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Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has been renewed for a second season before season 1 premieres

The Starship Enterprise in 2009 Star Trek
Paramount Pictures

We don’t yet know when Star Trek: Starfleet Academy will hit Paramount+, but we do know that the show will be back for a second season. That news was broken during a Star Trek universe panel at New York Comic-Con on October 19, along with the news that She-Hulk star Tatiana Maslany will make a guest appearance in the show’s first season. Details of exactly who she’s playing have been kept under wraps. Co-showrunner Alex Kurtzman was the one to make the announcement during the panel.

According to the series’ official logline, the show “will follow the adventures of a new class of Starfleet cadets as they come of age in one of the most legendary places in the galaxy. The series will introduce viewers to this young group of cadets as they come together to pursue a common dream of hope and optimism. Under the watchful and demanding eyes of their instructors, they will discover what it takes to become Starfleet officers as they navigate blossoming friendships, explosive rivalries, first loves and a new enemy that threatens both the Academy and the Federation itself.”

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Attention, Cadets! We're thrilled to announce that Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has been renewed for Season 2 and Tatiana Maslany has joined the ranks for Season 1! pic.twitter.com/vGQozQXwAv

— Star Trek on Paramount+ (@StarTrekOnPPlus) October 19, 2024

The show’s young cast includes  Bella Shepard, Kerrice Brooks, George Hawkins, Karim Diané, Sandro Rosta, and Zoë Steiner, and Holly Hunter has already been cast as the chancellor of Starfleet Academy. What’s even better: Paul Giamatti has been brought on to play the villain of the show’s first season.

Given all the star power attached to the series and the fact that it’s already been renewed for a second season, it’s clear that Paramount is bullish on Starfleet Academy. We’ll have to wait until the show premieres to find out exactly why.

Joe Allen
Joe Allen is a freelance writer at Digital Trends, where he covers Movies and TV. He frequently writes streaming…
10 best episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise, ranked
The Enterprise NX-01 departs drydock on Star Trek: Enterprise

Every Star Trek series is someone’s favorite (Star Trek: The Animated Series stans, we see you), but when it comes to the 18-year Golden Age of Trek between 1987 and 2005, the prequel series Enterprise is easily the least beloved. Airing on UPN for an abbreviated four-season run, Enterprise was meant to shake things up after three consecutive series set in the late 24th century.
Imagined as a sort of origin story for Star Trek in the style of The Right Stuff, creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga wanted to capture the danger and excitement of United Earth’s early interstellar space program, even planning to spend the entire first season on Earth preparing for the launch of Starfleet’s very first Starship Enterprise. The network, however, had other ideas, insisting that Berman and Braga not meddle with the consistently successful Star Trek formula. Thus, despite taking place two centuries earlier, Enterprise became, essentially, “more Voyager,” which in turn had been “more Next Generation,” a once-great sci-fi procedural that was nearly a decade past its peak.
That’s not to say that the series didn’t improve throughout its four-season run. After two years of struggling to justify the show’s very existence, Berman and Braga swung for the fences with a radically different third season that reinvented Enterprise (now renamed Star Trek: Enterprise) as a grim and gritty serialized drama unpacking the aftermath of a 9/11-scale attack on Earth. While immediately more compelling, the revamp failed to boost the show’s sagging ratings, and it was reworked yet again the following year, and leaned further into the “prequel to Star Trek” angle under new showrunner Manny Coto. This, many fans will argue, is where Enterprise finally found its legs, but it was too little and too late to prevent its cancellation. Still, each iteration of the troubled spinoff had its highlights and our list of the 10 strongest Enterprise episodes is spread fairly evenly throughout the run of the show.
Warning: This article contains spoilers for each listed episode.

10. Babel One/United/The Aenar (season 4, episodes 12, 13, & 14)

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The 10 most underrated Star Trek episodes ever, ranked
Captain Benjamin Sisko holds a smiling baby in the DS9 episode "Children of Time."

