Gary Buechler, known online as Nerdrotic, posted a photo this week of a shuttlecraft seat from Star Trek: Starfleet Academy now sitting in his home. His caption: “I have taken possession of a screen used shuttle seat from Starfleet Academy. You can call it a trophy. I would call it a scalp.”
The chair came from the 403 Auction fire sale Paramount ran in April, quietly selling off the entire physical inventory of Starfleet Academy and Star Trek: Discovery through two auction rounds totaling nearly 700 lots. Notable items included turbolift set pieces from the USS Athena at $10,000 each, shuttlecraft seats in the $2,500-$2,700 range, lab jars, terrarium displays, and door frames. The turbolift pieces received zero bids. The sets that Paramount spent millions building to celebrate Star Trek’s 60th anniversary got auctioned off alongside a note that buyers needed their own vehicle for pickup because no shipping was available due to “tight auction deadlines.”
Showrunner Michelle Paradise described the sale to The Hollywood Reporter as “deaccessioning narrative infrastructure.” The chair in Nerdrotic’s living room is what narrative infrastructure looks like when it sells for $2,700.
Starfleet Academy was canceled after two seasons. Paramount+ greenlit it in November 2021 as a youth-skewing Star Trek series set at the Federation’s flagship training school. The show starred Mary Wiseman, Celia Rose Gooding, and Bella Poarch, and was produced by Alex Kurtzman’s Secret Hideout. It debuted on Paramount+ in late 2025. When Paramount released the first episode for free on YouTube to drive subscriptions, it peaked at approximately 1,300 concurrent live viewers.
Nerdrotic, watching this number, ran an experiment. On January 15, 2026, he set up a camera pointed at a plastic Spock action figure sitting in an empty chair and started a livestream. He beat the Starfleet Academy premiere’s peak concurrent viewership in under three minutes. His stream ran 52 minutes and peaked at 3,389 concurrent viewers — nearly three times what Paramount’s flagship franchise launch managed with no barrier to entry. He posted his own summary afterward: “My live stream with a Spock action figure in an empty chair beat Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s 1300+ peak live viewers on YouTube in under 3 minutes.”
The moment made national television. Greg Gutfeld mentioned it on his show, telling his 3.3 million nightly viewers: “Some dude, a YouTuber, live streamed a Spock action figure sitting in an empty chair and it got three times more viewers.”
Nerdrotic responded: “My Spock action figure made it on the Gutfeld show. Thanks for the shout out. Sincerely, Some dude, a YouTuber.”
Paramount quietly made the Starfleet Academy YouTube premiere private shortly after.
The Critical Drinker’s review of the show pulled 403,000 views in 14 hours with a 99% like ratio. Nerdrotic’s own review more than doubled the premiere’s total viewership within a single day. The show’s trailer was ratioed. Its YouTube premiere was private. Its sets were auctioned off in Toronto with a no-shipping policy. The actress Gina Yashere, a cast member, spent the show’s final weeks posting about “fragile, angry White men” and the show evaporated without a third season.
Alex Kurtzman produced every incarnation of NuTrek since Discovery launched in 2017. Nine years. Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks, Prodigy, Starfleet Academy. The franchise that in 2017 he inherited with existing goodwill and a built-in audience is now a fire sale in a Toronto warehouse. Strange New Worlds has already had its sets torn down. There is no Star Trek in production anywhere.
When genetic engineering nearly doomed the species, humanity made a desperate bargain: let the frontier do what nature intended. In a harsh universe, these cadets have to make impossible decisions. Read Space Fleet Academy today.
