Star Trek has reached, once again, a crisis and juncture and turning point--which is not at all unusual.
If my very lengthy series of essays on this blog laying out (in rather inaccurate fashion) the history of Star Trek have anything to say, it is that Star Trek is not and never has been a simple, single formula or genre or thing or "vision" of Gene Roddenberry or anyone else. Most of what makes Star Trek interesting to me, in fact, is the intensely collaborative nature of the (now extinct) genre of network television, and how tied Star Trek has always been, not to any particularly original treatment of science fiction or politics, but rather with the ever-shifting personal and political and utopian American visions of itself.
Anyway, more or less since the year 1966, Star Trek has been in crisis: beginning with the initial crisis of its too-expensive budget and too-low ratings, extending through the crisis of its first cancellation, through the crisis of its second cancellation, and ending with the crisis of its true and final cancellation after its third season.
Then began the terrible monstrous crisis of trying to revive Star Trek, which took up most of the 1970s, got a lot of people fired, and resulted in dozens of unproduced scripts, lots of unused design work, one terrible cartoon show, and one terrible (but sublime) film. Then there was the terrible horrible crisis of TNG's birth and first two years, then the crisis of how to do a TNG spinoff in the '90s, and a lot of other crises that I refuse to summarize in this sentence.
Certainly, though, Star Trek has been in crisis in the year 2005, when Star Trek Enterprise went off the air. There are a lot of things one could say about Enterprise--and maybe one day I'll say them--but perhaps the most relevant is that its demise is impossible to untangle from the gradual and now irreversible decline of network television, television networks, and indeed television itself.
In 1995, Star Trek Voyager had debuted as the flagship show of the new network UPN; in 2001, Star Trek Enterprise took over that role; in 2005, Star Trek Enterprise ended; and in 2006 UPN itself went the way of the dodo. Its successor, the CW, has like most of network television continued to limp along til the present day, gradually losing viewership and profitability and shows: as of this year is set to run exclusively sports, news, reality, and variety shows, with its last produced scripted drama show set to end this summer.
In response, Star Trek took to the big screen, attempting to join the "Marvel rush" of would-be blockbuster films greenlit by executives desperate to find any even vaguely comic-book-esque franchise (Battleship? Emojis?) to share in the bounty with: and, like most of their peers, met with mixed success. JJ Abrams' Star Trek produced three successful, popular films that nonetheless were considered disappointments by the studio for not matching the grosses or profit margins of true blockbusters: and Star Trek was once again left to die.
While all this was going on, a little website called Netflix was introducing on-demand streaming to the world: an event that not only accelerated the decline of network television, but also led to a desperate attempt by any and every studio to replicate Netflix's success by creating their own streaming services. In 2014, CBS, the owner of the Star Trek shows, released CBS All Access (later Paramount Plus), a transparent desperate cash grab with a complete dearth of original content whose main selling point was that it had the old Star Trek shows available to watch. And so, a new era began, where the hoary network-television entity Star Trek would be retailored for a new age of free-flowing subscriber cash, maximal budgets, and an ever-increasing demand for content.
And then, of course, the streaming economy completely collapsed, and studios began cutting back massively, cancelling and reducing budgets across the board in a desperate attempt to figure out how the new model of streaming television could possibly be profitable.
Hence, Starfleet Academy was cancelled shortly after the airing of its first season ended, and a matter of a few weeks after its second season finished filming: as I speak, its sets are being auctioned off publicly for peanuts. Strange New Worlds, despite having two seasons left to air, has already finished production: and for the first time since Star Trek Discovery began in 2017 there are no Star Trek productions filming.
Meanwhile, Paramount is in the process of being bought out by Skydance, run by the son of Trump ally and CEO of massive-beneficiary-of-circular-AI-deals Oracle Larry Ellison in a monopolistic deal that numerous Hollywood and Star Trek stars are currently protesting, but which many people on the Internet either hope or fear will Make Star Trek Anti-Woke or something--itself partly a response to the massive, politicized online backlash to Starfleet Academy for being woke and/or having a gay Klingon. And as the Culture War (and also a real war) rages on, Star Trek fans around the world wait, and watch, and bemoan the fact that (undeniably) Star Trek is In Crisis, that (once again) Star Trek As We Know It Is Over, and wonder if anyone, anywhere can perhaps (in a stunningly original neologism that I just came up with) Make Star Trek Great Again.
As the dust settles, though, those of us not engaged in furious online debates over Wokeness (an online term for things that are cool from the year 2015) versus Anti-Wokeness (an online term for conservatism from the year 2019) can once again take stock, reflect, and post absurdly long essays on Star Trek to our blogs. In other words, "the more things change, the more they stay the same."
For abstracting (quod erat impossibile) from the political and economic situation of America, the fact remains that a lot of people have not been particularly happy with the 2017-2025, streaming-bubble, Alex Kurtsman era of Star Trek. Some of those people have been merely grumpy old men who would prefer to rewatch another episode of Star Trek TNG; but some have been people who had legitimate issues with the actual creative quality of these shows. And what is more, this era of Star Trek, taken as a whole, has resoundingly failed to recapture the general audience lost to Star Trek c. 2000, so that Star Trek is less culturally relevant in the year 2026 than it has ever been, even during the 2005-2009 interregnum, and is more or less the least culturally relevant franchise still producing content.
For after all, when Woke and Anti-Woke both disappear into the mists, reality will remain: and so will things like aesthetics and framing and character and story and plot and themes and meaning and the true and the good and the beautiful. Also budgets really matter.
1) Cheapness Powers the Starship
The question of how or even whether Star Trek could survive the decline of scripted network television was already a pressing one in 2006. For while the 2000s saw what is now referred to as the "Golden Age" of television drama, this was largely driven by "prestige networks" such as HBO, who could not afford the larger budgets and visual effects intrinsic to science fiction.
Already in 1966, the main obstacle to Star Trek being picked up by any network was that it was universally believed that as an adult, primetime network television science fiction show it could never be produced cheaply enough to ever be profitable.
This was, as things stood in 1966, very good, basic common sense: and it remains very good, basic common sense to this day. Science fiction by its nature necessitates unusual things; and unusual things are expensive. One cannot set a scene in the far future on Mars and then have people sitting at an Ikea table drinking Milo's iced tea out of Wal-Mart-brand glasses. If one wishes to portray aliens, they cannot merely be ordinary-looking extras from Burbank; nor can they wear off-the-rack men's suits from Kohls.
The challenge of science fiction is always the challenge of totality; which is at the same time the challenge of creating an entire alternate reality. As Chesterton correctly pointed out, it is always the little differences that one notices most when traveling to a foreign country; not so much the Pantheon or the Grand Canal in Venice as the absence of ice cubes in one's glass. And this principle applies even more to changes in time than changes in space. I am reliably informed that there are at this moment on the Internet elaborate, hours-long tutorials on how to dress and speak and carry oneself and do one's makeup to distantly approximate someone living in the 2000s.
And all of this is expensive! Television as it once existed and no longer does was an extraordinary thing, perhaps one of the most extraordinary works of human endeavor in all of history. Producing an hour of scripted drama once a week every week nearly the year round was a truly herculean task that necessitated essentially military-scale logistics and practically military-level hardship. Making a high-quality network drama was an around-the-clock, throughout-the-year task; and divorces followed television jobs of all sorts more closely than paparazzi celebrities.
