It’s no secret that Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has been the target of a lot of online vitriol. You can’t throw a rock on YouTube without finding a video slamming it as a terrible show that betrays the entire franchise, and those are the kinder ones.
If anyone knows that reaction, it’s Jonathan Frakes. The man who played William Riker on The Next Generation and is now a top Trek director spoke to IGN about the backlash against Academy and made an apt comparison to what he and the rest of the TNG cast endured 40 years ago. Frakes said:
“I was prepared because when Next Gen came out almost 40 years ago, we were trolled. Nobody wanted us. And this was pre-internet. But it’s still dimensionally more painful [today]… and the trolls are hiding, and the trolls are hating. … It's the first rule of the Constitution. I guess they're entitled to their opinion, but it surprises me how aggressively ‘anti’ they are with each new iteration of the show. And it continues to surprise me, and I try not to let it upset me.”
Frakes is perhaps being kind about how TNG was received back in 1987. To many, Star Trek was Kirk, Spock, and the rest, not a crew of strangers. The fact that the first season was pretty rough didn’t help matters.
Many sci-fi magazines of the time had fans (and several writers) slamming the series as awful and an insult to Star Trek. It took a couple of seasons before it finally achieved respect and built its huge fanbase.
That TNG backlash was ridiculous at the time, long before the Internet came around. Today, social media makes it worse, and Frakes is right to call out the haters who consider themselves fans. It’s a good defense and emphasizes why Trek fans need to accept Starfleet Academy more fairly.
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