Moments like these happen throughout the series. But so do a lot of teen drama moments, with plenty of screen time devoted to couples resisting and giving into their hormones, silly pranks between factions, and so, so much of beautiful teens talking through their trauma. All of these elements feel like they came from a CW soap, no matter how many Jem’Hadar you put in it.
In short, Starfleet Academy is not for me. So why am I bummed about it getting cancelled? Part of it is certainly that, with Strange New Worlds ending after season five and Star Trek: Legacy nothing more than a fan theory, there is no new Trek show in production. Apparently, Paramount boss David Ellison is more concerned about whining his way into buying Warner Bros. than he is making new Star Trek.
But really, it’s because Star Trek bigger than just me. I don’t mean that in the sense that it existed before I did, even though that’s mostly true—although I am old enough to have seen most of the TOS movies when they were new and to have watched TNG and all subsequent series in their original runs (and old enough to remember my uncles complaining about how Picard isn’t a real Starfleet captain because he never leaves the bridge).
Star Trek is fundamentally a show about boldly going, about exploring and facing new and unfamiliar places. Yes, it began as a series strictly about the voyages of the USS Enterprise, but as soon as Deep Space Nine debuted in 1993, the franchise also became more, finding space for moral ambiguity, political drama, and religious belief. Since then, the franchise has only gotten bigger and more diverse, to the point that, as they say on the hit podcast The Greatest Generation, “Star Trek is a place.”
Not every place is for every person. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations never promises that we’ll enjoy all those combinations. Sometimes, the combinations will create something that fills us with wonder and joy; sometimes, the combinations make us feel like Riker in that one Borg reality from “Parallels.” But if the franchise is going to be anything more than dull retreads and reruns, then we have to give it space to try something new, to make shows that are bad, and to make shows that aren’t for everyone.
Hopefully, that’s exactly what Starfleet Academy will do in its second and final season. Speaking with TrekMovie after the end of season one, Noga Landau, who serves as showrunner with Alex Kurtzman, revealed that season 2 will also end on a cliffhanger, despite the fact that they weren’t promised a season 3. When asked why she would choose to end her precarious season that way, Landau answered, “it’s because we listened to what our story wanted to be, and we went with it. We wrote it the way that it felt organic and natural.”
