Holly Hunter And ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ Cast Talk Technobabble
by Erik Amaya
While Star Trek is a venerable storytelling platform inviting the likes of Avery Brooks, Christopher Plummer, and other classically trained actors to play in the 23rd-32nd centuries, it features one peculiarity that can be daunting: technobabble. The scientifically-minded lexicon is full of terms that have infiltrated the culture — such as “shields up” and “warp core breach” — but for an actor, learning what a tachyon pulse means and how it can counteract a subspace string can be quite a challenge.
Last week, our own editor-in-chief, Erik Amaya, and other members of the Television Critics Association sat down to talk Star Trek: Starfleet Academy with members of the cast. Set in the 32nd century, it centers on the first class of academy recruits in over 100 years and the faculty assembled to teach them the principles of the Federation. Chief among that later group is Captain Nahla Ake, played by Holly Hunter, who admitted learning the Trek speak was like attending an academy all its own.
“The vocabulary in the bridge was something that, yeah, I had to ask, ‘what does that mean? How do I pronounce that?’ Hunter admitted. Besides Ake’s role as chancellor of the academy, she is also the captain of the U.S.S. Athena, a “teaching hospital” that is both berthed at the academy’s San Fransisco campus and free to travel the galaxy as an active duty Starfleet vessel. The purpose, within the series, is to give cadets practical experience in space. It also means Hunter and the veteran members of the cast have the chance to do traditional Star Trek scenes. Of course, that leads to learning the words and figuring out how to sound natural with them.
“I got somebody to help me memorize the lines and I just like drilled them in my head repeatedly,” Hunter continued. “Sometimes even I would write them on the ceiling. I might write them on the ceiling of my bedroom so that I would see the writing on the wall when it’s time to have breakfast.”
She credited drilling as a good way to get comfortable with the technobabble and that “the repeated scenes back on the bridge get more and more comfortable” as shooting went on.
For Star Trek: Voyager‘s Robert Picardo, whose fan-favorite Emergency Medical Hologram known as The Doctor returns for Starfleet Academy, the difference was less in the technobabble and more in the way the current Trek shows use modern language and idioms. “The new Star Treks are in contemporary language. In Voyager … we spoke in ‘mid-galactic speech’, you know, it was nowhere in time,” the actor said. As any watcher of the 1990s Trek shows know, those series had a particular sound and meter that removed it from then-current mode of speech featured in, say, Law & Order. “And now we speak in contemporary speech. It was a shock at first. I mean, they went nuts on the Internet that I said that would be ‘super helpful.'”
Nevertheless, Picardo embraced the change to The Doctor’s way of speaking. “In 800 years, The Doctor may have changed a little. And also, he now is teaching cadets, so he has to speak in their language. The adjustment came easily because there’s a reason for it,” he explained.
Gina Yashere, who plays the half-Klingon/half-Jem’Hadar academy cadet master Lura Thok, said her background made some of the technobabble easier to approach. “I’m from an engineering background and I used to build elevators for a living. I worked for Otis. And so I’m used to electrical, electronic speech,” she revealed. Although, like Hunter, it did take some drilling and memorization techniques to get comfortable with the more esoteric elements of Trek‘s lingo. “I had to learn some of this stuff phonetically and just memorize it that way,” she admitted. “That’s the best part of Star Trek. That and the ships being attacked.”
So while the show features a younger cast to appeal to a younger audience, the older Trekkies will find the tech talk and the spaceship battles as familiar as a cup of earl grey fresh from the replicator. Although, Picardo said there is one other difference from the old days: “In Voyager, there were no zippers in the 24th century, [on Starfleet Academy] zippers are back! I don’t know why, but they’re back.”
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy debuts this Thursday with two episodes. Subsequent episodes will debut on Paramount+ once a week through March.
