‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ Season 2 to Premiere March 2027, Bill Nighy and Rosemarie DeWitt to Guest Star
The second season of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy will premiere in March 2027.
The announcement came as part of Paramount+’s Star Trek panel at New York Comic Con on Saturday, which featured a conversation with the series cast and creative team, as well as a Q&A between Star Trek legend William Shatner and Ben Stiller.
Along with the announcement of season two’s release date, the Star Trek: Starfleet Academy portion of Saturday’s panel also revealed that Bill Nighy (Living, About Time) and Rosemarie DeWitt (Untamed, The Staircase) will guest star in the new season. Nighy will play Nahla’s estranged father, Nyk Ake, while DeWitt will portray Tarima’s mother, Laytha Sadal, the first lady of Betazed.
As part of the panel, co-showrunners and executive producers Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau introduced a new clip teasing the second season, alongside series cast members Holly Hunter, Sandro Rosta, Bella Shepard, Karim Diané and Robert Picardo. The second season follows the cadets aboard the USS Athena in their second year, with the group’s ideals around leadership, friendship, romance and morality being tested as they navigate emerging rivalries, diplomatic negotiations and a competitive schoolwide tournament. The arrival of a new and mysterious cadet will also raise questions that could have consequences beyond the classroom.
The panel began with the series co-showrunners acknowledging the attention their show received from the federal government, specifically deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, who derided the Star Trek series and declared, “It’s not too late for @paramountplus to save the franchise. Step 1: Reconcile with @WilliamShatner and give him total creative control.”
“When the White House tweets at you, it’s weird,” Kurtzman quipped. “They’re our favorite fans,” Landau followed up.
It would also close with Shatner and Stiller discussing one of The Original Series’ most recognized episodes, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” which directly explores the illogical nature of racism.
“There are certain Star Trek episodes that are really fabulously written. The episode of the guy, black and white, and the guy, white and black, to show you the stupidity of racial [discrimination],” Shatner said. “The[y’re] science fiction ideas, which are based on truth. By the way, that was so good because that episode blew my mind when I first saw it. They were so against it because he was black on one side, white on the other, and then the other guy.”
“Honestly, one of the best ways to explain how stupid racism is,” added Stiller.
The exclusive look at the first episode of Starfleet Academy season two focused on the cadets’ first away mission, which is interrupted by the arrival of a new character — Keats (Ruaridh Aldington) — who has a very significant part in season two. After crashing onto a planet, within his pod there’s information that the cadets need, so they’re sent down to the planet on a clock for what was supposed to be a test but becomes a real away mission.
While teasing what else is ahead, Kurtzman noted that the Nova Squadron episode of season two was “basically Top Gun in space,” according to the EP. “What’s available to us now technologically allowed us to go to a place that I don’t think we’ve ever gone to on television before. Certainly not in Star Trek. It’s a long major chase in space, which is awesome.”
Hunter also teased that she will portray her character and her twin sister in season two. For Picardo, the season will see “the doctor become a daddy. After 800 years of existence, his future existence is forever changed. Nothing will ever be the same for the character,” the actor said. “Now, did I expect that? Did I think that a character that I played 30 years ago and was recreating in the show [could be] still the same character but is forever changed by this huge event? I want to know all about his relationship with Sam and where Sam ends up in the future… that of course informs all of season two.”
He later revealed that, “The doctor, his greatest strength, is also his greatest weakness. Being a parent, it opens up all this emotional richness. He hasn’t experienced caring that much for a single individual, rather than just caring for the general medical health of whatever crew he’s serving with. But it’s also his greatest weakness because now he has someone that he loves and cares about enough that he is afraid of losing, which you saw hinted at in that seed.”
The cast and EPs reflected on the show’s ending throughout the panel, with Landau noting that “I love the people who, with this glee in their eyes, say, I never thought I was going to be a Star Trek fan, but they finally made a Star Trek for me,” she told the crowd. “All of those people, once they started watching Starfleet Academy, then they went back, and they started watching Deep Space Nine and Voyager and TOS [The Original Series] and Next Gen[eration], and realized Star Trek was always for them. They just needed that doorway into it through Starfleet Academy.”
For Kurtzman, “Star Trek has typically been defined through a somewhat narrow perspective, in the sense that people would say to me you had to be of a certain generation to like it, and I hate that. I think that’s so wrong. For me, it was really important to bring a younger generation to the mix,” added Kurtzman. “I feel like what Starfield Academy was able to do was marry the best of what Star Trek has always been. Obviously, with having people like Bob on the show and the legacy and the heritage of Star Trek, and then actors with the gravitas of Holly and Paul and everybody with these incredible, incredible cadets.”
According to Hunter, the second and final season provided an opportunity to more deeply explore what all the characters mean to each other.
“I say all the time that it’s one of the great joys of being in Star Trek and Star Trek: Starfleet Academy was to work with all these guys. We have had such a blast, and we love to hang out with each other,” the actress continued. “I didn’t really tell them what to do. People were like, ‘Oh, what kind of advice would you give? I really, I didn’t need to. I spent so much time observing them. It was a tremendous honor and learning experience for me to do the show for two seasons, and I just really am excited about the second season because there’s so much more intimacy that we just comfortably felt with each other over those 10 episodes.
As for how Star Trek as a franchise continues, for the Kurtzman, it must keep “finding a way to reinvent itself while also giving you something familiar, and that’s a hard thing to do, but I feel like we did do that.”
During Shatner’s portion of the panel, he once again recalled the original pilot being reshot after the studio, NBC, initially didn’t like it. “It did fail in the beginning. It failed the first time. NBC said we hate it, but [there was] magic to the idea. So they did something that I’ve never heard of before or since, and I’d be interested in seeing whether your experience is any different. And that is, they said we’ll give you another amount of money to make another pilot,” he told Stiller. “They had made a pilot. ‘We hate the pilot. We hate the cast. Recast it. Rewrites. Do something else, and we’ll finance it.’”
The actor said that’s when he was brought on. “That’s when they called me, and they said, ‘We’ve got this piece of film that’s a pilot. Would you come and see it? With the idea of playing the captain, I was in New York, and I flew to Los Angeles. I watched this pilot, and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s magical! What I saw, NBC probably saw, and made a few suggestions. Many other people made other suggestions. We shot another pilot, and it sold and that became Star Trek.”
The panel also featured Shatner recalling memories and sharing jokes about filming iconic episodes and scenes, as well as discussing his other ventures, including the doc The Sixty-Year Mission: How Star Trek Changed Television and the World as well as his heavy metal band The *uckers.
During the panel, Shatner spoke about the late Leonard Nimoy, his passing, their friendship as well as how Nimoy helped Shatner address alcoholism in his own life.
“We had as actors, the divorces and the deaths and the children,” Shatner said. “He had recovered as an alcoholic. He told me that he began drinking because he was so unhappy in his first marriage, and then his wife, after he divorced and married somebody else, said, ‘Well, are you happy now? And he said, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘Well, why are you still drinking?’ And he stopped drinking. I fell in love with somebody who had the same problem, and he tried to advise me, and I didn’t take his advice.”
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