Featured Essays Star Trek: Starfleet Academy How the Ghosts of the Past Haunt Starfleet Academy’s Future The revenants of Star Trek’s past inform where it’s going — and that might be a good thing. By Val Nolan | Published on February 18, 2026 Credit: Paramount+ Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Paramount+ Grab your raktajinos, activate your spoiler warnings, and take your seats, cadets; class is now in session! What class, you ask? Maybe Advanced Subspace Geometry? Perhaps Xenolinguistics? No, it’s something even more exciting… Cultural Criticism! Specifically that of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and his notion of hauntology. Admittedly Derrida can be a tough read but, broadly speaking, hauntology (which is a pun: “haunting” + “ontology”, the latter being, well, the study of being) offers a framework for understanding how big and transformative ideas, though they may seem defeated, never really go away. Hauntology is the kind of philosophy—or cultural/literary criticism more broadly—which can often sound like science fiction (ontological shock at disharmonic anachrony, anyone? Wasn’t that an episode of Voyager?!). It comes complete with its own technobabble, canon of texts, and occasional reboots or retcons, as well as its own very niche, very passionate fandom. These days it is often interpreted as an inability to imagine a future (partly but not exclusively on account of how influential British academic Mark Fisher deployed the term) but that reading is more applicable to, say, a prequel series such as Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. In the case of Starfleet Academy, however, we find something which is both much closer to Derrida’s original conception of hauntology as well serving as a toolkit to help us unlock the deeper themes behind the show: a series of metaphorical ghosts which emphasize vital connections between the past, the present, and the future. Essential to this is how Starfleet Academy takes place in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event known as The Burn, a disaster which has disarticulated the narrative of the franchise’s storyworld. The Burn is a literal historical rupture which has left time, to quote Derrida quoting Shakespeare, “out of joint” (for Derrida, “time” here broadly encompasses “history” among other things). In fact, spacetime itself has been left out of joint after The Burn in a manner extensively explored on Star Trek: Discovery. On that series, the largely collapsed Federation is reintroduced as a specter without a body, a quasi-secret concealed behind a distortion field whose representatives are rare and frequently intangible (consider the holographic Starfleet officers glimpsed via recordings in the episode “Su’Kal”). After The Burn, the myth of progress and forward momentum (particularly that of the Federation) has been left askew. The galaxy is thus haunted in this era. It is haunted by the lost idea of the United Federation of Planets (something we see throughout Discovery’s third season in particular, especially through the eyes of characters such as Aditya Sahil). However, if much of Discovery was about mourning the Federation, Starfleet Academy is about rebuilding it (that’s right there in the imagery of the opening credits). Because here the revolutionary idea of the Federation comes back. Though of course it has, technically, already come back by the end of Discovery, so Starfleet Academy essentially begins with this specter returning again (which is very Derrida; it’s a notion he derived from Shakespeare’s Hamlet). As such, the narrative gestures of Starfleet Academy are largely resurrectional in nature. The most obvious example is how the USS Athena’s arrival at Earth—and so the institution’s physical return to its old campus in San Francisco for the first time in over a century—is depicted as a significant moment of rebirth (as, for that matter, is the emergence of new Academy buildings from the ground in the title sequence). But, more than these visual cues, it is among the teaching staff of Starfleet Academy that we see the greatest hauntological energy. Here we find a preponderance of specters in the Derridean sense, what the philosopher calls “revenants” (a term which he borrows from folklore and meaning a returned spirit or resurrected corpse). And while we could get bogged down in differentiating specters from spirits or from ghosts (in any event, all true Star Trek fans know that ghosts live in candles), that’s not strictly necessary to appreciate what’s going on here. It is perhaps more illustrative to picture Derrida’s go-to example of a revenant in literature, the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the kind of urging figure which, as academic Kathy Shaw says, “confronts the contemporary with the necessity of participation.” Which is to say that such characters, and Academy has an abundance of them, typically call on protagonists to put things right. Doing this, Derrida says, asks characters not just to “learn to live with ghosts” (a reasonable description of the post-Burn era), but to speak of them, to them, and with them. This is something which Starfleet Academy cleverly literalizes by marshalling a variety of common science fiction tropes—the alien, the time traveler, the hologram, and even the ascended being—in order to depict multiple avatars of the Federation’s golden age (as well as some of the franchise’s most significant iterations), all without the concept becoming repetitive. We can in fact arrange the show’s characters on a spectrum of revenants in fascinating fashion. On the most straightforward level, Captain Ake is a 420-year-old educator who was there centuries earlier when Starfleet was “at its best” and who still remembers how the Federation used to be (this is, in fact, why she is tasked with the role of Academy chancellor). Half-Lanthanite, Ake is said to experience time differently from other humanoid species. She begins the series by coming back to Starfleet (again we see the Derridean return) after leaving the organization for fifteen years on a matter of conscience. Credit: Paramount+ While she may not be of the show’s present (or, at least, not entirely of the show’s present), Ake actively shapes those who are about to come of age in that present (with her cadets further symbolic of the future-to-come). She is, to take a big hit of Derrida, a “disjointure in the very presence of the present, [a] sort of non-contemporaneity of present time with itself.” As such, Ake embodies what academics such as Shaw see as the “dual directions of hauntology”: both the presence of the past and the anticipation of the