By Production is gearing up to begin this Summer on “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy,” the newest series for the Paramount+ service which has managed to lure Holly Hunter into a lead role while Paul Giamatti is taking on a recurring antagonist part in the first season.
The other week “Star Trek” franchise overseer Alex Kurtzman spoke with The Los Angeles Times about what’s in store for the series. As we know, the show will follow a new class of Starfleet cadets learning to navigate the Discovery-era 32nd century.
It begs the obvious question – why set it at that point rather than a more familiar time to Trek fans like the 23rd or 24th century? As Kurtzman explains there’s a specific reason for doing so:
“There’s a specific reason for that. As the father of a 17-year-old boy, I see what my son is feeling as he looks at the world and to his future. I see the uncertainty; I see all the things we took for granted as given are not certainties for him.
I see him recognizing he’s inheriting an enormous mess to clean up and it’s going to be on his generation to figure out how to do that, and that’s a lot to ask of a kid.
My thinking was, if we set ‘Starfleet Academy’ in the halcyon days of the Federation where everything was fine, it’s not going to speak to what kids are going through right now. It’ll be a nice fantasy, but it’s not really going to be authentic.
What’ll be authentic is to set it in the timeline where this is the first class back after over 100 years, and they are coming into a world that is only beginning to recover from a cataclysm – which was the Burn, as established on ‘Star Trek: Discovery,’ where the Federation was greatly diminished.
So they’re the first who’ll inherit, who’ll re-inherit, the task of exploration as a primary goal, because there just wasn’t room for that during the Burn – everybody was playing defense.”
The result is what he call an “incredibly optimistic” series, one that’s “very funny” and “very emotional” show with the kids representing “what a lot of kids are feeling now”.
The franchise will see the Michelle Yeoh-led “Section 31” film next year, “Lower Decks” getting a fifth and final season this Fall, and “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” to premiere a third season in 2025 with a fourth on the way.
The post Kurtzman Talks “Starfleet Academy” Setting appeared first on Dark Horizons.