Where time is so limited, however, expense naturally increases; or rather, time is traded for money in huge amounts at every level of production. It is for this reason primarily that keeping expenses down becomes not merely a general issue, but an absolute requirement for survival.
The main issue with producing a science fiction show in this environment, then, is not so much the inherent expense of the various component elements, but the added logistical complexity of having to produce so much so quickly.
If you are making a gangster show, one can easily hire five actors, buy five off-the-rack suits, and put them in the same office set with the same tables and chairs and pictures and coffee mugs you used last week for a cop show.
If you are making a science fiction show about aliens living in a futuristic society, though, you can do none of these things: every table and chair and costume and coffee mug must be carefully selected and often designed and manufactured specially.
Even here, though, the main issue is again not so much money as time and logistical complexity. You can come up with an alien makeup with little more than a few pounds of putty and a few man-hours of labor. The real trick is ensuring a steady supply of that putty and finding skilled makeup artists and scheduling them outside the regular shooting hours each and every day for six months; as well as making sure that the makeup looks exactly the same every day and also doesn't fall off or turn green six hours in. If you want five alien characters, the complexity of your logistical task is increased even further. You can design a dramatic, striking alien costume for one person for one day without too much difficulty, and perhaps manufacture it yourself in a week or two; designing and manufacturing five such costumes while making sure they don't rip on camera and can be easily repaired and/or replaced six months in is another thing. Given enough time, you can then design and build a set for these aliens in which every table and chair and cup and plate and artwork perfectly reflects the ethos of their alien society; and given even more time, one can even do it relatively cheaply, by scrounging for trash and painting it and cutting shapes in foil and doing all kinds of other similar things.
The real trick of all of the above, though, is doing all of the above in only a few days, and then doing it again and again every week for eight months: which very quickly becomes a logistical problem so intense it has the potential to render the entire concept of budgeting obsolete.
Prior to Star Trek, the only science fiction shows had either been deliberately cheap-looking and aimed at children, like Lost in Space, or else based around various clever conceits that allowed ordinary sets and locations and costumes and props to be reused without trouble, like The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. No one had ever before done a scripted network-quality dramatic science-fiction show set in outer space in the future with a permanent cast before--because common sense dictated that such a thing was impossible to produce.
In this sense, producer Robert Justman's workaholism and ex-military professionalism and adamant commitment to staying on time and under budget was more responsible for Star Trek's success than any idea Gene Roddenberry ever had. The feats of logistics Star Trek required to be produced on time and only slightly over budget eclipsed anything that had previously been done for television; and in certain ways, anything done since. All of Star Trek's costumes were produced in a secret location by non-union seamstresses who worked literally around the clock. New manufacturing techniques were invented by and for Star Trek to quickly make new props--as indeed they have continued to be invented for other science fiction movies and shows in the years since.
The irony, of course, is that one of the most common criticisms of the original Star Trek, looking back, is that it looks "cheap." In one sense, this is true, and was true even at the time. To design and manufacture so much so quickly, many corners had to be cut; but they were expensive corners nonetheless, in an expensive street. The "cheesy" sets, props, and costumes of the original Star Trek were pound for pound far more expensive than the most high-quality, high-finish sets and props and costumes from contemporary shows and films. Reality, after all, is nearly always cheaper than fantasy--as AI continues to prove. Buying a real suit is rarely more expensive than designing and manufacturing your own fake one.
In a real way, it is this, and not any purported optimism or alleged inspiration of its storylines, is the real triumph of the original Star Trek show. Its fame among science fiction products is earned by the very basic fact that it was the first, the proof of concept that allowed an entire genre to emerge.
Desilu producers and CBS network executives alike were blown away at the production quality of the original Star Trek's pilots, and profoundly surprised by how cheaply and quickly they had been made; and if anything even more surprised when Star Trek actually succeeded in going into regular television production without shutting down or imploding.
There was a cost for all this, of course: by and large, the people who worked on the original Star Trek show worked themselves into exhaustion, alcoholism, and many failed marriages to make that happen. Still, like the Apollo 11 astronauts, their greatest accomplishment was to simply to prove, once and for all and beyond all denying that it was possible.
Still, for all that Star Trek remained one of the most expensive network shows on television during its run, and was never remotely profitable while on the air.
It would be quite mistaken, though, to see studio filmmaking or network television as ever having been solely about making a profit. Star Trek was produced by Desilu, famously created by and named after Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, as part of a broader campaign to revive the studio after its founders' expensive divorce made the studio a mostly inactive laughing stock; for the studio executives, then, Star Trek was primarily a proof-of-concept demonstrating Desilu's production capabilities, a bid for respect showing their willingness to take risks and go where no studio had gone before, and hence a sales pitch to get other shows and films funded down the line.
For NBC, a huge part of Star Trek's appeal came from its (network-mandated) brightly-colored sets, costumes, and aliens, which the network used as part of repeated campaigns to advertise NBC's new all-color lineup to force competitors to imitate it and promote adoption among consumers to sell its parent company RCA's color television sets (by the late '50s RCA had something approaching a monopoly on color televisions). There is no doubt that the broader campaign to force color television was wildly profitable for RCA--though how much Star Trek contributed to this is less clear. Anyway, it was worth a shot.
It was for these reasons that Star Trek's cancellation after three seasons was in fact not inevitable; though it was certainly the path of least resistance, for the network, the studio, and the many people working around the clock to produce Star Trek and getting it on the air. By the time show ended, though, a huge proportion of them had already left after suffering exhaustion and/or nervous breakdowns.
Anyway, though technology has of course changed drastically since those days, this basic "science fiction problem" has remained to the present day the main thing limiting the number of science fiction shows on the air. After Star Trek went off the air, it was not in fact replaced by a bevy of replacements--far from it. Science fiction was mostly once again relegated to cheaper productions for children and/or cartoons; and even the attempt to revive Star Trek itself as a television show in the '70s ultimately gave way to a series of feature films, with their bigger budgets and greater production and filming time.
Even so, every Star Trek film struggled with budget; the first Trek film, The Motion Picture, was a "runaway production" whose problems with scripting and sets and costumes were added to by new problems with the burgeoning field of visual effects. The original Star Trek show had featured more or less the absolute minimum of space shots, and recycled most of those for good measure. Still, for the first pilot the visual effects had almost made Star Trek miss its airdate after a famous meeting in which the visual effects lead had rushed from the room, weeping and shaking and shouting apologies for his failure to produce the promised number of shots, and was promptly checked into a hospital for nervous exhaustion. Star Trek: The Motion Picture, though, was released into theaters after Star Wars, and thus ended up blowing a huge proportion of its budget on some of the most luminous and surrealistic images ever put to film--most of which were done by Douglas Trumbull working around the clock after the first special effects studio failed to deliver, after which Douglas Trumbull too was checked into a hospital for nervous exhaustion.
Still, it is a popular misconception that visual effects have been or now are the main contributor to the cost of science-fiction productions. By and large, the main reason science fiction productions are so expensive is the same reason as in the 1960s: the need to design and physically produce nearly everything seen onscreen.
