[COLUMN] Starfleet Academy Finds Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains broad spoilers for the fifth episode of Starfleet Academy, which aired this week. I’ve already written about some of my bigger issues with the show, and I found the fifth episode to be an unforgivable quagmire of the series’ worst impulses. I am not a huge fan of it, alas. However, there is something I noticed in watching it, something quite distinct and somewhat understated, which I did appreciate. So it’s nice to be able to say something nice about something you don’t necessarily glom to. 

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is not a good show.

However, most of the ways in which it is not a good show are extremely generic and common across so much of the modern Star Trek franchise. It is leaden with exposition, feeling very much like “second screen viewing.” It is very overt nostalgia for Clinton era liberalism without any introspection about how that paved the way for the current political moment. It is saturated with condescending fan service. It often feels like a generic and bland CBS procedural, a waste of the talent involved.

However, there is one aspect of the show that is strangely compelling and eerily engaging. It is so interesting in large part because the exposition-heavy show very rarely overtly draws attention to it. It is just part of the fabric of Starfleet Academy, no subject to debate or discourse, and never positioned as something performative or deserving of praise. While so much of Starfleet Academy is tethered to the franchise’s past, there is one way in which the series looks to the future.

Starfleet Academy is set in the distant future of the 32nd century. It is in effect a spin-off from Star Trek: Discovery in much the same way that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds was. From the third season onwards, after the crew of the USS Discovery were vaulted into the far future, Discovery was a show about an attempt to rebuild and to reestablish the Federation as a major galactic power. Building off that, Starfleet Academy is about the attempt to reinstate Starfleet’s training college.

So much of Starfleet Academy is exhaustingly familiar. Within the first five episodes, there are stories focusing on established Star Trek species like the Klingons, the Betazoids and the Bajorans. The season’s fifth episode, “Series Acclimation Mil”, is essentially an hour-long love letter to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which finds the eponymous sentient hologram (Kerrice Brooks), known casually as “SAM”, investigating the life and times of Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks).

Starfleet Academy unfolds quite literally in the shadow of the larger franchise. In the central auditorium, there is a wall listing the greatest heroes of the Federation. Every name on that wall may was well have a link to an article on Memory Alpha, from Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) to Nog (Aron Eisenberg) to Riley Shepherd (David Drew Gallagher). Why those names? Out of centuries of Starfleet officers, what links those characters outside of having appeared in Star Trek?

This heavyhandedness disguises one of the more subtle aspects of Starfleet Academy. As with any Star Trek show, Starfleet Academy is populated with aliens from across the galaxy. There is Jay-Den Kraag (Karim Diané), a Klingon with a passion for medicine. There is Darem Reymi (George Hawkins), a Khionian who can pass as a human. There is Tarima Sadal (Zoë Steiner), the daughter of the President of Betazed. All of this is expected.

However, there is also a very strong emphasis in Starfleet Academy on mixed race children, hybrids of various species. Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter), the new Chancellor of Starfleet Academy, is half-human and half-Lanthanite. The villainous Nus Braka (Paul Giamatti) is half-Klingon and half-Tellarite. Lura Thok (Gina Yashere) is half-Klingon and half-Jem’Hadar, admittedly a combination that raises all sorts of questions given what Deep Space Nine established about the Jem’Hadar.

This trend carries across into the show’s supporting cast. In “Series Acclimation Mil”, SAM is mentored by Isla Dax (Tawny Newsome), a Cardassian/Trill hybrid. Some background extras imply a similar sense of cross-species pollination, such as Ferengi that have points to their ears that make them look like Romulans and Vulcans. It’s a really interesting creative choice that informs a lot of Starfleet Academy, and it is more compelling because the series doesn’t draw attention to it.

Of course, there have always been interspecies hybrids in Star Trek. Spock (Leonard Nimoy, Zachary Quinto, Ethan Peck) is very famously half-human and half-Vulcan. Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) is half-human and half-Betazoid. B’Elanna Torres (Roxann Dawson) is half-Klingon and half-human. However, it is very notable that all of these series regulars are half-human. They exist in a liminal space between human and alien. They are not blends of two alien species.

Of course, there have been examples of this sort of hybridisation in earlier shows, but it tended to be a big deal. The Klingon Worf (Michael Dorn) reacts with disgust to realizing that his romantic interest Ba'el (Jennifer Gatti) is half Romulan. Tora Ziyal (Cyia Batten, Tracy Middendorf, Melanie Smith) was half-Bajoran and half-Cardassian and so welcome on neither world. On Star Trek: Enterprise, there were plans to reveal that T’Pol (Jolene Blalock) was secretly half-Romulan, but it never happened.

