This casting makes it easy to attack as woke and might limit its audience.

In all seriousness, that would be the absolute best reason for this series to fail. I would be incredibly proud of it.

I didn’t expect the apparent flashback framing device - Russ and Takei are a nice surprise.

Whenever this happens, it looks absolutely fine on some Mastodon instances (I just checked, and this post looks fine on my own), and “wrong” on others (like yours).

That suggests to me that the issue may lie with the Mastodon server, but I genuinely don’t know, and have no idea how to replicate the issue.

That is a bit of weirdness that happens sometimes when Lemmy posts federate to Mastodon. It sometimes grabs the thumbnail and headline from a completely different post.

I have no idea why, but it’s incredibly annoying.

Honestly, my biggest fear is that Paramount+ may not have a lot of the demographic they’re trying to capture.

How many young adults subscribe to that thing?

Commodore?

Kurtzman does confirm Klingons will be a part of the show; more specifically a “Klingon hybrid species who are several of our main characters.”

And then we have this, seen on TrekCore’s Bluesky:

Kling’Hadar?

My excitement was starting to die down thanks to the dearth of news, but hot damn, this show looks gorgeous. There’s some really interesting stuff in the interview, too:

“If you’re going to do a show about a young generation facing the future and you want it, as all Star Trek does, to be a mirror that holds itself up to the world as it is now, to situate the show in the halcyon days of the Federation would, in some ways, be dishonest,” Kurtzman, a showrunner on Starfleet Academy with Noga Landau, tells Entertainment Weekly. (The halycon days was a time period when the Federation of Planets enjoyed peace and prosperity.) “Our children are facing a lot of challenges right now and they are our hope for the future…They’ve got a lot riding on their shoulders, and they are meant to reestablish and rebuild everything that we all know and love about Star Trek,” Kurtzman continues. “They convey hope and they search for hope, and that felt like an extremely relevant message to talk about now.”

Landau adds, “It’s wish fulfillment. Every week it’s about a new part of coming of age. One week that can be a prank, war erupts another week, a romance begins another week, we encounter an alien species for the first time and we don’t know what the hell we’re doing [another week]. But at the end of every episode, what we want our audience to feel is, ‘I want to go to Starfleet Academy.’ Even in the deepest, darkest depths of character problems and drama, you get such a good feeling from watching this show [of] how much you want to be there so badly.”

“One of the things that we see all across the world now is how much hate is relied on to sow division between things that connect us as human beings and how hate is used as a bludgeon to destroy empathy, which I think is ultimately what Star Trek is about,” Kurtzman explains. “At its core, it’s about: We may not look the same, but we are the same. Finding that common ground and figuring out a way to understand our differences is at the heart of what [Star Trek creator Gene] Roddenberry was talking about.”

Without revealing too much, Kurtzman explains that Giamatti’s character “represents a tide that has swept across the world in a very profound and upsetting way,” he continues. “I say this without taking a political stance. That is part of what it means to invite everybody into the tent. One of my favorite things about Star Trek is that it reaches across the aisle. People on all sides of the political spectrum love it for different reasons. That is something that we really wanted to hold true to here.”

It also seems like we might learn a lot more tomorrow:

The creative leads are keeping many of the character details under wraps until the big Star Trek panel at San Diego Comic-Con this Saturday, but they confirm Holly Hunter plays the lead of the series, that of the captain and chancellor of the academy.

I can’t believe the manual had such a glaring misprint…

Yeah, it looked directly connected - if you squint, you’d probably be able to work out where on the bridge the door is.

Funnily enough, that episode provides supporting evidence:

BASHIR: Starfleet Medical won’t see it that way. DNA resequencing for any reason other than repairing serious birth defects is illegal. Any genetically enhanced human being is barred from serving in Starfleet or practising medicine.

One has to conclude that the procedure Bashir underwent is considered an enhancement, not a “repair” - like they tried to overcome his undefined disability through brute force, rather than address the underlying cause.

I’m not certain about the retro-style logo on the wall (I suspect the blockier lettering on the tote bag represents the actual series logo), but might this be the first look at (a version of) the series uniform?

I think the general policy is that genetic augmentation to grant superpowers is bad, while genetic treatment of disease or other medical conditions is generally okay.

They tiptoed right up to the line without outright stating it.

the SNW stardate madness would seem to continue

Nature is healing.

hopefully not the same way as Paris and Janeway went.

Nah, there’s a flower involved. That can only mean one thing.

I don’t remember seeing them before.

I also don’t remember any previous shots that establish that the conference room is off the bridge…

This one won’t be going down in history as my favourite episode.

Much of the episode is devoted to zombies, and zombies are boring. Moving on.

This might just be reflective of where my headspace has been at lately, but it bugged me that the crew showed absolute contempt for a treaty. There was absolutely no discussion of whether it was moral or just to violate it - they just wanted something, so they went ahead and took it. This isn’t exactly new ground for Star Trek, but it wasn’t something that I enjoyed watching in 2025.

I can’t decide if this was a bad Pike episode, or a good Pike episode that happened to reveal things about the character that I don’t appreciate. It’s telling that Batel didn’t tell him about her treatment because she knew that he would react in exactly the way that he did.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about clearing up the ambiguity of what happened with M’Benga last season, but I think it was handled pretty well - the strongest part of the episode by far. It seems like he might have a…different career path ahead of him when he leaves the Enterprise.

The Ortegas/Una story wasn’t bad, either. I do find it interesting that Pike will not be filing a report on this mission because it was off-the-books, but Ortegas gets reprimanded and sent for remedial training. I’m not sure how that works when there’s no mission to log.

I thought the directing and/or editing was pretty lifeless (heh) in this one, too - not a lot of tension throughout.

Yeah, and I think it also makes sense to assume that Paramount+ produced “The Ready Room”, considering they wouldn’t acknowledge that the second season of “Prodigy” existed.

I’m loathe to support layoffs, but I’m not that opposed to taking things away from the streaming platform and giving them to the production studios.

It took me forever to find the story, but I think what happened is that they sit down the Paramount+, which handled “publicity, photo, events, awards, talent relations, etc.”.

Those roles have been offloaded to the studio (CBS Studios), and I guess this event, and probably the recent Universal thing, have been put together by them?