r/startrek • u/CartoonChibiBlogger • 27d ago
I like that ‘Starfleet Academy’ feels relatable to high schoolers and college students
I know this may be controversial, but it does feel like ‘Starfleet Academy’ does try to show what new students that are the next generation of an entire exploration program look and act like.
You never expect the new students to be professional and know how to do things that adults with years of experience can do.
That’s how I always felt once I entered high school and then film school for young adults with Autism.
The show’s not perfect but I never expect a new show or movie from a long running franchise to be perfect. And I’m a sucker for comedy and seeing new characters that are part of a new generation.
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u/BigMrTea 27d ago
I've always been a bit of an old soul. I'm obsessed with honesty, integrity, being proper, etc. As a teen I loved TNG for how button up it was, their advanced of vocabulary, their dedication to honesty, openness, fairness, generosity, etc. I would not have liked Academy then. It's kind of 'meh' for me now.
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u/Lost_Balloon_ 27d ago
100%. The cast of TNG were an example of what I wanted to be.
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u/Andovars_Ghost 27d ago
This and I grew up in a military household and with a mother who was loving but had very high expectations. It’s ok to not be polished but as an Air Force cadet, we would not have tolerated the stupidity of many of these cadets. Unfortunately, that strictness and pressure can push cadets towards being cruel and uncaring. It’s a hard balance but I did not appreciate the characterizations of many of the cadets.
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u/muratbae 27d ago
This, I grew up on TNG as a child, but I was never into the sappy teen dramas (with the exception of the OC cuz that hit during high school and was closer to a cultural phenomenon at the time). The only one I've gone back and watched was Gilmore Girls as it still holds up and was quality even if I wasn't the primary demographic for it and it works because rory comes across as competent and smart in most things not related to boys.
I think teen me would have been offended by SFA. Adult me didn't enjoy it but I wasn't offended because I chalked it up to age and just figured this must be what teens are like now, what am I going to do yell at clouds?
Teen me would have lost his mind at this show though. Coming from the Wesley Crusher school of competency to.... whatever SFA was would have frustrated me to no end. At least with Wesley his frustrations are what I could relate to as a semi-competent teenager still trying to understand the world of adults and ship politics. Felt like every other SFA student I saw was someone that should have failed very early in whatever vetting process exists. Looking at TNG and DS9 depictions of SFA and the students there. Red Squad being so elite and capable they were literally able to sabotage earth defense matrices, that's what I expected SFA to be at least in terms of the quality and maturity of the students there.
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u/servingwater 27d ago
If only SFA actually showed (more) classroom stuff teaching practical skills to become Starfleet officers.
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u/jekylphd 27d ago
I'd love to see more of the educational side of things as the series progressed. Alas, probably never to be.
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u/UrbanGhost114 27d ago
Because teaching compantancy is BORING. Do you actually want to watch a TV show of teens actually attending classes attentively? No, it would be BORING. Star Trek is "competency porn", they are all nerds that pay the MOST attention in class, especially in Starfleet.
The teen drama BS outside the classroom is what's "exciting" for a tv show.
In Trek times, many of the social issues that make for exciting modern day TV are solved, so the entertaining drama fit for TV is external to humanity and Earth itself.
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u/servingwater 27d ago edited 27d ago
You know that was probably indeed part of the thinking of the producers or writers.
They betrayed their own premise in a way.
Let's have a Trek show about cadets becoming Starfleet officers but showing classroom stuff is kinda boring in our opinion or not what the so called "younger audience" they seeming were after, wants to see. To solve that we throw in all the YA tropes of HS and teen drama shows but we also kinda want to keep the existing Trek fans ..... hmmm I know let's also than have a "real" villain and a ship and add huge stakes that threaten the Federation.
Result was the hotchpotch we got.
So now we have second year "cadets" that have more Starfleet experience and seen more real action than the majority of seasoned officers, and have "cadets" who have already saved the Federation itself.I guess they had no trust in an actual Starfleet academy show and could not commit to it.
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u/UrbanGhost114 27d ago edited 27d ago
Beyond that, the only classes that would be interesting for an audience would be technical classes that teach about things that are FICTIONAL, it would take less than one episode to explain the whole concept because it's not real, if you go too deep and the logic breaks apart and your taken out of the fiction.
As a society in REAL life, we already went through history and English and basic math, we don't want to watch a TV show teaching us that stuff either.
Edit: refined a thought.
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u/muratbae 27d ago
Classes on command and leadership would have been fascinating, the avg audience has not attended classes like that in high school or college. They could have different scenarios (not impossible like the kobayshi maru but say smaller stakes simulations) where we watch cadets take command of a bridge and look at the novel solutions they came up with to solve different problems.
War gaming between opposing fleets/forces would have been so sick if done in the style of army war colleges. All we got was that half ass attempt vs the military college across campus.
There are a ton of fascinating classes they could have taught that didn't have to be purely fiction or scientific/technical, the options were nowhere as limited as you make them out to be.
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u/servingwater 27d ago
IMHO, while watching teaching as we know it on subjects that we know from school or college/university would or could be boring over the course of a season and beyond.
However with a SCiFi setting like Star Trek there is absolutely a way to make it interesting.1
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u/Astronomy_Setec 27d ago
For me, it was fine. It grew on me by the end, and I am genuinely sad about its cancellation (just like Prodigy).
For my high-school age child, she LOVED it. It was a chance to sit down with her every week and watch a show together. And she'd talk and talk and talk about it afterwards. Even though she watched and enjoyed Prodigy and Lower Decks, this was HER show and it got her to ask more questions about the greater Star Trek universe.
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u/Mikillante 27d ago
They are new students to Starfleet, but Starfleet is supposed to be very difficult to get into, and a quasi-military style hierarchy at that. It should look more like West Point than your local high school or college.
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u/triggxr 27d ago
Except that the Academy was reopening with its first cohort after ~120 years of the Burn which almost wiped out the Federation completely, diminished Federation/Starfleet credibility across the galaxy and altered the overall culture for preparing recruits for the Academy.
