Even though production on the first season wrapped a month ago, we still know very little about Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. Now one of the high-profile actors is talking a little bit about her time on the set of the upcoming series.
Academy’s heart
At NYCC last fall, about halfway through production, Paramount revealed Emmy-winner Tatiana Maslany (best known for Orphan Black and She-Hulk) had a “recurring special guest star role” in season 1. Unlike the other actors, they didn’t offer any details regarding her role. Now Maslany is opening up a little bit about her time in the final frontier in an interview with Collider while she promotes the movie The Monkey. She didn’t offer any character or plot details but she did talk in general about the show, the characters and working with some of the actors, including lead cadet actress Kerrice Brooks:
“Oh my god, I love Kerrice! Kerrice is unbelievable. The whole cast, the whole set is people not like Kerrice—Kerrice is obviously very unique; no one’s like her—but everyone is such a great character. There’s so much heart in the show. I had such a blast working on it. Holly Hunter is my hero. I couldn’t believe I got to work with her. Broadcast News is, again, one of those performances that is just beyond. Paul Giamatti is a total delight.”
Maslany also told Collider that she had seem some Star Trek before but being on the show has “opened up to me the Star Trek Universe,” and to the delight of her “big Trekkie” husband she has been binging Trek, saying “I’m going back, and I’m watching Deep Space Nine. My husband refers to it as my stories because I’ll be, like, sitting in the tub with my laptop, just like, ‘Oh! Oh no!’ And laughing. He’s like, it’s like my soaps. I love it so much.”
Return to the 32nd century
Maslany joined previously announced high-profile cast members, including Oscar winner Holly Hunter and Oscar nominee Paul Giamatti. The new series also features Trek vets reprising their roles including Voyager’s Robert Picardo as the The Doctor. The series is set in the 32nd century established by Star Trek: Discovery with Tig Notaro reprising her role as Jett Reno as a series regular with Oded Fehr (Admiral Vance) and Mary Wiseman (Sylvia Tilly) in recurring roles. Late last year Picardo talked a bit about how the setting and timeframe work together:
If you follow Discovery, this terrible thing called “The Burn” basically destroyed Starfleet Academy, everything was destroyed in the future. So now it’s come back. So it’s really about, rebirth, redemption, all of the great themes of after a tragedy, of rebuilding.
Academy cast and producers at table read (Paramount+)
Paramount+ has provided this official synopsis for the series:
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy introduces viewers to a young group of cadets who come together to pursue a common dream of hope and optimism. Under the watchful and demanding eyes of their instructors, they discover what it takes to become Starfleet officers as they navigate blossoming friendships, explosive rivalries, first loves and a new enemy that threatens both the Academy and the Federation itself.
The 10-episode first season wrapped production in Toronto in early February and is expected to debut sometime in 2026. Writing for the second season has been underway for a couple of months and it is expected to go into production around mid year, likely after filming on season 4 of Strange New Worlds (which began this week) concludes.
Keep up with all the news and reviews from the new Star Trek Universe on TV at TrekMovie.com.
For me, she locked in her eternal awesomeness with Orphan Black,
Still not sure I want an SA series, but at least the cast is top notch.
Exactly. I really don’t get it… the majority out there seems to think that casting her is a negative because of She-Hulk. It’s not her fault that show was a turd. In reality she’s a fantastic actor. Orphan Black is way up there for me, too, of course, but I also really enjoyed her work in Perry Mason. Always loved seeing her, no matter the project, and I kinda feel giddy knowing she’ll be part of Trek soon.
Though I don’t know what to think about those talking points regarding the show having “heart”. Seems to be a modern thing: everything needs to have heart, be emotional, blah. Star Trek needs adventure, wonder, science, bold questions & ideas. Some heart sprinkled here and there, yeah, sure—many cases in point, e.g. the ending of TNG “Legacy” (s04e06)—, but it was never what drove Trek as a whole.
What Majority? a handfull of internet comments are not a majority.
