Captain's Log: Starfleet Academy's Final Season Has a Date — March 2027, With Bill Nighy as Nahla's Estranged Father

1 day ago by T'Nara Vex 3 min read

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At NYCC, Paramount+ set the premiere of Starfleet Academy season 2 for March 2027 and announced Bill Nighy and Rosemarie DeWitt as guest stars. Here's what was revealed, plus what happened when Ben Stiller sat down with William Shatner.

Captain's log, stardate 103939.8. The wait is over, at least for a month. At New York Comic Con on Saturday, Paramount+ put a date on the last class of Starfleet Academy.

Season 2 of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premieres in March 2027, according to the Star Trek Universe panel at NYCC on October 10, as reported by Screen Rant, Collider, TVLine and Trek Central headlines, and detailed by Screen Rant and Yahoo. An exact day has not been announced. It will be the show's second and final season, as Paramount+ confirmed earlier this year.

The new faces

Two guest stars were announced, both with roles that go straight to the show's family drama:

• Bill Nighy plays Nyk Ake, the estranged father of Captain Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter). Screen Rant says Nyk is a Lanthanite, like his daughter.
• Rosemarie DeWitt plays Laytha Sadal, First Lady of Betazed and the mother of Ocam and Tarima Sadal.

Screen Rant adds that Hunter will also play Nahla's twin sister, and that Ruaridh Aldington joins the cadets as Keats, whom we've mentioned before. The official logline has the cadets starting their second year aboard the USS Athena, with rivalries, diplomatic negotiations, a schoolwide tournament and a mysterious new cadet. Training missions take them further from San Francisco and out into space.

What the panel showed

Coverage says the audience saw footage from the new season, including, per one report, a clip from the first episode's away mission. I did not find a public trailer or teaser release, so the footage appears to have been for the room. Robert Picardo, who plays the Doctor, said of his character: "The doctor, his greatest strength, is also his greatest weakness." We'll find out what that means in March.

Shatner and Stiller

The second half of the panel was the 60th-anniversary conversation. Bleeding Cool reports that Ben Stiller and William Shatner talked through behind-the-scenes moments and stories from some of Kirk's most iconic scenes. The segment ended with Stiller surprising Shatner by revealing the original Gorn head from his own memorabilia collection. That confirms a detail we flagged earlier as a single-outlet report: the Gorn head did turn up. Bleeding Cool's write-up doesn't describe Shatner's reaction or give specific anecdotes, so the best account of the hour will be the full video, which TrekMovie posted.

Why this matters

Starfleet Academy was cancelled less than two weeks after its first season finale, which Screen Rant notes left the story unfinished. The show was planned as a four-year series. Fitting the story into a final season is a real task for the writers.

Having Nighy play a Lanthanite father gives the show something Trek does very well: a family argument with galactic consequences, in the tradition of Sarek and Spock, or Worf and Mogh. If Season 2 is going to wrap up the Academy story, it needs the personal stakes to land alongside the politics, and a parent who left is as good a place to start as any.

Make it so.

Live long and prosper.

Sources: Screen Rant, Collider, TVLine, Trek Central, Yahoo, Bleeding Cool.