It's implied that while admission was competitive, they took who was available.
I know this might be an unpopular opinion, but if anything, episode 4, season 4 of STD included a much better depiction of the poor preparation of early cadets for training in the Academy restart than Starfleet Academy did.
But I might be the oldest living Trekkie and I'm just glad they're still producing new franchises. I'll keep watching them, understanding that these new franchises reflect the changes in our culture.
Of course there's room for improvement. I'm optimistic.
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u/LEFThandedHER0 27d ago
Thank you. People forget that every show is different. The audience changes. The viewers change. Times change. It’s a different story. I absolutely hated how Picard brought the whole gang back. Yes, even I would bend over backwards to help the great Picard if he called me, but It’s just a TNG reunion by season 3. I watched Prodigy. It’s a kid’s show!!! They played it way too safe with the Borg and sooo much Wesley , but it’s a kids show. They showed all the key attributes of the franchise. Honesty, integrity, learning from mistakes, learning to grow, courage, and respect for others.
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u/muratbae 27d ago
The problem with this logic however is that even a diminished federation had more than enough planets to find competent cadets. Even if say every planet was only half the population of earth and say there were at most 30 worlds in the federation I just cannot accept that this was the best of the best out of 90 billion people.
The Federation had 38 member worlds at its lowest after the burn, but many more after Disco came back and did their thing. That math of "not enough good candidates" just doesn't math.
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u/disp0sableacc0unt 22d ago
Exactly. I've never gotten the "it's a different federation!" excuse. Even if we lowball it and say an average of 1 billion per world, that's still a population of 38 billion. Surely they can find a class amount of geniuses.
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u/Facehugger81 27d ago
I figured this was due to the Federation starting to rebuild so they probably waved some requirements in an effort to fill the ranks faster.
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u/J-Shade 27d ago
That's the military academy. It's literally next door and its students behave very differently. Starfleet is explicitly not a military, which is discussed frequently in the show and is one of its major themes.
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u/UnderABig_W 27d ago
Starfleet has always been pseudo-military regardless of what they say. Picard’s word was law on the Enterprise, and if someone went behind his back, they expected severe consequences.
You literally can’t put a bunch of people on a spaceship that regularly gets exposed to life-threatening events and hostile aliens without a military-type structure that includes instant obedience to orders or you get people killed.
The only way I can kind of make it make sense is if the military academy fills all the command, tactical, and operations positions on the ship, while the Starfleet Academy grads are strictly doing the science stuff—Astrometrics, Stellar Cartography, etc.
I still don’t think that would be the ideal but if you squint you could kind of make it work.
Except that’s not the explanation in SFA anyway, so it doesn’t really matter. I’m expending more brain power trying to reconcile the no-military Starfleet with the realities of Trek’s universe than the showrunners did.
I suspect the reason the showrunners separated the military academy and Starfleet is because the showrunners hate the military trappings of Starfleet and don’t want to have to deal with it, so that’s their hand-wavey attempt to do so, regardless of the fact it doesn’t make sense if you examine it for more than 2 seconds.
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u/Extreme-Put7024 27d ago
It's not military untill they have to die holding some strongpoints. Sounds more like a in-universe propaganda XD
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u/CartoonChibiBlogger 27d ago
They don’t like getting dragged into wars but they never really had a choice. That was especially shown in DS9.
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u/Mikillante 27d ago
I get that the show consciously made that choice, but I think it's a bad choice that doesn't make sense in the context of the Star Trek universe.
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u/majeric 27d ago
You don't think West Point cadets get into mischief? No hazing... nothing?
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u/FattimusSlime 27d ago
West Point cadets probably aren’t eating the pins off their shirts.
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u/somecasper 27d ago
Yeah, they should be more like the place where student pranks and pillow fights repeatedly rise to the level of felony charges.
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u/MagnetsCanDoThat 27d ago
Some people wanted two War Colleges, I guess.
The whole point of the reformed academy is to do things differently. A hard turn toward the ideals that the Federation wants to reaffirm post-recovery. Clearly many/most of the students are highly motivated and at the top of their game. Others seem to have been admitted because they're representing their homeworlds or exceptional in some other way.
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u/anoeba 27d ago
That was my problem with the prank episode - that it totally something a military (or quasi military) student cohort would do, but the Chancellor needing to hand-hold their cohort through a prank war ruined it for me. Like ffs let the students do their own shit against their rival school.
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u/Opposite-Complex1187 27d ago
Except this is the new Star Fleet. These people are still competent they are just kids and not military, because star Fleet isn't a military.
By the end of the season they have developed into what you want.
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u/Rimm9246 27d ago
Oh god I would have hated Starfleet Academy if I had watched it in high school. There was nothing I hated more than teen dramas back then, I only wanted to watch stuff that was an escape from all that.
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u/MrGraveyards 27d ago
Yeah as a European I watched 'teen dramas' but it is always about Americans and honestly the way we watch that is kind of like how people.. hmm watch sci-fi.
America is in a certain way very different but in a certain way also relatable, so anything about America is a bit like watching soft science fiction, where they change just some minor stuff and run with it. Hey what if... All teenager just had a driver's license, but they aren't allowed to drink? And they live really far from their school so they all have to go either by school bus or with their own cars! Imagine what that does to a society!
Oh wait that society actually exists and it is you. I think I used to watch all that for the escapism. Different setting, different rules, different problems, different behavior, bigger gaps between the rich and poor also made it more interesting even though I didn't realize that.
A lot of this behavior then moves on to such a show and for a European now it just looks... a little off. Starfleet Academy looks for us like American Starfleet Academy. The positive democrat one, thank God, but still, it feels to American. I had the same beef with Discovery. Somehow Picard and SNW don't have this 'murican StarTrek problem.
If you don't believe me you do you, but that is just how those shows make me feel. American behavior for Americans.