That LEGACY ending is one of my fave bits in all of TNG — not that I have a ton of them, though I’d say that Riker/Gagh scene from season 2 is way up there, along with Picard’s disgusted ‘i don’t care’ at the end of SYMBIOSIS — mainly because it feels like TOS, specifically Coon-era TOS, which to me is really the reason Trek lasted so long in the minds and hearts of so many.
When I was a kid, I defended being a trek fan by focusing on the superficial — I like the shows where the ship fires its guns and Vasquez Rocks and Kirk wipes blood off his lip — but I think it was always something deeper than that, be it (for me) Shat’s finest moment with ‘go to your quarters or I’ll pick you up and carry you there’ or pretty much the whole last half of THE EMPATH.
But if there isn’t a brain in there someplace, the heart stuff just isn’t going to connect for me. Witness DSC. And ENT. And most of VOYAGER. And, most sadly, a lot of SNW.
I know it’s a cliche to say but I really do think ENT got good with S4. All berman era shows were bad in their first few seasons. But ENT never got the chance to grow the beard.
Growing the beard is terrific! Who knows, maybe I’ll get late ENT another try sometime, I did like the parts I saw of the Peter Weller shows.
The Peter Weller eps should have been the finale if it had to end.
Enterprise was better in the first two seasons than the latter two, if you ask me. The emphasis darker stories and contrived plots that we see today started here.
I prefer the first two seasons which, while uneven, had a true pioneering spirit, key to this kind of series. Once it went to the Xindi and Manny Coto, it just became another TNG light.
I find it funny that now both the protagonist and antagonist from She-Hulk are Star Trek alums!
NOTE: I mean that in a positive way.
We knew you weren’t saying it just to make us angry, because you wouldn’t like us when we get angry …
HAHAHAHAHA
PSA: Don’t sit in the tub with a laptop.
(Also: big fan of hers)
she HAS to be an Orion! lol
Makes me more excited for the show. The cast is amazing so that alone will be fun to see.
Great cast! That said, a Starfleet Academy series has always had zero appeal for me regardless of the era, and this is going back to the Harve Bennet days.
Robert Picardo is still the one that has me excited.
If it was 25th century I’d be excited. and if it was a show on a starship, I’m thinking this is like CW or 90210. More of the same Star Trek as Sitcom they’ve been making. I hate to say it other than Picard season 3 and Prodigy there hasn’t been anything attempting Star Trek.
Is it too obvious to ask (in response to the headline), if it only had a brain?
You win the internet this week (tough to do with Trump around)
Sincerely, I will cherish this moment (especially since there’s no telling how long an interference-free internet will be around, or an interference-free anything for that matter.)
Well done :)
It’s rare that I get this much positive feedback on a post — medium rare.
I mean.. I want to be condescending, and then I think.. yet, I want to give it a fair shot… but yeah, this is better than anything I was thinking of saying.
Heart has never been a problem for nuTrek. It’s brains that it’s in need of.
yeah…. heart too….
Justice for Icheb…
That was my first thought as well. Does ‘heart’ translate to ‘good writing?’
What else is she supposed to say?
Exactly.
I hold out hope, but that description makes me fear for it.
Every story doesn’t need to hold the fate of the universe at stake. There’s plenty of space for small stories to be told. I feel like having big stakes is often a cover for not having compelling writing. If they can’t hook you with story, they just turn up the volume. I hope I’m wrong.
I agree. They’re cadets. The new kids at school means new experiences, unfamiliar social dynamics, centuries of history, etc. It could be (dare I say) a DRAMA. If there’s a new threat each season it’s risks settling into a formula we’ve been seeing since season 1 of Discovery.
lol I know right? Cadets saving the federation is almost as bad as a baby crying destroying it.
