The next big Star Trek project coming out of the Secret Hideout empire is the Holly Hunter-fronted Star Trek: Starfleet Academy television series, a new younger-skewing live-action production set in the late 32nd century.
 
That time period — first introduced in Star Trek: Discovery’s third season — is nearly 900 years beyond the more-familiar settings of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Lower Decks, and Star Trek: Picard.
 
An era rocked by a century-long energy crisis after The Burn decimated intergalactic travel and massive destruction by Species 10-C’s dark matter anomaly, the Federation was stretched to a near-breaking point until the Discovery crew arrived and helped Starfleet rebuild its Alpha Quadrant alliances.
 

We learned in March that the upcoming Starfleet Academy show will be set in that same era (after the events of Discovery’s just-finished final season), and that choice to continue 32nd century storytelling has been a controversial one with fans who might otherwise prefer a return to the Star Trek: Picard-era 25th century.

Franchise boss Alex Kurtzman  — who will be directing the first two episodes of Starfleet Academy — went into detail about why Academy was designed for the far, far future in a new interview with the LA Times published today, explaining exactly why he and his team decided to explore the lives of future Starfleet officers in the Discovery future.

“There’s a specific reason for [the 32nd century setting]. As the father of a 17-year-old boy, I see what my son is feeling as he looks at the world and to his future. I see the uncertainty; I see all the things we took for granted as given are not certainties for him. I see him recognizing he’s inheriting an enormous mess to clean up and it’s going to be on his generation to figure out how to do that, and that’s a lot to ask of a kid.

 

My thinking was, if we set “Starfleet Academy” in the halcyon days of the Federation where everything was fine, it’s not going to speak to what kids are going through right now. It’ll be a nice fantasy, but it’s not really going to be authentic. What’ll be authentic is to set it in the timeline where this is the first class back after over 100 years, and they are coming into a world that is only beginning to recover from a cataclysm — which was the Burn, as established on “Star Trek: Discovery,” where the Federation was greatly diminished.

 

So they’re the first who’ll inherit, who’ll re-inherit, the task of exploration as a primary goal, because there just wasn’t room for that during the Burn — everybody was playing defense. It’s an incredibly optimistic show, an incredibly fun show; it’s a very funny show, and it’s a very emotional show. I think these kids, in different ways, are going to represent what a lot of kids are feeling now.”

In addition to sharing this insight into the show’s timeframe, Kurtzman also reiterated that while the Academy itself will return to the traditional San Francisco setting, the series will be both “Earth-based” and “space-based” as their team is working to design “San Francisco [of] the 32nd century.”

He also concluded the interview without spoiling anything else for the Star Trek Universe’s future… but did hint that there “are a couple of surprises coming up” for the franchise.

Keep checking back to TrekCore for all the latest Starfleet Academy news!