Posted in: Opinion, Paramount+, Star Trek, TV, TV | Tagged: opinion, star trek, Starfleet Academy

Star Trek: After "Starfleet Academy," Paramount Should Sell Franchise

The cancellation of Starfleet Academy represents a cultural shift that Star Trek won't be able to escape from with Paramount Skydance.

It seems like a broken record at this point, but Star Trek is at a crossroads again: Starfleet Academy has been cancelled after two seasons, despite the first-season finale just airing. The series, which was guaranteed two seasons, will roll out its second and final season around 2027, assuming SkyDance's David Ellison doesn't feel like just jettisoning the series randomly like Paramount abandoned the animated series Prodigy after its initial season, despite filming its second before it found a new home on Netflix to burn the remaining episodes. There are the obvious questions of how, why, and what to do next, but let's explore the why and how for now, starting with the state of streaming now compared to its predecessor, Star Trek: Discovery, which premiered in 2017.

Starfleet Academy: Biggest Problem Was Timing and Ownership

When Discovery premiered in 2017, it was a flagship series for the recently launched Paramount+, which was in dire need of original content to justify the monthly subscriptions in a growing market. The field was thinner then with Netflix, Hulu, and it was only going to get even more cluttered with other competitors in Amazon's Prime Video, NBC Universal's Peacock, and Disney's Disney+. As original programming churned out regularly, the desperate need to lean on a franchise like Star Trek diminished, not to mention shifting political climates, and now, new ownership under the Donald Trump-friendly David Ellison, who bought Paramount under his Skydance banner. Once the merger became official, we already saw dramatic changes at the CBS network level, gutting the more centrist CBS News and adopting a more right-leaning, Trump-friendly outlook, led by Bari Weiss. It's not just Paramount; Trump-friendly Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has also made more dramatic editorial changes with the Washington Post. It's a sign of a bigger picture trying to appease the Trump MAGA right rather than focusing on broader audiences.

One can argue the landscape has been changing for the worse on the entertainment front, with the cancellation of Late Show host Stephen Colbert, who's ending his show in May. Back to Starfleet Academy, and why it's lasting two seasons. Could anything have been done to extend its life? Hindsight being 20/20, Discovery enjoyed a five-season run through 2024, even if Paramount had a smarmy hand in how it ended, telling the cast and crew that season five would be its last and that they would be given some additional time to film an epilogue. Between Discovery's fourth and fifth seasons would have been the perfect time to release the first season of Starfleet Academy, simply because the two would have had a hand in galaxy-building simultaneously. Instead, we hit the reset button again, with an original set of characters with so few ties to its predecessor, sink or swim. I understand the need to get the new characters to breathe, but having a direct hand with the established and new casts together could have helped bridge the shows more directly.

Obviously, none of us knows where season two of Starfleet Academy will go and if Gaia Violo, Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau were told specifically where to go to have that out, so it could fit into two seasons, more organically, or if they'll have to scramble for a new ending, like its predecessor. The biggest problems the franchise has are the bad-faith actors who have no idea what Star Trek is, because the franchise was NEVER about bucking conventions. Even when Gene Roddenberry conceived The Original Series as "wagon train to the stars," there was plenty of pushback from traditional right-leaning conservatives who couldn't handle the idea of a female first officer (and won with Spock fulfilling role as part of the retooled changes Roddenberry was forced to make), and marketers who deliberately changed how Spock looked in promotional material because they thought his ears looked too demonic. NBC affiliates in the South thought the Kirk-Uhura kiss in the season three episode "Plato's Stepchildren" was, as the kids today call it, "too woke," because interracial coupling was still very controversial in the 1960s.

