I find I have a need to be trivial today. Because otherwise I’m going to be thinking about how truths we hold self-evident, may not be.

Such as — because this is far more important than anything actually happening in the world — I hold it sacrosanct that you cannot review a film without having seen it. Consequently the news this week that one particular film is being horribly review-bombed by people before it has even been released, this is unquestionably a bad, bad thing.

And yet I question that attitude of mine. Because the film is “Melania.”

It is as certain as can be that this film is shite altogether. But I could be wrong, but I’m not.

I’m minded, too, of how it is obviously wrong, unquestionably wrong, it is a wrong darker than death or night, to ever thinking anyone’s death is anything other than an appalling loss.

Yet out of 8.3 billion people on Earth right now, there are one or two politicians I find I’d be okay about. I’d get over it somehow. Probably quite quickly.

Trivia. Give me trivia. I noticed just then that I wrote about wrongs darker than death or night and you gave me a funny look. Quite right too. But it’s the title of an episode of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” and I’ve just read 880 scripts from that show.

This is mathematically interesting since there are only 176. But I read them all over Christmas, I read the lot back in 2023, definitely also in 2019, and unquestionably some time in the late 1990s too. I may have slipped in one more reading of the whole set, I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t bet my own money against my reading them all again, either.

I read them because they are good. It is that simple. Where “Star Trek: The Next Generation” is oddly a chore on the page, DS9 is like reading a novel. I get to the end and I am sad to leave it all behind me. Every time.

But there is also possibly a writing lesson or ten thousand of them in that set of scripts. Good and bad. (There’s one episode of which the writers have said publicly “What were we thinking?”)

And there are episodes I dislike. It’s still fascinating to read a complete set of scripts, for any show, as you see it find its feet, build and conclude.

Only, since I finished re-re-reading Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the new Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has come out. It’s exciting, it looks fantastic, and Holly Hunter makes a great captain. I defy anyone not to applaud just how she sits in the captain’s chair.

But I think the show has a couple of systemic problems that I’m longing to see them overcome them.

One is a little related to Deep Space Nine. It’s rather forgotten now, but when the show started, there was a character that the fans hated. Dr Julian Bashir was deeply disliked and I believe the actor was warned that was going to be the case. But the show took its time, let this character develop, and by the end Dr Bashir was up there in fans’ minds with all the other doctors on these treks.

Whereas Starfleet Academy’s first episode featured a dislikable character, but they made him brave and willing to risk his life by the end of the pilot. They made a woman character clearly fall for the bad boy and rescue him in every sense.

It seemed they couldn’t leave him as dislikable, he had to be redeemed immediately. Only, in Starfleet Academy’s second episode, he was right back to what he had been. The character had a reset switch by the end of the pilot.

Now, you should always watch more than the first episode of anything because the second one can be radically different. The show is bedding in, the writers are finding what’s working, all of the launch pressures are gone, the difficulties of telling a great one-off story that also sets us off on a whole series, that’s done.

So maybe this character won’t flip/flop so blatantly every time, maybe they’ve set on a course for him for the season.

I’m not trying to be coy hiding the names of these characters. I am blanking on just about every character’s name, though doubtlessly that says more about me than the show.

But then there is this, which I struggle to see how they will work on.

Follow: Starfleet Academy is focused on young, roughly university-age kids, going to this place to learn how to be your Captains Kirk, Janeway, Picard and the like. They’re going there to learn how to be heroes.

They are being taught by heroes. Their teachers are Starfleet officers, they are exactly the people these young students want to be. They are precisely the people these young students are learning to be, who they are aspiring to be.

But because the show is about the younger characters, the younger characters have to win. In any crisis, they must be the ones to save the day. It is contractual to the format.

So these kids act like they are already full-on adult Starfleet officers, they take charge and they constantly outshine the characters they are learning from.

So you watch this and inescapably wonder what in the hell they are doing still at Starfleet Academy? True, we get the odd very forced teenage throwing-glance-at-the-ceiling or giving each other the finger, and there you do think they are children.

But I don’t know why they are there, I don’t know what they are expected to learn. I don’t understand why any of the adult characters don’t have better things to do than stand around this academy pretty pointlessly.

I am certain this will be fixed. No question, the writers on this show are better than I’ll ever be. But until it is, I am constantly being thrown out of the story.

And that is one sacrosanct thing I will never let go of. It is so hard to get anyone into your story that electing to thrown them out is a heinous mistake.

I’m not the audience for Starfleet Academy and I am more than fine with that. It is brilliant that the franchise is trying new things, exploring new directions. Deep Space Nine was slammed for being different to the prior Star Trek series, but that difference made all the difference.

I love Deep Space Nine. The fictional space station in it feels like home. Equally, there will be those who love Starfleet Academy and it is nothing short of fantastic when a show gets into people.

Yet in every other example I can think of where there are strata of younger and older characters, the very first thing that happens is that the two are separated. The children are always left alone to solve whatever the drama is, because otherwise the adults should fix everything.

The adults don’t get to do that here. But hopefully Starfleet Academy will have a long run in which to sort it out.