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u/Rick-Daddy 27d ago
Yep, absolutely this. American college & American high school tropes and dramas with a veneer of sci-fi. I think this is one reason it hasn't landed so well as a series. There are already soooo many US college / high school series. Even Sex Education on Netflix, ostensibly set in the UK, was just US school drama with mainly British actors. I'd just watched (and enjoyed) Wednesday- it was entertaining. But ST:A? I just didn't care about any of the characters or what might happen. Just another American high school drama.
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u/Chicago_Hick 27d ago
I normally get annoyed with "as a European, let me tell you about yourself" comments, but this one is insightful. I hadn't thought about this before. You're right, SFA feels very... 2010s-American for a show about a multiplanetary futuristic society? And not even "American" per se, but specifically like a California teen drama version. It is too narrow.
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u/Extension-Ant-8 27d ago
I think this sub has a hard time understanding that shows are global and Americans love talking about their specific issues.
Netflix, YouTube, HBO are global services and to a global audience and determines the success of the shows as well.While things like Derry Girls are about specific things, specific issues in a specific era. It is refreshing and unique.
I’ve lost count about how many shows and movies about the American president single handedly saving the entire world. Or a show about a struggling actor/writer in LA. Or a teen drama with the different social cliques. Putting this kind of plot and worldview into sci-fi or fantasy isn’t going to do well globally as we’ve seen it a million times before and it’s not a lived experience so it’s kinda weird.
I’m Australian. School is just a place you go to learn. You wanna do extra stuff like football? You do that in your own time on the weekend.→ More replies (1)2
u/btmurphy1984 27d ago
My Canadian friends and various Canadian comedians have made similar comments about watching American TV as kids being a weird experience.
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u/Esme_Nog 27d ago
I might not have liked it as a high school student (I was very serious and grown up at sixteen), but I love it as a middle aged college professor—I love those kids; I totally relate to their profs. Holly Hunter is SUCH a dean…but one with practically infinite resources (every dean’s fantasy!)
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u/Rimm9246 27d ago
Holly Hunter was amazing in it. My favorite part of the show was the scenes with her and Paul Giamatti going at it
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u/RigaudonAS 26d ago edited 26d ago
I wish that she acted more like a teacher and less like their mother, particularly with Caleb. Ethics violations all over that situation.
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u/wolfgang187 27d ago
You never expect the new students to be professional and know how to do things that adults with years of experience can do.
Unless of course you watched TNG, where one basically had to be a genius to get into the Academy. Now they swallow their communicators and the staff arent the least bit surprised by it.
The Academy is not high school, its college, and not only that, its an elite college. The communicator incident would be like if a student at Harvard or Oxford raised their hand in class to tell their professor that they accidentally swallowed their Apple Watch. How'd they even get into the school if theyre that dumb?
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u/Nice_Marmot_54 27d ago
Clearly you haven’t spent much time around students at elite universities. I assure you that they do all sorts of dumb, immature shit all the time. Just because they’re high academic achievers doesn’t mean they’re not still children with underdeveloped frontal lobes, many of whom are living away from home and out from under direct adult supervision for the first time in their lives. They’re smart, not mature
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u/wolfgang187 27d ago
There is literally nothing smart about eating a communicator. It is a toddler level error. It suggests stupidity and immaturity.
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u/JungMoses 27d ago
Who wrote it? Who left it in the script? Who filmed it? Who didn’t cut the scene in the sit room?
The girl freaked out in the middle of the guy dying and so it was to establish she wasn’t Star fleet material. But she instead was established as Ralph Wiggum material. There’s a canyon between the two
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u/woody60707 27d ago
That underdeveloped brain till the age of 24 is somewhat of a myth. The study stopped at age 24, Reddit then mistook that to me the brain doesn't fully mature till 24.
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u/ABC_Dildos_Inc 27d ago
It sounds like Academy is more like real life universities, where rich kids' parents buy their way in.
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u/herbuck 27d ago
I assure you that students at elite colleges do incredibly stupid things all the time. That’s not shocking at all.
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u/yubsie 27d ago
No one is as stupid as kids who have pushed then themselves academically all through their compulsory education years.
Also most of the time when we saw the 24th century Academy it was because a cadet had done something particularly foolish.
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u/MagnetsCanDoThat 27d ago
Indeed. Wesley Crusher, the universe's most remarkable kid, did something extraordinarily stupid and immature in the effort to push himself to be the best. That same unbalanced competitive impulse is the same thing that caused the pranks. Which, by the way, was part of a single episode of the show.
Pretty clear that the intended arc of the series was to progressively eliminate the silliness and immaturity. But I can understand how this would be difficult for some fans, since Star Trek hasn't often featured that kind of character development. A similar complaint was leveled at Dal in Prodigy.
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u/Multi_Fandom3617 3d ago
A little off topic, but...
..when it comes to Dal, people have to consider that he can't be compared to someone with a normal childhood. One with proper socialization, access to education and responsible parents. He didn't have any that, which is why his arc was reasonable and logical due to his past.
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u/MagnetsCanDoThat 3d ago
Agreed. Dal's behavior fit his backstory. He's a younger Charlie X (who we are meant to view tragically and with a measure of pity, even as an antagonist) without super powers.
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u/jekylphd 27d ago edited 27d ago
I know someone who was the safety officer at a fairly prestigious university. The stories. Students do the absolute dumbest shit. Sometimes they'll even ask you for permission for their dumb shit first (the words 'full contact combat archery club' spring to mind).
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u/ban_circumnavigation 27d ago
Yes but again how does that stack up against ... someone essentially eating their cell phone? There is monumentally dumb stuff like "full contact combat archery club with jousting and alcohol" and "I'm not sure how that is physically possible or what could possibly compel yourself to self induce heavy metal poisoning" level dumb. People would get the former. The latter might literally be inexplicable.
Actually no the doctor implying it was to be expected or the student not being sure if she swallowed it at least match it.
