2 Best TV Shows Similar to Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
Star Trek: Inside the Roddenberry Vault
30 years after the series’ creator passed, what remains of his message as Star Trek is bigger than ever. For Star Trek fans, there are two very important dates decades before the very first episode of the original series ever aired. On August 2, 1943, the B-17 “Yankee Doodle” overshot its runway in the Pacific nation of Vanuatu and crashed, killing two crewmen. The pilot went on to be a crash investigator, serving stateside through the end of World War II, but it wouldn’t be the last time he narrowly escaped death in plane crash. On June 19, 1947, a Pan Am flight crashed in the Syrian desert after a catastrophic engine failure, killing most of the crew and passengers. One of the few survivors was the flight’s third officer, the very same man, a then-35-year-old Texan named Gene Roddenberry. The world knows Roddenberry as the man who invented Star Trek and gave the world decades of deep space adventures. When you look at all of that in context with the early morning when he narrowly avoided death, there’s the obvious takeaway that Kirk and Spock and Picard and Data and all the stories and faraway worlds that spun off from them are a kind of miracle. For me though, it’s impossible not to think of that biographical detail every time the Enterprise-D (or the Defiant, or the Protostar) is being dragged into a singularity or scrambling to restore shields in a fight with the Borg, klaxons blaring and crew members gritting their teeth as stuff combusts around them. The miracle, I think, is that Roddenberry survived something like that and then went on to create a story like Star Trek, a story with plenty of ships on the brink of disaster that isn’t really about disaster, but rather overcoming it. Continue Reading →
Star Trek: Prodigy
When Star Trek: Deep Space Nine debuted in 1993, it was different. No longer were our heroes aboard Starfleet’s flagship. No longer did they hail exclusively from the Federation. No longer would they harmoniously explore the galaxy with a different destination every week. Instead, they were stationed on a backwater alien refinery. The show’s major players were a mix of Starfleet officers, local veterans, and civilian operators. The station was the destination, and the stories came from the various visitors passing through. Continue Reading →