So I hear the first episode of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is available for free on YouTube. I think Samsung Plus is offering it as well. Not that it matters either way because I don’t care. The marketing felt nothing like Star Trek, I don’t care how many voice overs you use from actual characters from better shows. I’ve seen a few reviews and it sounds worse that I was expecting. Actually, some of the backstory reminds me of that failed animated series pitch that also decided to tear the Federation apart by ruining warp travel. I wonder if Paramount ripped itself off. You’re better off reading the comic from the 90s that spun off from Deep Space Nine and showed Nog at the Academy than this garbage.
To see the concept done better, we return to a show I discussed many years ago, Space Academy. This show, one of the few live-action productions by Filmation, also featured a bunch of cadets of a “federation” learning how to become space explorers. As the commander, Lost In Space‘s Jonathan Harris played Campu, a far different role from Doctor Smith. A further Star Trek connection would be that James Doohan played the commander of the Star Command garrison on the same planetoid in the spin-off show Jason Of Star Command, a previous Saturday Night Showcase entry. which serialized adventure of a man with superhuman strength fending off an invasion from outside the galaxy. And a couple of actors playing the kids also menaced the Enterprise in “And A Child Shall Lead Them” from the original Star Trek. Sadly, some of the actors of this show passed away according to Wikipedia (question the source).
Since I already did episode one in a previous Showcase, I’m jumping to episode 5, “There’s No Place Like Home” which shares some ideas with the Starfleet Academy episode according to reviews. Loki is given the chance to find out where he came from. The youngest member of the team, he’s put in a moral quandary when the source of that information has a request in return, to steal an explosive formula that might be more explosive than he knows. It’s up to him and his friends in Blue Team to save the day, but can they? Well, the show has 13 episodes so you can hazard a guess. Enjoy.
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BW’s Saturday Article Link> Evil Has Become Good
In a fictional sense that’s what we’re getting, as the villains of fiction are just given sympathetic backstories anymore. Their tales are being rewritten entirely so that the Wicked Witch, Maleficent, and Cruella DeVille (a name that speaks to her role in the story) are only some of the characters who were actually the heroes all along and the heroes are actually evil. It’s a form of propaganda I haven’t seen since a small group of Transformers fans back in my newsgroup days insisted the Decepticons were the actual heroes and the stories we grew up with were propaganda. Yes, this actually happened and I don’t know how serious…most of them were. One I know was way too serious, but that’s another conversation.
The Literature Devil, usually known for videos and his Morning Nonsense podcast, has started a Substack version of his old The First Edition YouTube channel and for his second article he looks at Maleficent and Elphaba specifically and how their stories compare with a fallen to darkness take on the wicked Queen from Snow White in the retexualized fairy tale series Once Upon A Time. In the article he goes over how you can have a villain fall to darkness and still be the villain while seeing the tragic events that corrupted him or her. There’s a difference between the fallen character and just changing the entire story. Plus, as I’ve gone over before while defending pure evil characters, villains serve a role in the narrative and taking them out of that role ruins the story.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on January 17, 2026 in Television Spotlight, Movie Spotlight, Book Spotlight and tagged Villain, commentary, Maleficent, Wicked Witch Of The West, Wicked, Wicked Queen (Snow White).
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