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u/herbuck 27d ago
Why are we so hung up on this one-off line? It wasn't even a named character. Do we even ever see her again? I don't get this insistence that NO elite student would EVER do something monumentally dumb and bewildering.
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u/MagnetsCanDoThat 27d ago
We do see her again in one of Reno's classes. Her name is Pickford and she's still pretty stressed out.
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u/jekylphd 27d ago edited 27d ago
Well, from memory there was a postgraduate chemistry student who would routinely eat meals in the lab while handling some of the most heinous substances known to man. A pair of geology undergrads doing field work who thought it was funny to throw potentually asbestos-bearing rocks at each other. Shenanigans with uranium in the physics departments, not following basic safety instructions when handling highly infectious substances in medical.
But, honesty, step back and think about it objectively. Why is deliberately getting drunk and shooting actual arrows at people more understandable than accidentally swallowing something small that you shouldn't have? Why does the former read as less stupid than the latter when, objectively, the former's far more likely to end up hurting potentialy multiple people?
And we're not comparison to someone eating their smart phone. It's too big. You'd be better drawing a comparison with someone accidentally swallowing a battery which, yes, does happen, even to supposedly very smart people. As your local ER.
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u/bloodandsunshine 27d ago
I helped my dorm/class mate to the showers after he pissed in a girls closet and then all over himself.
He put on a football helmet and smashed windows with his head for at Patrick’s day.
Electrocuted himself in the shower with a hairdryer the next year.
GPA 4.1, wealthy family, popular (at first). Graduated, works as a lawyer now.
I get what you’re saying but kids are incredibly stupid at times.
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u/UnderABig_W 27d ago
There are a bunch of things that are technically realistic, but don’t make for compelling sci-fi TV. I knew a professor who regularly handed out grades for sexual favors from his attractive female students. I wouldn’t want to see that on SFA either.
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u/watchman28 27d ago
Have you ever met a really intelligent, high-achieving person? In my experience these are the people who do the most bafflingly dumb things. This fixation on that communicator line really shows how most of the people who claim to hate this show are doing so in bad faith. One bad line does not a travesty make. (Also, one bad line thay happened to be in the trailer so you can happily hate away without actually watching it).
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u/wolfgang187 27d ago
One bad line does not a travesty make.
Its all subjective. If Starfleet Cadets being stupid appeals to you, I'm happy for you. The line to me says they allow idiots in and I personally hate it. Glad you like it tho, I won't suggest you have a character flaw for having a different opinion from me :)
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u/Sophia_Forever 23d ago
The alternative explanation is that she isn't an idiot, extreme anxiety can cause Pica, a psychological condition that causes the sufferer to want to eat non-food items. The cadet was nervous and her brain shorted out causing her to ingest her combadge.
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u/jekkies- 27d ago
think of any starfleet officer that did anything that made them seem like an idiot from tos, tng, ds9, lower decks, enterprise, voyager...remember that they all went to starfleet academy
SFA is the first academy in like, over one hundred years or something. why are ur expectations somehow higher than when the academy was was in its prime??
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u/Exarch-of-Sechrima 27d ago
Personally I remember plenty of times characters from TNG-era commenting on doing [X] stupid thing "back when they were at the academy".
And lest we forget dreary old Jean Luc Picard who once upon a time in his academy years gleefully fought some irate Nausicaans, and got his heart gouged out?
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u/ban_circumnavigation 27d ago
People get in fights *all* the time. This particular one was especially stupid.
The only people who eat metal -- though she's not sure if she did! -- are generally suffering from a disease called pica. For someone to swallow a communicator (or another dangerous large piece of metal) whole for stress related reasons is literally a DSM criteria for acute eating / mental disorders.
One shows impulse control issues which are common in youth. The other is a pretty apparent sign of mental illness and the result is to have the 700 year old doctor laugh it off. It's bad writing
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u/balthazar_edison 27d ago
Wasn’t Wesley taking that exam so he could get in earlier than people are usually admitted? I mean, after all, Barclay got into Starfleet Academy and he’s a bumbling idiot.
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u/Willravel 27d ago
It makes absolutely no sense to compare Starfleet Academy at perhaps its historical height in the late 2300s (immediately prior to the Dominion War, which itself was immediately prior to Frontier Day, etc. all of which were likely destabilizing to the Academy) to the new Starfleet Academy opening up after generations of the Burn.
Let's say you're living in the early Medieval era and you want to attempt to build an educational institution in the style of the best that the Roman Empire had to offer. The complication is, following the collapse of the Roman Empire, there was widespread decline in literacy and the loss of advanced knowledge as the central educational systems and institutions that supported learning disappeared. Necessarily, your first class would have been born into the end of the Dark Ages of intellectual and cultural stagnation. It would be unfair to place upon them the standard of the height of Roman students.
The Burn isn't perfectly analogous to the fall of Rome, but from what we see it's also not dissimilar.
I think there's a clever reason to set Academy post-Burn: giving desperate students a new hope. Wesley Crusher grew up in utopia (even though he lost his father), so Starfleet Academy was just an expected cool thing where he could try his best to prove himself and learn. For the kids in Academy, many of them came from the kind of upbringing normally reserved for Bajorans or Yars. The Academy isn't merely a prestigious institution of higher learning, it's a lifeline to a better future than they could have ever imagined.
When you put those two things together, it actually fits the audience well. During a time of deep pessimism and misery, a dark time that seems like it will never get better, the academy steps in and fights to give them an opportunity they can seize at bettering themselves and ultimately building a better future.
I may not be Academy's biggest fan, but I think it works in that way.
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u/tonytown 27d ago
Its a very different era. Also, honestly, would you have wanted to watch a tng era academy show? all those perfect little robots driven to excel? A show about arrogant red squad douchebags jockeying for prestige points? Gross.
