Bill Nighy sits at a black grand piano with a gold Starfleet delta on its lid in one of the first photos from the new season of “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.” It is hard, honestly, to think of a better image for a show that has been told it is playing its last song. Paramount+ used the Star Trek Universe panel on the Empire Stage at New York Comic Con on Saturday, October 10th, to confirm that the second and final season will premiere in March 2027. It also released a batch of first-look photos and, for good measure, named two guest stars, Nighy and Rosemarie DeWitt. Nobody on stage gave an exact day, though, so March is the whole of the date for now. For a series that learned in March that this season would be its last, a return date only five months out is a kinder schedule than most canceled shows ever get.
Both guest roles are family, and both are aimed squarely at people the audience already knows. Nyk Ake (Bill Nighy) is the estranged father of Captain Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter), and Laytha Sadal (Rosemarie DeWitt) is the First Lady of Betazed and the mother of cadet Tarima Sadal (Zoë Steiner). TrekMovie and TrekCore both report that the final season runs 10 episodes. Paramount+, for its part, has not yet said whether those episodes will roll out weekly, all at once or in some other pattern. The Hollywood Reporter credits Nighy for “Living” and “About Time,” and DeWitt for “Untamed” and “The Staircase,” which is a fair summary of the kind of actor this show is now able to call in for a single arc. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy” season one and the setup of season two.
For a series that learned in March that this season would be its last, a return date only five months out is a kinder schedule than most canceled shows ever get.”
Collider’s Perri Nemiroff moderated the first half of the panel. Hunter, Sandro Rosta, Bella Shepard, Karim Diané and Robert Picardo were joined by co-showrunners and executive producers Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the showrunners opened by acknowledging the attention the series had drawn from the White House. Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff, had posted that “It’s not too late for @paramountplus to save the franchise.” “When the White House tweets at you, it’s weird,” Kurtzman said, and Landau followed with, “They’re our favorite fans.” It was a light way to step around something that could have soured the afternoon. It also set the tone for a panel that mostly wanted to talk about the work.
Landau, in fact, spent her time on the audience the show did find. She told the crowd she loves the people who say, “I never thought I was going to be a Star Trek fan, but they finally made a Star Trek for me,” and argued, in the account The Hollywood Reporter published, that many of those viewers went back to “Deep Space Nine,” “Voyager,” the original series and “The Next Generation” afterward. Kurtzman, meanwhile, made the generational case even more directly, saying it “was really important to bring a younger generation to the mix.” Those are not, by any measure, the words of producers fighting their cancellation in public. They read more like two people who would like the second season to be judged as a finished thing, and the panel seemed built to give it that chance.
The casting, as it turns out, goes deeper than a pair of cameos. Nyk Ake is a Lanthanite, the long-lived species that also produced Pelia (Carol Kane) on “Strange New Worlds,” a detail both Screen Rant and Collider report. Redshirts Always Die describes him as Nahla’s full-blooded Lanthanite father. Hunter, for her part, also confirmed that she plays Nahla’s twin sister in season two, which The Hollywood Reporter and Screen Rant both carry. A father who can, in principle, outlive almost anyone and a twin nobody has met yet suggest a Nahla episode about the parts of a very long life she has not dealt with. How much of the season that story takes up is still a guess, and it might turn out to be a single hour.
Laytha Sadal arrives from the other direction, and the Betazoid parent paying a disruptive visit is about as old a “Star Trek” tradition as there is. Collider pointed to Lwaxana Troi (Majel Barrett), whose visits regularly upended life aboard the Enterprise for her daughter, Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis), on “The Next Generation.” Collider also notes that Betazed rejoined the Federation in the first season and became its new capital. That could, perhaps, make a visit from the First Lady of Betazed a political event as much as an awkward family one. The official logline mentions “shaky diplomatic negotiations,” and it is easy to imagine the two threads meeting, though nothing announced so far ties them together.
The room also saw footage, and that, unfortunately, is where fans watching at home were left out. The clip was exclusive to the New York crowd and is not being released online, as TrekMovie and Trek Central both report. Redshirts Always Die called the decision a “horrible choice by the powers that be.” Kurtzman set the clip up before it played. In the premiere, the cadets’ first away mission is interrupted by the arrival of Keats (Ruaridh Aldington), a new character who, by The Hollywood Reporter’s account of the setup, has a very significant part in the season. Keats has crashed onto a planet in a pod that holds information the cadets need, so they are sent down on a clock for what was meant to be a test and turns into a real mission.
