Some Blundering About Star Trek Prodigy 1×03: Starstruck

(There is no episode 2 of Prodigy. Episode 1 was a double-wide.)

Two weeks in and… I mean, it’s okay. Still don’t think this is going to be my bag, but the kids are still pretty psyched, except that Evelyn didn’t like the brief fight scene between Rokh and Gwynn.

We get some good hinting at the underlying mythos: Protostar is, for reasons not yet disclosed, massively overpowered, with two warp cores, along with a mysterious third engine whose nature has not been disclosed. It’s pretty obvious that this is what makes it so attractive to The Diviner. Janeway also leads off with the assumption that the Protostar’s nominal mission is to return to the Alpha Quadrant. Maybe it’s just because she’s a hologram and her programming is narrow in scope, but the general sense I get of it is that “This ship will be in the Delta quadrant, crewed by cadets, on a mission to return home,” is the specific use case this ship was designed for. (They still haven’t explicitly said this actually is the Delta quadrant, but at this point it really might just as well be).

There’s a pretty obvious interpretation at this point. I’m not really sold on it, because there’s some parts of it that seem, y’know, incredibly stupid, so I’m hoping this is either a misdirect or just ambiguity. But as of right now, it seems like what they are leading up to is that by the time of Protostar’s launch, Starfleet had an engine capable of quickly reaching the Delta Quadrant, and they chose to use it to build a training ship, on which cadets could be shipped out to the far side of the galaxy to reenact Voyager’s mission as a training exercise. The big reveal, if this is the case, is that at any time, the gang can tell Janeway that this whole thing has gone terribly wrong, and she’ll power up the third engine and spore jump quantum slipstream coaxial warp transwarp soliton wave wormhole the ship all the way back to the Alpha Quadrant.

As I said, while this is where I feel the evidence is pointing right now, it’s also very hard to swallow, since it requires assuming – particularly if this is indeed 2385 – that Starfleet has not only invented a much-faster-than-warp drive, but has developed it to the point that it can be deployed for the Starfleet equivalent of Naked and Afraid. It’s not entirely outside the realm of probability – as I have said a few times now, we know almost nothing about travel times in the post-TNG-era. It doesn’t appear that La Sirena could travel that fast fifteen years late, at least without transwarp. But then, Riker and his Armada show up what, two days later without it. It is still pretty weird, though. Again, the whole thing could be plausible if it’s closer to the 31st century.

Given that Janeway describes her namesake as “one of Starfleet’s most decorated captains”, it feels like it would be a lot more fitting if Protostar is closer to being the 29th century version of an Eagle Scout project. There’s an air of “Training exercise based on a famous historical event,” about the whole thing. Time will tell. (I will also toss out here the possibility that the show is set in 2380, but Protostar is from the future, and fell through a negative space wedgie. Possibly The Diviner is as well – with a name like that, his shtick could easily be that he and the Protostar are from the future, and he’s been using his knowledge of the future to get ahead while looking for the ship.)

Zero continues to be wonderful, even excited about the novelty of dying horribly. Pog is… Uninteresting this week. Janeway as expected is smug, and, tbh, a little racist depending on how you take her sort of offhandedly referencing Tellarite stereotypes. At least she doesn’t murder anyone or commit genocide. Gwynn is being set up for a redemption arc, and I’m glad that the show isn’t letting her off the hook. She’s done terrible things and she’s allowed terrible things. And it’s not personal – she’s not inclined toward being evil. But she’s loyal to her dad. There’s no instantaneous turn-around where she declares that she’d never have gone along with it if she’d known the truth. No, she acknowledges that she’s done wrong, but still plans to betray the others return to her dad and help him capture the ship. Then there’s Rokh. And it is wonderful seeing her struggle so hard with this sudden experience of freedom. I’m guessing they’re setting her up to betray them at a critical moment – she’s clearly overwhelmed with something as simple as the choice of what to have for dinner. She has some very child-friendly symptoms of PTSD. She’s clearly put out when Dal bosses her around. Someone is going to offer her an “out” at some point, and she’ll be tempted by it.