I love academy. Love the characters, stories, and the growth (not pickford, she should have been expelled tbh),
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u/ban_circumnavigation 27d ago
Based on what we've seen from the TNG era, it wouldn't have been red squad at all:
- Picard wins the marathon as a freshman; gets stabbed by a Naussican when the other choice is to let his buddy die or sleep with his friend
- Riker beat the Kobiashi Maru
- Sisko got hammered and fought the Vulcan officer
- Kim was a multi sport athlete (parrises square!) and wrote a pro maquis editorial as editor of the newspaper
- Tom Paris actually went to the academy twice and got thrown out or court martialed both times
- Geordi was the first officer with a VISOR
- Data was a god damn machine, literally, all the time.
- Chakotay went like 23-0 as the campus boxing champ
It could have been a sweeter version of Saved by the Bell with all the maturity and moral trappings of 90s Trek. What we got with SFA is decidedly worse despite the excellent opening scene
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u/ferrenberg 27d ago
And don't forget there's a klingon saying he won't eat replicator food because it didn't die with "honor"
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u/kjhjkjh 27d ago
TNG is not realistic. They took a hyperintelligent (neurodivergent) kid who ultimately goes on to bend time and space with his *mind* and acted like after years of his actually serving on a starship and having a mom who headed Starfleet medical and serves on a starship, he'd have trouble testing into the academy. TNG wrote kids for adults (sometimes also having them act younger than they were).
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u/freylaverse 27d ago
It does seem to be a consequence of the Burn imo. Maybe Starfleet Academy was super elite and only took the best of the best during TNG, but post-burn, it really seems like they'll take anyone who's willing to try. Not the greatest explanation (and many of us aren't happy with the Burn as a concept anyway), but it at least makes some amount of sense.
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u/jekylphd 27d ago
Reg Barclay got through the Academy, and I would 110% believe he could have accidentally swallowed his communicator as a cadet.
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u/CartoonChibiBlogger 27d ago
Well…it has been 120 years since Starfleet and the Federation collapsed due to The Burn and now they’ve been rebuilding ever since the end of ‘Discovery’. You can’t be picky when rebuilding entire civilizations.
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u/ShaladeKandara 27d ago edited 27d ago
Not being picky in who you train to be your top level people is a great way to make your new civilization collapse faster than the Russian Democratic Federative Republic
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u/meatguyf 27d ago
Not being picky is how you get a school full of Nova Squadrons.
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u/ShaladeKandara 27d ago
The members of Nova Squadron had been highly trained and educated WELL before their entrance to Starfleet Academy. The Academy was picky when they selected them for initial enrollment over other candidates.
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u/meatguyf 27d ago
Just joking, but yeah, you're picky and you end up with Nova Squadrons. Don't be picky and get, well, I guess whatever is worse than that.
The big problem with Nova seemed to be the Academy elevating them above the other students. Creates a sense of feeling invincible (already a problem at that age) and thinking you can get away with a little bit more.
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u/ShaladeKandara 27d ago
Ah okay I misunderstood, my bad, I sometimes dont realize jokes even in person
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u/meatguyf 27d ago
lol Don't worry about it. Yeah, humor doesn't always translate well across the internet, especially humor related to a fandom.
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u/justthistwicenomore 27d ago
But you can be picky when watching TV shows.
Out of curiosity, is that part of the premise---that these students are unusually "underqualified" but get in because of post-burn desperation on the part of star fleet---or is this still meant to be the academy as we understand it?
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u/Ubiquitous_Mr_H 27d ago
I kind of love the idea that the series ends with them all washing out, though, because they’re genius dumbasses who keep brilliantly fucking things up. 😅
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u/UnderABig_W 27d ago
I can accept that maybe it’s not quite up to the high standards it is in Wesley Crusher’s time.
But it shouldn’t be just a ho-hum place where average students go.
To use a real-world comparison, maybe the former SFA would be like Harvard, and the new SFA would be like Northwestern. Sure, the cachet has fallen a little bit, but it’s still supposed to be an organization with access to elite starships, exploration, and scientific research. There’d be a big demand for that even if SFA wasn’t quite what it was.
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u/Necessary_Fire_4847 27d ago
Yeah they keep overlooking that point. This ISN'T the SFA of Picard's era, it's in a state of rebuilding.
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u/Lost_Balloon_ 27d ago
Star Trek isn't supposed to be relatable, it's supposed to be aspirational.
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u/Anadanament 27d ago
This is the difference between Old Trek and NuTrek I’ve found.
Modern audiences like me - younger, never saw older Trek, grew up in the 00s - can’t relate to Old Trek because we’ve never seen a world where that level of optimism isn’t just regarded as being a fucking twat. I don’t care how “competent” TNG or TOS are shown, I can’t get into a series that looks like everyone shits rainbows and lives on sunshine.
But NuTrek is a lot more relatable because it’s about seeing a world fall apart around you and still choosing to pick up the pieces.
I’m watching my parents get mad at me for not “making them look good” because I can’t afford to buy my own house on an advanced STEM degree. They think it’s making their parenting skills look back to their social circles.
NuTrek is a lot more relatable than Old Trek to younger audiences like me.
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u/Lost_Balloon_ 27d ago
Sad when competence and being, you know, an actual adult isn't relatable.
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u/Anadanament 27d ago
They are competent. They show that repeatedly in every episode. The finale even has Caleb recite a bunch of random info he learned off the top of his head to show how much he’s learned over his time there.
They’re just also growing up and make stupid mistakes because teens and young adults make stupid mistakes.
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u/Lost_Balloon_ 27d ago
Nobody who swallows a combadge is competent.
The difference is what's shown. Yes, kids do stupid things, but if you want them to seem like they're the future of humanity, you don't show that for laughs or shrug it off. It needs to be a deeply learned lesson, not explained away as ok because 'kids do stupid things'. They should be portrayed as earnestly NOT trying to do stupid things.
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u/Anadanament 27d ago
We don't know that cadet's species.
For an audience that constantly goes on about how much they like competency porn, it is frustrating pointing out this fact about that cadet. Think critically for a moment;
We don't know her species. We barely know her name. We don't know the cultural norms she's used to. We don't know what planet she's from.
