Starfleet Academy’s cast did their homework to join Star Trek

Star Trek celebrates its 60th anniversary this year with the launch of Starfleet Academy, a show that feels very different from everything that came before it, because it’s set 900 years after the events of the original Star Trek and focuses on teens learning to be Starfleet officers in San Francisco and the mobile classroom the U.S.S. Athena. The Academy was out of commission for a century while the United Federation of Planets struggled to rebuild following a cataclysmic event called the Burn, but Starfleet has revived it, recruiting time travelers and especially long-lived faculty who can teach the first new class of cadets what the organization was like in its prime. That gave the showrunners an excuse to bring some franchise veterans to the series.