{"id":239696,"date":"2026-01-18T14:13:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-18T14:13:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/239696\/"},"modified":"2026-01-18T14:13:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-18T14:13:09","slug":"starfleet-academys-laziest-fan-service-scene-ruins-many-of-your-favorite-characters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/239696\/","title":{"rendered":"Starfleet Academy’s Laziest Fan Service Scene Ruins Many Of Your Favorite Characters"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBy Chris Snellgrove<\/a>
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t | Published 49 seconds ago\t\t<\/p>\n

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The new Star Trek spinoff, Starfleet Academy, has a really blunt form of fan service: a memorial wall with the names and final ranks of beloved characters from over 60 years of franchise history. This wall is obviously a naked attempt to appeal to old-school fans by revealing what happened to our favorite characters, all of whom are still remembered as Starfleet legends. There\u2019s just one problem: the memorial wall has several major inconsistencies that completely change what we know about these beloved characters.<\/p>\n

One inconsistency that several fans noticed right away is that while James Kirk\u2019s name is on the wall, he is listed as \u201cadmiral,\u201d but he died in Star Trek: Generations as a captain (remember, he was busted back down to Captain as \u201cpunishment\u201d for stealing the Enterprise in The Search For Spock). Does this imply that Kirk somehow came back to life and got a promotion before dying again? This is likelier than you might think since Picard revealed that Section 31 had his body in custody, making the idea of cloning Kirk or putting his mind in a robot body (like Picard himself) entirely possible.<\/p>\n

Wesley Crusher, Reporting For Duty?<\/p>\n

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Wesley Crusher\u2019s name appears on the wall, which isn\u2019t surprising. What is surprising, though, is that his rank is listed as lieutenant, junior grade, but he retired from Starfleet as an ensign to join the Traveler and start wandering the cosmos. He was still doing the Traveler gig in Picard, but his rank on this Starfleet Academy<\/a> wall implies that he somehow came back to the service and got a couple of promotions before retiring.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Weirdly enough, this might legitimize those deleted scenes from Star Trek<\/a>: Nemesis, where Wesley appeared at Troi and Riker\u2019s wedding in a Starfleet uniform. This forces us to consider whether young Crusher secretly had some adventures as a godlike Starfleet officer sometime between his departure from the service in The Next Generation<\/a> and him popping up again as a full-time traveler in Picard.<\/p>\n

Deep Space Nine Gets Snubbed (As Always)<\/p>\n

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The first Ferengi Starfleet officer, Nog (played by the late, great Aaron Eisenberg) is on the wall, but he has the same lieutenant rank he had in Deep Space Nine. This isn\u2019t necessarily an inconsistency (he could have retired after the Dominion War<\/a>), but it\u2019s disappointing that the Starfleet Academy writers couldn\u2019t retroactively promote this fan-favorite character, especially after they threw Voyager fanboys a bone by making perpetual ensign Harry Kim into an admiral on the wall.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nog\u2019s low rank is doubly disappointing because when the former Deep Space Nine writers began brainstorming an episode for a Season 8 set 20 years after the series finale (as seen in the excellent What We Leave Behind documentary), they imagined Nog as the captain of the Defiant. This wall could have canonized that interpretation, or at least given him a few courtesy promotions. Like, is the guy who lost a leg fighting the Dominion War that he played a crucial role in ending really less important than the guy who spent all his time playing in the holodeck with Tom Paris?<\/p>\n

Did A Major Discovery Character Die Offscreen?<\/p>\n

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Most of the Discovery crew members are still alive in the 32nd century, but the wall honors two Starfleet officers we saw die: Admiral Cornwall, who heroically died in battle, and Commander Landry, who died, uh\u2026trying to torture a tardigrade on the orders of an evil Captain from the Mirror Universe? That\u2019s not nearly as weird as the inclusion of Dr. Culber\u2019s name, implying that he somehow died between the Discovery series finale and the premiere of Starfleet Academy. Considering how much NuTrek prides itself on inclusivity, it\u2019s wild to think that Paramount<\/a> might have killed arguably the most prominent gay character in the franchise for a second time!<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an argument to be made that we shouldn\u2019t take the Starfleet Academy memorial wall too seriously in terms of franchise canon\u2026after all, it\u2019s peppered with both real-life names (like Riker actor turned Trek director Jonathan Frakes<\/a>, and prolific Trek novelist Peter Davd) and assorted Starfleet nobodies. Like, does future Starfleet really care about Tasha Yar, who died a crappy redshirt death before her alternate universe self gave birth to a future Federation nemesis? To these fans, I say that Star Trek can\u2019t have it both ways: we can either see this memorial wall as a celebration of our favorite characters or as just empty fan service.<\/p>\n

The Starfleet Academy writers clearly want us to take this wall seriously, but not enough to properly do their jobs when laying out all this nostalgia bait. Now, we are left with lingering questions about whether Kirk returned from the dead, whether Wesley returned to Starfleet, and whether Dr. Culber inexplicably died off-screen between shows. What else would you expect, though, from the writers who forgot that all Betazoids are telepathic and just assumed they were almost all like Deanna Troi?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Chris Snellgrove | Published 49 seconds ago The new Star Trek spinoff, Starfleet Academy, has a really…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":239697,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[141209,156,111,139,69,141210,19499,141211,117145,141212,141213,57307,437],"class_list":{"0":"post-239696","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-aaron-eisenberg","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz","13":"tag-peter-david","14":"tag-star-trek","15":"tag-star-trek-deep-space-nine","16":"tag-star-trek-discovery","17":"tag-star-trek-generations","18":"tag-star-trek-picard","19":"tag-star-trek-starfleet-academy","20":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}