Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Interview: Alex Kurtzman Talks Season 1 and Season 2
23Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is set to begin its freshman term early next year, and has already been renewed for a sophomore season. But how long will it take before the series graduates? Collider's Steve Weintraub spoke with the show's cast and crew about the show's long-term academic prospects at San Diego Comic Con this weekend. Paramount's Star Trek head honcho, Alex Kurtzman, outlined the length of a Starfleet Academy undergraduate degree:
"...the beauty is you have to have a four-year plan because college is four years long."
Elaborating, he likened the plot development of Starfleet Academy to the long-term storytelling present in Star Trek: The Next Generation:
"What I think we found and I would say that Starfleet is kind of the sum total of everything we’ve learned on all the shows is that yes, there are serialized stories that take you from beginning to the end of the season and that will carry into Season 2. However, we really do have standalone episodes, so once the story has been established, and everybody gets together, we begin to foreground certain characters as the lead of each episode, and then everybody comes together, so that by the time you get to the finale, you know everybody very very well. So it’s kind of a perfect balance, I think, of Next Gen standalone episodes where there’s a case of the week, or an alien of the week, or a diplomatic problem of the week, but then by the end of the season you realize it all weaves together into a bigger story. And we’re sort of doubling down on that in Season 2, but that’s the structure of the show."
Kurtzman then detailed when production of season 2 will begin, and whether a third season is in the cards, saying, "We start shooting our second season in less than a month. We do have a plan for Season 3. You know what’s so fun, Steve, is that when you start breaking a season, inevitably you have too many ideas, and you go, 'Oh wait a minute, this is cool that we should do this next season,' and then you realize… I always want to leave enough room to have improvisation happen, but know what pillars we are trying to hit, but we just came to the end of Season 2, we’re about to write the finale, which is kind of amazing, and it’s exactly where we wanted to go. But when we started Season 2, it isn’t exactly how we thought we’d get there. That’s really fun." Season 1 of Starfleet Academy is set to open its doors in early 2026 on Paramount+.
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