I’m thrilled to have Holly Hunter back on the TV screen. Hunter plays, Nahla Ake, the Chancellor of Starfleet Academy and has her hands full with the various cadets who she’s responsible for. Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is an eight-episode series on Paramount+. Two episodes are available and one episode will be dropped every Thursday for the next couple of months.
The target audience for this series doesn’t really include me. It’s aimed at teenagers. The first year students are teenagers with typical teenage problems. Starfleet Academy unfolds sometime in the 32nd century, roughly concurrent with the later seasons of Paramount+’s Star Trek: Discovery but centuries after most of the rest of the Star Trek canon. The starships look very different from what previous Star Trek ships looked like. If you’re a long-time Star Trek fan, you will surely be pleased to see some familiar faces here, including Tig Notaro’s Jett Reno, Oded Fehr’s Charles Vance, and Robert Picardo’s hologram Doctor.
Even though the target audience is teenagers, I’m young at heart so I’ll watch this new series with nostalgia. How about you? Are you a Trekkie? GRADE: Incomplete but trending towards a B
I enjoyed the original series in reruns circa 1970, but haven’t kept up with all the spinoffs! And of course, I don’t subscribe to any cable station with a + in its name!
Bob, the + stands for an increase in the monthly subscription on a regular basis!
Not a Trekkie, nor even a Star Wart, but was once a casual Trekite (Is that a term?). They’ve gone to the well a bit too often for me.
Jerry, the STAR TREK franchise has had some highs and lows. STAR TREK: STARFLEET ACADEMY is a middling product.
“Trekker” was once the Kool Kid version of a Trekkie…unlikely to wear a uniform or Vulcan earpieces, but fans.
I’ve been a pretty casual viewer of TREK stuff over the decades. Jane Wiedlin’s several-second cameo in the fourth film was pretty amusing.
I thought it was good but not great, as the late Marv Lachman would say. I like the actors you mentioned, but I find the angstsy teens tedious at best. Clearly the central character is Caleb Mir, who is willing to put the world in jeopardy in search of his long-lost mommy, a character I find pretty nearly unwatchable. Jackie disagrees, of course, as she likes every Star Trek show.
Bring back the far superior in every way Strange New Worlds.
Jeff, I’m with you on STRANGE NEW WORLDS. Way better than STAR TREK: STARFLEET ACADEMY. But on these Arctic Blast days–the current temp is 8 degrees with windchill of -5–I’ll watch it. All the schools are closed. Again.
Jackie wants to know how much snow you got.
Jeff, we already got six inches of snow–Big Orange took care of that in short order–but we’re about to get another foot of snow tomorrow. Our current temperature is 10 degrees, but with the 40 mph winds, the wind chill is -6 degrees.
Bummer. We were pretty cool for South Florida the last couple of days but it is mostly sunny now, if still breezy. But compared to your weather or New York’s, this is heavenly.
Jeff, it looks like more Arctic Air will hit Western NY this weekend with snow and single digit temps. Diane and I plan to just hunker down and watch some of the many programs we have on our DVR. This will be a good time to catch up on some of the series we’re behind on.
TNG was the last ST that I watched with any regularity. 40 years ago! How many of the “teens” in this new series are TINOs–Teenagers in name only?
Fred, two don’t give a date of birth, the others are 23, 24 and 25, so… all, I guess.
Fred, I’m suspicious about several of the “teens” in STAR TREK: STARFLEET ACADEMY. Several of them have a lot of make-up because they’re “aliens.”
I haven’t kept up with anything much after the original series and movies based on that. I don’t have streaming on current TV so probably couldn’t even access it.
Maggie, the various STAR TREK series are available on DVD. If I run across a set, I’ll be happy to send it to you.
Thanks. I think the older ones are the best. My favorite episode was the trouble with tribbles. Did you ever see the Star Trek Bloopers,? That was great fun
Maggie, I’ve seen the bloopers and they are great fun. If I find some of the older STAR TREK episodes on DVD, I’ll send them to you.
And the “free, with ads” streaming channels of Pluto TV are regularly running five STAR TREK series, at least, with other items popping up: https://pluto.tv/us/live-tv/5efbd39f8c4ce900075d7698
Don’t know if we’re going to stay with it or not, but watching the first episode gave us two strong positives: One was thinking that the actress playing Caleb’s mother was really good, then realizing it was Tatiana Maslany. The other is an image (a couple images) that will live with me hopefully forever, Holly Hunter sitting in the captain’s chair.
Jeff, you mean Holly Hunter curling up in the Captain’s Chair!
According to ChatGPT, if you watched Star Trek (the original series, the spin-offs, the cartoons, the movies…) starting January 1st for eight hours a day, you’d finish in late March (the Original Series: 79 eps × 50 min; the Animated Series: 22 eps × 22 min; The Next Generation: 178 eps × 45 min; Deep Space Nine: 176 eps × 45 min; Voyager: 172 eps × 45 min; Enterprise: 98 eps × 45 min; Discovery: 65 eps × 55 min; Picard: 30 eps × 50 min; Lower Decks: 50 eps × 25 min; Prodigy: 40 eps × 25 min; Strange New Worlds 30 eps × 55 min; film series: 13 films × ~2.1 hours. How many of you have seen them all!?
Milo, I’m pretty sure I’ve watched them all. How about you?