Movies & TV Star Trek: Starfleet Academy “Do not kill your instructor on day one” — Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s “Kids These Days” Welcome aboard the U.S.S. Athena… By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on January 15, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share The notion of portraying life in Starfleet Academy has been around the Star Trek universe for ages. It was first pitched as a movie back in the late 1980s and was seriously considered for the sixth movie following the lukewarm reception to The Final Frontier in 1989, going so far as to have a script by Harve Bennett and David Loughery, before deciding to do a last hurrah with Shatner, Nimoy, and the gang. Both Marvel (an ongoing series from 1996-1998 contemporary with DS9 and Voyager and using DS9’s Nog as a main character) and IDW (a 2015 miniseries telling stories set during the events of the 2009 Star Trek) have done Starfleet Academy comic book series. Simon & Schuster has done two sets of YA books focusing on the Academy, including a series from 1993-1998 that showed Academy tenures for characters from the original series, TNG, and Voyager, and another from 2010 that focused on the Bad Robot films. In 1997, there was a Starfleet Academy CD-ROM game (remember those?), which also had a novelization by Diane Carey, and the following year was Susan Wright’s Academy-focused novel The Best and the Brightest. The TV shows have done the occasional spotlight on the Academy, from TNG’s “The First Duty” to Discovery’s “All is Possible.” With the diversification of Trek on TV that we’ve seen since Secret Hideout took over producing Trek stuff for Paramount+, an Academy series was almost a given to happen at some point. Additionally, they’re having it spin off of Discovery’s final three seasons, which was a masterstroke. The thirty-second century is ripe for further exploration—Discovery barely scratched the surface—plus, it’s explicitly a Federation that is finally back on its feet after being isolationist and devastated because of the Burn. Now the Burn is over and there’s a new set of cadets coming in. It’s a great era to set an Academy series in, as you’ve got lots of different species coming together, many of them leaving their home star systems for the first time. Scripter/creator Gaia Violo has come up with a way of still doing shipboard adventures while doing an Academy series: the show primarily takes place on the U.S.S. Athena, a starship that is specifically designed to be a flying Academy. They will learn on the job, as it were, taking class and doing supervised shipboard functions on an actual ship. (And presumably also sometimes have unexpected adventures, as they do in this episode.) When on Earth, the ship docks at the Academy grounds in San Francisco, continuing to be the main campus building. Two of the main characters are functionally immortal, so they actually remember when the Federation was at its height. One is our lead, Holly Hunter’s Captain Nahla Ake, who is part Lanthanite (the same species as Carol Kane’s Pelia on SNW), and is several hundred years old. Hunter plays her with a similar relaxed, seen-it-all attitude to Kane on the sister show, but she’s very much her own person, and much less eccentric than Pelia. (Which is good, as that level of goofiness works in a supporting character, less so in your lead.) Ake is a good teacher, a compassionate authority figure, and a canny leader, and Hunter inhabits the character magnificently. Credit: Paramount+ The other immortal is one of two legacy characters in this pilot: Robert Picardo as the Voyager’s EMH, who still, centuries later, just goes by “Doctor.” He also added an aging subroutine five hundred years previous—the Watsonian reason is to placate organics, with the Doylist reason being that Picardo is very obviously three decades older than he was when Voyager was on the air. (Picardo also joins the swelling ranks of actors who have played the same character on three or more Trek television series.1) The EMH is, as ever, a total delight. Age has just made him even snarkier, and Picardo remains a treasure. The other legacy character is Oded Fehr’s Admiral Vance, and he retains his cool demeanor and charisma from his appearances on Discovery. Fehr was listed with the main characters, not as a guest star, which means we’ll hopefully see lots of him, which is always welcome. (Mary Wiseman and Tig Notaro are also supposed to be recurring regulars, coming over from Discovery as, respectively, Tilly and Reno, but neither is in the premiere episode.) The other characters are a bit hit-and-miss. I will give credit to director Alex Kurtzman (yes, Kurtzman himself directed this one) and the actors playing the various members of the bridge crew that they give each character a distinctive style of speaking and body language and personality. It’s not much, and I suspect that, as with Discovery, the bridge crew will only be occasional supporting characters rather than main characters, but “Kids These Days” gives me hope that they will stand out as individuals more than Discovery’s bridge crew did. However, the remaining adult we see is magnificent: Gina Yashere as Lura Thok, who is half-Klingon, half-Jem’Hadar. Yashere plays the role with gusto, modulating hilariously from deferential when dealing with Ake and the other adults to drill-sergeant bluster when interacting with the cadets. While Lura is first officer of the Athena—Ake even calls her “Number One,” as we’ve seen Pike and Picard do with their first officers—her actual title is “Cadet Master,” as she’s more directly in charge of the cadets. As for our gaggle of cadets, they’re a mixed bag. I think my favorite is Series Acclimation Mil, who comes from Kasq, a planet populated entirely by sentient holograms, and who goes by SAM, “in the interest of not being mocked mercilessly by my fellow cadets.” Kerrice Brooks plays her as delightfully nerdy, and I just want to hug her. She also wants the EMH as her mentor, a job the EMH pretty much runs screaming from. SAM was specifically created to be a teenager who interacts with organics to build a post-Burn bridge between Kasq and the rest of the Federation. Credit: Paramount+ My least favorite—by far—is sadly the one being set up as the main character among the cadets, Caleb Mir, played by Sandro Rosta. We spend the