As some of you might know already I am a huge Star Trek fan. I have watched every iteration of the franchise multiple times and have loved all of them except Deep Space 9, which I found to be one of the most boring TV shows I had watched. Was not a huge fan of Enterprise either but it was still watchable and I managed to finish watching all of it. Star Trek is a show with a 60 year history which makes adding a new show in the canon a potentially dicey affair because of how it would affect other shows and potentially create continuity errors. Which is why I find the ~1000 year jump in Discovery and the setting of Star Trek Academy in the 32nd century interesting. It allows the creators to start off with a clean slate and not worry about paradoxes and continuity issues.
The latest show in the series is called ‘Star Trek: Academy’ which is set about a hundred years after the ‘Burn’ which had brought down the Federation. It follows the first class of Star Fleet Cadets in a hundred years as they work towards becoming officers and rebuilding the Federation. I watched the show and so far quite like it, it still has the message of hope and how people need to work together to rebuild while retaining the core ethos of Star Trek, which is: Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.
Once the show launched we had the standard backlash from the usual suspects who think that any show that shows people other than straight white males in the story are destroying the franchise. One of the funnier complaints against the show was about how Nahla Ake played by Holly Hunter who is the half-Lanthanite captain of the USS Athena and the chancellor of Starfleet Academy sits in the show. I will admit it was a bit disconcerting to see a captain sit with her feet folded up into the captain’s chair but after the initial surprise it didn’t detract from her authority and was just a humorous sideline.
But to listen to the detractors, that quirk is destroying the core foundation of the show and it highlights how straight white men are being hounded out of their spaces because of politics. They keep talking about how the new show is making things political whereas the original didn’t do politics/social commentary at all.
Listening to their complaints I started wondering if we were watching the same show or not. Star Trek has always been political and covered important topics such as authoritarianism, imperialism, class warfare, economics, racism, religion, human rights, sexism, feminism, and the role of technology. In fact Gene Roddenberry himself stated: “[By creating] a new world with new rules, I could make statements about sex, religion, Vietnam, politics, and intercontinental missiles. If you talked about purple people on a far off planet, they (the television network) never really caught on.”
I do admit that I don’t like all the characters in the show and especially dislike the character Sam (Series Acclimation Mil) because of her extra-exuberant behavior and portrayal which is something that I find annoying in real life as well, because my personality is a polar opposite of that behavior. This is not to say that the actor is bad, just that I don’t like the character. The other characters in the show are all ok and show a surprising range of behavior where the show & the characters are not pure black and white portrayals and that makes the show very interesting.
The other major reason I like it is because of the underlying portrayal of hope in the show. The universe is a mess because of the Burn but it is not a grim retelling of Star Trek which is awesome. It is good to have shows that have a positive/light hearted take on things. (I am def not a fan of the Grim re-imagining of various franchises that has been popular over the last few years)
All in all, the show is a fun watch and I look forward to seeing where the story takes us.
– Suramya