Spoilers follow for the Season 1 finale of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (Episode 10).
The first season of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has, much like the first year for our cadets, come to a close. To celebrate this milestone, we had the chance to speak to co-showrunners Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau about the biggest moments from the finale, what’s in store for Season 2, and even a tease of what the future of Star Trek is looking like with the Paramount and Warner Bros. merger on the horizon.
As we said in our review of the finale, it feels as though the cadets are “just getting started” on their grand adventure in Starfleet. This is also very true regarding the production of the series, as Season 2 has already wrapped and was actually in the works even before the first season premiered.
“We did our writer's room [for Season 2] in the middle of production of Season 1,” Landau said. “We’ve been on this continuous train with the show, but this is really the first time in the life of the show in years where we've just been able to focus on one thing, and that's [post-production] on Season 2, which is really fun!”
Speaking of Season 2, Landau teased that, “we go so much deeper and there are so many new and unexpected things that happen.” Furthermore, fans can expect new students and teachers to pop up, which is just one of the many changes our core cast of characters will have to deal with.
“The dynamics that you thought were going to be one way forever start to slowly shift,” Landau shared. “And the paths in Starfleet that you thought you knew you wanted begin to shift because of the experiences that you have.
“I watched this happen so much in college with my friends, where they would come in saying, ‘I want to be a doctor, I want to be a lawyer, I want to be an architect,’ and then they would take a certain class or have a certain experience or have a relationship that opened their eyes to something completely new, and all of a sudden they found a truer version of themselves and a different path. That's something that we start to see happen in Season 2 in a way where I think our audience is really going to see themselves in these characters.”
Oh, the Places You’ll Go in Starfleet Academy
The first season features a very eventful finale that saw our heroes aboard the saucer section of the USS Athena work together to stop Paul Giamatti's villainous Nus Braka and his Omega-47 minefield that was surrounding the Federation.
While the day may have been saved at the end, the journey there was filled with heartbreak, doubt, failure, and missteps, and that’s exactly the point of this story. Watching this season, especially in the finale when Jett (Tig Notaro) tells Caleb (Sandro Rosta) he absolutely will mess up again, had my mind returning to Oh, the Places You’ll Go! and the fact that Dr. Seuss doesn’t sugarcoat the fact that we all will fail at some point in our journeys, and that’s OK.
“Wherever you fly, you’ll be the best of the best,” Dr. Seuss wrote. “Wherever you go, you will top all the rest. Except when you don’t. Because, sometimes, you won’t.”
“First of all, I love that you’re bringing that up,” Kurtzman told me. “I read that to my son a ton, and it’s one of the greatest books ever. In my personal experience, failure is the greatest teacher. Successes are great, but failure teaches you to appreciate them in a very different and meaningful way. And I think part of what that book is talking about is the idea that the real definition of success, at least for me, is getting back up.
“We had an opportunity that no Star Trek show has ever had, which is, usually when you meet characters on a Trek show, they're already in their assigned places, they've decided who they are, and they've decided their life path, but our cadets are very much not in that place.“
Kurtzman then shared that he is currently watching his son, who is in a similar situation and roughly the same age as these cadets, “negotiate through a really complicated time with a tremendous amount of fear of failure, but also a tremendous amount of optimism, which is what I think is really embodied in this show.”
“That is the nature of what it means to be young, and it's beautiful and necessary. I don't think you can actually get to the answer to those questions without really bumping up against a wall of failure. And I wish that weren't true because of course we want to protect our kids and we don't ever want them to feel those things, but it's really the only way they're going to get there, and we know that for ourselves too.”
Another one of the biggest bumpy roads in the season was the budding relationship between Caleb and Tarima (Zoë Steiner). They shared a real connection starting in the second episode, but their personal histories held them back from fully committing to each other on multiple occasions. For Tarima, it was her telepathic abilities and neural inhibitor that she viewed in a negative light, as she had a traumatic past because of those powers. However, Caleb helped her see that these abilities she has are a gift and a beautiful part of who she is.
“For me, a big part of growing up and being the age that Tarima is in the show was realizing that the thing that I most feared about myself was actually something that I could make peace with and use to navigate my way through the world,” Landau said. “And I think that one of the hardest parts of being young is that often the thing that you've been told over and over again by your peers, by your schools, by whatever, is that there's something wrong with you. In reality, it winds up becoming your superpower if you learn how to use it, and that’s a really important lesson that Star Trek can give to its audience, no matter their age.”
