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Star Trek: Starfleet Academy was an idea that was kicked around decades ago, pre-The Next Generation. Proving once more that there is no such thing as an original idea in Hollywood, it is also the latest Star Trek series from Paramount and will start production shortly.
It has also managed to sign Holly Hunter in a lead role and got Paul Giamatti on board in a role that may, or may not, be the villain.
Now showrunner and franchise marshall Alex Kurtzman has given an interview with to the The Los Angeles Times about the upcoming series, and explained why the series remains set in the Discovery-era 32nd century, not the more familiar 24th century. According to Kurtzman, it is because of… what else… current year:
“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.”
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy will land post-Discovery ending, and among a new season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks, and the Michelle Yeoh-led Section-31 movie on streaming. Star Trek on the big screen remains in a holding pattern.
