There’s a new change.org petition for a 3rd season of Starfleet Academy that broke 500 signatures in the first hour.

No idea if the executives would pay attention but it’s a way to counter the narrative of the negative brigading the show has been dogged by.

Variety claimed an exclusive and that they had an inside source.

This has the feel of drafted internal and external communications messages going out earlier than agreed.

There wasn’t a goodbye letter at the time of the Variety exclusive — but Deadline and everyone has it now.

And, as expected, someone in the UK has posted a Change.org Renew Starfleet Academy for a third season petition in the last hour.

It seems that my initial reaction was overly hasty and upset.

As I just replied to another post, towards the end of the article, Variety says, citing an unnamed source:

According to an individual with knowledge of the situation, Kurtzman and CBS Studios are currently in talks for a new deal that will keep him in the CBS fold. In addition to his work on “Star Trek,” he has produced shows like the “Hawaii Five-O” reboot, “Scorpion,” and “Salvation.”

The odd thing is that Variety seems to be saying that, according to the same unnamed inside source, negotiations are still underway for Kurtzman and Secret Hideout to continue production for CBS Studios (which I failed to notice on my initial read of the piece).

According to an individual with knowledge of the situation, Kurtzman and CBS Studios are currently in talks for a new deal that will keep him in the CBS fold. In addition to his work on “Star Trek,” he has produced shows like the “Hawaii Five-O” reboot, “Scorpion,” and “Salvation.”

If so, I’m wondering if someone leaked the specific detail of the termination of Starfleet Academy with the hope of a fan campaign to save it…

I just realized there’s even a fried egg in there.

A more measured take VS than I can manage at present.

My partner commented “It wouldn’t take much with the Ellisons” when I said it was reportedly canceled but, I have been hoping that there just might be more sophistication in the analysis of the show’s potential in a bigger, broader streamer.

My own thoughts go to women like my mother-in-law now in her 90s, or the superfan Bjo Trimble, who watched and supported Star Trek and other science fiction media, decade after decade, without seeing many women like themselves in principle roles.

They weren’t watching because of their husbands or kids, they were enjoying science fiction for themselves and their views, and all the related licensed media and merchandise they bought produced exactly the same advertising and other revenue.

Yet, entitled middle aged guys — who aren’t even in the key youth demographic anymore — want to define the franchise and seem to be being listened to.

Older person that I am, I recall the boys in the neighborhood would take their toys and wouldn’t join imaginative play unless they got to be the hero. I guess they never changed.

”…the show failed to find its significant audience.”

Put a show on a streamer that is targeting a completely different audience, and let the entitled vocal fans run wild with unchecked brigading, and then be surprised by low “crowdsourced” ratings.

Sigh.

This is depressing, if accurate, in that it may also be a signal that the new owner is looking for a new production company to manage the franchise just when things had finally and consistently stabilized with Secret Hideout.

I’m not hopeful for an SNW continuation in a Year One show, or Tawny’s project either.

It’s available as a BlueRay screencap from TrekCore…

Might be best to download directly from there:

https://tas.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=61

Definitely replicators, and ones that are presumably more sophisticated than the 24th century ones on Voyager given the general use of programmable matter by Starfleet in the 32nd century.

What’s challenging in the 32nd century setting is that more advanced technology exists but it’s availability is very uneven.

In Discovery, in the 32nd century, Admiral Vance makes the point that all the food at Federation headquarters is made from reconstituted waste. This is when Vance is negotiating with Osayraa of the Emerald Chain in season 3.

TAS and Discovery both showed the Enterprise has food synthesizers rather than replicators.

How significant is the difference? — it’s never made clear but picking up a meal from a food synthesizer is implied in TOS when Kirk gets a simple meal from a wall.

Also, it does seem that SNW’s food synthesizer is much more sophisticated than the one in TAS and Discovery, fabricating better quality basic materials.

Here’s compilation I made a while ago, of Scotty’s distain for the mayhem caused when the ship’s main computer gets hit by a ‘spatial anomaly’ and interacts with the ‘Rec Room’ 3D holographic simulator in TAS ‘The Practical Joker.’

This doesn’t seem to be offered in Canada.

The ‘Pluto Spotlight’ still seems to be on Academy Award Winners.

I see the regular TOS all day channel offered, but the movies aren’t featured in the movie channels.

In the ‘On Demand’ offerings, there’s a ‘60 years of Star Trek’ that offers TOS, TNG & Voyager as well as some documentaries as usual.

In fact, it seems that none of the movies are available on PlutoTV in Canada.

That distribution of reviews tells the story.

An honest distribution of views of people who had watched at least one entire episode would not rate with 1/10 = the worst show they had ever watched.

Not to mention that there are many people posting in other places that “they don’t need see it to know it’s awful” and that they are “campaigning against it.”

I really just want the Aventine Vesta-class.

Very cool.

I wonder if there will be any kind of installation in Canada this time. I don’t see anything listed in the upcoming events.

For the 50th anniversary, the Canadia Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa had a special exhibition that ran the whole summer. We were able to take our kids. There were a lot of costumes and props but also some interactive activities including a Kobayashi Maru test.

Honestly surprised that you would cite such a transparently manipulated crowd-sourced rating.

Especially when the Rotten Tomatoes pro critic score is 88% — far above the ‘review bombed’ audience score.

Also, it seems you’re unaware that the review bombing was so bad that it’s been having a ‘Streisand Effect’ raising the profile of the show.

When a show or movie has a distribution has a stack of 1/10 “worst show ever” votes and a fairly flat distribution otherwise, it’s clearly not showing votes of people who have seen it.

The IMDb profile is particularly revealing. The overall rating of the show is low 4.4, with lots of 1/10s, but the ratings of the actual episodes run from 4.7 to 7.0 with an average for the episodes over 6 — despite some continuing review bombing.

Here’s the obviously review bombed distribution of votes for the show overall.

Here’s the crowdsourced vote distribution for episode 10

The brigading by review bombers who never watched the show but claim they “saw some reviews on YouTube and know all they need to” got so completely out of hand that the people who have done this have made the situation into a pop psychology meme. Psychology Today even wrote a feature article “The Trouble with Review Bombing” about it.

I also note that haverholm has linked the Flix Patrol rankings that show that SFA drew much more audience on platforms other than Paramount+ — which suggests it’s doing its jog in attracting new audiences.

I believe that there was mention of some Legacy locations and species to visit too.

Sigh…

I’m perhaps at the extreme of negativity about the Legacy premise, but what Matalas seemed to be pitching was almost an anthology of legacy characters being visited by the Titanprise with the bridge full of offspring.

So, yes, Sirtis would not be wrong to think the focus of the pitch was the older cast with the younger characters and the visiting Titanprise as more or less the framing.

I have a theory that someone in senior management of the streamer under the old ownership had a strong belief that ‘children of legacy characters’ were a necessary bridge between old and new audiences. There seems to have been no awareness at all of his antithetical nepotism would be to the meritocratic principles of Starfleet.

We have La’an Noonien-Singh for no particular reason in SNW - she’s not even the bridge officer with augmented abilities.

Also, the more I hear about the pitch for Unity the more it sounds like a family saga with all the great things Archer’s offspring are up to as young adults (since the creators were told that they could have them at the Academy as they’d originally pitched).

It sounds like you might prefer to wait until the season is over and binge it.

The teasers and featurettes are the way Apple tries to create social media buzz rather than relying on the YouTubers to manufacture their own trailers.

That’s happening anyway, and there’s a it of AI slop. For those who want that stuff, my preference is to post the official ones.