I could just barely see having one or two super-promising cadets being assigned to a kind of ‘pony express’ duty. That’s something from my unrelated universe of stories, where ships are the only things that go FTL, so radio is WAY behind the times. But for the sake of it being Trek, modify this a bit and say there’s an area of space where subspace radio signals just evaporate or break up, so to get a message through you need to send a drone, since starships can’t be everywhere all the time (unless they have roulette wheels for primary hulls, but let’s not drag DSC into this discussion.) Well, if you have to evaluate who on the other side of the mysterious unknown subspace disruption force gets the news first, then you need somebody on the drone (imagine like the way Worf’s girlfriend arrived one time, in a torpedo tube) making that decision. Hence the pony express idea, where you have to get the mail through. (those old enough to guffaw over this can now imagine Lorne Greene of BONANAZA and GALACTICA fame singing ‘pony express’ … I’m sure it’s on youtube.)
In my universe of stories, that assignment usually fell to the best and brightest … and almost uniformly, they all burned out on it very quickly. Because whichever way they decide, it is like they are playing Kodos all over again … we tell Planet P about the plague first, but by the time we then drone on to planet r it will have spread there already. You can spend the rest of your life second-guessing yourself, plus you’re cooped up alone for long stretches in this warp-capable phone booth, which is why they choose the best&brightest, hoping they won’t crack up. (basically this was all backstory for one character on the show, who decades before was one of those pony express guys, but now is very happy to quietly exist on a privateer’s night shift.)
Anyway, I could see them letting a really smart kid save the sector every once in a great while, or at the very least CONTRIBUTE to that saving, by being the guy on the spot who has to make the delivery. But in all honesty, I keep thinking whatever they do here is going to make DS9’s VALIANT look very very good by comparison. And I like VALIANT, but I don’t totally love it.
Valiant is exactly what I was thinking but in the opposite direction, That “crew” proved that elite cadets could fight because they had specialized training and such but training is a poor excuse for experience. I may be wrong but this show, if it has cadets fighting a huge threat, would be like learning the exact opposite lesson. Of course the Doctor will also be there and Tilly and the Admiral so it might not work out that way. We’ll have to wait and see.
I always find it baffling that people are hung up on the cause of the Burn in season three and don’t bat an eye at Q, Kevin Uxbridge, time travel, transporters, shape shifters and the other myriad of fantasy elements in Trek.
Su’kal causing the Burn is a metaphor for the downfall of a civilisation beginning when we ignore the people in need of help. The Federation had lost its way ignoring their emergency beacon and that was the “punishment”.
Audiences aren’t going to think, “this would be better if the galaxy was at stake!” if the writing is good. Smart writing will beat out bad writing that has “heart.”
It’s very frustrating that writers can’t seem to come up with high personal stakes stories that have low planetary/galactic/universal impact.
Lots of current franchises suffer from this, Star Trek and Doctor Who in particular. Everything is going to end the galaxy’s existence, or the entire universe, or the multiverse. It’s tiring.
I really want to give this show a chance, but I’ve been unbelievably skeptical so far. Then, last week, I saw the scene they released where a transporter chief tells a group of cadets on the transporter pad that their molecules are about to be scrambled and reassembled—and the cadets look absolutely terrified.
Honestly, come on… it’s the 32nd century! In Trek lore, by the 23rd century, transporters were already a regular part of daily life. Even in Picard, we see transport booths on Earth beaming him from France to San Francisco. This is tantamount to telling someone today that they are gonna fly in a metal tube 30,000 feet in the air and having them horrified.
This just makes it even more apparent how far removed this new Trek is from the established Trek universe. I continue to grow even more disillusioned.
Link to the clip? I can’t seem to find it anywhere. .
Maybe they have too much info about the transporter (like about the times it went wrong, such as TMP), and that is what has them spooked. Regarding your metal tube in the air analogy (a very good one IMO), that reminds me of something that always bothered me about TWILIGHT ZONE’s NIGHTMARE AT 20,000 FEET (all versions.) I had been hyped so much about how great this episode was that by the time I first saw it, in reruns when I was 17 or 18, I was expecting a lot more from it. I thought i had figured out the surprise ending. … and then it didn’t have a surprise ending!
