Jake Vargas

If Star Trek has always been a mirror held up to our better angels, Starfleet Academy feels like a finger wagged inches from the audience’s nose. The show does not invite thought. It instructs. It does not explore moral tension. It resolves usually with a speech that sounds less like a character discovering a truth and more like a writers’ room checking boxes. What’s missing is the essential Trek engine: curiosity colliding with consequence. Classic Trek trusted viewers to sit with ambiguity. Kirk broke rules and paid for it. Picard argued ethics as if lives depended on it, because they did. Here, conflict exists only to be corrected. Characters arrive pre-aligned, morally laminated, and strangely untouched by doubt. When disagreement appears, it is staged not as drama but as a teachable moment. The result is inert television. The series mistakes virtue signaling for storytelling. Values are not dramatized through hard choices or irreversible mistakes. They are announced, applauded, and moved past. The academy setting should be a pressure cooker for ideas, ambition, failure, and growth. Instead it plays like a far-left orientation video with Starfleet logos pasted on the walls. Everyone knows the right answer. Everyone gives it. No one risks being wrong. Visually, it looks like Star Trek. Spiritually, it might as well be another franchise entirely. The optimism feels synthetic, the progressivism unearned. Star Trek earned its ideals by putting them in jeopardy. Starfleet Academy protects them from ever being challenged. This is not Trek as exploration. It is Trek as proclamation. And proclamations, no matter how well-intentioned, make for dull drama. Complete rubbish. RIP Star Trek.