There are, however, ways around this dilemma; and if Star Trek has survived and prospered through so many eras in which televised science fiction other than Star Trek was more or less nonexistent, it was not primarily because it was positive and optimistic about the future while other shows were dystopian, or because it had heroic, colorful characters where other shows focused more on plot and concept, but because Star Trek crews were again and again the tip of the spear and the absolute cutting edge and the greatest experts in all of global cinema at finding ways to design, build, produce, shoot, edit, and create practical and special and visual effects on the cheap.
I spent a shocking amount of my childhood and youth reading and rereading various accounts of how they did this; without realizing that in so doing I was absorbing the ethnographic literature of a vanishing people, like British schoolchildren reading about the Tasmanian aboriginals in 1850. The herculean efforts and patient, intensive cunning of the people that allowed Star Trek to dominate the airwaves in the 1990s and 2000s has long ago been lost to the pages of history, along with much of the motivation that underlay it.
The most famous and successful Star Trek film of them all, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, was produced for a budget of $12 million, about a fourth of the budget of Star Trek The Motion Picture. The bulk of the film takes place on one set, the bridge of the Enterprise, which was redressed to also portray the bridge of the rival starship Reliant. Nicholas Meyer, the film's wunderkind Jewish director, spent by his own account nearly a million of the film's tiny budget on various lights for the bridge set, which he used to create interesting, intense lighting set-ups to make the endless shots of the same set more interesting. George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic carefully planned out each of the film's space shots, going over the storyboards again and again with Meyer and the film's producer Robert Sallin. New costumes were made possible by taking the fabric from the first film's uniforms, recutting it, and dying it red. Kirk's apartment is filled with "antiques" consisting mostly of Hollywood props, and features 1960s commercial lounge chairs.
Once you start to drill down into the details, you begin to see how much of the success of Star Trek at its peak came from the never-ending ingenuity of crew members at every level in finding ways to reuse, redress, repurpose, and, in short, cheat. If the history of the various Star Trek productions has held a fascination to me since childhood, it is in part because I regard them as masterpieces not so much of human storytelling as of human ingenuity and effort.
To create a convincing illusion of an alien world for a television budget and timeline, creativity was simply not enough. One has to be able to not only design things, but design them quickly to be built quickly and cheaply--one has to not only design and build things, but select them, finding with inerrant eyes exactly which commercially-available chairs and lamps would look appropriate in 24th century human or Klingon rooms. One has to be able to not only design and build and select things, but redesign them, adding paint and electrical tape and custom-molded plastic parts to turn a 1960s lounge chair into the Captain's Chair of a futuristic starship. One has to not only be able to design and build and select and redesign things, but reuse them over and over again with slight modifications or in slightly different contexts, again hopefully without making it too obvious.
Anyway, that's how Star Trek got and stayed on the air through five shows and nine movies from 1966 and 2005.
The streaming era of Trek, though, changed all that; or perhaps more honestly, JJ Abrams changed all that. Star Trek, as discussed below, did not adapt well to the stylized, digitized, aestheticized hyper-intensity of 2000s art; nor did it do any better in the new era of blockbuster budgets and dark, emotive prestige dramas. In comparison to shows like Lost and Battlestar Galactica, which touted their high stakes and emotional intensity, the new Star Trek show Enterprise debuted unluckily in 2002 as a relaxed workplace show about friendly professional characters exploring the universe together. In comparison to the new bevy of blockbuster science fiction and superhero films, Star Trek Nemesis, the only Star Trek movie to be released in the 2000s, seemed both cheap and geriatric--with the half-hearted attempts to render the 62-year-old Patrick Stewart a hyperreal 2000s action hero by having him ride a dune buggy in the desert and hit space vampires with a plastic phaser rifle only adding to the embarrassment.
Anyway, after Star Trek Enterprise went down with UPN in 2005, Star Trek officially died; and the clever crack teams of obsessively resourceful and budget-conscious crewmembers that since 1987 had been using electrical tape to make plastic shelving look futuristic were officially decommissioned as relics of a past era. When Star Trek returned to the screen in 2009, JJ Abrams quite consciously reconceived the whole affair as a true blockbuster according to the rather limited JJ-Abrams-style idea of what a blockbuster is, with large sets, fast camera moves, a contractually-obligated (1) sexy woman per film, and special effects galore. The result was a bona fides hit; and a new era of Star Trek.
There was, however, an issue lurking beneath the lens flares: one that would rather quickly rear its head. Star Trek Nemesis was made by the same crack teams of budget-conscious television people as the previous films and shows, and so reused many rooms and sets and costumes and makeups and arguably storylines in a way that ultimately failed to wow either audiences or fans, making a measly $67 million dollars and losing money for the studio. Star Trek (2009) was produced by JJ Abrams' Bad Robot flunkies and a team of the best Hollywood had to offer, was a surprise hit of the year, and brought in a stunning $385 million.
However, Star Trek Nemesis, despite featuring a cast of old and expensive stars with built-in contracts, multiple alien planets, the Romulan Senate House, a new gigantic warship, a race of alien space vampires, numerous action sequences, and the longest extended space battle in the history of the Star Trek franchise, was produced for a budget of only $60 million. JJ Abrams' Star Trek cost $150 million.
Star Trek was a success d'estime; for the sequel, though, in full 2010s decadence mode, the studio and Abrams demanded more. After all, in 2012 The Avengers had come out, with a budget of $225 million, and made over a billion dollars. It was a brave new world, a final frontier, so to speak, of blockbuster entertainment! There was literally infinite money available to pay for lavish sci-fi and sci-fi-adjacent productions. The only rule was to go big: more CGI, more sets, more costumes, more makeup. The techniques in many cases invented by desperate Star Trek professionals in the 1960s, and refined by desperate Star Trek professionals in the '80s and '90s, were now being applied on an unimaginably large scale for a public with an apparently unlimited appetite. It was time for the new JJ Abrams Star Trek team to get theirs!
Star Trek Into Darkness was ultimately released in 2013 with a budget of at least $185 million: though less than the Avengers, this was still the most money spent on any production in the history of Star Trek. Adjusted for inflation, this is nearly 7 times the budget of Star Trek II, 2.5 times that of Star Trek Nemesis, and about 1.5 times that of the most fabled "runaway production" of Star Trek history, the production that featured more disasters and delays than any other, that drove Douglas Trumbull to the hospital after wasted years of visual effects development, that incorporated years of development and set-building for an entire unproduced television show, that got Gene Roddenberry fired, Star Trek The Motion Picture.
And then, well...Star Trek Into Darkness did fine. Fine. Actually, extremely well: it made almost a hundred million dollars more than its predecessor. It was not, however, the hit that Paramount had hoped for, a hit that would compete successfully with Marvel and other titans: and, dragged down by its massive budget and inflated expectations, was seen widely as proving once and for all that Star Trek could not hold its own in the big leagues. Paramount took one more shot at glory with Star Trek Beyond in 2016, with about an equivalent budget: and made even less money. Somewhere in there, Marvel films also stopped making much money. A Star Trek film has not been produced since: and the reason, ultimately, comes down to simple dollars and cents.
Production of Star Trek, then, shifted to another booming area of infinite growth and inflated budgets: the brave new world final frontier of streaming entertainment! Netflix did for television more or less what World of Warcraft did for video games: proved that monthly subscription fees made an awful lot of money.