For the last 47 years now, I have been thinking, maybe the next time they remake this, they’ll put in ‘my’ ending … which is after Shatner/Lithgow shoots the thing, a pilot rushes back, seizes him, drags him into a corner and quietly hisses, ‘Do you know what you’ve done?! How do you think we keep these things in the air?’ (the idea being that the demented-looking lamb-man is actually an anti-gremlin like creature that does on-the-spot fixes in mid-air, and that now this flight is seriously screwed.) It would kind of play into the fear most people have on some level about air travel while also coming off like a very trademark TZ shocker ending.
To concur further with your concerns about the show, I keep thinking they should be using something that had a brain in its head as a semi-template for the series … and my nominee would be ROOM 222, which was I think the first series James L. Brooks did. It was a high school with a very diverse group of kids who had a whole range of ideas about everything from war to literature (a whole episode about convincing the school to teach Heller’s CATCH-22 novel, and the subsequent fallout over same), and delivered occasional big moving shocks. The one I remember most is a kid who was on the decline in various ways, and it turns out he has leukemia. On the day of a big test, the series lead and main teacher Pete Dixon played by Lloyd Haynes enters quietly and just says, ‘Cory ___ is dead. Test is cancelled, class dismissed.’
Man, that hit me almost as bad as Henry Blake’s death in MASH did just a year or two later, cuz it felt real. Nearly a decade later, when I found out (third-hand) that my oldest friend had been shot to death in Sacramento, one of the first things I flashed on was that ROOM 222 episode, because it had that same shocking power and awfulness feeling.
Yeah, an Academy show could learn a lot by just youtubing some of those old shows (there isn’t a complete run on disk, unfortunately.)
I’d also throw THE PAPER CHASE in as a great series for SA to emulate, but shoot, Trek actually had one of the main TPC writers on TNG s1 as a writer-producer, and they shafted him almost like the way Meyer didn’t get used on DSC (I read something from David Gerrold saying they kept moving this guy’s office further and further upstairs to get him out of the way), so I’m thinking that referencing PAPER CHASE would be WAYYYY out of their comfort zone. Robert Lewin’s four credits on TNG are actually all watchable episodes (which says something given it is s1), so despite all the rewriting of his work, some quality does come through, and make him probably the only TNG vet who actually batted 1000.00 during his tenure.
Lewin wasn’t perfect on all shows … he worked on BRACKEN’S WORLD, which I vaguely remember as awful and which Harlan Ellison despised and he was on MAN FROM ATLANTIS briefly … but he was a really good writer, an Oscar- and Emmy-nominee.
All this and more (The Paper Chase nails it). They’re students. Show what THAT’S like. FOcus on the cadets and their relationships. We don’t need to see them saving Starfleet Academy each season like the place is Hogwarts.
One of the reason’s TNG’s “The First Duty” works so well is that it focuses on the cadets, the bond shared between them and the ramifications of their actions.
The blueprint was established by Ron Moore and Naren Shankar over three decades ago.
Tatiana Maslany is why I’m watching this show. Everything she is in is automatically 30% better!
I just wanted some more lower decks or similar.
That was full of heart
So agreed. I definitely still want more Lower Decks! I’m already missing it.
A show nobody and I mean nobody asked for. A show no one wants set in a timeline that should be erased. When you start giving the audience things they did not ask for born out your own creative delusion you end up like the Dr. Who Franchise or the worst of Marvel Studios.
SNW is the best thing they have going. Had they greenlit the Legacy series, things would be different. I hope the Skydance merger brings some improved creative decisions, starting with the removal of Alex Kurtzman as the creative head of Star Trek.
I don’t things will be different until they bring in new leadership with a new vision.
LEGACY run by Secret Hideout would suffer from the same weaknesses as all the other shows: obsession with “heart,” legacy characters, nostalgia, emotionalism, etc. PICARD avoided some of this, partly because it was one of the few places where the nostalgia was appropriate, partly because they had Chabon and then Matalas, and partly because the TNG actors knew what made Trek successful and still had some sway.
