Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

Growing Pains in the 32nd Century

At the center of *Star Trek: Starfleet Academy*. On one hand, you have a universe still putting itself back together after the catastrophic, warp-destroying event known as the Burn. On the other, you have a bunch of space cadets acting like they just stumbled out of a CW teen drama, complete with hacky-sack in the quad and aggressively hormonal dorm room politics. I’m not fully sure this combination works, but I couldn’t look away.

Created by Gaia Violo (alongside showrunners Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau), the series takes a massive swing. It relocates the storied Academy to the USS *Athena*, a colossal campus-starship hybrid in the 32nd century. The idea is sound enough. Rebuilding a fractured Federation requires a new generation of wide-eyed optimists. But taking the rigid, militaristic ethos of classic Trek and filtering it through a coming-of-age lens makes for a lumpy, frequently jarring watch. Sometimes it's a sweeping sci-fi epic. Sometimes it's *Saved by the Bell* with phasers.



The anchor keeping this whole precarious experiment from floating off into the vacuum of space is Holly Hunter. As Chancellor Nahla Ake, a 400-plus-year-old half-Lanthanite, Hunter is doing something fully alien to the franchise. I've watched decades of Starfleet captains plant their boots firmly on the deck, projecting stoic authority. Hunter doesn't do that. She goes barefoot. She wears retro spectacles. She drapes her skinny frame over the captain's chair, folding her legs up under her like someone settling in for a long flight in coach.

It’s a deeply weird physical performance, and it’s brilliant. You can see the centuries of exhaustion in the slope of her shoulders, but also a fierce, protective streak. She’s outlived almost everyone she ever knew, including her own son. When Collider noted that "Hunter’s performance makes Nahla completely unique from every other captain in Star Trek’s 60-year tenure," they were understating it. She’s a necessary disruptor.



There's a moment in the sixth episode, "Come, Let's Away," that perfectly illustrates what Hunter brings to the table. For the entire season, we've watched Ake lounge in her command seat, treating protocol like a mild suggestion. But when her cadets are suddenly ambushed on a derelict ship and she’s forced into a tense standoff with her old adversary, the mercenary Nus Braka (Paul Giamatti, chewing scenery with a glorious, spittle-flecked rage), her entire body changes. She doesn't say a word. She just unspools her legs and sits bolt upright. The air leaves the room. It’s a tiny, muscular shift in posture that communicates immediate, lethal seriousness.

Things get shakier when the adults leave the room. The younger cast—including Sandro Rosta as the talented orphan Caleb and Karim Diané as a pacifist Klingon—are clearly giving it their all. But the scripts keep trapping them in agonizingly familiar tropes. We get clandestine basketball games, clunky romantic misunderstandings, and debates about a refugee crisis that go absolutely nowhere. The Guardian's review joked that the show is "like Grange Hill, with phasers," which is funny until you realize how badly the teenage angst clashes with the life-or-death stakes of interstellar diplomacy.



Whether that tonal whiplash feels like a flaw or a feature comes down to your patience for young adult fiction. I kept checking my watch during the dorm-room prank wars, wishing the camera would cut back to Hunter and Giamatti playing three-dimensional chess with each other's neuroses.

Yet, I can't quite dismiss what Violo and her team are trying to do here. *Star Trek* has always been an inherently hopeful proposition. By focusing on a generation of kids inheriting a broken galaxy—kids who are messy, insecure, and frequently annoying—the show is making a bet that the future belongs to the unfinished. It’s a frustratingly uneven semester, but I think I’ll stick around for the final exams.