Critics Blame Review Bombing For Starfleet Academy Failure, While Manipulating Scores Themselves

By Jennifer Asencio
| Published 14 seconds ago

The latest Star Trek show was so unpopular that it was not only cancelled, but it has salted the earth for many other Star Trek shows and movies. Starfleet Academy couldn’t place even on Paramount Plus’s top streaming shows, much less compete with anything from other services. Yet the show’s supporters, including featured series actors Gina Yashere and Robert Picardo, have found someone else to blame: the fans.

Yashere, who played the Jem Hadar/Klingon hybrid, said in an Instagram post that “I’ll let you guys come to your own conclusions as to why we didn’t get to continue this wonderful legacy… Stay woke. Wokey woke. Wokest of woke. Wokeylicious. A cacophony of woke.”

Holographic doctor Picardo was more specific on X, “Careful! Can’t remind the ‘real Star Trek fans’ on this platform form [sic] what real Star Trek is and was meant to be. They get angry and abusive…” He then went on to single out Jon Del Arroz of Fandom Pulse, who he has blocked on the social media site; Picardo tagged Del Arroz after blocking him.

Hater Conspiracy Theories

To them and other crew of the show, the problem wasn’t that the show disregarded or ignored established Star Trek lore, sent all the Klingons to their version of Hell, or included gratuitous characters like the aforementioned half-Klingon or another Klingon who doesn’t want to fight and wears a dress (both are Klingons are LGBTQ). According to Yashere, Picardo, and others who were enthusiastic about the show, the real reason Starfleet Academy was cancelled was that disingenuous “chuds” review-bombed the show on critic-aggregate sites and launched a campaign against it. Yashere did not hold back that she directly believes bigotry was more involved than valid criticism.

The show’s failure was blamed on disingenuous fans supposedly poisoning the well against it, rather than on any accountability for the show’s flaws. The word is that the “trolls” who didn’t like the show are so culturally powerful that they were able to dissuade fans from watching the show entirely just by saying “mean” things about its plot, characters, and lore.

According to this logic, all the people who normally would have watched failed to do so because they were convinced by “irrational” haters to believe that it was not worth watching. Picardo, Yashere, and many fan accounts claim the show is excellent and the best Star Trek installment yet, so blame its failure on other, more insidious factors. 

The Reality Of What Viewers Want

Star Trek fans don’t seem to want sloppy writing or transparent “representation”; they want a good story, no matter who is in it. There is even a petition on Change.org to convince Paramount to “Batgirl” the second season by writing it off for tax purposes so it never airs.

Many fans agree that it is better for the show’s legacy to be preserved rather than sullied by a second season that the majority of fans don’t seem to want, as evidenced by viewing metrics. This has been a point of debate since Christopher Cushman’s infamous tweet in which he threatened that cancellation of the franchise would result from the “review bombing” of Starfleet Academy.

Internal Politics At Paramount May Be The Real Impetus For Change

However, some are convinced that changes within the Paramount corporation are also an impetus behind the cancellation. The recent purchase of Paramount by the Ellison family (famously supporters of President Trump) as well as the hiring of Bari Weiss as editor of CBS News, has caused Hollywood pundits to have “concerns” about the future of creativity from the studio and its holdings under “right-wing” ownership.

These expressions of concern have grown louder now that Paramount has acquired Warner Brothers, including HBO and CNN. As a result, Starfleet Academy’s few defenders often blamed owner David Ellison’s influence, direct or indirect, for cancelling the show.

Fan Blaming Is An Old Trick

None of these attacks on fans are new. Other IPs have accused fans of every -ism and -phobia available. This has been used to blame fans for the bad reception of other major franchises (Star Wars), of television properties (Doctor Who and the cancelled Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot), feature films (The Bride), and even video games (Dragon Age: Veilguard, Concord). Why make a quality product when you can just accuse the people who want quality of being evil?

What’s really disingenuous is that while Yashere and Picardo blame review bombs for the failure of Starfleet Academy to attract audiences or retain fans, there really is a show, The Pendragon Cycle, that has actively been suppressed by mainstream reviewers. Starfleet Academy has a Tomatometer score averaging 87%, while The Pendragon Cycle still has no score at all, not even a bad one.

For the King Arthur show, part of the problem is that it’s on a niche streaming site, but another part of the problem is that it has not only been ignored but actively suppressed. The hew and cry over Starfleet Academy’s cancellation is hypocritical when the behavior being criticized is the exact behavior these critics themselves have engaged in. It is, as Yashere reminds us, “a cacophony of woke.”

Whether the second season of Starfleet Academy airs or is shelved remains to be seen, but it’s doubtful that any of the show’s flaws will be meaningfully addressed. It’s easier to blame fans for being bigoted against the weak plots and gratuitous characters than it is to accept that you’ve failed.

By continually accusing detractors of bigotry, the showrunners, actors, and fans of Starfleet Academy avoid accountability by taking a stolen moral high ground and dismissing any concerns. It’s too bad the “correct” people didn’t tune in, or maybe they’d have a leg to stand on.