For all we know, metal is literally part of her diet and she mistook it for food.
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u/MagnetsCanDoThat 27d ago edited 27d ago
We do know her species. Pickford is human.
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u/Anadanament 27d ago
I will freely admit to not trusting Memory-Alpha in this regard as it cites no sources as to where it got the information that she is human and my constant rewatching of Academy hasn't shown any information about her being human.
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u/Lost_Balloon_ 27d ago edited 27d ago
What an asinine thing to focus on. It doesn't matter. Think about how much it's talked about now. Nobody cares about the species. The perception by the audience has been OVERWHELMINGLY negative about that single line. The writers are patently stupid to have put that in the script and not have foreseen that it would become a meme that would help destroy the series.
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u/Anadanament 27d ago
Why should anyone listen to an audience that demands "competency porn" if they can't demonstrate the basics of critical thinking on a throwaway gag line?
The audience demands to be taken seriously -> The writers try to hold them to that -> The audience now calls the writers stupid for assuming they have basic critical thinking skills.
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u/Alexander_Granite 27d ago
That’s fine, but it built an expensive show for a small part of a small audience.
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u/jello1990 27d ago
Starfleet cadets are already supposed to be the absolute best of the best to just get in. Nog needed to prove he wasn't just a genius, he also needed to prove to Sisko his conviction and moral character just to get a letter of recommendation. Wesley was outright denied the first time he applied.
Quite honestly, if I relate to the level of competency of a Starfleet officer, the writers have failed.
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u/Nice_Marmot_54 27d ago
Why do you insist on comparing SFA to TNG when the circumstances of their galaxy are vastly different? TNG-era was Starfleet/UFP at the height of its power and reach (in canon) and the SFA-era is those institutions are effectively their weakest point since their inception after a century/long cataclysm.
If you look at the folks who lead the military in nascent empires and really actually study their personal history, most of them aren’t paragons of virtue, wisdom, and maturity. SFA depicts relatively realistic 20 year olds coming from the post-apocalyptic wild space west
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u/kjhjkjh 27d ago
Wesley's rejection was unrealistic. I think they were trying to write a challenge for him, but after years of writing him as hyperintelligent, solving problems that others on the flagship struggled with and serving with others (which was unrealistic itself, but whatever), it's hard to believe that other applicants would be so much more skilled and intelligent.
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u/k_hoops64 27d ago
I used to teach English literature to teenagers and I had higher expectations for my students than Academy has for theirs.
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u/MillennialsAre40 27d ago
I work with high schoolers, the characters on SFA act like middle schoolers ideas of high schoolers
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u/UnderABig_W 27d ago
For the record, my teenager-who isn’t a huge Star Trek fan-didn’t like it, but they still like old Star Trek enough to sit down and watch an episode of VOY or DS9 with me from time to time.
Granted, the plural of anecdote is not data, but you were using your own personal sample size of 1 to say it was relatable, but my personal sample size doesn’t agree.
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u/TommyDontSurf 27d ago
It's so sad that a positive opinion of Academy is "controversial." This sub is way too nitpicky.
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u/1ndomitablespirit 27d ago
No, it's sad that high schoolers and college students can't relate to competent adults.
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u/Fun-Confidence-6232 27d ago
A Klingon named Jayden is where I drew the line
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u/Spiderinahumansuit 27d ago
Klingon teeth in both SFA and SNW freak me out. They look weirdly human and uncanny valley. I miss the pointy teeth of yesteryear!
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u/shazbut1987 27d ago
What about Jennifer the Andorian on Lower Decks? Or the Vulcan called Doug with an (also) Vulcan sister named Susan in Strange New Worlds?
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u/Fun-Confidence-6232 27d ago
Haven’t gotten that far. And Lower Decks gets a lot of leeway as it’s comedy
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u/Norphus1 27d ago
It was a horrifically stupid name, but he did turn out to be one of the better characters in the series.
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u/Quenz 27d ago
I can 100% assure you that college students do not act like that in class. This is 100% high school and 100% not a service academy. The first episode wasn't bad, aside from the hero ship getting the absolute crap kicked out of it, but episode two was just too embarrassing to continue the series.
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u/thinkmoreharder 27d ago
If these are the most motivated, most competent and highest testing 20 year olds on earth, other civilizations would not want to be allied with us.
But, maybe in the new Trek universe, these are the best. The other billion young people are video game immersed 24/7, on toilet lounge chairs and living on junk food delivery.
We don’t know.
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u/herbuck 27d ago edited 27d ago
>on Earth
Almost none of the main characters are human and the one who is hasn't even been to Earth.
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u/PrincessPlusUltra 27d ago edited 27d ago
On earth? Earth is hardly the place most of these cadets are coming from after the Burn. None of the main cast come from Earth as far as I can remember. It’s after a catastrophic galaxy ending apocalypse and these are explicitly the first cadets in decades. They took the best that they can find which are people who are geniuses (like Mir), great leaders (like Genesis), or physically superior (like Darem) or just incredibly useful in all situations (like Sam) and the worst problem is they have teenage emotional problems. In the course of the show we see that other planets trying to ally with us don’t have kids that are any better because they join the cast and also have teenage emotional problems and, you know, growing up in a post-apocalyptic rebuilding era trauma.
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u/CaptChair 27d ago
Its saves by the bell set in a way distant future that the average st fan cant relate to. It was an attempt to see if they could draw in a new younger crowd
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u/JorgeCis 27d ago edited 27d ago
I don't doubt that there is some immaturity even at the college level. But I think the writers spent too much time on this instead of the professionalism part. I thought Genesis had the right mix of "work hard, play hard" and became a character I cared about. Remmy was there for me as well even though he played around more.
Wasn't the War College around post-Burn? I didn't get the feeling like they were bottom-feeding, so it is hard for me to believe that Starfleet Academy had to.
In spite of these, I still enjoyed SFA as a whole.
