598: Should You Enroll In Starfleet Academy?
Extra Hot Great: This Week In TV
Extra Hot Great: This Week In TV
4.7 • 640 Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2026
⏱️ 82 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Star Trek universe goes teen drama -- and, for once, does it in the/a future instead of the pre-TOS "past." Since it's a Trek property, Andrew returned to talk about Paul Giamatti feasting on his anachronistic lines, whether the show works better as sci-fi or Space High, and where it ranks in Paramount-era Trek shows. We went Around The Dial with Ponies, Andrew's middlebrow-TV catch-up, and Shining Vale before Tara used up her djinn wishes on a What We Do In The Shadows Canon entry. Profilers won, McConaughey lost, and we prayed for guidance in a religious-network Game Time. Escape from your hidden prison planet and join us!
GUESTS
👤 Andrew Cunningham
TOPICS
Lead Topic: 🧑🏽🏫 Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
Around The Dial: 🕵🏻♀️ Ponies
Around The Dial: 🫱🏻🫲🏽 The Diplomat
Around The Dial: 💪 Invincible
Around The Dial: 🧠 High Potential
Around The Dial: 👻 Shining Vale
The Canon: ⚰️ What We Do In The Shadows S04.E06: The Wedding
Winner & Loser: 🔎 Ann Burgess
Winner & Loser: 🍺 Matthew McConaughey
Game Time: 🙏 Thou Shalt Guess The Title
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NOTES
🗒 Full episode notes can be found on this episode's page on our site
🦋 Andrew Cunningham on Bluesky
📚 Andrew's book-discussion podcast, Overdue
🖖 Alan Sepinwall's review of Starfleet Academy
👔 Tara's Justin Theroux piece for GQ
✊ Minneapolis-St. Paul mutual-aid resources
🦋 Norm Charlatan on Bluesky
💄 Listen To Sassy
📷 Photo: Brooke Palmer / Paramount+
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Time, with its infinite sense of humor, will always fall upon itself like an origami chicken. |
| 0:09.4 | Ha ha, ha, yeah, and this moment, this moment is that chicken. |
| 0:20.7 | This is the Extra Hawk Rate podcast, episode 598 for the week of January 19, 2026. |
| 0:33.1 | I am her suit, Tick-Tat, Toe Board, David T. Cole, And I'm here with Stress hormone Bouncy House, Sarah D. Bunting. |
| 0:41.0 | Red alert. Red alert! Barefoot, Chancellor Tara Arellano. In the future, barefoot is legal. |
| 0:46.8 | And singing hologram, Andrew Cunningham. I'm not actually getting older. I'm just programmed to look that way. |
| 0:56.2 | Welcome to Extra Hot Great for another week. |
| 0:59.6 | We welcome back Sarah. |
| 1:00.9 | Hello, Sarah. |
| 1:01.9 | Hi, Sarah. |
| 1:02.8 | Hello. |
| 1:03.0 | We missed you terribly. |
| 1:05.2 | And, of course, we welcome our special guest. |
| 1:07.5 | He is a writer and a podcaster. |
| 1:08.9 | You have heard with us many times before. |
| 1:11.3 | It's Andrew Cunningham. Welcome back, Andrew. Just every time a Star Trek thing happens, good or bad. |
| 1:17.2 | Here I am. Which will this be? Let's find out. We are in fact here to talk about Star Trek, |
| 1:24.4 | colon Starfleet Academy. It's been several generations since The Burn, |
| 1:29.5 | a multi-galactic catastrophe, the details of which are not important other than that it's a metaphor |
| 1:34.3 | for COVID. Your Star Trek mama so big. When she sits around the house, she really sits around |
| 1:40.3 | the house. Oh, Star Trek bird. Now, as isolationist planets are internally debating opening relations and young people are |
| 1:48.2 | daring to hope for better lives than their parents and grandparents live through, |
... |
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