In contrast, Starfleet Academy presents this cross-pollination as a simple matter of fact. There’s a sense that this sort of intermingling is so common that it doesn’t even necessitate comment. The products of Klingon and Tellarite unions seem to be so accepted as part of galactic norms that Braka can be identified as “a Klingarite” and everybody instinctively understands what that means. It is just a part of life in this big, populated galaxy.

This is endearing for a number of reasons. Superficially, it allows Starfleet Academy to have fun with make-up designs that are literally decades old. Of course, Star Trek has a history of changing alien designs from one iteration to the next, as with the Klingons, the Romulans and the Andorians. However, throwing these existing designs into a blender allows for some fun creative work from Shauna Llewellyn and her team on Starfleet Academy. Something new from something old.

It also feels oddly in keeping with the spirit of Gene Roddenberry, often treated as something of a sage old prophet by Star Trek fans. Roddenberry was a notorious horn dog in both his personal and professional lives. Famously, the reason that NBC wouldn’t allow Roddenberry to cast the actor Majel Barrett as “Number One” in the original Star Trek pilot had nothing to do with sexism as he claimed, and more to do with the fact that the then-married Roddenberry was having an affair with her.

Roddenberry had an extended affair with actor Nichelle Nichols who he cast in Star Trek and reportedly cast Andrea Dromm as Yeoman Smith so that he could – in the words of producer Herb Solow – “nail her.” It is perhaps an understatement to suggest that Roddenberry was obsessed with sex. One of his first projects after Star Trek was the broad (and disastrous) sex comedy Pretty Maids All in Row.

Even within Star Trek, Roddenberry was obsessed with sex. For Star Trek: The Motion Picture, he created the Deltans, a race so sexy that they had to take “an oath of celibacy” when working with alien species. The novelization reveals that James Kirk (William Shatner) was named in honor of his “mother’s first love instructor”, which seems to imply that his mother was so bad at sex that she required multiple educators.

This trend carried through to The Next Generation, where Roddenberry created the Betazoids, who are a surprisingly large part of Starfleet Academy. Betazoids are incredibly sexual and sensual creatures, who get married in nudist ceremonies. Roddenberry was also responsible for the creation of the sex paradise planet Risa, which – as writer Ira Steven Behr pointed out – was an insane concept to try to get on American television during the 1990s.

So this aspect of Starfleet Academy is true to the spirit of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, imagining a future where absolutely everybody is having sex with absolutely everybody else. It is weirdly charming, and an illustration of the strange and unexpected legacies of Roddenberry over the larger Star Trek franchise. However, there is also something deeper underpinning this, something which feels more fundamentally in keeping with the franchise’s philosophy.

In genres like science-fiction and fantasy, there can be a sort of rigid boundary around the idea of race and identity, as demonstrated in the recent debates about the racial characteristics of orcs in popular fantasy. At a time when the idea of racial purity has found itself back in the cultural and political mainstream, it is quite reassuring to see Star Trek reject the notion of such rigid boundaries and celebrate unions that transcend them.

This racial component is part of the subtext of the make-up designs in Starfleet Academy. Ilia Dax is not just part Cardassian and part Trill, her hair is also recognizably curly. Not only does this exist in contrast to the longstanding tradition of Cardassians with slicked back hair, it has a certain meaning in the context of the presentation of race in American popular media. The Klingon Obel Wocak (David Keeley) has pale skin without being regarded as a freak like the Albino (Bill Bolender) was.

The best part of all this is that it goes largely unsaid. Starfleet Academy is not a particularly subtle show. It rarely implies anything when it can simply exposit it bluntly and repeatedly. However, this blending and hybridization goes largely uncommented upon, which is honestly really charming. The show makes the statement simply through the inclusion of these characters and by treating their existence as just the logical outcome of the franchise’s core philosophy.

In some ways, this feels like Star Trek keeping pace with Russell T. Davies’ reinvention of Doctor Who. In the second episode of the 2005 revival, “The End of the World”, the Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) explains to Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) that in the distant future humanity will spread among the stars and diversify itself by blending with countless other species. The last pure-blooded human being, Cassandra O’Brien (Zoë Wanamaker), is presented as a racist monster.

The idea of “infinite diversity in infinite combinations” is central to the mythos of Star Trek. While Starfleet Academy is a deeply flawed show that is clumsy and messy, it does at least reflect that idea in one important way. The show presents a future in which the boundaries of race are no longer as rigidly defined as they once were. There is perhaps a cheesy joke to be made here about finding “strange” on new worlds, but it is also something that feels new and modern in an established framework.