I love Star Trek, almost all Star Trek. Sure, I skip past “Profit and Lace” when rewatching Deep Space Nine, still can’t stand Malcolm Reed in Enterprise, and I don’t ever want to see the Klingon sexual assault from Discovery again. But on the whole, if people are going to go boldly in Starfleet uniforms, I’ll be there. However, I wasn’t there for Starfleet Academy. I watched every episode, yes, but (Romulan mean girl aside) the teen drama didn’t do anything for me and I felt like Holly Hunter or Paul Giamatti never had a handle on their characters. Each Thursday was an obligation instead of a joy.So I should be thrilled at the news that Starfleet Academy will end after its second season. Yet, I’m not. Starfleet Academy will likely go down as my least loved Star Trek show, but I think that its cancellation signals a distressing turn in one of my favorite franchises.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});On the surface, Starfleet Academy is classic Trek. It follows a group of young cadets as they learn about Starfleet principles, guided by the Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager (played again by Robert Picardo) and by Captain Nahla Ake (Hunter). As the cadets learned, they demonstrated the type of professionalism and higher ideals that fans want to see in a Trek show.Take, for example, the premiere episode, in which young Klingon Jay-Den (Karim Diané) hesitates when performing field surgery on teacher Lura Thok (Gina Yashere). Jay-Den pauses for a moment, overcome by fear and a commitment to non-violence that prevents him from harming another being. Instead of coddling his feelings, Thok reprimands him, demanding that he do his job. At the same time, Captain Ake outsmarts the villainous raider Nus Braka (Giamatti), while rival cadets Caleb Mir (Sandro Rosta) and Darem Reymi (George Hawkins) stop griping at each other long enough to complete their duties.Moments like these happen throughout the series. But so do a lot of teen drama moments, with plenty of screen time devoted to couples resisting and giving into their hormones, silly pranks between factions, and so, so much of beautiful teens talking through their trauma. All of these elements feel like they came from a CW soap, no matter how many Jem’Hadar you put in it.In short, Starfleet Academy is not for me. So why am I bummed about it getting cancelled? Part of it is certainly that, with Strange New Worlds ending after season five and Star Trek: Legacy nothing more than a fan theory, there is no new Trek show in production. Apparently, Paramount boss David Ellison is more concerned about whining his way into buying Warner Bros. than he is making new Star Trek.But really, it’s because Star Trek bigger than just me. I don’t mean that in the sense that it existed before I did, even though that’s mostly true—although I am old enough to have seen most of the TOS movies when they were new and to have watched TNG and all subsequent series in their original runs (and old enough to remember my uncles complaining about how Picard isn’t a real Starfleet captain because he never leaves the bridge).Star Trek is fundamentally a show about boldly going, about exploring and facing new and unfamiliar places. Yes, it began as a series strictly about the voyages of the USS Enterprise, but as soon as Deep Space Nine debuted in 1993, the franchise also became more, finding space for moral ambiguity, political drama, and religious belief. Since then, the franchise has only gotten bigger and more diverse, to the point that, as they say on the hit podcast The Greatest Generation, “Star Trek is a place.”Not every place is for every person. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations never promises that we’ll enjoy all those combinations. Sometimes, the combinations will create something that fills us with wonder and joy; sometimes, the combinations make us feel like Riker in that one Borg reality from “Parallels.” But if the franchise is going to be anything more than dull retreads and reruns, then we have to give it space to try something new, to make shows that are bad, and to make shows that aren’t for everyone.Hopefully, that’s exactly what Starfleet Academy will do in its second and final season. Speaking with TrekMovie after the end of season one, Noga Landau, who serves as showrunner with Alex Kurtzman, revealed that season 2 will also end on a cliffhanger, despite the fact that they weren’t promised a season 3. When asked why she would choose to end her precarious season that way, Landau answered, “it’s because we listened to what our story wanted to be, and we went with it. We wrote it the way that it felt organic and natural.”That’s the perfect answer, one that captures the tragedy of the show’s cancellation. Working with creator Gaia Violo, Landau wrote the show as she thought it should be, in a way that was true to the characters, even if it didn’t match the condition of the broadcasting order, even if it didn’t make some Trekkies happy.I didn’t enjoy season 1 of Starfleet Academy and I wasn’t looking forward to season 2. But I’m glad it’s going to continue going its own direction, all the way to the end. The franchise is a little less rich, a little less bold without it.Star Trek: Starfleet Academy season 1 is now streaming on Paramount+.The post Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s Cancellation Is a Bad Sign, Even If You Didn’t Like It appeared first on Den of Geek.