Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is off to a difficult start in a new clip—well, it seems like it’s from near the beginning of the series, anyway.
Strange things are afoot in space! Strange things that might be useful teaching experiences, if everyone survives. As the USS Athena flies somewhere near the Badlands, “Subspace instability may be creeping in,” says Number One, Lura Thok (Gina Yashere). This, as it turns out, is the least of the ship’s problems. Captain Nala Ake (Holly Hunter) ominously says, “Well, let’s not total the ship on our first run” … right before that basically happens.
And then we have one of those Star Trek scenes where it makes no sense that anybody gets out of this alive. Swirly red balls attack the ship! Things go boom! Everything goes boom. Weird techno-growth-looking-stuff creeps over the entire hull! The cadets on board are instructed to run for their quarters, but not everyone listens to the little, bossy robots. (I do appreciate Robert Picardo’s Doctor saying, “Don’t panic, breathe! Breathing is your friend!”) The brief moments with a few cadets, though, are far from the point.
The point is Paul Giamatti showing up to gnaw on the bridge.
Giamatti is playing the antagonist, Nus Braka, who clearly has a beef with Captain Ake. That beef that is described using a strange metaphor: Time is not a flat circle; time is an origami chicken. (Nice to know origami still exists centuries in the future.) Giamatti, in hologram form, strolls about, cackling and stalking. It’s been “fifteen long years” since whatever happened with them before. Guy knows how to hold a grudge.
At New York Comic Con, Giamatti enthused about his role to Screen Rant, saying:
I’m half Klingon, half Tellarite. I was very excited to be half Tellarite because, as a kid, I liked them. They’re this kind of argumentative, obnoxious pig people. And I was like, “That’s me, man. I want to do that”. It was great. I get to be an alien, I get to be a bad guy, and I get to come in and disrupt this world. He’s everything that Starfleet is not. He’s the opposite of all of it, and he wants to rip it apart. It’s great.
His ripping-apart project seems to be proceeding apace.
Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau are co-showrunners of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which premieres January 15, 2026, on Paramount Plus.