For Caleb, it was all about trust and learning to let people in rather than push them away. He was consumed by the pain of losing his mother, so it was hard for him to realize that allowing others in was actually a powerful way to heal without leaving her behind. This is seen in one of the biggest moments of the finale, where Caleb and Tarima connect telepathically and he says I love you without words, to which Tarima responds at the end, “I love you too.”
“I loved what happened with Caleb and Tarima in Episode 6,” Kurtzman said, speaking about when Tarima accidentally found one of Caleb’s memories that he wasn’t ready to share. “And we knew that you had these two people, one who'd only been alone, who'd never really allowed love in, and who was terrified of that kind of intimacy, and another who was terrified of that kind of intimacy for totally other reasons.
“And I think there comes that moment when, in a relationship of any age, but particularly at that age, where you're like, ‘Wait, we're crossing into a different threshold now that is really different than anything I've experienced. It's way more intimate. This person's seeing things about me that I'm not even sure I want to see about myself and I can't handle it at all.’ And so breaking them apart in six was something we really wanted to do to have them hit the wall and think, ‘What are we going to do now?’”
And as for the ‘I love you too’ of it all, that was another point of discussion between Kurtzman and Landau. Many times, a push and pull happens in a writer’s room between giving the audience the expected outward affections of love (holding hands, kissing, proclaiming their love) and subverting that and showing it in a different, more subtle way they weren’t expecting.
“I was fighting for a ‘love you’ not because generically I want a happy ending, but because if you put the audience through that ringer, then you better bring them to a satisfying place at the end.
"And by the time you get to the ending in the finale, you have two characters who are like, ‘Man, we have been through the ringer, the chips are down, all the pretense and all the guards that we have are gone. Where are we really with each other?’ And I don't think you could get to that place of honest openness had you not gone through the dark night of the soul that they both go through. So, ultimately that's very satisfying for people.”
The Optimistic Yet Cloudy Future of Star Trek
One of the main reasons the moment between Caleb and Tarima may be satisfying for people is that we can relate to it. Despite this show taking place in the 32nd century, many of the problems our cadets encounter could be faced by any of us in 2026. That’s Star Trek at its best, and for Kurtzman, we’re not even close to running out of tales to tell.
“The thing that's so beautiful about Star Trek is that it really is a limitless wall of stories,” Kurtzman said. “You can go on forever and ever and ever. And to me, it's all about what story, when, and why, because Trek has always been a mirror that meets the moment, and each iteration of Trek reflects something about the social or emotional climate of the world.
“You never want to make a show that doesn't do that. And I think for Starfleet Academy, this is very personal. You go like, ‘Oh, I see what my kids are facing. Let's make a show about that. That feels really relevant right now.’ Ultimately, what I think we love about it most is that it's a really great and very special opportunity to reinforce what is most important about Star Trek: optimism.”
And what about those future stories? We know Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Season 2 is on its way, but the future is very uncertain for this 60-year-old franchise, especially with the Paramount and Warner Bros. merger looming large above it all.
“I would say that there are many characters that I'm interested in exploring, some who've been established, and others who have not,” Kurtzman said. “And we had such an incredible time doing Prodigy and Lower Decks, both of which are shows we are so proud of, so I feel there's a lot of opportunity there too.
“The honest answer is that what's going on right now with Paramount and now the merger with Warner Bros, it's so massive that I think the amount of time the company needs to take to figure out its plans is just longer than it has been in the past because it's got so much on its plate. And I get that. I understand that. But, the good news for me and Noga is that we are out of working on the writer’s room, production, post-production and more on two seasons of Starfleet Academy at once. We have not had a break in three years, three straight years. So to be able to just focus on editing right now is kind of a gift, and it’s also allowing me to have conversations with Paramount about what new ideas are there for Trek, and those conversations are happening.”
But the most important question of all linked back to the finale, when Genesis (Bella Shepard) has her triumphant moment sitting in the Captain’s chair before remembering that nature was calling. According to Landau and Kurtzman, Genesis’ ‘Wait, I think I have to pee’ line stemmed from someone actually having to go on set and joking that one can’t just spend all day on the bridge without answering the call.
“We had to earn 60 years of this franchise in order to get to this moment,” Landau said with a laugh. “People just didn’t do that on television back then, but yeah, we waited six decades for this moment.”
For more, check out our conversation with Jonathan Frakes about how fan hate is “dimensionally more painful” today than in his Next Generation years, and also check out our breakdown of the Star Trek timeline.
Adam Bankhurst is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on X/Twitter @AdamBankhurst, Instagram, and TikTok, and listen to his show, Talking Disney Magic.