entire teaser with him and Ake, and I was pretty much sick to death of him before the opening credits even rolled. He’s introduced to us as a six-year-old (played by Luciano Fernandez) whose single mother (played with her usual brilliance by an underused Tatiana Maslany) is arrested as an accessory to a pirate, Nus Braka (played with scenery stuck in his teeth by the always-brilliant Paul Giamatti), who has killed several Starfleet officers. Ake is the captain in charge of sentencing both Braka and Caleb’s mother, and she hates that she has to separate a mother from her child. Then Caleb manages to escape. We cut ahead fifteen years. Ake is a teacher on Bajor, having quit Starfleet after being put in a position to separate mother and child, and having failed to track down Caleb at all in those fifteen years. As for the now-twenty-one-year-old kid, we see him on the way to prison, but he manages to hijack the prison ship in an attempt to use the ship’s computer to locate his mother. Prior to his breakout, they list his criminal record, and it pretty much starts the nanosecond he escaped from Ake’s custody. So he’s been living the life of either a prisoner or a fugitive for most of the fifteen years since he was six years old, yet he managed to become a wiz at piloting and making covert communications and astrophysics and operating systems on a starship, er, somehow. That sound you hear is my disbelief gasping on the side of the road. If Caleb wasn’t human, I might be willing to buy it, but unless we later find out he had some kind of mentor to teach him at least some of this stuff—a Fagin to his Oliver Twist, a Lob to his Modesty Blaise, an Achmed El Gibár to his Storm—I might like him better, but probably not. He’s the whiny rebel who thinks he’s too cool for the Academy, and he’s only going along with it because the alternative was a brutal prison sentence (the cutting off of fingers and hands is mentioned) and because Ake has promised to help him try to find his mother. (Hey look, a seasonal through-line!) The rest of the cadets we meet are all similar types, some more clichéd than others (though none as clichéd as Caleb). Bella Shepard’s Genesis Lythe is the pretty genius, daughter of an admiral, smart as a whip, clever with wordplay, and just generally annoyingly perfect, but charming enough so you don’t hate her. Intellectually I want to dislike her, but Shepard is so charming I’m willing to forgive it. (This is an acting trick that Rosta does not manage.) Credit: Paramount+ George Hawkins’ Darem Reymi is the asshole child of privilege, the first Khionian in Starfleet. He’s an arrogant snot, complete with an entourage of sycophants. On the one hand, there’s (at least) one of these in every classroom. On the other hand, I’m already bored with his shit. We’ll see how this goes. And then we have my second favorite of the cadets, Jay-Den Kraag, a Klingon who wants to pursue the sciences and loves bird-watching. I’ve been dying to learn the status of the Klingon Empire in the thirty-second century (Discovery avoided even mentioning the Klingons once they bounced forward in time), and I’ve similarly been dying to see a Klingon who isn’t cut from the warrior cloth for a change. Not seen in this episode is one other main character, Zoë Steiner’s Tarima Sadal, a Betazoid. The Athena only just arrives at Earth at the episode’s end, so presumably she’s waiting for them there (along with Reno and Tilly). The story itself does all the things a premiere episode is supposed to do. We meet the characters, we get the setting, and we get an unexpected conflict, as Nus Braka shows up to steal the Athena’s warp drive. The ship is damaged, it needs to be fixed, and the cadets need to bring their special skills to bear. And I have no trouble believing that these particular cadets come with existing skills and useful traits, as up until a year or two ago, they were more isolated and self-sufficient. These people didn’t expect to have the option of the Academy until Discovery showed up and reversed the Burn. It all works nicely and we get enough to make me very interested in what happens next to most of these people. (I say “most” because I could give a damn about Caleb. I mean, we know what’s going to happen, he’s gonna try to find his mother and he may find her, he may not, but it’s not going to end the way he wants and snore.) Hunter plays Ake much differently than any of the other Trek captains, as you can tell that she’s, on the one hand, seen it all, and on the other, is still excited about the possibilities ahead of her and her cadets. She has the joy of learning that most of the best Trek characters (and best teachers) have, but she also has the accumulated wisdom of the centuries that we’ve previously seen in a few characters (Guinan, particularly; Pelia, occasionally), and it makes her nicely stand out from her fellow captains. I just hope they don’t overuse the search-for-Mom plot with Caleb, and I especially hope they don’t overuse Nus Braka. The setting doesn’t really lend itself to a recurring antagonist, and besides, Giamatti’s OTT act works best in small doses.[end-mark] [Editor’s Note: Keith will be back to cover episode 2, “Beta Test,” in a later post.] Picardo has played the Voyager EMH on Voyager, Prodigy, and now Academy. The others include Michael Ansara as Kang (original series, DS9, Voyager), LeVar Burton as Geordi La Forge (TNG, Voyager, Picard), John deLancie as Q (TNG, DS9, Voyager, LD, Picard), Michael Dorn as Worf (TNG, DS9, Picard), Jonathan Frakes as William T. Riker (TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, LD, Picard), Alice Krige as the Borg Queen (Voyager, LD, Picard), Gates McFadden as Beverly Crusher (TNG, Prodigy, Picard), Richard Poe as Evek (TNG, DS9, Voyager), Tim Russ as Tuvok (Voyager, DS9, Picard), Armin Shimerman as Quark (DS9, TNG, Voyager, LD), Alexander Siddig as Julian Bashir (DS9, TNG, LD), Marina Sirtis as Deanna Troi (TNG, Voyager, Enterprise, LD, Picard), Brent Spiner as Data (TNG, Enterprise, Picard, LD), Sir Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard (TNG, DS9, Picard), George Takei as Hikaru Sulu (original series, Voyager, LD), and Wil Wheaton as Wes Crusher (TNG, Picard, LD, Prodigy). ︎The post “Do not kill your instructor on day one” — <i>Star Trek: Starfleet Academy</i>’s “Kids These Days” appeared first on Reactor.