Starfleet academy tries to combine the Harry Potter and Star Trek franchise. This is a great
idea but does not seem to work yet. Even AI could have written a better story and build better characters as for now.
[Some statistics illustrate: after 5 days, the
free premiere on youtube has 177K views, 7 K likes, 22 K dislikes (3 times more dislikes). The audience mostly go for the
comments, after seeing reviews like this
with 890K views after 22 hours has currently 79K likes and 184 dislikes, or
this which after 17 hours has 67K views with 5.7K likes
and 48 dislikes. The writers of the show obviously prioritized on "messaging". It gave review platforms a golden opportunity
to laugh on Hollywood, which is ironic: Hollywood has become funny now by removing any humor from their content.
Maybe this TV show will go into TV history as a parody. Also the seemingly positive
reviews are in essence bad, if one reads between the lines. Reviewers know that reviewing can be tricky. They have to
tip-toe around what they really think, as otherwise they are labeled as "bigots" or "racists".
Liking or disliking has become a litmus test about ideology. Critics are already called
the baddies.
There is still hope of the Streisand effect will kick in and save the TV series. The disaster could become a reason for becoming a
must-watch series. Sometimes, spoofs work, like in the Austin Powers trilogy which had laughed about the Bond franchise
successfully. It was so bad and over the top, that it became a huge success and its bad taste is still funny today. Other times, like in the
Disney business, the Snow white disaster proved to be a substantial financial loss. In the long term, this just does not work.
Entertainment is a business after all. Also the choice of actors is strange. I like Holly Hunter (she was amazing for example in
Raising Arizona) but her character does not work in Starfleet. (Should you make a "statement" by disobeying dress code rules like walking around
barefoot or curling feet up in the command post chair? It does not fit as the Captain of a ship that is also a school for educating cadets.
Maybe it was an attempt to be funny. Or then as a commander of the ship slap a fellow officer disrespectfully several times.
If genders were reversed, that part alone would have been a scandal 60 years ago in the original Star Trek series.
These are missteps that count, simply because the show tries so very hard to be inclusive:
it stereotyped clumsily, like that with the Asian hologram is triggered to recite Starbucks orders or then have all white males represented
unlikable idiots. If the main focus is on ``sensititivity", then the slightest insensitivity is noticed.)
A common denominator for failure is the absence of humor. There is no humor that works in these
first two episodes. The most funny thing was probably that one of the cadets swallowed her star fleet badge. (It might have been inspired
by a line from the well written SciFi "Serenity", where River, after the team has been chased by Reavers, just ends a scene with
"I swallowed a bug". Apropos: in the current Starfleet show, the worrier species of Klingons have become sensitive ``bird watchers". It
can get confusing for anybody who is familiar with other Star Trek implementations).
There would have been opportunity. In "Full Metal Jacket", there is the iconic
drill sergeant scene. It is brutal, but
also brutally funny. It got referenced in other movies like Forest Gump a few years later. Tough teachers appear also in Harry Potter, like with
Severus Snape. While one can read that Gena Yashere had been using the Full Metal Jacket drill sergeant scene as an inspiration to play
Lura Thok, the writers did not give her yet the opportunity to shine. They obviously did not dare. The TV show must have been written by
a committee. Such entities tend to opt for "safe" and suppress creativity. As "agreement" is important, one goes for the lowest denominator,
which results in boredom or confusion.
Even repeating a line shouted by Lee Ermey could have been an opportunity for being funny.]
I watched two episodes so far. In Episode 2, there is a physics lecture. It would have been an opportunity to
reference some cool physics. But only "shortest distance" and "entropy", "time arrow" are mentioned.
Later, Fibonacci numbers (a cliche) appear. The original series had some intriguing ideas like 3D chess,
used logic to defeat a computer example: Mudd
or complexity example Pi. In the later
Star trek movies, there was some innovative teaching in which the definition of dimension appeared.
In Harry Potter, there were some lessons in charms, potions, dark arts,
herbology or pottery. Starfleet would have been a golden opportunity to do something innovative academically,
"where no one has gone before". Let us hope that the writers will fill in the void in a later episode.