Starfleet: Academy launched on Paramount+ and after a watch of the first two episodes, it seems the whole thing is a woke mess and not at all in keeping with the traditions of Trek. There was no one to relate to, no one to root for, the Federation is just a sham, and every character seems to have been constructed in a writers' room to make sure all the identity boxes were checked.
The new series starts 120 years after the collapse of Earth due to something called "the burn," as in climate change probably. The leaders of the new ship, and the new Academy, are entirely female and sometimes walk around the ship barefoot. The new captain goes around talking about how "advocating for social change matters."
But perhaps the wokest part of all is how the Federation, that great alliance of planets, is no longer the moral good of the universe and the leaders of it are willing to turn Earth into a backwater to attain their globalist aims.
The set up for the new Star Trek opens with a black and/or brown single mother and her son is facing law enforcement action on a planet far from earth because they and their pirate friend stole food from the Federation, killing a shuttle pilot in the process. They are set before a Federation magistrate to plead their case and the man, Nus Braka, explains that he wasn't stealing, not really.
"Facts are a woman was starving and I had a solution. Not an idea, not good intentions, a solution," Braka says. As he gets sentenced to a penal colony, the mother, Anisha Mir, gets placed in a rehabilitation camp and loses custody of her son, who becomes a ward of the Federation.
It's all presented as horribly unjust. After all, Mir was just stealing and killing to feed her child and now she doesn't get to raise her son and Caleb. Caleb, as soon as he is able, and within moments after his mother is carted off, stages his own insurrection and escapes the Federation for a life of crime and an endless search to find his mother—who he would have seen in regular visitation if he'd stayed in custody of the Federation.
Now the thing is I love Star Trek. I watch all the Trek. I've watched a bunch of it multiple times. I watched TNG and DS9 back when you had to tune into a specific time to do it and had to wait a full week between episodes. And there's one thing I can tell you for certain: the Federation have always been the good guys.
That's all come to a crashing halt with this new Starfleet: Academy. The concept is that there was some kind of crisis, collapse, calamity that brought the whole Federation, Earth, and the original Starfleet Academy to an abrupt end, civilizationally speaking. Holly Hunter plays the magistrate, Nahla Ake, who sentenced mother Mir, and was disillusioned about the "family separation," shall we call it, and gave up her captaincy, "resigning in disgrace."
She resigned because the Federation "wasn't living up to their principles" but when she hears that Caleb has been found after being "on the run this whole time," she feels like a moment of redemption may be at hand. When she finds him again, in some kind of wretched prison, the two are emotionally transported back to all those years ago when Caleb was just a boy and Ake was a Federation do-gooder who did wrong.
Now 15 years later, Caleb is a disillusioned, uneducated yet jacked 20-something with a chip on his shoulder and Ake tries to enlist him into the newly reforming Starfleet Academy. The storied school that spawned Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway, Archer, will now be based in woke ideologies that come straight out of an idealized Les Miserables sentiment where crimes are all explainable when considering previous trauma.
Ake is the new captain, her character is intended to take the reins where the previous captains left off. But instead of being a ship's commander, she is the chancellor of Starfleet Academy, teaching the first class in 120 years on a big ship as they all make their way back to Earth. And the Federation seems to have decided they're done with human men.
Just like in the woke progressive present, men have no place in Starfleet other than under the thumb of those women who are "rightfully" in control, leading with empathy and guided by past trauma. It's really just all so stupid.
Star Trek used to be a story that told us what we could aspire to, heights of intelligence, governance, culture, but now it tells us only the depths to which we have fallen. Suspicion, paranoia and the oppression/victim complex rule the day for cadets and officers alike. We look to science fiction as both a warning of potential pitfalls and for hope as to what we could become. Starfleet: Academy definitely falls in the category of pitfalls.