In the good old days of 2017, then, every company was blowing huge amounts of money trying to replicate Netflix's success by drawing as many former television watchers into becoming streaming-service subscribers. The question again, though, was not so much how to make Star Trek feasible as to make Star Trek cool.
Bryan Fuller, the wunderkind former Voyager staffer given the keys to the kingdom, apparently chose to tackle this issue by creating a historical anthology show featuring key stories from past Star Trek lore, while visually "rebooting" Star Trek as a whole--which meant more or less redesigning everything onscreen. Then, of course, Bryan Fuller's vision went down in flames--apparently at least in part because of the sheer production difficulty of his vision, which called for design and production on a scale that even CBS All Access was not prepared to provide. Even so, behind-the-scenes sources indicate that the sheer complexity of a new crew attempting to learn how one even could do science fiction for television, let alone redesign every element and make it big and cinematic and widescreen for the 4K streaming era, proved a nearly insuperable obstacle to the show ever premiering. Announced first in 2015, Star Trek Discovery missed its initial release date of January 2017, missed its second announced release date of May 2017, and finally made it online in September.
In my harsh, uncaring opinion, the only season of Star Trek Discovery that has any particular artistic value is its first. Not that the first season is good: but it is interesting, if only as a monument to a truly unparalleled (and extremely short-lived) era of streaming-television excess and insecurity. Story-wise, there is a lot to say: but almost more interesting is the visual style of the show, which operates according to a "more is more" philosophy more or less unparalleled in the history of the Star Trek franchise.
Discovery in its beginning did not feature more sets than the average Star Trek show: there is the usual bevy of hero ship and guest ship sets, and really not much else. These sets, though, are much, much bigger--and also a whole heck of a lot shinier. Perhaps most cogently, everything is simply more designed and more produced. There are very few repurposed office chairs or lamps on Star Trek Discovery, and a whole heck of a lot of custom objects of every sort. Digital displays and screens are built into every set, showing custom digital images. The Klingons, famously, are no longer actors wearing wigs and headpieces, but actors covered in thick scaly makeup from head to toe, with fake eyes and fake teeth and head extensions, kitted out in ornate carved costumes with hundreds of pieces. Even the iconic Klingon sword the 'batleth is redesigned to be more complex in shape (and therefore harder to construct) and carved with numerous intricate shapes.
The results, alas, are mixed at best. If there is one thing Hollywood has gotten continuously better at throughout its history, it as building things. The introduction of flatscreen tablets easily incorporable into sets alone is revolutionary; as is the use of silicone in makeup. Virtually everything designed for the new Star Trek shows has looked good The tricksters of previous Star Trek productions had designed and built, by and large, for the screen--with a keen sense of just what would be visible on screen, and what would not, and in what resolution. There is an impressionistic quality to all previous Star Trek productions, an almost painterly focus on atmosphere and feel and image and contrast over detail and size. The Star Trek Deep Space Nine sets were at the time they were built some of the largest and most complex ever built for television--but what makes them interesting is the way they are designed for the screen and even for the aspect ratio, the way they are built around intense contrasts in height and level and light and shadow, designed to "pop" even at low resolutions and on small screens. So many of Discovery's gigantic sets seem merely large, dark spaces onscreen; or even like CGI when they are in fact not.
Almost more important than the production and design intensity of Discovery, though, is the complete change in directing style. Way back in 1966, the Star Trek crew made a fateful choice, but a necessary one. With so much complexity and expense in production, visual effects, costuming, and makeup, some aspect of the show had to be sacrificed to stay even within the general region of their budget. The choice, by and large, was the complexity of the directing and filmmaking.
Or, put another way, even with so many extraordinarily expensive elements, the most expensive resource by far for the original Star Trek crew, as for all television production, was simply time. And so what was sacrificed, by and large, was time.
Season 1 of Star Trek TOS was a graveyard for experienced television directors. Some were frustrated by the actors; some were stymied by the need to work around and with special effects and creatures; but most simply did not get the episodes done fast enough for Bob Justman.
Hence, for Season 2, Justman established an innovative (and cost-saving) measure: Star Trek would henceforth have only two directors, who would alternate episodes. These two directors had shown they could direct Star Trek on time and under budget; and from now on, only they would get the chance to do so. There was, simply, no room for error.
How did the directors do it? Well, the main way to reduce time in directing is to reduce the number of set-ups and angles and coverage; and the main way to do that is to reduce the complexity of shots and the amount of movement involved. The Star Trek crew also got in the extraordinary habit of prepping and lighting the next set while the crew was shooting on other sets.
JJ Abrams is to an extent an "old-school" filmmaker who is most adept at using camera trickery to make his casts of young ingenues look cool as they run through hallways and/or fall off of things. To a real extent, he did more with less--though admittedly much less more with much more less. Still, if there is one thing he bequeathed to all later Star Trek productions, it is lots of complex shots and angles and set-ups.
Jonathan Frakes, who has directed both films and movies and who directed extensively for both the '90s Trek shows and the streaming era, has said many times that the greatest difference between the two is simply the complexity and time of the directly. Star Trek is no longer shot quickly and cheaply on quick and cheap sets; it is shot, rather, much more like a blockbuster film, with many camera set-ups and lots of complex camera moves on large sets with many built-in digital elements and additional elements added in by CGI.
The difference made by CGI to the feasibility of sci-fi television (and sci-fi in general) has been commented on frequently since the '2000s--in a very exaggerated fashion. It is true that the ubiquity of CGI, particularly in its early days, made it significantly easier and faster to do certain kinds of things: such as, for instance, having a shot with multiple ships in it or a large battle scene or a long camera pullback. It also, however, was from the beginning less efficient and slower at doing other things--such as, for instance, rapidly building a screen-ready outer-space ship, which skilled modelmakers could do in half-an-hour using glue and model parts.
More to the point, though, even in the areas where it was undeniably exponentially faster, this led rapidly to an exponential increase in the expectations for visual effects and their prevalence on television. In the 1960s, the number of visual effect shots in an episode could be, frequently, counted on two hands (or sometimes one)--with most reused. In modern Star Trek, however, there is hardly a shot that is not digitally enhanced in some way. '60s Star Trek built its consoles from plywood and decorated them with static slides, acrylic buttons, jelly beans, and the (rare) video added in post-production. Modern Star Trek builds its consoles with real digital displays featuring moving videos and moving pictures with shifting text--that all have to be built by digital artists each episode.
I am not trying to say that all these moves are mistakes--though some of them are. At the very least, many of them show, once again, severe diminishing returns compared to past eras of Trek television. The trouble with modern Trek's penchant for spinning and rotating cameras, for instance, is not merely that it is more expensive: it also does not necessarily and always lend itself better to a sense of serious outer-space drama than old Trek's simple, carefully-framed masters and two-shots and close-ups.
Anyway, arguably this hardly mattered when Star Trek Discovery went on-air in 2017, and streaming television was booming: it most certainly matters now, in 2026, when streaming services have entirely taken over the television ecosystem and then collapsed, and every studio is cutting back massively on its investment in television production. It was widely reported that the first, ten-episode season of Star Trek Starfleet Academy cost $100 million: admittedly a mere fraction in comparison to Star Wars Andor's budget of about $600 million for two season of twenty-four episodes, but still quite a bit of money. There is absolutely no indication that this money was wasted, any more than Andor's budget: Starfleet Academy is by far the most ambitious modern Trek show in terms of its basic production, with massive, good-looking, entirely custom-designed and -built sets filled with numerous extras in alien makeup to portray its futuristic college campus on a futuristic earth that is also a massive starship prone to flying into space and getting involved in space battles.
