Some Blundering About Star Trek: Prodigy 1×05: Terror Firma

Look at me building up a buffer even though it means Imma be a week late talking about Disco all season. Minor spoilers: Yay trans rights, boo the fact that mental healthcare doesn’t appear to have made significant advancement in a thousand years.

Well that was rather more than I expected.

There’s certainly something to be said for modern television in that even a largely disposible kids’ show like this can actually Get On With It five episodes in. Going in knowing that this is the last episode before the mid-season hiatus, I expected us to end on some sort of transformative equilibrium. Not an outright cliffhanger – it seems like in the era of binge-watching, the genre fiction public has largely lost its patience for “Now wait six-to-twelve weeks to find out how the heroes escape certain death,” structures – but something that establishes a new status quo and leaves us with six-to-twelve weeks to instead contemplate what this new state of affairs will mean. But I wasn’t expecting them to do all of the transformative equilibria. I expected them to recover the Protostar and get off the planet. But I didn’t expect them to recover the Protostar and get off the planet and confront The Diviner and have Gwynn’s face-turn and discover the mysterious secret of the Protostar’s third engine. We’re resolving plot threads faster than we’re asking them, which is unusual for a show of modern complexity, even a kids’ show. What we’re really left with is just, “What’s the Diviner’s deal?” and “Where is Dal from?”, neither of which is a mystery the show has spent much effort actually investing me in. (We don’t even really have “Will our plucky heroes escape?” as a mystery at the moment, since they have escaped; it seems pretty stable at the moment that the Protostar has fucked right off well out of The Diviner’s range for the moment; when we pick up, there’s going to need to be some new inciting event to justify this not simply being the end of the story. I assume everyone-but-Dal is going to insist that they need to go back and liberate the Diviner’s labor camp).

So yeah, the big secret of the Protostar is… A protostar. Not every day that “exactly what it says on the tin” is quite this literal. This is a weird thing to put in your training ship, to be sure, and quite possibly we’re still playing into my notion that the ship was intended to strand cadets in the wilderness, but with a secret “easy button” to bail them out in an emergency. Interesting that Janeway doesn’t seem fully aware of it, since she’s surprised that its containment field is using up so much power. You might be about to object to the idea of powering a ship with a small star that needs to be contained with a force field that uses much of the output of a traditional power plant. But it’s Star Trek. The ships already run on antimatter and have a tendency to explode dramatically when pierced. I find it especially interesting that the Diviner refers to it as, “My salvation.” It’s got me speculating – heck, when he’s mentioned the Protostar by name, was he actually talking about the ship, or the star? They’re clearly setting him up as a tragic villain in some regard – major kudos for his clear agony and reluctance when he’s forced to choose between saving Gwynn and claiming the ship. We know him and Gwynn are the last of their people. I’d been assuming that the Protostar’s secret was simply a faster-than-warp engine and he wanted it to go home. But now, the obvious reveal here is that he’s from a dead star system and a portable baby star is his only chance to restore his homeworld. There was a moment there when I thought the episode might end on a cliffhanger with him getting control of the Protostar – I somehow didn’t see it coming that the Protostar was what the murderplanet would show him as an enticement. Touche, Prodigy. Well played.

Pog mentions the sleeper ship again, and this time we see a crashed Klingon ship. Not only the ship, but Klingons are known well enough that Dal and Gwynn can muse darkly on their chance of survival where even Klingon warriors had failed, which seems like still more evidence that the Delta Quadrant isn’t as far away as it used to be. I mentioned the lack of transporters before, but The Diviner has one, so I guess they’re not going for surprise. Janeway never offers to beam them up, and they have to retrieve Gwynn by hand, so I’m not sure what the deal is. I suppose if it turns out that the Protostar is a burn-era ship (And a minimalist one at that), it might not have its own transporters, on the expectation that the crew would be carrying their own personal transporters. The baby star aside, Protostar doesn’t feature a lot of the hallmarks of far-future Starfleet – no detached nacelles; no morphing phasers; discrete communicators and tricorders rather than tricomm badges. But its transformation is a bit closer to the “morphing” on Book’s ship than to Voyager’s variable geometry, and there’s several hundred years of Starfleet history unaccounted for.

Speaking of, at the risk of reading too much into things, Holojaneway again refers to her namesake in a way that feels like she’s referencing a historical character. Small missed trick that when she asks, “What would the real Janeway do?”, she doesn’t follow it up with, “But there’s no Tuvix here for me to kill…” It’s interesting that she seems to be far more autonomous and far more human in her thought processes than most of the holographic characters we’ve met in the past few years, and that she clearly thinks of herself as a distinct individual from the real Janeway – and yet, she also refers to herself as a “former captain” when talking to the computer. I also liked the problem solving she showcases for the target audience in working around her limitations to leverage the cleaning system since she isn’t permitted to operate the weapons.

You also see the kids’ show heritage as Dal similarly showcases problem-solving in his sudden discovery of celestial navigation, but why did this have to fall to him instead of Zero? The whole thing for Medusans is that they’re inherently good at navigation. Zero started off in a great place back in episode 1 being sort of charmingly inexperienced but hypercompetent. But halfway through that first episode, the “but he’s very, very green,” outstripped the, “he’s incredibly intelligent and his nature as an energy being gives him unique insight,” and it really just never looked back. Also, I think it would be nice if Zero gave us a little gallows humor. Y’know, Pog shouts, “Oh no, we’re all going to die!” and Zero echoes, “Oh no, you‘re all going to die. I’ll be okay. Non-corporeal.”

So I guess we’ll see where they go from here. If the show just ended on this, it would be a certain amount of closure. The gang has made peace with each other, escaped the murderplanet, and are beyond the reach of the Diviner. It’s a new stable equilibrium, so we’re really going to need a new inciting incident to get the momentum going again.

But not until 2022.