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Starfleet Learing Academy Cartoon published 01/21/2026 When I was a kid I watched the ‘Star Trek’ episodes as they originally aired. My dad only watched news and sports, but he made an exception for ‘Star Trek’ and watched it with us. We were sad when the show was canceled, but it soon returned as reruns every day in the afternoons, and I made sure to hurry home from school to watch them. Yes, I am a big fan of “Star Trek,” but my interest faded after “Voyager,” and I was in no hurry to watch Paramounts latest generation of the show. ‘Star Trek’ hasn’t been good in a long while. The action movies in which they turned the characters into comic book heroes was abhorrent to me. Spock using his fists instead of a nerve pinch? That’s not Spock. Then, iterations on TV devolved further and the franchise became absorbed by woke-ism, much like ‘Landru’ hypnotizing a civilization. I finally broke down and watched the first two episodes of “Star Trek Academy.” The first one was free on YouTube and it didn’t get a lot of views, but they did leave the comment section open to their credit. The comments were comedy gold. The show was as bad as they were saying, even though Paramount seemed to have spent a lot of special effects. After all, it is set well into the future—a future far more distant than the original series. It’s too bad they forgot what made TOS as popular as it was. That is, likable characters and compelling, well-written science fiction. This new Trek seems to have forgotten that and concentrated instead on identity and intersectionality. There are very few white males in the Academy. Some of the characters don’t seem to be qualified to be there in the first place. They don’t strike me as ‘the best of the best.’ Getting into the Academy used to be notoriously difficult. Now there’s a ‘sensitive’ Klingon. Some of the behavior is not in line with Academy discipline. Some are way overweight and one main character is a downright criminal—a charming criminal, sure, but why is HE in the Academy? It’s not clear. Holly Hunter plays the captain and it was insulting to see her with her legs draped around the chair. No! “Sideways” actor Paul Giamatti seemed totally miscast as a Klingon, but he did a commendable job as a renegade and he played the bad guy role even more over-the-top than Ricardo Montalban did with “Kahn.” Giamatti is good at whatever role he plays. Holly Hunter has a lot of mileage on her odometer, but she too remains an excellent actress. Robert Picardo is back as the hologram doctor, who claimed to have aged intentionally to not freak out humans. He sings opera in one episode, but the series needs to be more than a woke soap opera with an Academy set in what looks like a futuristic shopping mall. There were too many scenes showing people walking long expanses of that mall and talking…and talking some more. Plus, the far-distant future uses staircases instead of escalators or turbo lifts? Really? I may watch a few more episodes to see if it can improve, but many at this point are saying… “It’s dead, Jim!” — Ben Garrison