I’m not hate-watching Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. It’s okay. It’s not good, it’s not horrible, and the central axis - Holly Hunter’s Chancellor and Sandro Rosta’s Caleb Mir - actually works. Other people have complaints about the show, but I think they’re misplaced: most focus on procedure and presentation. My complaints are more fundamental: the show keeps setting up stories that demand structural competence the writers don’t have, or that they fear. And it hurts the show a lot. I want to like the show. I hate when it sucks.
Star Trek historically asks “what must be true if this is true?”
That’s the engine of the franchise at its best: posit a condition, then follow it honestly. What if a rock were a person? What would the fleet do if no medical personnel were present in an emergency? What if a society’s entire value system were built on logic - or violence? The best Trek stories don’t just pose these questions — they engage with them. With rigor. ST:A poses them constantly and then flinches from, well, most of them.
What the show could have done with Jay-den alone - a pacifist queer-coded Klingon in an endangered civilization - is dig into the real tension: his societal role should be to propagate the species and its culture, but his apparent preferences lie elsewhere. Every ultra-conservative father with a son who plays with dolls would understand that storyline; every ultra-liberal would understand the pressures to conform and maybe see why those pressures exist. That kind of conflict builds bridges, and that’s what the Star Trek franchise has always done best when it cared to try.
ST:A invokes institutions without understanding how institutions function
The Chancellor - Ake - has the same “she’s always right” writing that sank Discovery’s later seasons - Michael Burnham approaching every conflict with the Power of Pure Empathy and Maybe A Tear or Two - but Holly Hunter’s performance keeps it from collapsing. So far.
Mir, her student and foil, is Wesley Crusher, part eight: effortlessly competent at everything, which raises the obvious question - if this super-fit super-genius hacks electronic personalities for breakfast from school, how did he end up on the wrong side of the law? But at least Mir has internal conflict. At least he’s learning. The central dramatic pairing works because the writers gave them a story worth exploring.
What if an authority felt betrayed by her own responsibilities, and her charge escaped into horrible circumstances, only to be reunited later, when the authority could actually help him as she’d intended? That’s a little far-fetched, but … this is Star Trek. We accept living rocks and warp drives, phaser pistols and transporters. We’re okay with far-fetched if it can make us think.
The supporting cast is where the show invokes institutional logic it can’t support. The War College is presented as a rival institution with no institutional identity beyond “not the Academy.” The Academy itself asks no hard questions about what it means to train officers in a post-war, post-collapse Federation: it’s presented as a grand challenge but we… see no challenge, no building, no struggle, no messes. These are set pieces cosplaying as structures, and they convert every participant into a caricature from a script, not a character who deserves or demands engagement.
Rivalries without win conditions are not conflicts
The War College cadets are felt cutouts, but the deeper failure is structural: they’re in a rivalry with the Academy without clear winning conditions. But they’re warriors! Sun Tzu should reign supreme, in concept if not named outright. They don’t set a desired outcome, so of course they lose. They’re meatheads written like meatheads, utterly unsympathetic, and the conflict they represent diminishes the show. Even their self-centeredness feels scripted.
They’re the writer room sneering at the hands that supposedly keep the wolves at bay, in a setting where ST:Discovery even showed us the wolves. In other Star Treks, the galaxy had mostly progressed beyond such simple things, but not here. Here, the setting has explicitly regressed. The War College is mandatory and important and … well… a prop.
We’re supposed to see them as foils to the “good guys” at the Academy, but they have no fangs. They serve as interservice rivals without the necessary merit to justify the rivalry. An antagonist with no winning condition isn’t an antagonist; they’re furniture.
Personhood without material constraints is incoherent
SAM is a “photonic” individual - a solid-ish hologram. Star Trek has covered uncertain identity from our perspective before: the Horta, the Doctor (a character in this show, even!), and Data. But those explorations worked because they imposed constraints that generated drama. SAM floats in the show without material limits: she goes to bars with the rest of the Scooby Gang, she has feelings, she has a quirky episode. But what she doesn’t have is a coherent account of why she’s a person, and without that, her identity is decorative.
She’s presented as a student at the Academy, but the show never engages with the obvious questions: if she’s software, where’s her hardware? How does she learn? Why does she learn, and why here? (Why not anywhere sentient beings happen to congregate? Why not a market?) She has a responsibility to be an emissary for “her people” - other sentient holograms - and to understand “organics,” but without communicating what “understanding” would mean. I think personally it’d be pretty simple: survival and propagation. Photonics wouldn’t understand that well, I’d imagine, and that’d be where the learning was. (“Why do they do all that … interacting, rather than just copying a file and starting a routine? Strange, very strange. And they need to eat, you say?”)
