[COLUMN] Starfleet Academy Offers Nothing New for Star Trek's Next Generation | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the first two episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which premiered last week on Paramount+. It is not great, unfortunately. It’s not the worst thing that the franchise has produced lately - it’s a step up from the third season of Star Trek: Picard or that Section 31 movie - but it’s still bad in ways that most of these shows are unfortunately bad. So, consider yourself warned if you want to watch the show blind.

Starfleet Academy, the latest show in the Star Trek franchise, is a show about a lost future. This makes it somewhat ironic that it feels so desperately and clumsily stuck in the past.

Much is made of the utopian subtext of the larger Star Trek franchise, the argument that Star Trek represents a fundamentally optimistic and hopeful depiction of the future. This reading of the franchise is largely rooted in the Star Trek television shows of the 1990s, overseen by producer Rick Berman. It is most apparent in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager. Fans will often argue that this optimism was always part of the franchise’s history, but this is revisionism.

The truth is that Star Trek has always spoken more to America’s present than to humanity’s future. The original Star Trek was a product of the Cold War, and reflected the stark realities of that time. Under Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner), the Enterprise voyaged out into a galaxy that was a graveyard of alien empires, populated by unruly but all-powerful children, and where madness was often quite literally contagious.

In “Journey to Babel”, the members of the Federation were revealed to be at one another’s throats. The galaxy was so inherently hostile that Starfleet vessels had a standard operating procedure – “General Order 24” – to destroy all life on a planet's surface from orbit. Human beings existed at the whims of a hostile universe. As Leonard McCoy (Karl Urban) points out in JJ Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, “Space is disease and danger, wrapped in darkness and silence.”

This was because the original Star Trek was a product of its time. It arrived at a point where the United States was a dominant global power as older empires crumbled to dust. The dangerous children that populated the show spoke to contemporary anxieties about the counterculture. The show spoke to a world that existed on the edge of M.A.D., mutually assured destruction. America moved to secure its global interests against the spread of communism.

Much of the utopianism that fans associate with Star Trek only really came about after the end of the original series. While the original Star Trek included multiple references to money, the Federation was only established as being moneyless in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, released in 1986. William T. Riker (Jonathan Frakes) stated that the Federation was vegetarian in the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the following year.

The utopianism that was established in The Next Generation and which carried through into Voyager was a product of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the resolution of the Cold War. It spoke to “the end of history”, “the unipolar moment” and to American “hyperpower.” The United States was an uncontested global superpower. The western world entered a period of what it believed to be peace and economic prosperity.

The utopia of The Next Generation was never a vision of the future, but instead a reflection of the present. The Next Generation offered a vision of a relatively stable and peaceful galaxy. Under Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), the Enterprise was effectively a “luxury hotel.” Even in Voyager, when Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) and crew are thrown across the galaxy, they are never so inconvenienced by their plight that they have to cut down on their holodeck usage.

To demonstrate how closely this utopian vision of Star Trek is tied to that historical lacuna at the end of the second millennium, Star Trek: Enterprise was thrown into an identity crisis by the trauma of 9/11. The show’s first two seasons tried clumsily to limp on as if it were business as usual, but the series’ third and fourth seasons tried to draw the poison out of the wound: “What does it mean to be Star Trek in the middle of the War on Terror?

This new era of Star Trek, overseen by Alex Kurtzman and beginning with the launch of Star Trek: Discovery in 2017, has grappled with a similar but distinct existential question. Launching one year into his first term, the biggest philosophical challenge facing this new wave of Star Trek shows has been: “What does it mean to be Star Trek in the era of Donald J. Trump?” This, to be clear, is only natural. Star Trek should be engaged with the contemporary world.

The particular contours of that question have varied from one show to the next. On Discovery, Trump was personified by Captain Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs), a monster from an alternate dystopian timeline where the Federation was the Terran Empire, and by the ethno-nationalism of the Klingon Empire under T’Kuvma (Chris Obi). On Picard, the threat was more philosophical, as the Federation became more isolationist and xenophobic.

On Starfleet Academy, a show set in the distant future of the franchise universe, that specter manifests in various ways. It is personified in the villainous Nus Braka (Paul Giamatti), who according to Kurtzman represents “a tide that has swept across the world in a very profound and upsetting way.” More broadly, the series unfolds in a future where the Federation is attempting to recover from a disaster known as “the Burn”, to pull itself back together and repair this broken future.

As the title implies, Starfleet Academy is about a younger generation. It concerns the first class of students to study at the reopened academic institution that provides the basis for Starfleet. The Academy is overseen by Chancellor Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter), hand chosen for the job by Starfleet Commander-in-Chief Charles Vance (Oded Fehr). Ake’s primary objective is to restore a broken faith with these young children who never knew the prosperity and stability of the Federation.