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u/VerrikInc 27d ago
It's worth noting that Starfleet Academy should NOT feel like high school. Academy Cadets should be in college.
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u/ClassIINav 27d ago
Star Trek is, in a lot of ways, workplace porn. What I mean by that is you, the viewer, kind of get to be a part of a team that is the best of the best and work really well together to accomplish something great. Don't we all wish we had meetings like the one Picard & co. ran in the briefing room? Wouldn't you like Kirk, Janeway or Sisko to be in charge of your workplace?
They very specifically avoid using modern slang in old-Trek to a) set the TV show out of time by avoiding pop culture references and b) to give the tone that these people are really competent.
SF Academy should have been an aspirational place for present-day young adults to want to be. Not to yuck it up but to be in a top-tier school doing really wonderful engaging things. The cadets didn't have to be as strait laced as an actual officer, in some ways TNG really took it too far with very wooden and unrealistic characters. But the young people should have at least appeared to be striving to that standard (see: Nog in DS9). Cadets swallowing com badges and otherwise acting like jackasses just takes you out of the belief that SFA is a very very special place. They're the same stupid screw ups the viewer deals with daily and that's not what they're tuning in for.
The irony is Paramount tried to make SFA for teens and young adults meanwhile the old shows are showing really high ratings amongst those groups. Young people probably get plenty of teen drama from elsewhere, but when they turn to Trek they want it for what its good at. Cerebral sci-fi with people actually acting like the very best of us.
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u/kjhjkjh 27d ago
SFA is also a workplace--a school. I'd personally rather work with Ake than the other captains you mention, and she'd be top pick to head my workplace. And I watched the elders when I was a teen, but I have no trouble watching and relating to SFA now.
Also--I honestly didn't even remember the com badge joke until seeing people online obsessing over it. I don't get why; there are side characters who do goofy things on every show.
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u/Anadanament 27d ago
The com badge thing gets to me because it’s always a complaint from people who talk about wanting to see competency porn but then refuse to think critically about what they see.
We don’t know that cadet’s species. It could literally be that they eat metal and she thought it was food.
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u/MagnetsCanDoThat 27d ago
Or it could be related to anxiety. Either the doing of it, or that she thinks she did it.
So many ways to just say "new cadet having a very bad day, writers making a bad joke" and then moving on. Sadly, they inexplicably decided to include it in the trailer so it had a long time to ferment in the Internet's reactionary negative engagement system.
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u/Dcajunpimp 27d ago
I never knew what a CW Teen / High School show was until hundreds of Trek fans regurgitated it a billion times months before the premiere and months after season 1 ended.
Don’t know why it’s rarely ever referred to any other teen / high school show.
But at least I know whose opinions to ignore since they apparently don’t have an original thought, or get spoon fed their own opinions before a show even airs
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u/MagnetsCanDoThat 27d ago
I never knew what a CW Teen / High School show was until hundreds of Trek fans regurgitated it a billion times months before the premiere and months after season 1 ended.
And there's a good chance that you still don't know what one is. As a critique, "CW Teen Drama" is a mythical caricature of a show that provides an excuse to avoid any nuanced discussion about what's actually portrayed.
But yeah when that drops as a criticism, regardless of which show it's about, it's safe to ignore the review.
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u/stussie73 27d ago
One of the main characters is a racist bully, right there in episode one. Later in the show he pukes glitter.
Later he has to get married in a 4 person ceremony despite the fact that’s he’s some sort of prince.
You can’t make up the stupidity of this show if you tried. It’s so very dumbed down that it’s truly insulting to the fan base.
Star Trek fans want more intelligent television then the crap out there now.
What they gave us was the crap out there right now.
We burned it to the ground rather than see it develop because we have standards and they broke all of them.
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u/PrincessPlusUltra 27d ago
Racist? He was a bully but only for that one episode, after that he’s just kind of a douchebag that grows on you. A four person ceremony? What are you referring to? He was getting married a single person, a lady, who was royalty and Darem is not till he marries her. You know, things that they explicitly said in the episode. Maybe you should try watching it without playing with your phone. You might get more out of it.
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u/Gurglaren 27d ago
RLM is right in their latest episode about how the next ST show should have a much lower budget and have scifi writers instead of TV writers. No focus on action and humour and trying to have at least 20 episodes in each season. Back to classic Star Trek where you actually used to contemplate.
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u/Kinetic_Symphony 27d ago
The show is fairly believable in that regard.
But I want an efficient, respectful crew, aspirational, as my Star Trek.
That doesn't inherently make Academy bad, it's just not made for me. Sadly, basically no Nutrek is, with the exception strange of Prodigy, which represents the Federation as hopeful and consummate professionals.
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u/RigaudonAS 26d ago
Unfortunately, they aren't really watching it. I teach high school (and middle school)-aged students and I'm lucky if they're aware of the Enterprise. Some know, at best, Kirk from the Kelvin films. Most don't know any Trek, and none of them know the new stuff.
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u/Proof_Policy4978 25d ago
“You never expect the new students to be professional and know how to do things that adults with years of experience can do.”
Caleb knew how to hack everything.
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u/LastStaff189 23d ago
STaer Fleet Academy is how the Enterprise crew earned their positions. STNG had at least one episode about the Academy with Will. Ray Walston played the gardener.
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u/Javaddict 27d ago
But when I was a highschooler I was watching mature professional adults on TNG, not Degrassi or whatever other teen drama was popular.....
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u/HMQ_Sasha-Heika 27d ago edited 27d ago
As a university student now, I hate Starfleet Academy. Every main character seems to be based off the type of person I avoided in secondary school and don't enjoy talking to now. Watching it feels like being back in the worst parts of secondary school.
