Trailer for the new series. I’m apprehensive about it because it is a direct spinoff of the loathsome Discovery, but maybe it might be okay.
So it takes place in like the 33rd Century. It will barely be Star Trek anyway.
I’ll probably try it, but not thinking about it as Star Trek. The Discovery spin-off part is really not a selling point.
For being a series supposedly oriented toward the future, it sure seems unimaginatively stuck in the past. (Ricardo’s Doctor? The mystery of Ben Disko? Really? Come on.)
This has Alex Kurtzman and his Chatgpt-esque remix-and-repeat fingerprints all over it.
Pass.
Looks very 20th century militaristic.
This strikes me as a very odd scenario. If I’m going to jump the Star Trek universe hundreds of years more into the future, I’m going to concentrate on major plot differences in terms of friends, enemies, and situations. I’m not going to hang around Star Fleet Academy watching people take classes and do the 33rd century equivalent of “college stuff”.
Coming back and rereading this later, I curse the overlooked autocorrects.
They missed a great opportunity by not getting Brian May onboard for the theme song.
I remember that there was at one point talk of the Deep Space Nine character Miles O’Brien as a lead character in a series set at Starfleet Academy.
Am I the only one curious about the bureaucracy and logistics of Starfleet? I mean, it’s literally the poster child of “fully automated luxury space communism”, but most of the series and movies just kind of gloss over the society that makes this possible. How did they get there? What’s the day to day like for people who aren’t actively on a starship?
I, for one, would love to see more of their educational and other social systems. I loved that Picard had some moments of that, and maybe this series will too?
When I first heard that they were planning a Starfleet Academy show, I was hoping for something set in the NG/DS9 period. I may watch the first few episodes, if only to confirm that they managed to screw it up.
I may be completely lost anyway, as I stopped watching Discovery after the first episode of season 3.
I thought Tilly was supposed to have a big role. Apparently not.
I was looking forward to seeing her win a decathlon and rise to President of Starfleet while everyone cries and hugs. And in the second episode…
I think the following is a newer trailer than the one in the OP.
All that sounds like a vast amount of work, and a vast amount of future and past continuity worm-can opening.
It’s mostly a soap opera now, and the thing to focus on are the characters interacting with each other while undergoing triumphs and shortfalls. While being sure to keep their interactions and responses sufficiently grounded in the early 21st Century USA that the paying audience can relate to the characters.
IOW, don’t get your hopes up much.
In the first trailer it looked like it might be okay. In this one it looks incredibly awful.
Also, Stephen Colbert is joining the show, in a voice role as the Digital Dean of Students.
It’s looking less and less likely that I’m going to watch this. As I said before, I stopped watching Discovery after the first episode of Season 3, and I don’t have any idea who any of the people in the trailer are, or what the background for the series is.
You have to be familiar with Tilly, but she was in the trailer for one second and apparently is in the series for one second, too. This woman from the trailer is from Discovery. Everybody else is either a new character or Robert Picardo.
I caught part of the last episode of Voyager the other day where Kim, who had gray hair and wasn’t an ensign, attended a party where he was able to run into his old friends. The party had servers making sure everyone had drinks and I couldn’t help but think to myself, “Why the #%@$! are these people serving drinks at a party?” The servers were quite clearly working rather than socializing, so why would they do it?
In an episode of TNG, Picard says something about money not being important, but instead humans work to better themselves. Who the hell chooses to work catering to complete strangers if there’s monetary recompense? Maybe it’s their kink?
Here is an interview with the showrunners where they describe how it was really hard to make a “Star Trek” show set at Starfleet Academy because the characters are students who never go anywhere or do anything other than attend class.
There is an inherent tension between the “Star Trek” ethos of “explore the galaxy, see what’s out there” and the restrictive setting of the academy. If you’re going to make it work, you have to commit to one or the other. If it’s the first, then it’s not the academy show (or at best you’ve got a bunch of seniors who have to fly a mission as their graduation project, but then they graduate, because they’re seniors, and you have a whole new cast the next season). If it’s the second, then you’re telling a very different kind of story than is usually told in Star Trek, one that’s more like an earthbound soap opera. DS9 showed how to do Trek in a single location, but they had galactic politics to lean on and expand the scope. College-age kids don’t have that. This would basically be Felicity or Undeclared in space, and obviously that doesn’t “feel like Trek.”
The showrunners have evidently chosen to solve the tension between these two story models by saying, “Let’s just mash the two together!”
This project seems wildly misguided to me.
The first time I heard this concept floated as a series was many, many years ago. It was sometimes jokingly referred to as Star Trek: 90210.