Starfleet Academy just got canceled. I think the image above shows why — that difference between the critic score and the audience (”popcornmeter”) score. A lot gets said about "review bombing" by offended white men, but of course very little is said about the influence of social media and early-review accessibility on reviewers. Seems to me that both are in play. And there’s kind of a full-circle moment here, with the megacorporation, having pumped up the first number, now responding to the second one.

But, having accounted for the ideological left, I don't think we can ignore the ideological right either. Hatred of "New Trek" is real, and it is very easy right now for influencers to build a following on conservative platforms like X, which are no better than liberal platforms just because they’ve selected a different ideology to be partisan to. I've sat through half a dozen YouTube videos blasting Academy, and they invariably make the same mistake that the haters on the left make in putting so much importance on casting and themes that they forget that good storytelling does not care about genre. And they never acknowledge that Star Trek has always been progressive, so if they liked it before, then they should know that ideology does not hinder good storytelling.

In any case, the result now is an odd moment in Star Trek: Nothing is in production, and every show has been canceled. But we still have 1 season of Academy and 2 seasons of Strange New Worlds in the can and on the way. Weird.

My own thoughts on Academy, having completed the first season, is that it was… fine. We’ve seen better, and we’ve seen worse. In my earlier review I dubbed it “Star Trek: 90210”, and I stand behind that. That doesn’t make it a bad show, just one that’s aimed at a different demographic. But it also meant that it spent way too much time on sit-and-talk-about-our-emotions pauses, which I am just not very tolerant of in general. I believe every scene should advance the story, and the fact that a series has more time does absolutely NOT mean that they should waste it.

So, as usual, the industry learns the wrong lessons and stumbles forward into an uncertain future. Way it goes, I guess. On the plus side, this pause in Trek productions doesn’t appear to be permanent. After all, there is too much money to be made.