OLD AND BUSTED: “To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before.”

The New Hotness? To Boldly Go Where Beverly Hills 90210 Has Gone Before:

Needless to say, the cringe is extremely strong in this one. As the Critical Drinker notes in the video below:

This feels like the kind of show that their target audience would have on a second screen while they flick through social media on their phone.

So every so often they can look up and see some really hot, young, muscly, good-looking characters having relationship stuff going on—vaguely connected to the Star Trek universe—and then they can look back at their phone again. That’s honestly what this seems to have been designed for.

And, wow. As you say, Star Trek used to be a show of real intelligence and ideas, something that would expand your view of the world and what was possible. And this is what it is now? Wow.

Gene Roddenberry must be rolling over in his grave. The first show he produced was The Lieutenant, starring Gary Lockwood, who would appear as a guest star in the second Star Trek pilot, before hopping on a plane to London to become the co-star of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Lieutenant depicted Lockwood’s character as being, as Wikipedia notes, the young idealistic “recent graduate of the United States Naval Academy who is assigned his first command, that of a rifle platoon,” at Camp Pendleton in southern California. Roddenberry, a former L.A. cop and WWII bomber pilot, kept the military theme going in the original Star Trek, of course. Even after Roddenberry’s death, Star Trek: The Next Generation could do an episode set in Starfleet Academy that depicted a far more disciplined and serious group of students studying to join a futuristic military origination than the weird L.A. high school class in space depicted in the new trailer.

Oh, and just to put the button on the new series: Stephen Colbert Joins Cast of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Role Revealed at New York Comic Con.

James Lileks once wrote that whenever Kirk mentioned “we were at the Academy together” about that week’s guest star, it was Trek’s version of “I have a bad feeling about this.” I’ve got a very, very bad feeling about Starfleet Academy.