Star Trek: Everything We Know About Starfleet Academy
It's the Star Trek series in the place that trained the greats. Finnegan, Nick Locarno, who?
Rumours of the long-fabled, but never before materialised, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy were revived in June 2018 when Variety revealed that it was one of "the potential new shows" in development under the then newly signed Alex Kurtzman, although CBS wasn't confirming any of it at that point.
The buzz continued in the years that followed, with various news outlets passing notes in class. In August 2021, a New York Times profile piece on Kurtzman noted for the first time that Starfleet Academy would be "aimed at a younger audience," and the following month, for 'Star Trek Day,' Kurtzman spoke at some length to Wil Wheaton about his, and everyone's, excitement for the planned series. Only a few months later, in February 2022, Deadline also reported that Starfleet Academy was "in development". More on this in a moment, but for an idea that had been more or less in perpetual creation, it looked like Kurtzman and co. were finally making it happen.
Nonetheless, we would have to wait until 30 March 2023 for Starfleet Academy to get its graduate certificate of series confirmation status from the studio. Since then, we've had all sorts of excitingly tantalising news, so much so that we've made an entire list out of it for all you eager cadets out there to get studying. Moreover, as you read these words, Starfleet Academy is due to be filming its first scenes, so you'd better get ready to meet your roommates!
12. Tale As Old As Future Time
No one could say they hadn't given it a lot of thought. In fact, the idea of setting a Star Trek at the Academy has been around for so long — almost as long as Star Trek itself — that it probably deserves tenure at the hallowed institution.
As related by Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens in The Longest Trek: Writing The Motion Picture, it was all the way back in 1968 that Gene Roddenberry told the World Science Fiction Convention in Oakland California that, "he was talking to Paramount about making a feature film version of Star Trek that would tell the story of how Kirk, Spock, and McCoy met at the Academy". For one timeline at least, that particular encounter would have to wait until 2009.
Skip ahead to the 1980s, one suggestion in the running for what would go on to become Star Trek: The Next Generation was, according to Rick Berman in The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years, to set the series "on a starship that was run by cadets in Starfleet Academy".
The idea for a movie version of Starfleet Academy never went away either. To coincide with the 25th anniversary celebrations, what was then provisionally titled Star Trek: The First Adventure / Starfleet Academy / Star Trek: The Academy Years was greenlit by the studio and even fully scripted by Harve Bennett and David Loughery. A regime change at Paramount put paid to the professorial project in favour of The Undiscovered Country, although Bennett never gave up on the idea, continuing to pitch it to Paramount well into the 2000s.
If you can stretch your mind back to the 1990s, you might also remember Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, the PC game, released in 1997, as well as a veritable bounty of Starfleet Academy novels during the decade featuring the younger selves of the crew of The Original Series, The Next Generation, and Voyager.
Canonically speaking once more, and though mentioned numerous times in dialogue, we've only actually seen (the Prime) Starfleet Academy a handful of times on screen. You can count Kobayashi Maru in Star Trek II, then a series of firsts in First Duty, a re-used shot in Time's Arrow, 8472 fakery in In The Flesh, a notable flashback in Lower Decks, and finally, at least some study time in Prodigy before the 'synth' attack on Mars.