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!”
Entertainment
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Entertainment
Star Trek’s First Broadcast Episode Was Very Carefully Chosen, Because It Was Boring
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
These days, Star Trek is a bona fide pop culture phenomenon. But during the development of The Original Series, there was anxiety that the general public wouldn’t really understand Gene Roddenberry’s mashing up Western tropes with a sci-fi setting. Making matters worse was that the original pilot, “The Cage,” had been rejected by NBC for being too brainy. Fortunately, Roddenberry got a chance to shoot another pilot, one which impressed the network enough to order an entire season worth of episodes.
Several episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series had already been shot when the time came for this new show to make its broadcast premiere. The first episode that the general public saw was “The Man Trap,” which featured a shapeshifting monster that was revealed to be an alien salt vampire. This good-but-not-great episode was an odd choice, and it was one that the cast and crew hated. As it turns out, though, this episode was very carefully selected by executives because it served as an inoffensive, relatively straightforward encapsulation of everything Star Trek had to offer.
It’s A Trap!
Most of the information we have about why “The Man Trap” was selected as Star Trek’s first episode comes from the book Inside Star Trek: The Real Story. Within this impressive reference tome, Robert H. Justman and Herbert F. Solow revealed something surprising: NBC had several other episodes to choose from for the premiere, including “The Corbomite Maneuver,” “Charlie X,” “Mudd’s Women,” “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and “The Naked Time.” All of them had already been shot and were mostly finished, so it was just a matter of figuring out which episode would serve as the best introduction to Star Trek, a heretofore unknown sci-fi series.
“The Man Trap” won out, mostly because the powers that be worried that other episodes would be off-putting to general audiences in some very specific ways. For example, they worried that audiences would find “Charlie X” a story that was “too gentle” because it focused on an adolescent with special powers. This was probably the right call, in retrospect: when Variety gave a negative review of “The Man Trap” (an episode chosen, in part, because of its relative maturity), they declared that Star Trek: The Original Series was “better suited to the Saturday morning kidvid bloc” (ouch!).
A Monster Hit Of An Episode
“The Corbomite Maneuver” was a great potential choice, but this episode’s impressive special effects were still in post-production, and almost all of its action took place on the ship. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” really outlined the premise of the new show, but it was deemed “expository” for general audiences expecting more action and danger. Justman thought “The Naked Time” was a killer introduction to the crew’s personalities, but the network passed, presumably because of how over-the-top (half-naked, swashbuckling Sulu? Oh, my!) that episode gets. “Mudd’s Women,” meanwhile, was deemed too offensive because the plot involved literally selling women to miners.
Through this process of elimination, executives decided that “The Man Trap” was the best intro to Star Trek. It had cool scenes on both the Enterprise and a distant outpost (a strange new world) and featured a straightforward action plot you didn’t have to be a sci-fi aficionado to understand. Finally, it was all about finding and defeating a creepy monster, which offered thrills to audiences of all ages. The network’s choice paid off, and Star Trek: The Original Series became the most popular sci-fi show in television history, even though the cast (including William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy) thought “The Man Trap” was the worst possible episode they could have chosen.
All of this is a keen reminder of how much thought and work went into putting Star Trek’s best foot forward. It might be a reminder that Paramount’s current upper leadership needs, as Starfleet Academy hit the ground running with the worst episodes of Season 1. The show got better after that, but it didn’t matter because the prospective audience had already been driven away. As it turns out, today’s execs need to learn something that the network execs of the ‘60s had learned very well: series succeed when you give the audience what they want to see and not what you want to show!
Entertainment
How A Fantasy Box Office Bomb Lost $200 Million In Theaters, And Suddenly Became A Streaming Hit
By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
For the last decade as streaming has taken off in homes around the world, it’s become possible for films that lost historical amounts of money in theaters to find success, even if it might be the post-Mystery Science Theater 3000 trend of “so bad it’s good.” That’s why a massive flop, for example say, Morbius, and films that slightly missed the mark like The Fall Guy can turn it around and become a streaming success.
What’s even more impressive is the amazing turnaround of 2013’s Jack the Giant Slayer, which lost Legendary Pictures an alleged $200 million, only to end up topping streaming charts in 2025.
The Classic Fairy Tale With A Twist
Everyone knows the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, the classic fairy tale about selling a horse for magic beans and climbing a beanstalk to find a giant living in the clouds. It’s simple, contains multiple morals, and can be easily adjusted to turn Jack into the villain, but Jack the Giant Slayer instead asks, “What if there was no moral, and instead of one giant, there was an entire army of evil giants?” The movie is the classic story, as you’ve never seen it before, and it almost works.
Nicholas Hoult plays Jack, the young man who finds himself trading his horse to a monk in exchange for beans that he can’t allow to get wet, ever. Like the rules in Gremlins, it’s not long before Jack accidentally gets the beans wet and a beanstalk grows under his house with the princess, Isabell (Eleanor Tomlinson), trapped inside as it grows into the sky. All the king’s men gather to rescue the princess, including Lord Roderick (Stanley Tucci), who, thankfully, Jack the Giant Slayer makes obvious is very evil, very quickly.
It’s up to Jack, Isabell, and the loyal Knight, Elmont (Ewan McGregor) to save the kingdom and stop the invasion of giants led by Roderick and the giant two-headed General Fallon (Bill Nighy). If there’s one thing Jack the Giant Slayer does better than every other adaptation, it’s the third act featuring a full-blown war between humans and giants, with a touch of humor and absurdity. Watching a giant toss a windmill like the glaive from Krull is the perfect amount of off-beat to distract from a surprising amount of body horror in both the giant’s designs and Fallon’s ultimate fate.
A Movie For No One
Jack the Giant Slayer looks too good, and the star-studded cast is having way too much fun for it to be a truly bad movie. The problem is that the pacing is off: it takes a little too long to get to the good stuff, then it feels a little too rushed, and though it is a fun adventure, it’s also, like the source material, simplistic. It’s not like the movie wasn’t watched in theaters; it made $197 million worldwide, which would be a great haul except it cost $185 million to make, and that’s not including the extensive marketing campaign.
The push and pull of director Bryan Singer’s vision of a dark take on the fable, complete with actual people-eating on screen, and the sanitized version that hit theaters, which was still too dark for children, since the film is surprisingly rated PG-13, meant it ended up being a film for no one. The Rotten Tomatoes ratings, of 52 percent from critics and 55 percent from the audience, are proof that the final product is not great, but not bad; it’s a movie that will keep you watching for a few hours and then leave no lasting impression. These days, Lionsgate and Sony wish they’d release a movie that is that well-received, as even Jack the Giant Slayer looks like a masterpiece compared to Borderlands or Kraven the Hunter.
Streaming is the perfect home for Jack the Giant Slayer, and 10 years later, it no longer matters that the movie lost hundreds of millions in theaters. It finally gets to stand on its own as a fun, if unremarkable, fantasy adventure.
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Frederik Andersen, Hurricanes look to shut down Senators in Game 2
