Well now. I dunno. I’m not sure if this show is for me, but unlike Lower Decks, I won’t say that it not being for me is reflective of a failing in the show. The kids loved it though; this appears to be the Trek that finally got the kids into Star Trek.
The first thing I’ll say about Prodigy is that it feels much more Star Wars than it does Star Trek. I’m not quite sure how to explain that in detail, but this seems to draw much more from the tradition of The Clone Wars and Rebels than Discovery or Lower Decks. Also, there’s the extent to which Dredlok is very obviously General Grevious.
We’ve got some decent character designs. Our “hero” is Dal, a purple teenage from an unknown species who is… Well he’s you’re generic rebellious mouthy teenager archetype that I don’t really need from my Star Trek, but that’s fine. Gwyn is the Evil Overlord’s Beautiful Daughter Who Is Loyal To Dad But Isn’t Sold On The Evil. I know neither of these are exact matches to Star Wars characters, but this feels so much more like a set of Star Wars archetypes than Trek. Things get cooler with Rok-Takh, an adorable giant rock girl with just lovely eyes. And then there’s Murf, the non-verbal amorphous “team pet” who’s… I mean he’s pretty much Gleep from The Herculoids but with a cooler color palate. The neatest design among the regulars is Zero, a Medusan who wears a homemade kit-bashed robot suit that sort of looks like the version of Broke-Down-Animitronic-Punk Mike Wazowski from a hypothetical Disney-Pixar’s Epic Woody. And… why does Pog look like Beebop from the ’89 Ninja Turtles cartoon?
I love the simple joy when Rok and Dal realize they can understand each other. Withholding translators for the first half of the story is done to great effect here. The one plot misstep to my mind is the introduction of Hologram Janeway. She just turns up in the last scene to introduce herself and nothing else. I get that they don’t want her stealing the show from the “proper” characters, and they didn’t want to push her back to the next episode. But I feel like there was a great place to insert her that would make her appearance feel coupled to events rather than bolted on. In the show as written, Murf activates the weapons console by randomly squishing on it, which probably is meant to hint that he’s more intelligent than it seems. But I’m not convinced the payoff is going to be worth the setup here. I think it would’ve been better for them to struggle to find the phaser controls, and then Hologram Janeway appears and just says, “Looks like you’re having some trouble. Would you like to view a tutorial on using the phasers to clear navigational hazards?” while things are too busy and tense for everyone to stop and ask what her deal is.
Now, Protostar itself… Meh. As I’ve said before, the streaming era’s Starship Porn has been a little lacking. Discovery is a weirdly-proportioned ship; La Sirena has a very deliberately “It’s a private cargo hauler, not a Cool Ship” thing going on, and Cerritos is almost deliberately ugly. Protostar is just a sort of generic-looking incarnation of the general Starfleet archetype, like what you’d doodle if you were given the prompt “Draw a Starfleet ship”. The interior decor is the most Kelvin-Timeline we’ve seen in the prime universe… If this is the Prime universe; I guess we can’t actually be sure yet.
That gets us to the big question for me as the season unfolds. According to what’s been released from the showmakers, Prodigy is set in the Delta Quadrant in 2383. That’s a couple of years after Lower Decks and a couple of years before the Romulan supernova, five years after the end of Star Trek: Voyager. This is all hard to square, and if it’s right, I think we need to be expecting Temporal Shennanigans to ensue. Because Gwyn has been on this mining colony her entire life, and the implication is that the Protostar was buried here for at least that long, probably much longer. It’s hard to imagine that within five years of returning to the Alpha quadrant, they built Protostar, sent it all the way out to the Delta Quadrant, lost it, buried it, and The Diviner set up a mining colony to look for it.
Then there’s the fact that we see a bunch of different species here, and of the ones we’ve seen before, only the Kazon are Delta Quadrant natives. There’s a Tellarite, a Medusan, a Caitian and a Lurian – all Alpha Quadrant races. Now, Voyager did occasionally encounter displaced Alpha quadrant refugees on its way home, but Dal is able to make broad, vaguely racist generalizations about Tellarites, which implies to me that they’re a species that is well known in this part of space.
While this is far from certain, it feels like The Diviner has a personal history with the Protostar, some time in the distant past. One plausible explanation is that the Protostar reached the Delta Quadrant via time warp some time in the distant past, and The Diviner has been unnaturally prolonging his life in his quest to find it. Why? Unclear. Some of his dialogue implies that he’s just looking for A Federation Ship in general, but it feels more like it’s this ship in particular. You almost wonder if this is a revamp of the general outline if Star Trek Beyond, and The Diviner is part of Protostar’s original crew, somehow transformed and twisted by Space Weirdness.
But this still doesn’t explain the presence of so many Alpha Quadrant races, and their presence in a context that doesn’t acknowledge the extent to which they shouldn’t be there. The Diviner also speaks of the Federation as something whose existence must be kept hidden from the enslaved workers for fear it might foment rebellion. That doesn’t fit well with the Federation of 2383, whose presence in the Delta Quadrant is effectively nonexistent. My inclination at this point is to assume that Protostar was lost in 2383, but that the series proper is set a long time after that, closer to the time of Discovery far enough in the future that there’s been a significant diaspora of Alpha Quadrant races all over the galaxy, in a place and time where the Federation isn’t unheard of, but is more legendary than real. Obviously, my dream-come-true would be for this to be in the same part of the timeline as Calypso, but I recognize that’s a longshot.
I’ll definitely be back for more next week. It’s interesting to see a Star Trek that feels so utterly not-beholden to the feel of Star Trek, even if I’m not quite sold on why this even should be part of that shared universe and not its own thing.
You’re right that this is a Trek that doesn’t feel like a Trek yet, barring the starship, the name of the Federation, and the presence of Holo-Janeway. Which could be really grand, since there hasn’t been a lot of non-Starfleet Trek in the world yet. It would be interesting to see if this series goes after “what does the Federation and Starfleet and all their ideals look like to people who have no exposure to them at all, rather than from the various perspectives of people who have internalized (most) of those ideals in their day-to-day existence?”
All that bouncing around (and superhuman levels of durability) definitely feels Star Wars to me, not to mention the blatantly non-human character design; sure, live-action SW has always been human-centric simply because actors, but there have always been droids and aliens and things scattered about the place, whereas live ST mostly leaves them out.
Dredlok is clearly Maximilian for those of us who are old enough to remember The Black Hole (and who surely aren’t the target audience).
The indentation/floodlight definitely says “Voyager era” to me, so I guess that’s a good thing?
Protostar… doesn’t feel like a right name for a Starfleet ship. It’s a thing a Starfleet ship might be investigating!
Have to say I’m not inspired. I felt I was being pandered to. Nothing difficult here, nice simple characters, look at the action, oo fun stuff. (But mainstream Trek has certainly been guilty of that too, with less colour.)
(For calibration: I feel vaguely positive towards both ST and SW, but I don’t go out of my way to watch them.)
It feels a bit weird for a ship, but it feels about right for a class of ship (cf Nebula, Nova, Galaxy, etc), and there’s a presumed convention that prototypes carry the name of the class.
Yeah, I guess.
Chatting about it with some friends this evening[UK], I think a reason for keeping going is that this isn’t the 1980s TV I grew up on – it is properly serial, and characters can actually change and grow. So yeah Dal is annoying now but that doesn’t mean he’s still going to be just the same even at the start of the final episode.