Entertainment
Starfleet Academy Is Destroying One Of Star Trek's Most Beloved, Classic Characters
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
When casting for Starfleet Academy was first announced, fans were shocked and delighted by the return of Robert Picardo. His holographic Doctor was a fan-favorite character on Star Trek: Voyager, and his presence on the new show has been mostly awesome. However, the writers surprisingly tweaked this comedic character by making him a tragic figure who is occasionally overcome by grief at the thought of the friends and even family he has lost over the years.
The episode “Life of the Stars” healed that pain in the most unexpected way: holographic cadet SAM starts glitching out because she has no memories to help process trauma, so the Doctor volunteers to raise her for the equivalent of 17 years. If Starfleet Academy gets its intended four seasons, it could be very rewarding to see the Doctor transformed into a father figure working alongside the child he raised. But given the persistent rumors that the show will be canceled after Season 2, I can’t help but think Star Trek ruined the Doctor by changing his personality and then giving him an arc that may never actually play out.
Star Trek’s Funniest Character Gets Serious
Just to be clear, I’m not opposed to the idea of changing up the Doctor’s character. Over eight centuries later, it would actually be a little strange if he were exactly like he was back on Star Trek: Voyager. Plus, Robert Picardo is an amazing actor, and he’s just as good at drama as he ever was at comedy. But as with so many things in Starfleet Academy, the writers have struggled to find the right balance with this character.
For example, the Doctor is still called upon for laughs, only he is expected to be part of this show’s broader comedy efforts. That’s why any given episode will have him mugging for the camera while singing for the opera or cracking snarky jokes about cadets’ bowel movements. In a particularly low moment, he played the insanely annoying host of a dinner party, which came to a premature end thanks to a farting fish (no, really).
But he is also meant to be a haunted, tragic figure whose dialogue hints at past trauma that he is still processing. Heck, he opens up “Life of the Stars” with a noir-flavored monologue about how many dawns he has seen and how time is a “beast” that bites everyone differently. It’s a cool way to start an episode, but it forces me to ask, once more, whether the writers of Starfleet Academy expect him to be the comedy relief or to be an edgy, brooding legacy character.
Big Changes For Your Favorite Character
“Life of the Stars” ended with a major change for the Doctor: he decides to help fix a glitching SAM by raising her for the equivalent of 17 years. This is meant to give her the emotional resilience she will need to handle various situations as an adult while helping the Doctor move on from the trauma of losing a holographic daughter over 800 years ago. Should Starfleet Academy get four full seasons, it could be very rewarding to see how Robert Picardo handles this latest permutation of his character.
Unfortunately, Starfleet Academy is going to almost certainly end after Season 2. When that happens, one thing will be very clear in retrospect: they really squandered the Doctor, one of the most beloved characters in Star Trek history.
It’s obviously rewarding to watch characters grow and evolve over time. We got to see it happen in previous shows with young Star Trek characters like Wesley Crusher and Nog, and that’s presumably the idea with Starfleet Academy: to watch our youthful characters grow and mature into proper Starfleet officers. However, such character plotting only really works if the writers have enough runway for this dynamic storytelling to take off.
Star Trek’s Future Looks Bleak
While nothing has been officially announced, the future for Starfleet Academy looks bleak: the show consistently fails to make the Top 10 for Nielsen streaming or even Paramount+’s own Top 10. It’s also frighteningly expensive to produce (like, at least $8 million per episode), making its future doubly uncertain in the wake of Paramount’s merger with Skydance and possible acquisition of Warner Bros. Given these factors, many fans are worried the new show won’t get confirmed for Season 3 (it was long ago renewed for Season 2), and even members of the cast treated shooting the Season 2 finale like a bittersweet farewell.
There would be many repercussions of a sudden cancellation, but I can’t stop thinking about what this news would mean for Robert Picardo’s Doctor. Originally, his return was one of the reasons I was most excited about Starfleet Academy; like many, I loved his acid sarcasm and cynical sense of humor on Voyager. I was alarmed early on that this new spinoff treated him as the worst-written comedy relief of all time, but there were still enough glimmers of the old character to keep me tuning in.
Now, near the very end of Season 1, Starfleet Academy has changed the Doctor by making him a father to SAM, but we’ll barely get to see that relationship play out if the show gets canceled after Season 2. That means that the new Star Trek show brought the Doctor back only to neuter his comedy while saddling him with an unexpectedly traumatic background story. All of this was presumably in service of his arc with SAM, one that the writers will barely get a chance to explore if the show doesn’t get a third season.
It’s Dead, Jim
Obviously, hindsight is 20/20, but I can’t help but think that this has been a supreme waste of both the Doctor and Robert Picardo. Star Trek brought back its funniest character and made him spend half of Season 1 taking part in poop and fart jokes, and the other half brooding about something that happened 800 years ago that he never cared about before. All of this to pave the way for a “Doctor Daddy” storyline that will go nowhere after Starfleet Academy gets quietly canceled, a la Prodigy.
Ah, well: maybe the failure of Starfleet Academy will convince Alex Kurtzman (or whoever, God willing, replaces him) to finally give us a Star Trek Legacy show featuring characters like the Doctor. Such a series might actually respect both Robert Picardo while finally giving the fans what they want. Until Star Trek can start appealing to the fandom rather than soulless executives, though, this franchise will receive the diagnosis made famous by its original Doctor: “It’s dead, Jim!”