Coming back to Earth with 'Starfleet Academy'

"Star Trek: Starfleet Academy," premiering Thursday with back-to-back episodes on Paramount+, takes on the necessary assignment of going where no "Trek" has gone before, while also recalling all the places it has.

- ROBERT LLOYD

JOHN MEDLAND Paramount+

KARIM Diane, from left, George Hawkins, Kerrice Brooks, Bella Shepard and Sandro Rosta star.

Created by Gaia Violo, the new series, which might cynically be regarded as a bid to bring younger viewers to a franchise a decade older than "Star Wars," goes down to Earth and back to school. But it is always best to park your cynicism at the door when approaching "Star Trek."

We're in the 32nd century, post-"Burn" timeline established in "Star Trek: Discovery,” among the cadets at the eponymous San Francisco campus, newly rebuilt after “more than 120 years” to train Starfleet officers.

(None of your redshirts here.) Holly Hunter plays Nahla Ake, both captain of the USS Athena and chancellor of the academy, where the starship’s detachable saucer docks, forming the school’s main building and giving the producers two locations for the price of one. (With its curvy lines and greenery, its atrium recalls nothing so much as a high-end shopping mall or hotel.)

(It's of no importance, except to a pedantic Californian TV critic like myself, but I would point out that the campus is technically in Sausalito, with San Francisco seen across the bay. The Golden Gate Bridge, so often destroyed in science-fiction films, is still standing, as is the iconic Ferry Building, wrecked by a giant octopus in “It Came From Beneath the Sea.”)