Star Trek has always been about a brighter, more hopeful future. Yet as a franchise, things have never been darker when it comes to the house that Gene Roddenberry built. What once seemed to be a promising, near weekly resurgence has fizzled dramatically, with Star Trek: Strange New Worlds heading towards its ending, and Star Trek: Starfleet Academy a muddled mess. So with that in mind: what is to be done about Star Trek? How do you fix a franchise that has gone this terribly wrong?
I want to be clear about one thing up front: this is not about what the bad actors online are constantly rattling on about, that “Star Trek has gone woke.” One of the single stupidest sentences a human can type, since 1966 Star Trek has been about progressive politics and pushing the envelope of what can be done and said on TV in order to present a vision of the future where troubles exist, but we approach them through empathy and intelligence. Star Trek has always been woke, if we really want to use the term, and if you don’t get that you really haven’t taken away a single lesson from the shows and movies.
No, this is about the janky plots, wooden acting, and most of all terrible looking production of these series (with exceptions), which have turned something that was often enjoyable for its lo-fi production (see: walking down the same hallway in multiple directions) into an eyesore. And also probably important to mention at this point, as well: I like Star Trek. And I want to like these shows. But they are bad.
I don’t want to spend too much time breaking down which shows are good or bad, and which parts of shows are good or bad, because we all have our own opinions. For my money, the first season of Star Trek: Discovery is one of the ballsiest, jaw-dropping seasons of TV I’ve ever seen, but for plenty of other Star Trek fans, it’s not their cup of tea. Similarly, despite loving the cast and look, I was cold on the first season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, while other fans were over the moon. I mention this not to call in angry comments on this article about specific shows but to note that this isn’t about specific series; it’s about the franchise as a whole, and the issues it’s facing.
Discovery, whatever you think of it, kicked off a new era of Trek on streaming, and as streaming has changed, so has the impact of Star Trek. As mentioned earlier, time-wise it seemed like between Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, and the Short Treks we might be heading towards 52 weeks of Star Trek streaming a year. Add in Prodigy and Strange New Worlds, the Section 31 movie, and even late in the game, that regular cadence seemed to be a possibility. Instead, we’re down to just Strange New Worlds, and the mixed reception to the third season (it’ll be ending with an abbreviated Season 5), as well as the 10 episodes of the upcoming Starfleet Academy. Response to the latter is TBD as of this writing, but you can read our review for thoughts on how well we think that will go. Short version? Not great.
Look, I’m not a TV producer. I’m a TV critic and commentator, and anything I suggest will run right into a wall of “you can’t do that on television” for any number of totally correct production reasons. But there are several “fixes” that could help the state of Star Trek I can suggest anyway, because I don’t have those limitations of budget, timing, etc in place. Think of them as armchair, or captain’s chair tips for how to fix a flailing franchise.
Get Back to 22-Episode Seasons
This is very much tilting at windmills not just with Star Trek, but with TV as a whole. But just to run some quick math, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager all ran for seven seasons each, with anywhere from 172 to 178 episodes total. Since Discovery began, there have been 225 episodes of Trek, total, from all series. That includes 10 episodes of Short Treks, and 40 episodes of Prodigy, the latter of which were mostly shunted over to Netflix. If we just consider live-action hours of TV (which eliminates Lower Decks, the best of the bunch), there have been 125 produced over the past nine years, far less than any single live-action series from the ‘90s heyday.
(Before someone jumps in: yes, The Original Series only ran for 79 episodes. Thank you.)
Was every episode of Trek produced in the ‘90s good? Absolutely not. Some of them – perhaps even a lot of them – were godawful. But what a longer season on a broadcast schedule allows is time for the writing and acting staff to figure out what works, what doesn’t, and tweak accordingly. Think of early episodes of Next Gen, which just couldn’t figure out what to do with Tasha Yar. Or Deep Space Nine, which took multiple seasons to hit its stride. Same with Voyager, where the early seasons can be considered “rocky” at best.
In the modern era of TV, you just don’t have that time. With 10 episodes per season, it’s pedal to the metal, which is why I’d argue the first season of Discovery worked so well. It came in with a clear vision, hit the ground running, and you could get on board, or be left behind. It wasn’t until later seasons the show slowed down and spent time with the characters first, versus plot – though your mileage may vary there, as well.
Similarly, Strange New Worlds, which has a more traditional Trek episode structure, has suffered from the needs of the streaming era. Since the cast is uniformly great, it’s the character focused episodes that have worked, while the overarching plot episodes have struggled. Every Trek series has had some sort of plot that weaves in and out between the done-in-ones, but with 22-25 episodes, there’s space between those to develop the characters. Strange New Worlds, with its shorter seasons, has time for (approximately) five character driven episodes, and five plot episodes, and then they’re done. It’s just not enough time.
Starfleet Academy also suffers dramatically from that lack of space (no pun intended). Perhaps it could develop its characters over a longer number of episodes, but as is by Episode 6 (the first six of 10 were provided to critics) they still don’t know who these folks are. That’s reasonable for a longer season. For a 10 episode one? They’re running out of time.
Without belaboring this point too much, Trek needs those longer seasons to get to the weird one-offs that try something wild that shouldn’t work, but absolutely do; the philosophical mine-fields that stick with fans long after they’ve broadcast. And these short seasons just ain’t doing it.