In the Futurama episode Where No Fan Has Gone Before, the wisecracking robot Bender describes Star Trek as having “79 episodes — about 30 good ones.” And, if we're being honest, Bender's not wrong. Across the franchise, there are now roughly 900 canonical installments, and out of a field that large, there are naturally dozens, even hundreds of entries that you can simply disregard. Of course, like any fanbase, Trekkies contain multitudes, and we don’t all agree on which episodes deserve the scrap heap.
One fan’s space junk is another fan’s latinum, and there’s no accounting for taste. We’ve selected ten episodes from across the history of the franchise that some fans might tell you to skip, but that we think deserve your attention. Is one of your dark horse faves on our list? Have we gone to bat for an episode you wish would be erased from the space-time continuum? Follow us to the salvage yard and find out…

10. The Time Trap (TAS season 1, episode 12)

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The 10 best Star Trek: Voyager episodes, ranked
Captain Janeway gives a speech on the bridge of the Starship Voyager

As much as fans love to praise Star Trek as groundbreaking science fiction, it’s important to remember that, for most of the franchise’s history, Trek was weekly procedural television. Until the streaming era, each series was churning out roughly 26 episodes a year, and by the later seasons of Star Trek: Voyager, some of the creative crew had been in the business of making Star Trek for over a decade. The franchise was a crossover commercial success, the kind of success that the money men like to leave exactly as it is for as long as it’s doing steady numbers.
The operation was essentially on rails, and there was a lot of pressure from the studio and the network to keep it that way, which accounts for the general blandness of Voyager and the early years of its successor, Enterprise. The waning years of Trek’s golden era were plagued by creative exhaustion and, consequently, laziness. Concepts from previous series were revisited, often with diminishing returns, and potentially groundbreaking ideas were nixed from on high in order to avoid upsetting the apple cart.
That’s not to say that Star Trek: Voyager isn’t still a solid television show, and even many Trekkies’ favorite. The saga of Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) and her gallant crew finding their way home from the farthest reaches of the galaxy may not be as ambitious as it could have been, but it is steadily entertaining, which is why new and nostalgic fans alike enjoy it as cozy “comfort viewing.” For our part, however, we tend to enjoy the episodes that have a certain emotional intensity or creative spark, that feel like conceptual or stylistic risks. As such, you might find that our list of the 10 best Voyager episodes differs greatly from some of the others out there. We like when Voyager dared to get heavy, or silly, or sappy, or mean. So, without further ado, let’s raise a glass to the journey ...
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10. Counterpoint (season 5, episode 10)

Counterpoint drops the audience into the middle of an ongoing story,in which Voyager is boarded and inspected by agents of a fascist government, the Devore. The Devore treat all travelers through their space with suspicion, but are particularly concerned with capturing and detaining all telepaths, who they view as dangerous. Despite the risks, Captain Janeway is attempting to smuggle a group of telepathic refugees to safety, all while putting on a show of cooperation for smiling Devore Inspector Kashyk (Mark Harelik). Much of the plot takes place in the background, obscured from the audience in order to build suspense. The real focus is on the evolving dynamic between Janeway and Kashyk, a rivalry that simmers into one of the Voyager captain’s rare romances. Kashyk works in the service of what are, transparently, space Nazis, but when he offers to defect to Voyager, can his intentions be trusted?
Beyond its intriguing premise, Counterpoint is a particularly strong production with a lot of subtle hints of creative flair. Director Les Landau and director of photography Marvin Rush, who had been both working on Star Trek since the 1980s, shoot the hell out of this story, breaking from Voyager’s even lighting and predictable camera moves to make some very deliberate choices that build a great deal of tension around what is essentially a bottle episode. The makeup team, supervised by equally seasoned Trek veteran Michael Westmore, supplies a memorable and imaginative makeup design for an alien astrophysicist who appears in all of two scenes in this episode and is never utilized again. Most of all, Kate Mulgrew provides what may be her most subtle, human performance in the entire series, embodying Janeway’s famous conviction and strength of will while also granting a rare glimpse at her more vulnerable side without ever straying into melodrama.

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