Anyway, while most public press discussion of Academy's cancellation has focused on the alleged political motives of David Ellison, it is exceedingly likely that one of the main reasons for the show's cancellation was in fact its basic expense relative to its middling viewership numbers. It is, if you want to think of it that way, merely Star Trek The Original Series all over again.
Of course, viewership numbers for streaming services are mostly made up--and also that no one really has a formula for how viewership of a show actually causes or even correlates with money made by the streaming service itself.
Still, one cannot deny that there is a certain troubling arc to the last fifteen years of Star Trek productions: a bridge, so to speak, across an abyss that has not yet been proven to lead reliably to success and now threatens to lead into an abyss where science fiction television may well go extinct once again. If one surveys the current landscape of science fiction television, one sees that nearly every major show is struggling to justify its budget, and the number of shows released is cratering. Live-action Star Wars television appears to be more or less over for the foreseeable future, and the reason would appear to come down largely to Disney's inability to control or justify ballooning budgets. The Expanse was cancelled and rescued by Jeff Bezos, but still ended years ago. Foundation is in production with its fourth season, due to be released in 2027, but it is unclear whether it will ever reach a fifth. And, of course, though there are still three seasons filmed and due to be released in the next year, for the first time in more than ten years there are no Star Trek shows currently being filmed for release on Paramount Plus, and no plans whatsoever to create more.
JJ Abrams and his successors proposed that if Star Trek wanted to regain its cred with a pop-culture landscape that had gone in bigger and bolder and more stylized directions, reach a larger audience than ever before, and along the way also make a lot more money, the way to go was to spend a heck of a lot more money on making Star Trek look as good and cool as possible. From one perspective, Starfleet Academy, with its openly YA-inspired concept and marketing and large, production- and CGI-heavy budget, is the biggest reach in this direction Star Trek has ever made.
And, well, it failed. So maybe it's time to try something a little different? Just asking?
2) Drama Requires (Not Avoiding) Conflict
I just spent a huge amount of time and many excess words trying to communicate something of the complexity of budgeting for televized science-fiction and how Star Trek productions have changed over time--despite the fact that, if I'm being honest, very few viewers will ever notice the difference. Star Trek the Original Series, to be sure, does look somewhat cheap and unconvincing looking back--a factor that has in fact made it less accessible to later generations. This is not, however, really the case for the '90s Trek shows, particularly not after the HD remastering of Star Trek The Next Generation last decade. These shows all look perfectly fine today--and still pull audiences on streaming services, even if not the kind of numbers JJ Abrams was gunning for.
Still, as David Livingston, the famous (or infamous) production manager for TNG and DS9 in the '90s, said quite correctly, the temptation for people making a science-fiction show is always to do more, build more sets, hire more extras, use more makeup, design more props, and add more effects--even though these things were mostly irrelevant for the effect and reception of the show, which depend principally on the story being told. Admittedly, it was Livingston's job to perpetually job Star Trek directors out of all those sets, extras, makeups, props, and effects--a task he was extremely successful at, often by rather unscrupulous means. Still, he had a point.
Or, as Nicholas Meyer, who wrote the first-draft script of Star Trek the Wrath of Khan in 12 days then directed it for $12 million dollars, said more hyperbolically, it was his rooted belief that audiences cared nothing for how a movie was shot, how it looked, how big its budget was, or who was in it: all they cared about was whether it was good.
Anyway, the decline and fall of Star Trek streaming cannot be entirely reduced to budgeting: nor cannot it be denied that the Trek shows since 2017 have for the most part generated middling reviews at best with mainstream press, middling viewing numbers with mainstream audiences, and an extraordinarily harsh and politicized backlash among the devoted online Trek fandom.
I don't think this backlash has been entirely fair--though I am also on record as calling Star Trek Discovery "the work of art that most fails to participate in any form of human reason." To again quote Nicholas Meyer, the temptation for creatives whenever a movie or show generates harsh criticism or bad reviews or bad box office numbers is to find scapegoats--to blame, say, the marketing, or the budget, or the studio, or political trends, or social pressures, or even the audience itself--rather than admitting that maybe the work of art simply wasn't good enough.
I am not, in this piece, trying to assert that Starfleet Academy wasn't good enough, and that's why it was cancelled. I do, think, though that it has been bedeviled from its beginnings with certain problematic story-telling trends that have bedeviled more or less every other streaming Star Trek production since 2017: and that it might be helpful to list them, if only for educational purposes.
Admittedly, to a large extent I owe Starfleet Academy itself for my recognition of the biggest storytelling flaw of modern Star Trek, since I did not consciously recognize it until watching the most recent season. Upon reflection, this problem is in fact much less prevalent in Starfleet Academy than in other recent Trek shows: still, it is upon reflection the main reason why I did not enjoy the first season of Starfleet Academy very much.
To once again quote a behind-the-scenes comment from people who made Star Trek in the '90s, Rick Berman, Michael Piller, and Ira Steven Behr all at various points made the completely obvious point that the basis of drama is conflict--and therefore that the main issue with Star Trek The Next Generation in its early seasons was Gene Roddenberry's dictum that none of the Starfleet characters could ever be in conflict with each other.
There are very few ways in which the first two seasons of Star Trek The Next Generation, a stultifying show about nervous professionalists facing cosmic horror in carpeted rooms while listening to classical music, remind me of the recent crop of streaming Trek shows, with their outsized insistence on spinning cameras and heightened emotions and lots and lots and lots of action. Still, I cannot deny the uncanny, dawning realization that the two remind me of each other an awful lot--and that the main reason they do is because both are pathologically afraid of conflict.
This might appear, at first glance, rather confusing, since one of the most common criticisms of streaming-era Trek, since the days of Discovery, has been the penchant of characters to cry on camera and otherwise express strong emotions and personal conflicts in ways that fans used to the more staid world of '90s Trek see as "unprofessional" or not in keeping with the standards of officers in an outer-space paramilitary organization. There is truth in this criticism in many particular instances, but as a high-level critique it mostly misses the point--and would miss the point even more with Starfleet Academy, a show about young adults trying to learn how to be officers in an outer-space paramilitary organization.
What strikes me most cogently about the storytelling of streaming-era Trek, though, is not the prevalence of conflict, but its absence: or, more precisely, the way in which again and again promising dramatic conflicts are set up in contrived ways and then, and above all else, resolved way too quickly and finally and in fundamentally unsatisfactory ways.
Properly considered, the two problems are really one. Again and again, modern Trek sets up conflicts from the very beginning with a resolution in mind, in such a way as to ensure that that resolution will be obvious and exceptionally easy. Conflicts set up in such a way, though, are rarely dramatically satisfying, since they are both too simplistic in themselves, and point too straightforwardly towards their obvious resolution. This lack of fundamental interest, though, means that there is a strong temptation to dispense with such conflicts as soon as possible and in such way that writers and audience members never have to think of them again. This leads to such resolutions coming off even on their own terms as extremely rushed, overly final, and hence fundamentally unsatisfying.