Keats, to be fair, is not a new name. Paramount announced at San Diego Comic-Con in July that Aldington had joined the second season as a series regular, playing what TrekMovie and TrekCore both quote as a “young alien our cadets encounter on an away mission who possesses a mysterious backstory.” TrekCore’s copy of that description adds that the cadets make the risky decision to bring him back to the Academy, only to realize he is a wanted man whose life is in danger. That lines up with the “mysterious new cadet” in the new logline. It also means the season’s main mystery has been hiding in plain sight since the summer.
Kurtzman also gave the panel, by some distance, its biggest boast. According to The Hollywood Reporter, he said the season’s Nova Squadron episode was “basically Top Gun in space.” He added that new technology let the production stage a long chase sequence in space that he did not think television, and certainly not “Star Trek,” had attempted before. That is a big claim to make about a franchise with 60 years of starship battles behind it, and it may not survive contact with the finished episode. Still, it is exactly the kind of swing a show with nothing left to protect can afford to take.
The Doctor (Robert Picardo) gets the most personal turn of the returning cast. “After 800 years of existence, his future existence is forever changed. Nothing will ever be the same for the character,” Picardo told the crowd, in remarks The Hollywood Reporter published. He explained that the hologram has become a parent and that his relationship with SAM (Kerrice Brooks) shapes the whole season. Hunter, for her part, said she was excited about the new season “because there’s so much more intimacy that we just comfortably felt with each other over those 10 episodes.” That sounds like a cast that had found its footing by the time cameras rolled on the second season.
The photos, meanwhile, fill in the rest. Paramount+ released 11 images, and Screen Rant read them as moving the cadets further from their San Francisco campus and into tougher training missions in space. The away team appears in silver suits on a pale, dusty world, with Genesis (Bella Shepard) and Tarima crouched over equipment cases on the sand. Another frame catches Caleb (Sandro Rosta) and Genesis leaping across a burning pit. Caleb shares a frame with Darem (George Hawkins), another with Ocam (Romeo Carere), and a third with SAM and Jay-Den (Karim Diané), while Nahla stands in her red coat with her arms folded. The two guest stars get two photos each. One shows Nighy gesturing to a room full of cadets with The Doctor seated in front of him, and another has DeWitt, dressed in white, facing her on-screen daughter.
TrekMovie, Deadline and Screen Rant all reproduce the official logline for the season. It follows the cadets into their second year aboard the USS Athena and promises “budding rivalries, shaky diplomatic negotiations, a fiercely competitive schoolwide tournament, and the arrival of a mysterious new cadet whose existence raises questions that could have consequences far beyond the classroom.” Screen Rant adds that the series was conceived as a four-year show to mirror the cadets’ time at college. That means it will end at what was meant to be its halfway point. The final-season framing, for the record, is official, not inferred. When the cancellation was announced in March, CBS Studios and Paramount+ said they “look forward to sharing the upcoming second and final season with everyone,” which leaves no room for doubt.
The second half of Saturday’s panel belonged to the franchise’s 60th anniversary. Ben Stiller interviewed William Shatner over clips from Captain Kirk’s most famous moments, as TrekMovie and The Hollywood Reporter both describe. “Strange New Worlds,” for its part, was not part of the program, and its fifth and final season is still only expected sometime in 2027. With both remaining series ending next year, Screen Rant notes that there is no new “Star Trek” series currently in production. Kurtzman’s own line on how the franchise survives was that it keeps “finding a way to reinvent itself while also giving you something familiar, and that’s a hard thing to do, but I feel like we did do that.” In March, the people who were not in that room, which is nearly everyone, will get to decide whether he is right.
What Do You Think? Does Bill Nighy as Nahla’s Lanthanite father, with Holly Hunter also playing a twin sister, sound like the best episode of the final season or a lot of story for one hour? Should Paramount+ have put the exclusive New York Comic Con clip online for fans who could not be there? With Keats turning out to be a wanted man, how much of a 10-episode final season can one mysterious cadet carry?
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