And then the show tries to ask an actual question about her: how is she even an individual? In her feature episode, Mir alters her code to try to help her on her journeys. But the implications of rewriting someone’s being are treated as a plot device, not a philosophical crisis. If she’s an individual, Mir just literally changed who she was, and that’s… no. That question about individuality and responsibility is fantastic and they not only whiffed on it, they hid from it, and honestly, made it worse. After all, why wouldn’t Mir change her to be more of a Barbie doll if he could? She wouldn’t even have to know what her “before-self” was! … yeah, exactly. Ew.
The episode ends up evoking DS9 to say “See, we remember quality” without actually embedding any of it. If everyone in this universe idolized Sisko, why didn’t everyone actually idolize Sisko? Why is canon reverence significant for one episode and absent from the show’s DNA otherwise? Why are they so selective? Sisko can be a hero - but they have hundreds of years’ worth of heroes to choose from. If they’re going to point at one, they’d better defend why, better than “this is a name the audience will recognize, go team.”
Culture is defined by participation, not aesthetics
And now we get to the real problem - and what it implies about the show as a whole.
One of the students, Jay-den, looks like a Klingon. He may even speak Klingon. But he’s a Klingon Who Does Not Do Klingon Things, and in a culture defined by participation - by honor rituals, by the hunt, by combat - opting out isn’t dissent. It’s departure. Maybe it’s even worse: capture.
Jay-den was raised in a very primitive setting - cookfires, woods, primitive shelters - in, well, a nontraditional family unit. Klingon culture is canonically dyadic and monogamous; their mating rituals are approved by matriarchs, and based on equal pairings, explicitly. The primitive part is fine: QoNoS has been destroyed, and the Klingons are endangered as a species and as a culture.
But Jay-den’s family is two fathers and one mother - which is doable, under some pretty extreme circumstances - but would absolutely represent a negative outcome with some really, really bad implications: namely, Klingon women are gone and the population growth is very negative. This isn’t a dying culture: this is a culture that’s got its toes over the edge and it’s looking down.
But any show that invokes extinction without showing adaptive brutality is cheating itself and its viewers. That they did not show the costs of survival implies the writers are lazy, uninformed, or so invested in culture war issues that they’d rather consign Klingons to extinction than make sense… and along the way, they’re ignoring what could be a story worth telling.
There’s a hunt scene, representing a manhood ritual, that exemplifies the problem. Jay-den refuses to participate - not failing performatively, but refusing. His father takes him “through the rite” anyway and intentionally misses the kill, an oblique gesture of acceptance. But if you want your son accepted within the culture, the kill has to happen. In fact, the son has to do it. The father didn’t just accept his son’s departure from the system; he subverted the ritual itself, lying to - whom? Himself? Jay-den? The entire community? He had the option to even symbolically complete the rite - corrupting it, even so, but at least it would be completed - and chose not to, hollowing out the ceremony from within.
As a member of a culture with such participation rituals, I was offended. Greatly. That’d be like a father incorrectly reciting a son’s oaths, just because the son didn’t want to, but then the son claims the benefits of having taken those oaths. Utter betrayal on every level.
Pacifism inside a dying warrior culture has existential consequences
Again: the Klingons in this setting are critically endangered, maybe even past “critical” given the family structure we’re shown. Their homeworld has been destroyed, civilization in diaspora, clinging to tradition as an anthropological survival mechanism - because that’s how cultures work when they’re dying. In that context, Jay-den’s pacifism and his apparent attraction to non-Klingon males aren’t just personal choices; they’re an advocacy for the Klingons to be referred to in past tense only.
The show doesn’t engage with this. Jay-den demands respect for Klingon culture while rejecting its defining practices. He defends his people through debate but doesn’t respect the value system he’s defending. (Meanwhile, every Trekkie is expecting him to debate with Bat’leth in full swing. He’s a Klingon, for goodness’ sake!) His societal role in a dying population is unclear, and the only logical reading the show offers is accidentally ugly: that his identity makes him unfit for propagation, enough to cull him from the herd. That can’t be what the writers intended, but it’s what the worldbuilding implies when you follow it honestly.
They tried to say “this is a better way” using a story that said “this character is unfit for survival” in the anthropological sense.
Every living being has a survival imperative, and cultures receive a Jungian shadow of that. Jay-den is portrayed as opting out of the cultural imperatives, but they gave him narrative freedom to do so, and that’s not how those societies work. The contract we watchers have with Klingon culture is being violated, and that’s fine, unless it’s implicit. And it is.
Their hands are writing stories that are unable to tell themselves. And that’s a sin.