I talked about this a bit in my Listicle on Star Trek Discovery, listing such scintillating storylines as "our non-binary character feels anxious about taking on more responsibility, but then takes on more responsibility anyway, serves on the bridge, goes an away mission, and passes all tests all with flying colors and no noticeable issues or even momentary problems" or "multiple character arcs ended with someone deciding to talk to their therapist" or "saying out loud to someone something they'd been thinking about saying for several episodes." Particularly in later seasons, "character feels bad about something -> character admits to someone they feel bad and agrees to talk to a therapist" and "character is nervous they won't be able to do something well -> character does the thing well" were more or less Discovery's standard storytelling mode.
The issue with this storytelling model, it should be said, is emphatically not a lack of professionalism. In fact, if this mode of conflict resolution is anything at all, it is certainly professional. What is wrong with it as a model for televized drama is simply that it cuts out all the drama.
Previous Star Trek shows operated by and large according to an older (and arguably more stylized and less realistic) storytelling model where conflicts were conceived and presented primarily for their dramatic value. The key to such a storytelling model is to create conflicts that are not easily or simply resolvable, that naturally tend to escalate in intensity, that reach a point where they seem impossible to resolve, and perhaps most importantly where every step of this process takes place in actually filmed scenes.
There are very good and bad examples of this basic genre, as well as very realistic and very contrived versions--but this is not the point. The point is that this model of drama naturally results in and works itself out via a dramatic narrative of conflict and resolution or tension and release: or, more technically, via a very basic ABC, usually four or five act structure whereby (A) the first act or two establishes a conflict, (B) the next act or two builds tension and increases the intensity of that conflict to the point of seeming impossibility, and (C) and the last one or two acts satisfyingly resolve that conflict and release that tension while establishing meaningful consequences and/or impacts for the conflict as a whole.
Compared to this baseline, the problem with Star Trek Discovery's favored narrative where (1) a character has an unknown problem that (2) results in tension with other characters, but then (3) they verbalize that conflict and (4) go to therapy is that it fundamentally cannot be mapped onto this kind of standard dramatic structure period. Put in those terms, the entire arc simply belongs to part A of the standard dramatic structure, in which a conflict is established--B and C, where the conflict is intensified and resolved, is simply omitted, or happens offscreen.
The same is true of the even more common narrative where (1) a character is nervous about accomplishing a task and/or about their general competence, (2) receives one or more affirmations from other characters, and (3) does just fine actually, which might be considered better in that it takes less time to establish the basic conflict and at least gestures towards onscreen resolution, but which not only cuts out (B) entirely, but in the most fundamental sense removes (C) as well, since we never actually see the internal or external process by which the character was enabled to succeed and/or overcome their fears.
Once I realized this basic storytelling structure, where a conflict takes an exceptionally long time to be established, is never intensified, and then is rapidly resolved mostly offscreen, I started to see it everywhere in modern streaming Trek.
Starfleet Academy, the ostensible subject of this post, admittedly did better on this than most modern Treks, first by coming up with more interesting conflicts and then by taking at least some steps some of the time to intensify those conflicts. However, what I was struck by more than anything else in Starfleet Academy by the sheer speed with which conflicts were resolved.
This is in part, ironically, due to an unfortunate reaction from the days of Star Trek Discovery, which created a new generic model that has generally been observed by later productions. By this model, a single season is produced together and treated for many purposes as a single, discrete 10-12 hour film that tells a single continuous story. A great deal of online fan criticism has been directed at this format and the way in which it allegedly leads to stories feeling drawn out and unsatisfying and formless, with nothing ever resolved but merely put off.
In response, Strange New Worlds returned to a more or less episodic format, albeit with a generally greater degree of inter-episode connections and consequences than on Star Trek TOS and TNG--though much less than on DS9. Strange New Worlds is by far the most popular of the streaming-era Trek shows: and also the best. Hence even Starfleet Academy, a show produced by the Discovery team, while continuing to employ the season-story model, has introduced more broadly episodic content--or rather, I would say, more than anything embraced a kind of episodic vibe.
On one level, the first season of Starfleet Academy tells a fairly simple story, which is advanced across more or less every episode: in this story, Caleb, a troubled orphan whose separation from his mother was caused by Starfleet is forced against his will to attend Starfleet Academy but learns to find friends and a home there while also finding his mother and saving the entire Federation from the evil Nus Braka.
On another level, though, the show can be divided fairly cleanly into two sets of episodes: one set that might be called the "main arc" episodes and feature the season's villain Nus Braka and Caleb's unresolved past with him and his missing mother, and another set that might be called the "school hijinks" episodes. Since the season has only ten episodes, though, this comes off a bit strangely--and in particular, highlights the basic narrative problem discussed above on both a micro (episodic) and a macro (seasonal) level.
In terms of the season arc, Caleb is introduced as a hardened juvenile criminal on his way to prison who hates the Federation and everything it stands for. Once he is forced to attend Starfleet Academy, though, he transforms more or less immediately into a fun and cocky kid who bucks authority but gets along with everyone and knows his limits. Since this abrupt character transformation coincides almost precisely with a haircut and clothes change via transporter, one wonders about what else the transporter may have changed.
Anyway, this is the season character arc, and arguably the central arc for the entire season: Caleb's transformation from anti-Federation criminal to committed Starfleet cadet. Unfortunately, this transformation is more or less immediate--and the bulk of the season is spent, not intensifying this conflict, but rather doing the exact opposite.
In Episode 2, to be sure, Caleb gets into comical trouble for being too cool and cocky and briefly toys with running away from the Academy because it's too strict; he doesn't, though, and instead falls in love with the daughter of an alien ambassador and helps to solve the Federation's biggest geopolitical crisis.
After that, though Caleb's dramatic conflicts with the Academy and the Federation are more or less entirely dropped, replaced instead by more YA-appropriate conflicts with that one girl and his jerk roommate. After spending the whole season as a quite normal and well-adjusted kid with a bit of a chip on his shoulder, though, Caleb in the finale abruptly decides to leave the Academy and run off with his mother; he doesn't, though, and in fact this lasts only about fifteen minutes before he rescues his comrades and recommits himself to the Federation and once again saves it by delivering a big speech to the whole Galaxy about how great the Academy is and how his fellow cadets are his family. Whatever this is, it is very difficult to call it a dramatic narrative.
The same is true to an even greater degree for many of the individual episodes. I quite enjoyed the opening episode of the season, but was driven to a point of near-total frustration by its second episode, "Beta Test," which combined its story of Caleb deciding not to run away but instead fall in love with the daughter of an alien ambassador with a much more interesting geopolitical problem.
In the extremely mildly post-apocalyptic setting of Discovery's 32nd century, it turns out, the core Federation world of Betazed had left the Federation and isolated itself behind a gigantic and topical psychic space wall. Now, negotiations are due to start between the Federation leadership (oddly represented only by a single Starfleet admiral, as if the Federation were in fact a military dictatorship) and the Betazed President. Core to the Betazoid's unwillingness to drop their space wall is the fact that the Federation had failed to protect Betazed from threats during the Burn--and an understandable fear that the Federation would again fail to protect them. Hence, the Betazoid President's demands include (in a not unrealistic fashion) various security commitments and commitments regarding Betazoid influence on and control over Federation security institutions. The Federation, meanwhile, wants Betazed back, but cannot risk alienating other potential worlds and current members by giving it favorable treatment, especially in the face of widespread resentment by less fortunate worlds at Betazed's isolationism and prosperity.
