{"id":205398,"date":"2025-10-17T01:00:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T01:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/205398\/"},"modified":"2025-10-17T01:00:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T01:00:07","slug":"star-trek-starfleet-academy-is-set-in-precisely-the-wrong-time-period","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/205398\/","title":{"rendered":"Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Is Set in Precisely the Wrong Time Period"},"content":{"rendered":"

Say what you want about Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, but it\u2019s a series that\u2019s absolutely determined to strike out on its own path. With its decidedly younger cast, school-based setting, and, if the trailer is anything to go by, fairly frequent relationship drama, it\u2019s definitely not like any other Star Trek<\/a> series we\u2019ve seen recently. (And that\u2019s before you get to the pair of Hollywood heavy hitters chewing up the scenery at its center.) But while its central premise \u2014 detailing how unseasoned cadets are forged into the Starfleet captains and leaders of tomorrow \u2014 is certainly compelling, the specifics of its setting are\u2026 questionable at best and an outright red flag at worst.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The series takes place in the 32nd century, after the events of Star Trek: Discovery\u2019s final season. This is a controversial decision in and of itself, as Discovery isn\u2019t exactly beloved among a fairly wide swath of the Trek fandom, and the story of the event known as The Burn<\/a>, which decimated warp travel, fractured the Federation, and essentially ended Starfleet Academy as we know it wasn\u2019t as compelling as the show wanted it to be. (Or nearly as well explained.) Starfleet Academy will follow the first class of cadets to come through the institution in over a century, a concept that may sound interesting on paper but that also somehow feels almost completely disconnected from nearly every Trek story that has come before.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong, one of the best things about the rebirth of Trek on streaming is that it\u2019s encouraged the franchise to tell very different sorts of stories. And there\u2019s certainly something to be said for the idea of a series that\u2019s focused on younger characters and lower-stakes stories about personal relationships that don\u2019t necessarily involve a potential galaxy-ending threat. Even the promise of more romance is an exciting one. However, it\u2019s difficult to focus on those stakes when the show must also flesh out a revamped world that still feels largely unfamiliar.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Out of necessity, this Starfleet Academy is going to largely be about creating something new: A fresh future, a reconstituted Federation, and a reimagined Academy that apparently sends its students on real-time ship-based missions even as it\u2019s attempting to teach them theory and ethics. It\u2019s unlikely to connect to many (most?) of the experiences that previous cadets shared, and outside of a few ancillary figures (Tig Notaro\u2019s Jett Reno, Oded Fehr\u2019s Admiral Vance), it\u2019s about an entirely new crop of characters, several of whom hail from species we haven\u2019t met before. There\u2019s not a whole lot for viewers to really hang their excitement on, which is likely why it can feel as though there\u2019s relatively little of it within the larger fandom.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Say what you want about Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, but it\u2019s a series that\u2019s absolutely determined to strike…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":205399,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[96,391,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-205398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-tv","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205398\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/205399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}