Blow Like No One Has Blown Before

• Starfleet Academy is rotten from the inside out, veined like rancid blue cheese with not only overt radical progressivism but, in its complete eschewal of the franchise’s fundamental positivity and evolved humanity, a deeper, more damning nihilism that’s become a hallmark of the modern Left.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Review (S1: E3)

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

WOKE REPORT

All of It

• Every molecule of the show has been poisoned by white suburbanite liberal woman-think.