STAR TREK: INTO IRRELEVANCE

National Review

 

Star Trek: Into Irrelevance

By Jeffrey Blehar

January 20, 2026 6:25 PM

 

This morning William Shatner appeared randomly in the news for being William Shatner: He was photographed sitting in the driver’s seat of his car while idling at a stoplight, eating a bowl of raisin bran, complete with milk and a spoon. More power to ol’ Bill: Rank hath its privilege, I say.

 

Because while it’s great to see that Captain Kirk is alive and well after all these years, I wish I could say the same for Star Trek, the franchise he will always be synonymous with. It is now officially dead. Yes, the week has been full of grim developments, and that was before I went and ripped a page from Trent Reznor and hurt myself today: I watched the first episode of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, the newest (and, one suspects, final) series in the “rebooted” Trek universe, the one headed by writer/executive Alex Kurtzman and beloved by absolutely nobody on Planet Earth.

 

Rest assured, it is beyond terrible. It is bad in nearly all the predictable ways you would have expected it to be — whether you’re a fan of the Trek universe or not — a big-budget mess that somehow looks and feels strangely cheap. But I don’t think there was ever a way it could have succeeded; it feels like a foreordained mess. People will accuse Starfleet Academy of being “woke” — and it is in a number of cringey ways. But the problem runs far deeper than that: The entire intellectual property is creatively exhausted now. This is the end for Trek — or at least it should be for a very, very long time.

 

I promised my editors that this wouldn’t be a rant. National Review is enough of a niche publication as things stand — without me driving away our readership with lengthy discourses on the subtle craft of Ron Moore’s narrative storytelling during the “Dominion War” seasons of Deep Space 9, or the underrated comedic joys of Lwaxana Troi episodes of TNG. But to properly situate my own fandom: As you can probably tell by now, I am quite the committed fan of what people generally refer to as “classic Trek”: the original ’60s series itself, The Next Generation of the late ’80s, and Deep Space 9 of the early ’90s. (I watched Voyager only intermittently during my high school years, out of an entirely understandable teenaged interest in Jeri Ryan’s talents.)

 

So understand that Starfleet Academy has almost nothing whatsoever to do with that era. This “Trek” universe is set in the 32nd century, a thousand years after the original series, after a galaxy-destroying disaster known as “The Burn.” In other words, we are now in a darker, grimmer, quasi-postapocalyptic Trek future — wholly different from the sober but open-minded optimism of the original series and its successors.

 

The story is barely worth summarizing, the frame around which the season will no doubt be draped: In this future of privation and starvations, Captain Holly Hunter resigns her commission in outrage and shame after being forced by Starfleet to separate a mother from her child. (The mother was an accessory to murder committed by an anarchist smuggler played by Paul Giamatti, the only person who seems to be having any fun in his role.) Fifteen years later, she is called back into action to train a new batch of recruits, including that very same kid whose family separation spurred her initial retirement — he’s still searching for his missing mom, and she’s prepared to give him a chance to enroll at the academy to help. Aren’t coincidences like that just wonderfully convenient?

 

There is a specific conflict in this episode involving that smuggler played by Giamatti, but the plotting lacks tension, the dialogue betrays zero depth of thought, and the show plays as an hour of gormless CGI “action” plus 15 minutes of young adult antics more worthy of an episode of Saved by the Bell — The College Years. Are these new kids young? Headstrong? Racially diverse? (Given that this is Star Trek, that means alien races as much as human ones.) All of the above. And they are absolutely beyond boring, text-box descriptions of characters rather than characters themselves. My primary takeaway from watching this show: This is not Star Trek anymore. It’s Star Trek as a skinsuit, a dull serial devoid of deeper philosophical ideas or quirkily intellectual sci-fi premises, with only “drama” and “action” (note scare quotes) in place of the ideas and sense of wonder that used to define Trek. Who is this even for?

 

It’s easy enough to criticize what’s wrong with Starfleet Academy in the most obvious way: It looks cheap, it’s poorly acted, and it’s terribly written. But its flaws run far deeper than that, to the premise as much as the execution; I’m not even sure it would be possible to make a good version of this show. The reasons for that have nothing to do with wokeness. The premise itself is flawed: How much fun is it to watch a group of immature and green trainees learn the ropes of their job? Can you imagine a show exclusively populated with Wesley Crushers? Wouldn’t that be the worst idea for a Star Trek show ever? Guess what you have here!

 

I imagine in future episodes the academy trainees will get out there into the wider galaxy, and probably end up saving the universe by the time the season wraps. (I certainly hope so; they won’t get a second season to finish the job.) But even if they do, that will only show up the show’s limitations: What made classic Star Trek truly great was its ability to tell standalone stories, and not tiresomely overstuffed story arcs.

 

Every week there would be a new quandary, a new scientific conundrum, diplomatic standoff, mysterious plague, or whatnot. Because the characters themselves were developed independently of their need to serve specific plot roles in one overarching story, we got to see them in countless different situations, how they reacted under pressure, how they cooperated or dysfunctioned with one another. Classic Trek came from an era when TV had the patience — and the need — to invest in that kind of character-building, and without it, NuTrek cannot help but feel barren by comparison: Instead of going where no man has gone before, its engines have stalled in creative exhaustion.

 

Update: Subsequent to publication, I learned that Paramount has already greenlit Season 2 of Starfleet Academy. May God have mercy on our souls.