Ditch The AR Wall
This has been an issue since Discovery, and certainly since COVID changed shooting on shows dramatically, but the use of their AR Wall, the large screen that supposedly helps create digital sets, looks bad. The CGI landscapes the crews keep wandering through look even worse. Strange New Worlds has generally avoided a lot of these issues by having a very well designed set for the Enterprise (which has likely been digitally enhanced), but whenever we’re on an alien planet in any of these shows it looks like they’re walking through Meta’s legless VR.
Is it more complicated to shoot in either real locations or build sets wholesale? For sure. But right now it’s distractingly awful to watch the Starfleet Academy students clearly walk a short distance while a set out of Lawnmower Man zooms towards the camera around them. If Star Trek can make a hallway into a million different hallways, you can also shoot the same quarry or forest in Canada a million ways, as well.
And if you have to use the AR Wall for whatever reason? Please, get someone who knows how to shoot it properly. Even Disney has had issues with their version (called The Volume) on shows like The Mandalorian, where in 50% of episodes you can see the curve at the bottom of the screen. It can look okay, and even be seamless with the right production. But only when used sparingly, instead of as your entire backdrop as on Star Trek.
The Far Future Era Tech Stinks
This is a relatively minor complaint, but the tech as magic ethos of the far future era where later seasons of Discovery were set, and Starfleet Academy takes place, stinks. I understand the idea beyond better transporter technology, but having people bloop instantly in and out of places completely undercuts the charm of the old transporter sound and visual effect. Programmable matter, which is basically a catch-all for “does whatever we want,” is even worse. I can’t comprehend why you would want to be in a ship with unconnected parts that rotate around each other, let alone how it’s supposed to work.
Did previous Trek shows spend too much time over-charging the dilithium crystals or reversing the polarity of the photon torpedoes? Sure. But you always felt like you were watching a starship with mechanical parts that needed to be fixed by working humans. And often, those things broke. This far-future era might as well be a bunch of wizards flying around in Transformers, because everything seems to work properly all the time and nothing looks particularly interesting. Sci-fi needs rules and guardrails to make it work, otherwise it’s Fantasy. And it’s part of the reason Strange New Worlds (which is set in a future with more “rules”) has connected so well with fans, while some of these other shows have not.
Stop Listening To The Online Commentators, And Start Listening To The Audience
This might seem contradictory, but getting back to the whole “idiots calling Star Trek woke” thing, there seems to be a massive pull-back on the progressiveness of the franchise, particularly when it comes to sexuality. Discovery pushed things forward dramatically by introducing happy gay couples, trans actors, non-binary actors, and exploring more fully what that means in the world of Star Trek.
Strange New Worlds, perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, seems to have dialed other sexualities than “aggressively straight” back significantly in Season 3, to the point that “everyone is horny for Spock” became a major throughline along with “Spock is increasingly horny, but only for girls.” While Starfleet Academy does introduce a female/female couple, and floats the idea that a Klingon character is likely gay… Versus the main straight couple, who have a full-on, extended sex scene with PG-13 side-boob style nudity, the female-female couple get an extremely non-romantic hand on shoulder touch that wouldn’t even get you called into HR, and the male-male (possible) couple have a scene where it looks like they’re two kids dancing in kindergarten.
It’s hard not to think that Paramount, a company which has aligned itself with the Trump administration, and has pushed back against the supposed “woke agenda” isn’t also moving backwards when it comes to progressiveness in their most progressive franchise, listening to those bad actors instead of the wider Trek audience. I get that it’s hard when the trolls are so loud. But part of the trick of any creative endeavor is listening to your audience, incorporating what will make the show better, and then ditching the “advice” that doesn’t match up where you want to go.
There are many, many people who are offering honest and well-thought out criticisms of Star Trek without pivoting to philosophy that is antithetical to the spirit of the franchise. It just seems like, based on what we’re seeing on screen, those voices are losing out to the louder, meaner ones who don’t have anyone’s best interests at heart other than monetizing their TikTok views.
Get A Futurist To Reboot The Franchise
The basic takeaway here is that Star Trek just cannot continue the way it has been going, and as much as I love the world that Roddenberry built, he envisioned the future 60 years ago. We’re headed to a different future, with different challenges and new ideas, and it might be about time to let someone else take a crack at interpreting that vision.
It’s something that was already tried once, with the 2009 movie reboot – and semi-successfully so, bringing in new audiences and coming up with something fresh and exciting that honored the past while moving Star Trek to the future… Right up until it hit several walls itself (I think we’re on the fifth or sixth announcement of a fourth movie in that franchise, which will likely never happen?).
But Trek is best on TV, not on the big screen. We need someone new with a hopeful vision of the future to take a look at the bones of what Gene Roddenberry developed all those many years ago, and figure out what that means in 2026 and beyond. Is it small tweaks to the look and feel of the shows? Perhaps a complete ground up reimagining? Whatever it is, Star Trek is in the biggest period of needing a reinvention since Enterprise ended in 2005. What’s happening now is not working… It’s time for Star Trek to leave this era behind, and boldly go into the future if it wants to live long and prosper. Otherwise, this 60-year anniversary might also be its last.
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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