This is--really!--a very interesting set-up for a conflict. Unlike very many of the storylines concocted for Discovery, it has a built-in complexity and intensity that, if handled correctly, would easily lend itself to a great deal of dramatic situations indeed. Imagine the resentment of a representative of a poor world seeing an untouched Betazed given special advantages! Imagine the resentment of people from those worlds just outside the wall that starved while the prosperous Betazed failed to help them! Imagine the arrogance of the Betazoids in the face of their vast psychic powers and proven ability to protect themselves without the Federation's help! Imagine the generational anger at their past contributions to the Federation and the Federation's past failure to protect them! Imagine the frustration of the Federation officials forced to soothe all these fears and address all this anger and somehow find a way to reconcile them! Imagine the potential for for voices raised, for phasers shot, for debates, for drama!
Really, imagine them, because the show gives us absolutely none of this. As it turns out, in an absolutely inexplicable YA fashion, the Starfleet Admiral chooses to hold the negotiations between these two governments in the form of a kind of Junior Varsity debate in front of the cadets at Starfleet Academy, with him and the President parked at two . Ostensibly, this is because the Betazoid government is very influenced by a youth movement and he wants to show that the Federation also values its youth--but it simply makes no sense whatsoever for high-level negotiations where extremely valuable and incendiary political fodder like security commitments, veto powers, and seats on the Federation council to take place in public at all. If they were to take place in public, though, presumably it might make sense to do it in the presence of some of the people with stakes in the matter, and not a bunch of bored children?
What is really frustrating about these scenes, though, is the way that they function to systematically exclude actual conflict and drama from the situation. If the Federation's possible commitments to Betazed are in fact incendiary, why not show that by having a character, I don't know, actually express that? If the Betazoids are in fact furious at the Federation for failing them, why not show that by having character express that too? The scene as it is written nods vaguely in this direction, but mostly consists in the Betazoid President making straightforward demands and the Federation Admiral offering vague platitudes like "Progress is the acceptance of identity, not the negation of it," and "we view your passion as a great gift" before adjourning.
If the key to drama is to find every way possible to show conflict onscreen, there are few choices as anti-dramatic as taking an inherently conflictual situation and translating it into a scene where two uninvolved characters speak calmly at podiums in front of uninvolved children.
A later (praiseworthy!) attempt to actually intensify the conflict for a change ends with the Betazoid President storming off and ending the negotiations. The argument that leads to the blow-up, however, is mostly over Caleb (who is pursuing the President's daughter) and whether he should have been admitted to the Academy. It ends with a ritualistic exchange in which the Academy Commandant accuses the Betazoid President of "allowing your walls to define you," while the Betazoid President retorts (in one of the odder and more stilted sentences I can think of to express an emotional collapse): "It's one thing for you to tell me who my ancestors were, another to demand we look past all that has happened and expect us not to have changed."
Even within the scene, this is treated not so much as a dramatic conflict between irreconcilable points of view as a performative political choice: "He came here to say no." Or, put slightly different, "This scene is structured not by a desire to show conflict and resolve it, but a desire to assert conflict and avoid resolving it." Or, put slightly differently, "This is not a dramatic scene."
In any case, one scene later, the conflict is in fact entirely resolved offscreen, after Caleb talks the President's daughter into talking her father into talking to the Federation again. Offscreen, they agree to a deal by which Betazed apparently abandons its security demands and in return the Federation builds its new capital and center of government on Betazed. On paper, this is a clever enough resolution, since the presumption is that the Federation will have to commit resources to protecting Betazed if it becomes their capital: but it is also upon reflection entirely hollow since it entirely skirts any of the substantive dramatic issues that were supposed to be at the heart of the Betazed-Federation conflict.
How would poor worlds that resented Betazed's prosperity and selfishness respond to it being suddenly made the Federation capital? How would Federation loyalists respond to a world that had abandoned the Federation in its darkest hour suddenly becoming its capital? How would Betazoid isolationists feel about their world suddenly being the heart of an interstellar Empire? How would Betazoid culture cope with all the new contacts? How would other new worlds entering the Federation react to this extraordinary perk offered to Betazed?
Again, I invite my reader to imagine the dramatic answers to all these questions, since the show is entirely uninterested in any of them. By the end of the episode, Betazed is back in the Federation and the Betazoid President's daughter is enrolled at the Academy: and by the end of the season, the new capital has been officially inaugurated on Betazed without us ever seeing any of it.
Fundamentally, the conflict between the Federation and Betazed is imagined not as a dramatic narrative so much as a math problem. Betazed wants something + the Federation can't give that thing = the Federation offers something just as good, and Betazed immediately accepts. Coming up with the answer to this math problem, it is true, happens to take about 45 minutes of screentime--and anyway happens offscreen--everything taking place onscreen, including the apparent dramatic conflicts between characters, was in reality a kind of epiphenomenal screen for this simple conclusion working itself inevitably out.
I do not, then, feel that the problem with Starfleet Academy or Discovery is merely a generic or structural one: it is something much more basic and all-pervading. In structure, this episode features something rather similar to the ABC narrative I described above--a conflict being established, intensified, and then resolved. Generically, there can be no question that it is in fact the kind of relatively self-contained story with lasting consequences that fans had advocated for against Discovery. So what's wrong with it?
Well, put simply, what's wrong with Starfleet Academy is that it is completely based around an absolutely pathological desire to avoid and nullify conflict.
This may appear at first glance rather confusing for a show that, like Discovery, bases so many of its storylines around what are at first glance rather over-the-top personal and political conflicts, and so much of its screentime around people crying. Nevertheless, when one looks not at the existence of conflict, but how each show portrays and resolves its conflicts, this reality becomes more obvious.
The Betazed-Federation conflict is in essence both interesting and primed for drama. The only way I can coherently make sense of the show's approach to it is to either imagine that the writers and producers were all engaged in a rather elaborate conspiracy to show as little of this conflict on screen as possible, or else motivated by a rather strong psychological desire to the same end.
This was only affirmed for me by one of the show's other most praised hours, "Vox in Excelso," which foregrounds the show's awkward gay Klingon cadet. Again, if there is an issue, it is certainly not the writer's ability to conceive or set up a conflict.
The show again takes the very bold step of portraying the 32nd century Klingons as a broken species nearing extinction, scattered as refugees and hunters throughout the space they once ruled. Klingons are widely hated for adhering to their prideful refusal to accept any help from outsiders, as well as for their adherence to their warrior traditions--which has perhaps led them to prey on other peoples as pirates and raiders. Our young Klingon cadet character "Jay-Den," it seems, grew up in a polyandrous extended family of hunters living off the land, and was expected to continue in this tradition as a warrior--but instead with the encouragement of his brother decided to pursue his own path and eventually enter Starfleet Academy and become a doctor after this same brother died without the benefit of advanced medicine. After a confrontation with his father where he was cast out of the family, Jay-Den now finds himself an outcast both among Klingons and at the Academy.
These are both very interesting and dramatic conflicts! On the one hand, there is the conflict represented by Jay-Den, between family and tradition on the one hand and personal desires and advanced technology on the other. On the other hand, there is the geopolitical conflict, where a proud people fallen on hard times refuses to give up their way of life and accept help from outsiders rather than preying on them.