Which brings us back to Dal. Oh Dal. Fuck, man. Dal is the Wheeler of this show. And not a cool Wheeler like in Yu-gi-Oh. No, I mean Wheeler the kid from Captain Planet. You know: the one who the showmakers assume the audience will identify with, and thus must be a total asshat. Wheeler was cool and sassy and rebellious and white and blonde and male and American and wielded the bad-ass power of fire (Ironically, his power was actually the least cool in practice, because very few of the practical uses for “can summon fire on demand” are amenable to a kid’s show. He could have solved most of the plots by simply immolating the bad guys, but you’re not allowed to do that in a kids’ show), so he was the one the writer’s treated like an actual person rather than an object lesson. In particular, because this is a children’s show, every week somebody is contractually required to fuck up hardcore so that they can learn an important prosocial lesson. And it’s going to be the one that the writers assume the audience is imagining themselves as.

And that brings us to Dal: he’s rebellious, he’s “cool”, he’s male, and… I mean technically he’s not a white boy, but come on. Dude has strong white boy energy. The entitlement, the sass, the disrespect for authority, the arrogance, the hair. (Dal is voiced by a black VA. I don’t want to overlook that. And yet, he’s clearly written in the tradition that traces back through Bandit Keith, Bart Simpson, James Wheeler, Mike Seaver, Eddie Haskell, and Tom Sawyer).

My point is, Dal’s job in this show is to be wrong. He leads off by lying to Janeway that they’re Starfleet cadets (This is clearly coded as Wrong and Bad because it is a Lie, and Dal struggles to justify his behavior to the others. This is just kids’ show morality trumping logic, because, look: she’s the ship’s computer. It would actually be kinda bad if the ship decided they weren’t allowed to be there), claims command, and when Janeway proposes taking them back to the Federation, he freaks out and orders them away.

I hope there’s something to this. Dal doesn’t know where he’s from, that’s part of his backstory. There’s a hint in here that Dal might have some actual reason to be worried about the Federation, and it would be cool if it’s something he doesn’t actually consciously understand – some suppressed memory linked to the Protostar’s backstory. But right now, I kinda think they’re just going for, “He’s being sassy and rebellious and doesn’t want to return the ship to its proper owners.” which is gross and dumb. He goes on to get them nearly destroyed by ignoring Janeway’s advice and flying the ship into a star, then doubling down by resisting Janeway’s help to make additional bad decisions, accidentally releasing Gwynn from the brig by diverting too much power to the engines.

That’s another thing that grates a little – apparently, it’s like one button push to divert so much energy from the ship’s systems that internal security goes down, the shields drop and the life support shuts down, and you don’t even notice you’re doing it. This is poor design. Protostar also has a vehicle replicator, which can build a shuttle in a matter of minutes. That seems rather extravagant, and another hint that Protostar isn’t 2380s technology. But, again, Gwynn is able to replicate a shuttle despite all power being diverted to the engines, and they can’t restore power later, because they can’t turn the replicator off.

But none of this is unforgivable. And it might be more evidence for the wild theory I gave above: they’re building up to a reveal that in the event that the gang gets in really thoroughly over their heads, Protostar can auto-pilot itself back to the Alpha Quadrant – that any danger they’re in is being “permitted” by the ship in the name of education. (This is not sustainable indefinitely of course. If this turns out to be the case, I’d expect the first season finale to find them discovering Protostar’s Easy Button, and either having to sacrifice it to stop The Diviner, or else discovering that it’s broken).

Now that The Diviner is hot on the trail of our heroes, I expect there to be more external conflict starting this week. Hopefully that will soften the kids’ show morality here, because having Dal be the primary driver of conflict in this episode just wasn’t fun.