She-Hulk Actress Tatiana Maslany Promotes Upcoming Role In Starfleet Academy: "There's So Much Heart"
She-Hulk actress Tatiana Maslany is promoting the new Starfleet Academy show in interviews with a vague comment that may not be a compliment to the show, saying “there’s so much heart.”
2025 is slim pickings for Star Trek fans as the only content to be released so far is the Section 31 TV movie, along with a promised Strange New Worlds season 3 which will only have ten episodes.
Less is more given the current state of Star Trek under Alex Kurtzman, with fans hammering recent offerings of Star Trek: Discovery and the Section 31 movie with bad reviews, with ratings dropping to exceedingly low levels. According to a CBS Insider, merchandise sales have also been down for the show, which is going to lead to a review of Kurtzman’s work at the end of July to see whether they will renew his contract or not.
Starfleet Academy may end up being the last of Kurtzman’s offerings to the Star Trek universe, a concept with dubious interest to Star Trek fans to begin with, but having it be a relaunching of an Academy set post-Discovery makes it something of even less interest to casual fans, who would be looking for a Original Series or The Next Generation iteration if they had any interest at all.
The Starfleet Academy show is set to bring back a couple of characters from Discovery, including Tilly, the overweight redhead with anxiety issues. To try to lure classic Star Trek fans to the show, Robert Picardo is reprising his role as The Doctor from Voyager.
He spoke last year on the show’s setting saying, “If you follow Discovery, this terrible thing called “The Burn” basically destroyed Starfleet Academy, everything was destroyed in the future. So now it’s come back. So it’s really about, rebirth, redemption, all of the great themes of after a tragedy, of rebuilding.”
One of the recurring characters is played by the embattled Tatiana Maslany, infamous for her role on She-Hulk, Attorney At Law, where she constantly preached identity politics and transgender activism in the promotion of the show, which bombed for Disney+.
She spoke on her upcoming role on Starfleet Academy to Collider, saying, “Oh my god, I love Kerrice! Kerrice is unbelievable. The whole cast, the whole set is people not like Kerrice—Kerrice is obviously very unique; no one’s like her—but everyone is such a great character. There's so much heart in the show. I had such a blast working on it. Holly Hunter is my hero. I couldn't believe I got to work with her. Broadcast News is, again, one of those performances that is just beyond. Paul Giamatti is a total delight.”
Maslany admits she was not a Star Trek fan before working on the show, but she claims she is now. She said, “It's opened up to me the Star Trek Universe, which I knew The Original Series, I'd seen some of the movies. My husband's a big Trekkie, and so he and I watched Wrath of Khan and stuff like that during COVID, but now I'm going back, and I'm watching Deep Space Nine. My husband refers to it as my stories because I'll be, like, sitting in the tub with my laptop, just like, 'Oh! Oh no!' And laughing. He's like, it's like my soaps. I love it so much.”
She also calls the character of Odo “her dream man”, saying, “That guy's a shapeshifter who literally becomes a liquid form and goes into a bucket every 16 hours, and he's my dream man, and I love him so much. It's the best. It's the best.”
It seems she’s trying to reference 1990s Star Trek to try to assuage the fears of fans who are used to Kurtzman offerings ignoring continuity and changing the feel of Star Trek into something unrecognizable. But to promote a show talking about its “heart” is an odd choice as well as it doesn’t give much indication that it particularly has any good writing or storylines that she thinks fans will enjoy.
It echoes the odd promotion of Section 31 from Robert Kazinsky where he said he was terrified of how fans would receive the show.
What do you think of Tatiana Maslany’s involvement in Starfleet Academy? Does that excite you as a Star Trek fan? Leave a comment and let us know.
For a great alternative to modern Star Trek, with sci-fi spy thriller action, read The Stars Entwined on Amazon!
I can't wait to watch the hours of amusing youtube videos this show will spawn. Likely it will lecture us all on identity politics and how women make the best starfleet officers.