Hey everyone, how're you all doing today? I'm actually doing very well. My health stuff has been taken care of and I'm recovering nicely from it. Which means I'm back to work on the blogs a lot more. Today on the Star Trek Journal, I'm gonna be doing my discussion/review of the first season of Starfleet Academy, which dropped its season finale last week. I'm really excited to talk about it. So let's get into it. Engage!
As I said in my initial thoughts on this show that I had been a little worried about it when Paramount announced they were doing a teen drama Star Trek series. Mainly because over the last 15 years or so, teen dramas have been hit or miss. For every Glee there was a Riverdale. For every big success there were three or four failures. My point is that because Star Trek had never done a teen drama show before, there was every chance this one wouldn't work. Thankfully, it did. Spectacularly in my opinion.
I talked about the first four episodes in my previous post on this show, and honestly, the remaining six episodes were pretty awesome. One of my favourites was episode 5, "Series Acclimation Mil", which was focused on SAM (played by Kerrice Brooks), the photonic being sent by her makers to be their Emissary. She spent the episode trying to find out what exactly happened to Benjamin Sisko after he disappeared into the Celestial Temple at the end of the DS9 finale, "What You Leave Behind". I loved this episode because SAM got to meet Jake Sisko, played by Cirroc Lofton, and Illa Dax (played by Tawny Newsome), the most recent host of the Dax Symbiont, who is probably the longest living Trill symbiont that we've ever met. This episode did legacy characters right. As did this season as a whole.
Holly Hunter as Nahla Ake was probably the most interesting character of the adult characters that were in this show. Being a Lanthanite, she has the same light attitude towards situations that we saw in Pelia in SNW. However, unlike Pelia, Nahla is less mysterious. Pelia was very much trying to pull off a TNG season 2 Guinan vibe, whereas Nahla feels more like TNG season 5 Guinan or Generations Guinan.
Two characters that really surprised me the most this season were Tarima Sadal, played by Zoe Steiner, and Caleb Mir, played by Sandro Rosta. I know, Caleb was the audience POV character for this season, but he surprised me because they played him differently than most characters of his archetype (the loner bad boy type) have been played in the past. And that includes Ryan (Ben McKenzie) on The O.C. Actually, Caleb kinda reminds me of Ryan a little bit. I liked Tarima though because she was exactly how Deanna should've been on TNG back in the day and, well, due to circumstances out of Marina Sirtis's control, that character never quite reached her full potential, even in her later movie appearances and her appearances on Picard.
One thing I was a little disappointed in was the fact that Mary Wiseman only returned as Tilly for one episode. While it was a great episode, they hyped her up pretty hard in the initial press release that announced her return, alongside Jett Reno (Tig Notaro is still amazing), the Doctor, and Admiral Vance (Oded Fehr), and so it was disappointing that Tilly only showed up in one episode, and it was closer to the end of the season, even though they set her up in Discovery's final season to be at Starfleet Academy.
I've heard people bitch about the drama on this show. It's a teen drama series guys. It's closer in tone to Smallville, Riverdale, and The O.C. than it is to any of the other Star Trek shows. It's built differently because it's a completely different kind of Star Trek show than the others are. Which is good, because that's what made it fresh. Which is harder to do now that Star Trek has been around for almost 60 years.
Another complaint I always hear and it's one I had when Discovery first started coming out in 2017, is the amount of modern slang and language the writers put into the scripts. I've gotten used to it. Here's the thing, the shows from 60, 50, and even 30 years ago were mostly written by white men pulling from a writer's guide as to what could and couldn't be included in a Star Trek script. And I'm pretty sure there was something about including sophisticated dialogue in them. However, that's not how people speak in real life. Modern Star Trek has done their best to open the franchise up so that it would be more accessible to new viewers. And that includes using language that is familiar to the new person who might be watching Star Trek for the first time with Discovery or Lower Decks or even Starfleet Academy. Especially because Star Trek has so much technobabble in it that can easily go right over someone's head if they're not used to it.
The writers of DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise started doing this as early as 1994 or 1995 (around DS9's third season). Because they were the first Star Trek shows to not have any input from Gene Roddenberry whatsoever, and so they didn't feel beholden to his level of verbal sophistication. Nor did they feel the need to have a character quote Shakespeare in every piece of dialogue. Sure, it might date Starfleet Academy a bit as the show gets to be nearly 40 years old, as TNG is close to being now, but people will still enjoy it. Just as people still enjoy One Tree Hill, The O.C., and Glee today as much as they did 20 years ago when those shows first started.
There's so much more I could talk about. But, I think I'll save that for another time. Afterall, this Star Trek blog will be around for a very long time to come. I plan to talk about episodes, books, comics, characters, ships, technology, and the shows's production history as we go along. Right now though I just wanna say that I really enjoyed this season of Star Trek. It was engaging, fun, interesting and proof that Star Trek can tackle just about any genre and make that genre feel fresh.
I gotta go and clean up from dinner so I can get myself ready for my next appearance on The VHS Club Podcast, tonight at 9 pm ET. Katie, Nat, and I are reviewing the 1989 movie, The Wizard. Until then live long and prosper!
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