future. The perspective which this provides the character is crucial in setting the tenor of the Academy. Her resulting idiosyncrasies grant permission for the next generation to live life joyfully and messily (#TeachableMoments). Next on our hauntological spectrum we find Commander Jett Reno, who jumped almost a thousand years into the future aboard the USS Discovery in that series, and so is a revenant who begins by physically/temporally coming back from the past (“I should not be here,” as she says in her introduction). Entirely in keeping with the franchise’s tone, she attributes her return to the laws of physics rather than something supernatural as in Derrida’s examples (that said, she almost immediately asks cadet Caleb if he’s ever seen a ghost, flagging up more traditional conceptions of haunting). Reno so, in addition to supplying deadpan humor, brings to the Academy a lived experience of the Federation’s early years. Further along the spectrum again we come to The Doctor. This character’s return is more metafictional in nature (and more substantially so than, say, Reno’s): a return to the franchise after his time on Star Trek: Voyager in the late 1990s (and a return rehearsed more recently on the second season of the frankly wonderful Star Trek: Prodigy). On Starfleet Academy, The Doctor serves as a witness to seven hundred years of galactic history. As a hologram, he already exhibits a spectral incorporeality (Caleb’s hand passes through his arm in their first encounter) but he doubles down on that here with a tendency to “pop in now and then” by appearing out of nowhere (or, if you prefer to see him in the fashion of the Derridean revenant, “one cannot control [his] comings and goings”!) Where Reno lived through the first century of the Federation and Ake lived through its collapse, The Doctor represents a broader experience of its ups and downs throughout a great sward of the human calendar’s third millennium. Nonetheless (and please remember your spoiler warning!), Starfleet Academy’s truest revenant must be Deep Space Nine’s Captain Benjamin Sisko. In the episode “Series Acclimation Mil,” Sisko appears but does not appear. He is both present and absent. He is simultaneously dead (in the Fire Caves of Bajor) and alive (assumed into the Celestial Temple). Though not a member of the teaching staff, the character is a tangible influence on cadet SAM in particular (“completely changed me, my whole life,” she says). Sisko further displays the paternal quality of the revenant which Derrida draws from Hamlet. He is the avatar of the father, or the “Anslem,” that being the Bajoran word for “father.” This is of course literal in the case of his son Jake—who here manifests in revenant-adjacent holographic form—but also, metaphorically, in the case of the equally holographic SAM who looks up to the elder Sisko as a role model. Yet what further elevates Sisko on the revenant spectrum is the unreality of his presence (helped, perhaps counterintuitively, by Avery Brooks’s retirement from acting). Sisko’s image is prominently displayed on the screens in the Academy classroom as one of the unexplainable mysteries of the last thousand years, however, as with Hamlet’s father, we never see his face. This is a rights issue, surely, but it is used smartly by the show’s creators. By essentially shrouding Sisko’s face in shadows, the character appears to look out from the screen at SAM (and, to an extent, at the audience) without himself being seen in much the same way the ghost of Hamlet’s father looks out from behind the visor of his armor. The revenant therefore observes without being observed in a way which prefigures the spectral suggestion of Sisko’s face in the clouds over San Francisco at the end of the episode. Of course, in Derridean fashion, the ultimate revenant requires a scholar—as Marcellus calls for in the opening scene of Hamlet—in order to interpret the specter. But, crucially, Derrida maintained that the scholar, who he characterized primarily as an observer or a recorder of events, may not the best person to speak to the specter (“It is offended,” Marcellus remarks of Horatio’s failed attempt to speak to the ghost; “’Tis gone and will not answer”). Thus Illa Dax, the Academy’s professor of the unexplainable, literal witness to Sisko’s life, and another candidate for revenant (on the spectrum somewhere between Ake and The Doctor) is able to guide SAM in her investigation; however, it is only SAM herself who can successfully speak to Sisko as she is revealed to be doing in the episode’s final moments. Credit: John Medland/Paramount+ In this way, Illa Dax is emblematic of how, together, the Derridean “radical untimeliness” of Starfleet Academy’s various revenants challenges the cadets to understand the Federation’s past as a stepping stone to imagining a new version of its post-Burn future. The show’s young characters are thus called upon, as Derrida and any number of temporal agents might have it, “to put time on the right path, to do right, to render justice, and to redress history.” The show’s rhetorical strategy is to tackle this in a manner which, in the best spirit of science fiction, prompts audience reflection upon the ills of our own world. In such a light, Ake’s assertion that democracy “lives in continuous action” certainly hits home in the present moment. Hauntology therefore reveals itself as a powerful theme for Starfleet Academy, one particularly apt in this year of Star Trek’s 60th anniversary (the new celebratory intro which debuted at the start of Academy episodes is just one signifier of this). It is obviously not the only way to interpret the series, but watching Starfleet Academy through this lens makes visible deeply embedded storytelling elements and techniques which, in the longstanding tradition of Star Trek, resonate with our real world (such as how The Burn serves as a stand-in for any number of hugely disruptive twenty-first century events). Applying some of Derrida’s ideas to Starfleet Academy is thus both a fun thought experiment and an unexpected means of appreciating the decisions behind why many of the show’s characters were chosen to begin with. Fittingly, it also asks questions of us, the viewers and fans, about how we see the connective narrative tissue between the past and the future. It offers a different way of thinking about a different type of Star Trek, one which has been created to reflect the anxieties which haunt our present day. Indeed, just maybe, it is an illustration of why Starfleet Academy is the Star Trek we need right now.[end-mark] The post How the Ghosts of the Past Haunt Starfleet Academy’s Future appeared first on Reactor.