25 thoughts on “Starfleet Academy”

1. Steven Colbert is supposed to be in all episodes. Yucchh. I watched the first episode and didn’t see him; so far so good. Yawn. Worse than Lower Decks. A Klingon with Mommy issues? This not Star Trek, it’s Star Dreck.

   1. Star Dreck, clever. Consider it stolen

      1. There is of course, the more inclusive form: Star Dweck.
         As well as just Star Wreck.

   2. Stephen voices the “Digital Dean of Students”, so you’ll hear him rather than see him.

      1. I had no idea Trump was completely responsible for the evils of the 32nd Century, according to the Dean…

2. Based on the actors portraying all the female Starfleet crewmembers in TOS, I had assumed that either through drugs or genetic engineering all people were physically optimized by age 25. Not to mention in the 2nd episode, Charlie X, we see physical exercise is a must requirement aboard a Starship.

   OTOH it was a bit of a let down when I got older to realize just how much say Gene Roddenberry had about the female actors on the show. Quite a letdown from my pre-teen days with the thought that 23rd Century medical science had come through for everyone. Sort of like ST:TOS meets up with the Twilight Zone’s Number 12 Looks Just Like You

   1. Or the possibility that the ST:Transporter can do amazing cosmetics…

      1. In TNG they had nanites and that was in the 24th century. What should they have in the 32nd? Just dreck all the way. Sad waste of talent for Holly Hunter and Paul Giammatti; the rest of the actors are so so. They are supposed to get 2 seasons at least. Probably end up like Prodigy.

3. Stephen Green almost watched a whole episode, so you wouldn’t have to.

   I wonder what it would take to become a Sub-Space arsonist?

   1. Keep The Burn, feel The Burn.
      …You kids stay off my Solar System!

4. Strange New Worlds isn’t half bad. Although it utterly frickin mangles original Star Trek (i.e. TOS Star treck, and even a bit of Next Generation) continuity. I mean Ethan Peck as Spock is in nearly as many beds as Kirk from TOS. Who knew Vulcans were that randy outside Pon Farr? And on meeting Khan in Space Seed both would have to say “Damn your Granddaughter is HOT”. Actually Kirk might not due to alternate universe issues.

   Honestly Enterprise’s T’pol mucks with the Vulcan issue almost as much.

   But yeah even the adds on Paramount for Starfleet Academy are cringe worthy. This is NOT the Starfleet Academy that produced Kirk, Spock, Picard and countless others we love. Clearly the writers have no clue what West Point, Annapolis, Colorado Springs or even the USCG Academy at New London or Britains Sandhurst look like.. Heck I don’t think they’ve even seen an actual engineering school or college. They sem to be writing Beverly Hills 90210 in space without any of 90210’s redeeming values.

   1. I had intended to mark part of my first paragraph as Spoilers but having pled it in pointy braces it just got eaten likely as bad HTML. It is a 4 year old show though so anyone fond of Star Trek has likely already seen those spoilers…

   2. I am currently watching DS9 on Paramount+. What a contrast. As Sisko said in the episode “the Ship”, ” You’re supposed to be professionals! Act like it!!”. Trek needs to get back to writing like that.

5. “Strange New Worlds” could have been great. There have been a few decent episodes. Anson Mount is a very good actor who can portray a great Pike, on occasion.

   But it is let down by the mostly young, feisty, female bridge crew, by the constant “command via vote” style where Pike asks everyone what he should do in the middle of a crisis. By his donning an apron and hosting barbeques in his vast palatial quarters for all of his buddies… I mean subordinates. By an Enterprise that looks like a Celebrity Cruises lines ship. And by the overuse of CGI by people who think space is a continuous web of purple and green nebulas. To name only a few of SNW failings.

   1. Season 1 was pretty good but it’s gone downhill at warp speed since. That musical episode in S2 was beyond stupid and the dwarf Vulcan affair with Una in S3 was asinine. I’m dreading S4.

      1. OMG, the musical was awful. But, the new Kirk and Scotty have promise. Still trying to get Thomas Jane as Bones, but Karl Urban really nailed it.

         Just stop with all this juvenile woke sh!t

6. The total stupidity of ST:SFA is hard to grasp. It’s fractal. There’s the stupidity you see from 30,000 feet, but you can zoom in and focus on stupidity at smaller and smaller scales, and it all looks stupid. So I’m thinking you can just describe a particular view of it and the criticism would apply to all of it.

   For example, the little kid at the start steals a captain’s comm badge and uses it to escape, on a Federation base, where in theory they have sensors that could locate him in five seconds. He grows up on the streets for the next 15 years, living the life of a criminal street urchin until he starts committing adult crimes.

   Then Holly Hunter whisks him away to Star Fleet Academy, which in theory is the most selective school in the galaxy. The academy fits on a single ship and maybe has a couple hundred students, so they must be the top 0.0001% of the galaxy’s best and brightest.

   But the street urchin, who is possibly completely illiterate based on his background, and who certainly has never had a math class in his life, just fits right in. It’s like the writers thought than an illiterate Guatemalan Indian who never made it past first grade elementary school, and who had a rap sheet a mile long, was ready to take on the MIT engineering program, simply because he had a tragic backstory.

   Only very woke liberal writers could possibly think like this. Ironically, it argues that they think schoolin’ and book learnin’ are useless, and that all anyone needs to succeed is a sob story about being oppressed.

   1. The Mexican cartels run a sort of academy for kids and it takes cunning and intelligence to rise up out of it but I am guessing the writers didn’t build a character like that.

   2. Fractal stupidity. I commend you George. The rare case where the sum is neither greater than or less than the parts, just the same…

      1. Should we call this the Manglebored Set?

7. I’ve disliked all of what I call Star Crap since the very beginning. It’s interesting that over on NSF, there’s a topic on “Is Western SF Dying” and it’s all about media SF, rather than books. I liked Farscape a bit, but I think I just wanted to fuck Claudia Black. The first time I saw it, Rygel was the main thing on the screen, and I wondered if I’d stumbled on some new Muppet show. Star Trek, Star Wars, Star Crap/

   1. Apparently Amazon/MGM are preparing a new Stargate series. How many ways can they f*ck that up. Star Wars, Star Trek and now Stargate it will be the Trifecta of f*ckups.

      1. Let me count the ways. In production so far we’ve spent:
         1 million
         2 million
         3 million
         …

8. Critical Drinker has weighed in.
   Epic.

9. Have you guys checked in on Bill Whittle lately?

   I was wondering what he has been up to as Right Angle fell off my viewing list and his rambling podcast can be interesting but there isn’t a lot of time for that kind of stuff right now.

   Years ago he mentioned he was creating a new show and he had hired artists to do renderings and had a bunch of themes he wanted to write around. I checked in on him last week and he has embraced the age of ai. I don’t know what his plans are as I just popped in to watch a stream but it looked interesting and I hope he is able to get it off the ground.

Comments are closed.