Imagine, again, the dramatic potential here! Imagine Jay-Den's confrontation with his parents, where he must get them to accept help from him despite viewing him as a traitor! Imagine Jay-Den's confrontation with fellow Starfleet Academy cadets, who might well view him with prejudice! Imagine the difficult situation the Federation would find itself in, having to defend their worlds and kill Klingons acting as raiders and pirates, knowing that each battle brings the race one step closer to extinction! Imagine the lack of sympathy of worlds depredated by the Klingons, the prejudice that turns easily into hatred, the self-defence that could so easily become genocide! Imagine the agony of the Klingons themselves, so conscious of their past glories in contrast to their present circumstances, forced to degrade themselves in so many ways just to survive! Imagine the struggle over honor and morality and survival, the debate between those who would rather plunder and conquer than accept help and those who would rather accept help than dishonor themselves!
Seriously, again, please do imagine all this, because absolutely none of it is in the show. The idea that the Klingons are engaging in plunder and depredation is mooted once in the show, as a background line, and declared unproven. Mostly, Jay-Den's family are just generic Native Americans in furs who shoot arrows at hawks as a ritual and inexplicably have a starship too. Jay-Den in fact never sees them or confronts him. No Klingon is ever shown being even slightly rude to him. The other cadets have opinions about the Klingons, but no is prejudiced against him personally.
Ultimately, the show again chooses to boil down this entire personal and geopolitical dramatic conflict into a series of conversations at podiums in front of bored cadets. Caleb and Jay-Den decide to debate the Klingon issue: but what they in fact debate is the abstract moral question of whether it is right for the Federation to force the Klingons to accept help or not. Caleb has no particular investment in this topic other than his friendship with Jay-Den. The two get angry at the first debate, where Jay-Den insists that Caleb is "denying Klingons their right to define themselves," an "existential right," and concludes: "Without self-definition, are Klingons Klingons?"
Then, of course, Lura Thok, the half-Klingon cadet master, informs him on the basis of no evidence whatsoever that in fact his family never rejected him at all, and what he had interpreted as his father abandoning him in rage was in fact in her interpretation an act of loving acceptance to allow him to go his own way. This is an absolutely pathological scene from any point of view, dramatic or psychological. And then, at their second debate, Jay-Den declares: "The Federation stops being the Federation if it insists Klingons stop being Klingons. These are not mutually exclusive. Both exist in me. I exist as both, on my own terms." Anyway, whatever this means, he then proceeds to give the solution to the entire geopolitical and cultural crisis.
"I hate you. Beyond the obvious reasons, I hate you. Because you think your way of life is better than mine. And that gives you the right to infect the entire universe with the Federation's own special strain of bureaucratic chlamydia. And anyone who dares disagree with you is--your word-- 'a lowlife,' and beneath contempt."
I realize how ironic this is coming from me of all people: but I nonetheless have the sad and painful duty, as a member of the Star Trek fandom, to tell the current writers of the Star Trek productions that they really should try to be less-winded.
This isn't a complicated critique, really. I use a lot of words in part because I am a writer, and words are my medium. Television, though, is a visual medium, and must rely primarily on its visuals. Words play an essential role in telling a story and making it effective; but they can also easily get in the way!
There is an entire corpus of lore from older generations of television and film writers about the paramount need to cut down scripts and the words spoken in televisual productions as much as possible, and the various techniques for doing so; about how much can be conveyed, and conveyed much more effectively, with just a look, or a shot, or an cut, or a musical sting. Nicholas Meyer once calculated, by his own admission, that the attrition rate for words in his scripts, from first draft to edited film, was 50% or more; and this parsimony shows!
The experience of watching Starfleet Academy reminded me of all those admonitions as few things ever have. The list of things on Starfleet Academy that would be more effective if half the words were cut out is very long, and amounts more or less to the whole show.
The best example of this, perhaps, is "The Life of the Stars," which bills itself as a serious exploration of trauma and healing via the historical art of drama. I really cannot convey enough how almost this works. On paper, the show avoids most of the pitfalls I discussed above, in that it sets up a fairly straightforward series of conflicts, intensifies them, and resolves them in various ways that are at least decently satisfying. What drove me absolutely crazy and up the wall throughout the show's entire run-time, though was how absurdly verbose every character and every scene was, and the way in which this actively undercut both the drama (by stating and restating every point of conflict endlessly) and the resolution (by repeating said resolution over and over again until it had lost all impact).
By the time the show had gone to its third "resolution" scene in which a voice-over iterated and reiterated the extremely straightforward lessons of the show (trauma is hard; talking about it to supportive friends can help), in large part through extended quotations from the play Our Town, I was ready to drive splinters into my eyeballs.
Again, a quotation would help:
'The life of the village against the life of the stars.' We're the village. Made up of tiny moments that'll get swallowed by big ones, and...the only thing we know for sure is that one day we'll all be gone. We know, but...we keep going. Maybe that's what makes it matter. Everything that happened, it's not your fault. But you know that already, and...doesn't make it feel any different, so why bother, right?
Sam and The Doctor lived. They're not the only ones. As the play ends, the Stage Manager once again takes the stage and bids everyone goodbye. 'There are the stars doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings up there. Just chalk or fire. Only this one is straining away...straining away all the time to make something of itself.' Life is a heartbreaking, gorgeous blip in the universe. Everything matters and nothing does. What has always been certain: time is both forever and achingly finite. But what a shame it would be not to live every moment."
This closing montage would be much, much better if it were silent: if we were merely allowed to focus on the images (of familiar faces smiling, friends embracing, catharsis, stars, a cityscape--unsubtle enough, but effective), rather than being distracted by trying to figure out what it looks like for a big moment to swallow a tiny one, or what precisely it means for everything to matter and nothing to matter simultaneously.
The issue with Starfleet Academy is not principally that the writing is bad--it's that there's way too much of it, that it never gives the audience a moment to simply contemplate an image (of a face, a ship, a cosmos) without laboriously explaining to us what is going on here and what it means.
I use way too many words; and have used too many words even in this purportedly light piece. The one time I made a feature-length film, I also used too many words. It is, you could say, my besetting sin.
I do not want this piece to be merely a clickbaity condemnation of Starfleet Academy. There are many things I like about it. I like its schmaltzy sincerity. I even appreciate the show's halting efforts to try to figure out how you do a progressive show about a law enforcement and military academy in 2026. I like the show's attempt to finally pay homage to Deep Space Nine and the character of Sisko, even if they didn't precisely stick the landing. I like the character of Genesis Lythe, who is a perfectly realistic portrayal of a certain kind of overachiever I know well. I enjoy endlessly the glorious beauty of Holly Hunter playing a Starfleet Captain. I enjoy Paul Giamatti's portrayal of Nus Braka. I like Jett Reno, even if I wish they would have her be a little less wordy when making jokes. I like Lura Thok, even if I wish they had given her some actual drama to play and not merely jokes and cute lesbian love moments. I like the Athena, inside and out. I like the Doctor.
Verbosity, though, is a good note to end on for precisely this reason: that on this issue, at least, I am emphatically speaking as one sinner to another. Please let there be fewer words next time?
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