This is very literally woven into the show’s character arcs. In the open scenes of the premiere, Ake is responsible for separating Caleb Mir (Sandro Rosta) from his mother (Tatiana Maslany). It is a very loaded piece of political imagery with a strong contemporary resonance. This serves as Ake’s original sin. Her guilt for her complicity in that familial separation informs her work at Starfleet Academy. Ake goes out of her way to recruit Caleb among her first batch of students.

The show’s second episode concerns the negotiation of the readmission of Betazed into the Federation, at the behest of a younger generation led by Tarima Sadal (Zoë Steiner). The contemporary parallels are also quite pronounced there, with the “isolationist” Betazoids building a “psionic wall around their planetary system.” They seem to plan on “keeping that wall up.” It’s not exactly the most subtle piece of political commentary.

More broadly, the show is about the idea that contemporary politics have failed the younger generation. “These kids are inheriting a broken world that they did not create, but have to clean up,” Ake explains to Vance. Defending her choice of students, Ake explains that “the traditional paths to Starfleet disappeared for many of these kids.” Starfleet Academy speaks very heavily to a generation that feels betrayed and abandoned by contemporary politics.

Allowing for some clumsiness in the execution, this is not the worst hook for a Star Trek show. The problem is that Starfleet Academy doesn’t really have anything to offer this wayward generation except nostalgia, the promise that things can be made the way that they once were. Vance hires Ake to run Starfleet Academy because she is half-Lanthanite and therefore is old enough to remember the Federation before “the Burn.”

“You were there centuries ago when Starfleet was at its best,” Vance urges her. “You can show them what that really means.” The show is saturated with nostalgia and callbacks to older Star Trek. Not only does the EMH (Robert Picardo) appear as a series regular, he gets to repeat his “tricorder… medical tricorder” gag from the first episode of Voyager. Whenever something the audience should recognize appears on screen, there is a helpful musical sting to clue the viewer in.

In its opening episode, Starfleet Academy lifts a lot from the opening of Voyager. Just as Janeway recruits Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill) from a Federation penal colony, Ake pulls Caleb out of prison. Just as Voyager’s first mission takes it towards the Badlands, Ake pilots the Athena towards the Badlands. Just as disaster strikes and leaves large portions of the Voyager crew dead, the cadets on the Athena are forced to step up after a surprise attack leaves their ship crippled.

This heavy reliance on internal continuity for the Berman era Star Trek shows reflects a broader external nostalgia for the 1990s. This is reflected in the casting. Holly Hunter is an icon of 1980s and 1990s cinema. Ake feels like an embodiment of the same 1990s New Ageism that informed Michael Piller’s work on Deep Space Nine and Voyager, the wise old trickster lady who is also a kook who walks around the institution in her bare feet because she’s such a free spirit.

There is a clear longing here to return to the 1990s. It feels very telling that the show focuses on Betazed’s readmission to the Federation. Betazed was one of the new planets invented for The Next Generation, home to Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) and very much an expression of “notoriously horny” Gene Roddenberry’s sex positive New Ageism. Starfleet Academy doesn’t focus on one of the Federation members from the 1960s, like Vulcan, Andor or Tellar. It focuses on one from the 1990s.

This is a fatal flaw with this era of Star Trek in general and with Starfleet Academy in particular. It feels like the franchise has nothing new to offer audiences, beyond the comforting reassurance that – to tweak a Dan Quayle quote – “the future was better yesterday.” It is an understandable impulse, but it is also cynical and bankrupt. After all, what is this nostalgia but just a slight variation on the nostalgia that underpins so much of the ideology that the franchise is trying to reject?

More to the point, while the 1990s were prosperous and relatively peaceful, so much of the chaos of the modern political moment flows as a direct consequence of decisions made during that decade. Indeed, eagle-eyed viewers can see the shadows of the Californian political movements of the 1990s that would birth Trumpism stirring beneath the surface of Voyager. There is no going back. The only way out is through. A lost generation needs more than reheated leftovers of yesterday’s dreams.

Even within the world of the show, the Federation cannot have been a perfect system, as it collapsed so readily into chaos. Why would a younger generation ever trust a system that crumbles under the slightest pressure? Surely, the goal should be to build something new and modern, to acknowledge the flaws in the old system and provide a viable alternative to the darkness sweeping through the cosmos?

In the fictional history of the Star Trek universe, Earth did not respond to the horror of World War Three by regressing back into a world of nation states. Instead, it evolved into something more resilient that could ensure that such a disaster would never happen again. Why would the children of Starfleet Academy bet their futures on something which collapsed at the expense of their stability and prosperity? Starfleet Academy cannot offer any answer beyond nostalgia.

It is perhaps unfair to burden Starfleet Academy with this criticism. It was also true of Discovery and Picard. Still, this problem is especially egregious here given how aggressively Starfleet Academy is about the need to offer a brighter future to the next generation. It can’t do that looking backwards.