Complaining About "Identity Politics" or LGBTQ Presence Makes No Sense

When Star Trek entered the syndicated age for The Next Generation, season five guest star Melinda Culea (The A-Team) was cast as Soren, a member of an androgynous race who was resistant to conformity and ended up falling in love with the Enterprise-D's first officer, Cmdr. William Riker (Jonathan Frakes) in the 1992 episode "The Outcast." Frakes originally wanted a man cast in the role of Soren, believing the episode's theme would have been far more effective, but showrunner Rick Berman shot down the idea, saying, "Having Riker engage in passionate kisses with a male actor might have been too unpalatable for viewers." It wouldn't be until 1995, with Deep Space Nine's season four episode "Rejoined," that we'd see the first kiss between two LGBTQ+ characters: Susanna Thompson (Lenara Khan) and Terry Farrell (Lt. Jadzia Dax), two Trill characters who were in a previous relationship and had reconnected. The episode THEN generated the expected outrage upon its initial release, and there's no doubt that the discourse from trolls would have been similar had the Internet been as sophisticated then as it is now. Keep in mind, we still didn't see a kiss between two MEN until 2017's Discovery, with Anthony Rapp (Lt. Paul Stamets) and Wilson Cruz (Dr. Hugh Culver).

How does that discourse go into Starfleet Academy with all its outrage? We had three LGBTQ characters: Karim Diané's Klingon character, Jay-Den Kraag; Tig Notaro's Jett Reno; and Gina Yashere's Jem'Hadar-Klingon, Lura Thok. The only regular public display of affection was between the two heterosexual leads, Sandro Rosta (Caleb Mir) and Zoë Steiner (Tamira). Is the idea of a gay Klingon that far-fetched? If anything, it evokes the struggles the Klingons endured in Star Trek shows that had to deal with how much traditional Klingons already rejected him for accepting anything regarding the Federation, kind of like a certain human-raised Federation officer in Michael Dorn's Worf on TNG. Both characters literally just wanted to be accepted by their peers, but wanted to embrace the path more aligned with their interests, and there's literally no canon to establish how Klingon society feels about LGBTQ members, and the discrimination just comes from bigots. Certain people's rigidness towards science fiction is perplexing, considering the entire foundation is on principles that we haven't figured out how to execute yet, like warp drive and deep space travel. So there's literally no way a fictional race, even a manufactured one, like the Jem'Hadar, can grow beyond a single sex and have interspecies relations with another fictional race in 900 years of evolution? If they create the characters, who cares how they came to be? Just make them interesting.

As fans, we can gripe all day about various things from quality narratives, writing, direction, talent, and execution, and come up with compelling arguments, but complaining about things for merely existing seems rather silly when it's all fiction. You want something real Hollywood did that actually hurt others? How about casting whites in ethnic roles while ethnic actors exist, who are more than capable in those roles? There are still too many examples of straight actors playing LGBTQ parts when there are plenty of LGBTQ actors around. For those who insist "identity politics" was NEVER part of Star Trek, clearly didn't watch or understand the franchise, especially when characters like Jay-Den and Worf were NEVER Klingon enough for their peers, or Spock (Leonard Nimoy, Ethan Peck, Zachary Quinto), when he's constantly confronted by racist Vulcans who diminish his worth because he has a human mother.

Right now, with no new Star Trek content planned UNDER NEW OWNERSHIP with the final two seasons of Strange New Worlds, the final season of Starfleet Academy, and whatever "concepts" of a new Star Trek film franchise they have, the future's looking pretty bleak for this franchise, and Ellison needs to sell this franchise to a conglomerate who won't constantly undermine the creatively integrity of the franchise. Who would embrace Star Trek at this time? Well, I'd argue Netflix, which is under NO PRESSURE to appease Trump at any level, would be an ideal buyer, but they showed zero interest in resuming the animated series Prodigy; taking on the burden of Trek might make them rethink that stance. I'd say Disney, but the way their questionable stance on the critically acclaimed The Orville has received little to no attention between the last two seasons is troubling. Their relationship with the Doctor Who franchise lasted only three years. Perhaps, creator and star Seth MacFarlane's deal with NBC Universal gives them pause. NBCU also becomes a possibility, but their track record of how much they're willing to commit to classic IPs becomes questionable, like the reboots of Quantum Leap, Saved by the Bell, Punky Brewster, but Bel-Air was a success.

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