We’ve known Star Trek: Starfleet Academy was coming for a while now, but we finally have some real footage. Paramount just dropped a trailer, in addition to an official announcement that the show will premiere in “early 2026.”
For the uninitiated, the show is set at the titular Starfleet Academy in future San Francisco and follows a group of cadets and their instructors. The trailer introduces us to all of the major characters, more or less, all while chancellor Holly Hunter does her best space Dumbledore and delivers a rousing speech.
Eagle-eyed fans, however, will notice an abundance of Easter eggs in this footage. Starfleet Academy is where nearly every major Star Trek character in franchise history went to school, and they’ve all left their footprints here. There are shoutouts to James Kirk, Wesley Crusher, Tom Paris and, most interestingly, a class that examines the ultimate fate of Deep Space Nine head honcho Benjamin Sisko.
The trailer also re-introduces two fan-favorite characters from previous installments. Robert Picardo returns as the holographic doctor from Star Trek: Voyager and the one-and-only Tig Notaro returns as snark-mouthed engineer Jett Reno from Star Trek: Discovery. Holograms don’t age, but people do, so I wonder what kind of sci-fi gobbleygook they’ll come up with as to why Picardo now looks older.
Paramount
Speaking of the passage of time, there’s the Discovery-sized elephant in the room. Starfleet Academy is set in the 32nd century, after the crew of the Discovery accidentally ended up there at the end of season two. This is 800 years after the 90s shows like The Next Generation and 900 years after the original series. So this means any and all connections between planets and species are likely to be radically different, as eight centuries is a really, really long time. Just think about how different the year 1225 was from today.
The show premieres in six or seven months on Paramount+. Star Trek: Starfleet Academy stars the aforementioned Holly Hunter, Sandro Rosta, Karim Diané, Kerrice Brooks and Paul Giamatti as the half-Klingon antagonist.
