Spoilers Star Trek Academy [spoiler thread]

[Willie the Duck]

Question -- how many cadets are there at the Academy? It seems like there's about a dozen? Not enough to fill one department on one starship, let alone a fleet. I assume there was some sort of training program in place beforehand, otherwise who would be crewing all the current Starfleet ships? Was that the War College?

Then again, maybe it's the Strange New Worlds extras cost problem which made it seem like there were only about 10 people on the Enterprise. Maybe there are hundreds of cadets, but we only see a dozen of them?

I generally assume it is cost of people and/or space when such things happen.

Schools and sporting events and parades are a problem, in that you want a whole bunch of extras just doing/being in the background. If you can have individual classes and only see a brief hallway scene of massively multiple classrooms worth of people moving about (one shot for a whole season, or maybe you can green-screen and layer the same people in different outfits or the like), that helps a lot. Star Wars stumbled upon a great shortcut when they had stormtroopers standing in formation be something you could paint onto a scene and then just include the moving ones as real people. Star Trek always was better with locations than people, in that they could afford a matt painting of Planet XYZ or building ABC, but not 200 extras, a place to shoot them in, and a choreography team to make it look natural.

 

[Aeson]

I wonder if the whale's name was Gracie, in addition to being pregnant?

I said in my best worst Scotty "Captain, there be whales here" then when the girl said the whale was pregnant, I said just like Gracie.

 

[Aeson]

I'm enjoying the show. Tig Notaro and Gina Yashere are a cute couple. Is the one war cadet half Vulcan half Klingon? It looked like a male Vulcan too. I'm surprised he went along with the pranks. Maybe he's a student of Sybok. Holly Hunter will never sit in a chair normally on this show. I think they're going for more humor with this series. It doesn't seem out of place to me. Strange New World, the humor sometimes seemed awkward and out of place. I'm not sure why. Not as cringy as the humor in Star Trek IV, though. Paul Giamatti was great. That was a textbook example of chewing the scenery. When done correctly, it's fantastic. Prank wars between schools is a classic trope.