This post contains some mild spoilers, mostly from the beginning of the first episode. Today is a good day to watch television. That’s because the first two episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy hit the Paramount+ streaming service, becoming the newest addition to the long-running Star Trek franchise. It’s set in the late 32nd century, 120 years after the burn that ended all warp travel, and with it, most of Starfleet in the process. Now that warp travel is once again possible—you’ll have to watch Discovery’s final three seasons for more on that—the Federation is putting itself back together, and that includes reopening Starfleet Academy. That means this show is about young people in space, like Caleb Mir (Sandro Rosta), who was separated from his mother by Starfleet as a child, 15 years earlier. Mir and his mother, played by Tatiana Maslany, were traveling with a pirate—Nus Braka, played by a scenery-chewing Paul Giamatti—who killed a Federation officer while stealing food for them. The first episode opens on Braka and the Mirs being apprehended by Starfleet. Despite her misgivings, Captain Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter) carries out her order to separate mother and child. She’s to go to a rehabilitation colony, he’s to become a ward of the Federation and go to school on Bajor. At least that’s the plan until he escapes a few minutes later. Then we jump forward 15 years. Ake is teaching on Bajor, having retired from the Federation, ashamed of what she’d done. Admiral Vance (Oded Fehr) shows up and asks her to become commandant at the newly reopened academy in San Francisco; for the past few decades, new recruits have been trained instead by the War College. But Starfleet needs explorers now, and having a rival school means they can show up at some point to challenge some of the show’s protagonists to a Parrises Squares tournament.
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