The executives at Paramount were so confident in the success of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy that they renewed it and completed filming for a second season even before the conclusion of the first.
However, the show has now been canceled.
The only reason Starfleet Academy will see a second season is due to this preemptive decision. Had the decision-makers at Paramount exercised caution, they might have waited to assess the audience’s response to the inaugural season before committing to another. Unfortunately, they have already invested a significant sum in a series that has been poorly received.
Oops.
According to Variety, the first season of ‘Starfleet Academy’ achieved an 87 percent approval rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Aramide Tinubu from Variety praised it as a ‘delightful entry point’ into the series.
Predictably, it achieved this rating. The show made the bold choice to portray a Klingon as a gay pacifist, complete with a skirt. This approach seems tailor-made to secure an 87 percent fresh rating from Rotten Tomatoes, by introducing controversial elements into a cherished franchise, particularly targeting a younger audience.
“But the show failed to find a significant audience,” Variety laments. “Across its 10-episode first season, it has failed to rank on the Nielsen Top 10 streaming viewership charts.”
Translation: Normal People, not so much.
Oddly enough, in an X post defending Starfleet Academy, Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner, gets it all wrong but still accidentally explains where everything went wrong with this once legendary franchise.
“During the first airing of my Star Trek series where a kiss was objectionable; many southern stations pulled the episode & condemned the show,” wrote Shatner. “Using today’s vernacular it would absolutely be called woke DEI crap, because it went against ‘norms’ of society for its time. Not a lot seems to have changed.”
Shatner’s referring to a season three episode called “Plato’s Stepchildren” where aliens use telekinetic powers to force a kiss between Captain Kirk and Lt. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols).
But here’s the difference…
Like all of the original Star Trek episodes, “Plato’s Stepchildren” is about Big Issues and moral dilemmas. In this case, free will, how power can corrupt, dehumanization, and prejudice. The episode is not “about” an interracial kiss.
Certainly, at the time, everyone involved in producing the episode understood what the kiss meant in 1968 America, but because adults ran the show, they also understood that good storytelling demanded the story be about something bigger than a kiss. So the kiss became an element used to tell that bigger story, which was itself driven by a theme that even America’s worst bigot could relate to: being bullied by the powerful.
The original Star Trek was never an All About Me show. The characters were not driven — as is obviously the case in Starfleet Academy — by the narcissistic disease of self-expression. Instead, they were driven by duty to Starfleet and their shared humanity.
Best of all, and this is what has made the original series and its subsequent feature films so timeless, the central characters of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy were beautifully explored when that sense of duty came into conflict with right and wrong. It was never through self-expression that these characters unfurled. Instead, it was through their actions, interactions, decisions, sacrifice, and the resolution of moral dilemmas that we came to know, love, and respect the crew of the Enterprise — not them kissing on one another or wearing a skirt or demanding to be accepted for who they are.
This is also the difference between timeless and timely storytelling. In that respect, Starfleet Academy felt stale the day it was released, like something from 2020 when there were still enough people high on their woke supply to make garbage like this a temporary hit.
P.S. The interracial kiss in “Plato’s Stepchildren” ended up not being controversial at all. According to Nichelle Nichols, other than one letter, the mail was overwhelmingly positive. The women wanted to know what it was like to kiss sexy Captain Kirk. The guys wanted to know the same about sexy Uhura. The original Star Trek moved the ball by appealing to human nature, not by looking to rewire it.
