Streaming service Paramount Plus premieres the first episode of the Star Trek spinoff Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, created by Gaia Violo and set in the post-Discovery 31st century time frame. Holly Hunter stars, with Paul Giamatti guest starring and veterans of past Star Trek series (Robert Picardo and Oded Fehr) also joining the cast. 
Stardate 853724.6: On the harsh desert planet Pikaru, Anisha Mir and her son Caleb are brought to stand before the outpost’s ranking Federation officer, Captain Nahla Ake, as he passes judgement on a Venari Ral pirate called Nus Braka. Convicted of downing a Federation shuttle and murdering its pilot, Braka claims he was trying to find food for himself and for Anisha and her child. Due to the violence of the incident and her involvement, Anisha is sentenced to a rehabilitation camp, while the Federation takes on Caleb as a ward of the state – the most lenient penalty Ake was able to arrange. Trying to console Caleb, Ake tells him he will be sent to a school on Bajor where he will be in safe hands and his next meal will never be in question. But at the first opportunity, Caleb escapes into the inhospitable environment of Pikaru.
15 Years Later: On the run since Pikaru, and falling back onto the skills he learned from his mother and Nus Braka, Caleb Mir, now 21 years old, has run afoul of Torothian authorities and is en route to one of their penal colonies for what is now a long list of increasingly violent offenses. He discuvers that, unlike the Federation, the Torothians have no qualms about “softening up” their prisoners in transit. At the first opportunity, Caleb attacks his captors and commandeers their shuttle, asking the onboard computer to query the Federation database for the whereabouts of his mother. His freedom is short-lived: a Torothian ship captures the shuttle; his assault on the crew only makes his sentence worse.
On Bajor, now-retired Nahla Ake is a teacher at the Bajoran school to which she intended to send Caleb. Admiral Vance approaches her with news that Starfleet Academy is returning to its ancestral home in San Francisco, and offers Ake the chancellorship – quite literally the chancellor ship, since the Academy is now a giant starship in its own right that berths on Earth between missions. Citing her perceived failure in the case of the Mir family, she politely turns Vance down, until he dangles a piece of information he knows she will find irresistible: Caleb Mir has been found, alive but in trouble, old enough to attend the Academy. Ake travels to the Torothan prison to visit Caleb and make him an offer: a clause in the Torothan treaty with the slowly-rebuilding Federation allows low-level offenders to commute their sentences with service, which Caleb could fulfill by attending Starfleet Academy. And Ake also has a prize to sweeten her offer: Anisha Mir escaped from prison a year ago, and Ake offers to help Caleb find her. Reluctantly, and with his mother’s warning not to trust the Federation still fresh in his mind, Caleb accepts.
Within hours of donning the uniform of a Starfleet Academy cadet for the first time aboard the U.S.S. Athena, Caleb has already figured out who his friends are – including Genesis Lythe and Kraag, a quiet Klingon cadet on a sciences track – and has already made an enemy, namely Darem, who boasts of being the first Khionian to enter the Academy. A holographic student named SAM tries to latch onto the Doctor, formerly of U.S.S. Voyager and now Starfleet Academy’s chief medical instructor, as her personal mentor, a role and a responsibility he does not seem to want thrust upon him. Caleb hacks the communications system to try to send a message in the blind to his mother. But this attracts the wrong kind of response: a Venari Ral ship intercepts the Athena near the Badlands and coats the Federation ship with a kind of programmable matter that invasively intergrates into the hull, causing major damage. Nus Braka himself appears on the Athena’s bridge in holographic form to deliver an ultimatum to Captain Ake. As soon as his hologram disappears, Caleb offers a solution using his knowledge of the Venari Ral’s weapons, but it’s a plan that will require his fellow cadets to take life-threatening risks – including a certain Khionian upon whom he’s made an impression.
Caleb’s plan works, but when he races to engineering to implement it, he is met by Nus Braka himself, who drops a tantalizing hint that something happened to Caleb’s mother after escaping from a prison on Goja V. Caleb still puts up a fight, but more importantly he ensures that the Venari Ral’s programmable matter is excised from the hull. Then he turns his attention to Nus Braka, who escapes in one of the Athena‘s escape pods as his own ship is destroyed. After the Athena returns to Earth, Captain Ake tells Caleb that his unauthorized communication put all of his fellow cadets and crew at risk, but his quick thinking on the fly also saved them. He can remain at the Academy, with some minor punishment (including being restricted to campus for 90 days), or he can go, but Starfleet Academy offers him the best chance of finding his mother – and bettering himself in the process.
written by Gaia Violo
directed by Alex Kurtzman
music by Jeff Russo / additional music by Dan the Automator, Sam Lucas, Alex Yewon and Antonio Andrade
“San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)” performed by Rufus Wainwright
Cast: Holly Hunter (Captain Nahla Ake), Sandro Rosta (Cadet Caleb Mir), Karim Diane (Cadet Jay-Den Kraag), Kerrice Brooks (Cadet SAM), George Hawkins (Cadet Darem Reymi), Bella Shepard (Cadet Genesis Lythe), Oded Fehr (Admiral Charles Vance), Gina Yashere (Lura Thok), Brit Marling (Computer Voice), Stephen Colbert (Digital Dean of Students), Robert Picardo (The Doctor), Tatiana Maslany (Anisha Mir), Paul Giamatti (Nus Braka), Rebecca Quin (Lt. Ya), Ken Barnett (Lt. Hayden Thriss), Michael Brown (Lt. Dandrid), Nicole Dickinson (Lt. Atlee), Tricia Black (Lt. York), Avaah Blackwell (Haile), Joseph Chiu (Ensign Weldu), Raffa Virgago (Cadet Pickford), David Benjamin Tomlinson (Starfleet Officer), Scott Gemmell (Darem’s Posse), Mia Yaguchi-Chow (Darem’s Posse), Ritchie Lawrence (Darem’s Posse), Luciano Fernandez (young Caleb), Atlas Blu Klamer (Scrap), Solen Morales (Little Orion), Kenzyn Hoffman (Little Suliban), Ian Busher (Torothan Senior Guard), Lynn Anne Zager (Detention Center Computer), Darren Richardson (Torothan Shuttle Computer), Brian David Gilbert (DOT), Jeremy Culhane (DOT)
Notes: This series takes place after Star Trek: Discovery, though much like that series’ third through fifth seasons, in the shadow of an event called “the Burn” that severely restricted the travel and almost fatally limited the Federation’s reach. In the initial “present day” scenes on Bajor, we learn that Nahla Aka is 422 years old and, according to Admiral Vance, part Lanthanite (the same long-lived species as Pelia on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds). But even that pales next to the age of the Doctor, formerly U.S.S. Voyager‘s Emergency Medical Hologram, still functioning seven centuries later (and last seen in the second season of Star Trek: Prodigy, in the late 24th century); Robert Picardo joins Michael Dorn in the rarefied air of regulars on one Star Trek series who became regulars on a later Star Trek series, though Picardo’s reappearance as a regular 25 years after his previous live-action appearance may beat Dorn’s very short wait between the end of The Next Generation and the fourth season of Deep Space Nine). The Doctor’s involvement with the crew of the U.S.S. Protostar is acknowledged, as are that show’s characters, whose place in history apparently became significant enough for SAM to name-check them. The Badlands (where Voyager was catapulted into the Delta Quadrant) were last seen in later seasons of Deep Space Nine.
LogBook entry by Earl Green