Starfleet Academy: The Absurdity where no Screenwriter, Actor, Director, Producer has gone before... and hopefully will never go again

Ridiculous, pointless, pathetic, absurd, boring, insulting, debrained... are some of the adjectives I could interminably pile up here to describe the latest Star Trek offspring of a series without ever attaining to give a clear idea of its unbelievable stupidity.

I enjoyed the first episode, not because it was specially good, but because it was the threshold to a new sphere of the Star Trek universe and because I like Oded Fehr, Paul Giamatti, and of course Robert Picardo. I stoically endured the three next episodes forcing myself to keep up hope in the Star Trek vision, telling myself that many TV series are somewhat weak in their beginnings but that they later improve, finding direction while the actors finally fit their own characters. But, truth to be told, I couldn’t stomach the fifth chapter and turned off the TV before starting to cry out of rage seeing the group of officers rehearsing table manners for a dinner they expected to have with some sort of alien chancellor. Wow! I couldn’t believe the amount of idiocy accumulated in the twenty-something minutes of pseudo-narrative up to that point.

Everybody knows that we are living in terrible, dangerous moments. An unpredictable narcissistic moron leads the (arguably) most powerful nation on Earth. An astute, cynical tyrant leads the (arguably) second most powerful nation on Earth. A bunch of visionless weaklings leads the joke-yoke that is Europe. A gang of subnormal entities without brains nor balls leads the catastrophe that is Spain. And lets not speak nor shed tears for the rest of this doomed world of ours... The 60s were no easy times either, but some of us —those who needed to see the best human ideals enacted in the vision of a possible future— got hope and learned to believe in mankind viewing the Star Trek Original Series: man united exploring the stars, confronting in peace or in battle extraterrestrial cultures but learning from them all, man and alien diverse but bonded... e pluribus unum in a galactization of the best American humanism. Sixty years later, in the darkest of times when the world has become a lunatic asylum, those of us who are still naive enough to seek hope in the visions and idealizations of the future— I wonder, what faith, what promise, what lesson, what courage, what anything can we expect from the latest Star Trek incarnation?

Oh, lets see what we have here:

—An Academy chancellor (Holly Hunter as Captain Nahla Ake) who in her hundreds of years roaming the galaxy as a long-living Lanthanite hasn’t learned yet how to seat properly on a Captain’s chair, or on any other chair for that matter. Her voice sounds as if she were mildly drunk or as if her tongue were too big for her buccal cavity. Strutting the scene with her unkempt mane, she is the most charmless and uncharismatic Starfleet Captain I’ve ever seen.

—A maverick Cadet (Sandro Rosta as Caleb Mir) who is a decaffeinated re-edition of a rebel with a (parental) cause Pine’s Kirk. He is salvageable though. In any other context it could prove interesting to follow his development.

—A softy Klingon Cadet (Karim Diane as Jay-Den Kraag) who represents the zenith of the current pussyfication trend on a galactic scale. He speaks as if he had an unhealable injury in the cerebral lobe where the linguistic functions of the Klingons are located, whichever this is under their stony trilobite-skull. Physically he is closer to an anorexic Masai than to a member of the Kronos warrior race. Of course, he has daddy-issues... how could he not.

—A holographic Cadet (Kerrice Brooks as SAM) who, to put it mildly, is a physical divergent entity, something between a female Orc and a Lord-of-the-Rings Dwarf... in other words, an aberration. As a character, she is an aberration too, mentally unmental, personally unpersonal, and irritatingly childish as a clownish cartoon too loud even for ears remotely distanced from the screen.

—A Dar-Sha Cadet (Bella Shepard as Genesis Lythe) who is beautifully insipid and a Khionian Cadet (George Hawkins as Darem Reymi) who is insipidly insipid.

—A Cadet Master (Gina Yashere as Commander Lura Thok) who is a Klingon-Jem’Hadar mongrel behaving herself like a bad-tempered, outspoken Nephilim granny (see The House of David). And because one has to pepper up every story with the LGTB+ cinnamon, be that coherent with the narrative or not, she had obviously to be involved in a lesbian miscegenated relationship. ♪ Keep it gay ♫, ♪ keep it gay ♫, ♪ keep it gaaaaaaaaay ♫ (see The Producers, 2005 version).

—The Doctor (Robert Picardo), glorious as ever, witty as ever, great actor and great character sadly sequestered for such an unsubstantial program. It is painful to see him fight to preserve his dignity against the tide of idiocy episode after episode.

The rest of the characters up to this point are totally irrelevant, as for the screenplays it is better not to say a word than to be sued by the GRDS (Guild of Retarded Debrained Screenwriters). I don’t know... if Discovery and Strange New Worlds were not mediocre enough, Section 31 and Starfleet Academy have recently come as if they were part of a conspiracy to destroy the Star Trek universe for good. Anyway, if sometime someone finds a hidden gem in this last ill-conceived program, please contact me and let me know. I confess I’m not ready to keep murdering my neurons with it any longer.