Even then we got S2. And I fear LEGACY would descend into “the Star Trek kids do their thing.” A lot of the interesting PICS3 characters didn’t survive the season.
I specifically asked to NOT have something by this. ANYTHING in the 32nd century is a bad idea. the 32nd century is the WORST thing Star Trek has ever done by far!
You Legacy people are just sad.
Something odd about this particular entry on the site. I can access it from my home desktop computer, but when I call up the site on my phone, it omits this story and starts with the one located below this. Is this a typical kind of error, or something entirely different?
That sounds like it depends on the browser you are using and the default protocol the browser uses, whether it would be the default HTTPS or some moble version like WAP.
Thanks for the info, I’ll see if my wife can make sense of it for me. It just seemed strange that I could post on the thread from my phone one day, then not be able to even access it the next day.
I noticed today that this was the last story shown on my phone, i.e. all the newer stories were missing. Also, this story was missing about 2/3 of the comments. No matter how often I pressed “Reload” it didn’t change. It was fixed when I deleted the browser cache.
Anytime!
And ya that is strange. Back in the day there were 2 webs. The desktop version and the mobile version and they worked vastly differently but ever since the iPhone the mobile version has since largely disappeared. But from time to time you can still experience some spots out there where you can hit them accidentally. What you hit largely depends on the device id of the browser you are using but I can’t imagine a modern mobile browser that doesn’t support the desktop web.
I’m very late to smart phones (shoot, I didn’t even get a cellphone till shortly before the 09 came out) and haven’t figured much out about them beyond calling and browsing and replying to the occasional text, so it might just be an idiot thing on my end. I haven’t even figured out how to dump the browser cache as Elim Garak suggested above.
All I really know is that Boost Mobile has got impossibly lousy feet-on-ground service in NW Oregon. After being directed to a nearby store by the company, I found a locked closed store. I was directed to a 2nd store, several miles further distant, also locked and closed, yet both were supposed to be open in midafternoon. Was directed back to original store, where this time I found a very angry man — totally evincing the surly vibe of the convenience store guy near the beginning of FALLING DOWN — telling me that they were no longer open there anymore (Oh, then what are you doing here? And why doesn’t your corporate know this?) and that I should go to a different store for Boost service about a mile away … a store that doesn’t even have a phone number or any apparent connection to Boost, and then the guy told me to get the fuck away and started banging on the glass door for emphasis, all this in plain sight of people going in and out of adjacent stores. After that I called Boost back to report him and they refused to take the report or even connect me with customer service unless I could give them my pin, even though I was mainly thinking they’d be concerned this guy might be doing something shady like running a drug operation or something out of this ‘shut’ but not shut store. In retrospect, I think I shoulda just called the cops! (happy ending, the phone I was trying to buy for my wife wound up being purchased, along with a tons-cheaper plan, by my wife online from a different company that has already demonstrated more customer support than I ever got from boost. Am switching service myself next month.)
I just hope it’s heart the way SNW, Prodigy and Lower Decks conveyed it. If they do heart the way Disco did, they’ll have a stroke.
I just can’t get excited for this, I can’t even expand on that – I just have no interest, especially after that Section 31 thing.
I choose to believe that “movie” exists in the temporal cold war time bubble and will be erased.
Akiva Goldsman doesn’t seem to be directly involved, so I’m less pessimistic.
The excitable hype by various “stars” reminds me of the same tactics used for Section 31
Well, we’ll see how it goes. So far the Kurtzman era has been pretty uneven, with some highs and some considerable lows. I’ll always give a new show a chance. I wish for a little more science, philosophy and allegory in the stories. So far we’ve had a lot of spectacle and a lot of romps and also a lot of re-heated ideas. I want something fresh for Star Trek, like Species-10C (a truly alien civilization… even though they had a lot of shades of Arrival’s heptapods). Here is hoping.