Star Trek is in a weird place right now. After a surge of movement that kicked off with Star Trek: Discovery in 2017 and came close to releasing new episodes of Star Trek shows nearly every week of the year, things have wound down considerably. Now we’re heading towards the final seasons of Strange New Worlds, which is coming off the mixed reception of its third season, and the debut of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which per its title is based in a school for prospective Starfleet crew-members and has taken its fair share of knocks online. And that’s it.
Unfortunately, based on the six episodes provided to critics for review (10 total will be broadcast in the first season), while there are some high points in the episodes, Starfleet Academy doesn’t get passing marks on its report card. And it certainly won’t turn around the downward trajectory the franchise has been heading on for the past few years.
Created by Gaia Violo, and showrun by Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau, Starfleet Academy takes place in the farther-than-usual future after the events of Discovery’s finale. There, a newly resurgent Starfleet is looking to reboot its ranks, and pivot from the aggressive stance it has taken since the cataclysmic event known as The Burn to the hopeful, helpful Starfleet we’ve known and loved through multiple previous shows. To do that, they’ve reestablished Starfleet Academy in San Francisco, with the little twist that the school is also a spaceship so they can have the best of both worlds: school adventures; and classic space adventures, as well.
It’s basically Harry Potter or any number of other “magic school” scenarios, except sci-fi. Yet the show makes the bizarre choice to take a full hour to get there. Instead, we meet our child of destiny Caleb Mir (Sandro Rosta), a talented orphan raised by Tatiana Maslany’s mysterious – and mostly missing – mother. She’s been working with a dangerous pirate named Nus Braka played by Paul Giamatti, who is in full on, cackling, Amazing Spider-Man 2 level villain mode. Giamatti looks like he’s having fun, but it’s not fun to watch… All annoying tics and cackles, and nothing against the Sideways star but it’s hard to imagine him physically going toe to toe with the jacked up Caleb, as he does later in the premiere.
After the darker version of Starfleet sends Maslany and Giamatti to space jail, Caleb flees. It’s only when he’s a cool, disaffected teen or twenty-something – the show sort of wants to play off like high school, but it’s clearly closer to grad school, if not later – that he’s found by the single good character on the show: headmaster/captain Nahla Ake, played by Holly Hunter. Ake’s primary motivation is she feels torn up about botching the arrest years earlier, so she recruits Caleb for Starfleet Academy with the promise she’ll help find his missing mom.
Hunter plays Nahla as basically a hippie, mostly refusing to wear her Starfleet uniform, wandering around the school with no socks or shoes, and often curling up in the captain’s chair like a cat. Pretty much every choice Hunter makes is fascinating to watch, and in fact you might spend a good portion of Starfleet Academy wishing you were watching a more straightforward Star Trek series where Hunter takes her crew on missions to the planet of the week, instead of having to deal with these dumb kids.
There are plenty of other dumb kids, by the way, though by the end of the six episodes screened the show still hasn’t quite figured out why they’re all there, or how they’re supposed to interact. Star Trek by definition needs longer than 10 episode seasons for this very reason, so the writers can figure out the characters and the right mixes between them. But that’s another conversation entirely.
Let’s talk dumb kids. There’s Karim Diané as Jay-Den Kraag, a sensitive Klingon who is probably gay. Kerrice Brooks gives Giamatti a run for his money as “most annoying character” as Sam, a living hologram who fits the “what does it mean to be human” slot filled by umpteen Star Trek characters before. George Hawkins is Darem Reymi, who starts as the show’s requisite rich bully character, and then ditches that almost immediately, along with the alien powers he exhibits in the premiere that aren’t applicable in any other situation. And Bella Shepard is Genesis Lythe, aka the show’s Hermione, a Starfleet legacy who knows everything and completely falls to the wayside once the show realizes Caleb can be the genius character, instead. Which is unfortunate, because alongside Hunter, Shepard makes the biggest impression in the initial episodes.
The “adult” cast fares a bit better, and that’s largely because they’ve all done this before. Tig Notaro stars as an all-purpose teacher, bringing her sardonic character over from Discovery, and is a welcome dash of dry humor. Robert Picardo also returns as his hologram Doctor from Voyager, making Sam somewhat redundant. And Gina Yashere as the shouting drill sergeant Lura Thok doesn’t get a lot of character development, but at least she’s funny. More distracting is Stephen Colbert as the voice of the school’s constant hit-or-miss announcements. Nothing against Colbert, but the announcements increase as the series continues, and start to feel like a crutch for the thuddingly unfunny humor in the rest of the sequences.
While the first episode plays like a straight-up lower tier generic Star Trek adventure, the second episode is the best of the bunch, managing to balance school stuff and Star Trek stuff in equal measure, as we meet the cast and establish the setting.
But that’s the exception, as the rest of the episodes waver from mostly embarrassing to outright disaster. An episode focusing on Sam looks like it has graphics made in MS Paint. The hour giving us backstory on our gay Klingon has sequences that look like they were shot by a film school student. One episode essentially finds the students playing laser tag over and over again to the point where I started to feel like I was going insane. And the less said about the show’s reliance on The Volume and poorly rendered CGI the better… This has become part and parcel with modern Trek, where it looks like the characters are wandering through a VR game intro screen instead of anywhere real, and it just keeps getting worse.
The bigger issue is that Starfleet Academy doesn’t make a good argument for its continued existence. There is something eternally interesting in the idea of young people trying to bring back hope in a galaxy that badly needs it, but the requisite Star Trek philosophy has been muddled by adults who are writing some imagined idea of “youth” with the edges sanded off so as to not offend any section of the viewing audience.
There’s an episode where the students debate about the Klingon refugee crisis that keeps jumping back and forth on the idea of refugees so many times, it becomes impossible to know what the series itself is trying to say on the subject. And when it comes to sexuality, something that should be baked into the school concept, Starfleet Academy is a huge step back from Discovery… While two straight characters get as explicit a sex scene as is allowed in the Star Trek universe, our gay Klingon dances with a crush like they’re in second grade, arms held as far apart as possible.
It’s frustrating particularly since this should have been a no-brainer. There have been umpteen school-based shows and books, and transposing those tropes to Star Trek sounds on paper like an easy lift. Yet episode after episode, Starfleet Academy plays like the folks behind the series are not just trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to the school part, but figure out how television works, too. It’s discomfiting to watch, and if it wasn’t for Hunter’s engrossing performance the show would be an outright “F” on the Star Trek report card. As is, I’d suggest they need to come back for summer school… But frankly, it might be for the best if they quit school entirely, and reassess what Star Trek looks like going forward. Because whatever this mess is, it’s not working.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premieres with two episodes, January 15 on Paramount+.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Premiere Dates And Episode Guide:
New episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, at 3am ET / Midnight PT. The season will premiere with two episodes on January 15, followed by one new episode weekly until the season finale.
Here’s what we expect from the full list of episodes in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy with premiere dates.
- Thursday, January 15, 2026: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Season 1, Episode 1
- Thursday, January 15, 2026: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Season 1, Episode 2
- Thursday, January 22, 2026: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Season 1, Episode 3
- Thursday, January 29, 2026: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Season 1, Episode 4
- Thursday, February 5, 2026: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Season 1, Episode 5
- Thursday, February 12, 2026: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Season 1, Episode 6
- Thursday, February 19, 2026: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Season 1, Episode 7
- Thursday, February 26, 2026: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Season 1, Episode 8
- Thursday, March 5, 2026: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Season 1, Episode 9
- Thursday, March 12, 2026: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Season 1, Episode 10 *Season Finale*
Where To Watch Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
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