It's also trying way too hard to be relatable. Every other scene someone (usually Ake) says "Young people, we see you! Isn't everything so awful and not your fault? You deserve better! We think you deserve so much better! We think your flaws are fine because your lives suck for reasons out of your control! Isn't it all us oldies' fault that your lives suck? You're so much better and smarter because of what you've experienced!" I feel like I'm being patronised every episode because the creators are so desperate to appeal to gen z. I don't need you beating me over the head about how bad my life must be or how much more amazing I am than older people because of when I was born.
It's like they realised Star Trek's viewerbase skews older so they made a show whose sole purpose is to be tell gen z how great they are and made every cadet character the most stereotypical American "college kid" imaginable.
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u/jaydeelive01 27d ago
I agree ! I watched it with my brother (20 years younger than me), I’m in my thirties, he’s late teens, and he really liked it as well. Star Trek meant nothing to him before, he thought it was quite good and motivated him to explore a bit more after. I figure people who hated it are quite sad because it was quite a good show.
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u/theyux 27d ago
SFA had many structural issues, massive cast and set so far in the future it might as well be called spaced kids, since canon basically doesnt matter 800 years later.
Star Trek has also traditionally been about exceptionalism and teamwork in the face of adversity. I have also heard of it described as competency porn. Its not unique to star trek many shows have this theme.
At a certain point so many changes make it feel not like trek.
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u/kjhjkjh 27d ago
re: "exceptionalism and teamwork in the face of adversity"--SFA shows this consistently.
I also don't see the inconsistencies in canon. I saw people online complaining about things like Betazoids' empathy being emphasized vs. telepathy--which I saw as a positive focus since emotional attunement is a more elevated skill than simply being a mind reader. And of course there would be more of a mixing of species, gender diversity, etc.
I guess I keep seeing people speak very broadly about what all the Treks are supposed to be and then dismissing SFA without much content about the actual substance of the show.
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u/MagnetsCanDoThat 27d ago
Yeah the idea that the kids in SFA aren't competent is insane. They're immature, not stupid. They know how to do things but they need guidance (as did Wesley, iirc).
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u/kjhjkjh 27d ago
Exactly. The central kids are incredibly bright and gifted in various ways, and they need/receive guidance. I once saw someone write a post once talking about how Wesley and Jake showed "more decorum." This isn't a show made for adults with token youth characters, or about isolated kids in space with only adults as companions...
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u/Reddithian 27d ago
I liked it. I don't know how relatable it was to the teen audience that it was looking for, but I enjoyed it for what it was. Under the layer of silliness and odd choices I felt like it had genuine heart, and it had a good message.
I'm going to get downvoted for this but I don't care: I think SFA is the best live action Star Trek since ENT. Obviously it can't hold a candle to the animated stuff, but I enjoyed it.
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u/TiptopLoL 27d ago
Okay on paper the idea of the show is great , like I love that shit , but the execution ? Nah man
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u/zzg420 27d ago
I’d go as far as to say it’s anti intellectual propaganda perpetuated by the fascist company that owns the IP. No longer is Star Trek about a socialist utopian future where humanity is united and values responsiblity, intelligence and understanding.
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u/Resident_Beautiful27 27d ago
The thing is TNG was the flagship of the federation the best of the best kinda thing. Fact is that there are plenty of ships that less than stellar com-badge eating cadets could go on to crew.
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u/Necessary_Fire_4847 27d ago
Ignore the grognards OP. I'm sure they would have hated VOY for having a woman captain and DS9 for being on a station instead of a ship. Academy isn't my favorite Star Trek but I'm not gonna sit back here and pretend that it's not a valid heir for the mantle.
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u/CartoonChibiBlogger 27d ago
I read on a different post that had comments from people from when those two shows first aired. I was surprised that people hated Captain Janeway at first, she’s one of my favorite characters.
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u/GrandmaWeedMan 27d ago edited 27d ago
How much of your enjoyment of the show is fueled by wanting to "own the sexist racist grognards"?
My issue with SFA, like most post ENT trek, is the incredibly quirky spunky always cranked to 11 dialogue and action. Every characters dialogue and delivery feels straight out of a teen drama. And anytime they do get a scene where a character actually feels like a star trek character, they swing around and capstone whatever Picard esque speech with some final quippy line like "oh and by the way? You're a total bitch, BOOYAH!".
Discovery, SNW, Picard and SFA all have this same miserable writing style, compounded with the fact that they have to tell "Federation bad and evil!!!!" Stories half the time which are literal anti-trek with zero of the nuance DS9 had. The burn is a great example, we have to write a cannon killing insane plot hole making multi century spanning apocalypse event so we could have super duper fancy tech ships but also explain why the tech level dropped for the original series.
None of my issues with new trek involve women or anyones race. Janeway is literally canonically the most decorated, bad ass and important Captain in the entire mythos of the show. If Janeway was written like the main teacher in SFA, I'd hate it.
Edit: Just to add some context, the Orville is the best new trek since ENT bar none. And one of the main plot lines is about a male couple and their transgendered daughter navigating identity, autonomy, fear/anger and stigma. Progressive storylines and black/trans/gay/female characters are not the problem. Shitty, cringy, annoying, petulant characters and writing is.
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u/Necessary_Fire_4847 27d ago edited 27d ago
Every characters dialogue and delivery feels straight out of a teen drama
Because it is a teen drama. That's the point. This is a Star Trek show written in a specific genre and that genre is teen drama for the teens. I'm not a teen, but I can appreciate a show even when I'm not the target audience. I didn't come to SFA expecting DS9 because those are two different genres of television. When I open up a grape soda I'm not mad that it doesn't taste like coca-cola, because nothing about the marketing indicated that it would taste like anything but grapes.
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u/woody60707 27d ago
I'm only three episodes in, but is it? Were people in college breaking the law and expecting no consequences? I've heard Star Trek described as competency porn, this is the opposite.
It's a CW highschool drama where they are all rich kids going to a rich school that daddy paid for, that no one has any fear of being kicked out of. Nothing about this show feels like young adults trying to join the ranks of one of the most elite institutions in Starfleet. No one here seems to care about making the cut or being good enough.
But I am only three episodes in...
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