Star Trek: Prodigy - Season 1 Review, Part 1

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about the first three episodes of the first ever 3D animated Star Trek series, Star Trek: Prodigy! Well, maybe they're actually just two episodes, as it starts off with a double length story. Either way, what you're getting here is:

• 1-01 - Lost and Found (1)
  
• 1-02 - Lost and Found (2)
• 1-03 - Starstruck

Star Trek is far from the first sci-fi franchise to get a kiddified animated spin-off (RoboCop got two of them!), though Prodigy seems to be more of a Star Wars: The Clone Wars than a Stargate: Infinity, as it's apparently considered to be in-continuity. That means if they blow up someone's homeworld in it, it has to be blown up in all the serious grown-up live-action series too, that's just how it works. Prodigy's also far from the first Trek cartoon, though it does something the other series have been avoiding until now: it stars a crew of literal children. This is a very different approach to the one Star Trek: The Animated Series took, as the series deliberately avoided putting kids on the ship, trusting that young viewers would be able to latch onto the adult heroes just fine. I have to admit, it's not exactly filling me with hope and enthusiasm, but I'm trying to keep an open mind.

Okay, there'll be SPOILERS here for the two/three episodes and probably some earlier Trek series as well (like Discovery), but I'm going to act like I don't know a thing about what happens next. Because I actually wrote these reviews right after watching the episodes for the first time and I genuinely had no clue where it was going.

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Note: I rate episodes on a 1-9 scale, with 5 being where my attention starts to fail.

Star Trek: Prodigy - Season 1
1-01	Lost and Found		6
Episode: 001 | Writer: Kevin & Dan Hageman | Director: Ben Hibon | Air Date: 28-Oct-2021  A group of teenagers find a spaceship in a prison camp and use it to escape. Look, they've actually given me an episode title to screencap, it's amazing! Right now the animated series all show the episode titles and the live-action series don't, I guess because they're too prestigious and serious to taint their stories with this kind of nonsense.  Other than that, Prodigy seems to be the opposite of Lower Decks, which in many ways is the most Star Trek of the current series. Lower Decks feels like it's made by people who've seen every episode of Next Gen seven times (especially the bad ones), own a worn out copy of the Technical Manual, and know all the SNL skits by heart. This, on the other hand, could've just have well been called Star Wars: Prodigy or Farscape: Prodigy, as it's deliberately disconnected from almost everything in Trek and whenever anything familiar does show up it's been reimagined a little. But it seems like the plan is to slowly introduce more Star Trek into it over time, to give younger viewers a taste of what the franchise is about in each story without taking it for granted that they'll care about any of it. So Lost and Found's been given the job of introducing the USS Protostar and showcasing why Starfleet vessels are awesome. This particular Starfleet vessel is awesome because it can fly around like the Millennium Falcon and go pew pew pew! I mean, I'm sold! I already thought the Protostar looked pretty after seeing glimpses of it in screencaps and trailers, but now that I've seen it in action I love the thing. It was great seeing those proper phaser beams in action, and Dal standing on the hull, hiding under the shields! Plus I didn't know I needed to see a shot of a Starfleet ship flying through a waterfall, but it turns out I did. The design of it seems like a cross between Voyager and the Enterprise E, with a hint of the Kelvin Universe Enterprise in its warp nacelles, and that's exactly what it should look like really I reckon. It seems a bit on the small side, closer to the Defiant than Voyager, but that makes sense for the small crew. That bridge looks like it's from Star Trek Online though, as it's bloody huge! The massive window is very atypical for Trek, but hey Starfleet's all about infinite diversity in infinite combinations... or maybe that was just the Vulcans. Either way I liked all the shots of the crew looking at Dal standing outside, and I can appreciate how it takes advantage of the series being animated to give it a design that would be too expensive on the live-action series. The episode also had other things to set up besides the ship, like the premise, and the characters. I have to admit I'm still at the point where I have to keep looking up what the characters are called, but it took me a season to learn who Rhys, Bryce, Owosekun and Detmer were on Discovery so I'm not considering that to be a massive flaw. Also Dal's the only one of them who's really annoying, aside from maybe Jankom Pog, so that's cool. Dal is a smart-ass protagonist who doesn't know when to shut up or when to quit, so he's pretty much what you'd expect from a series like this and I'm sure he'll grow on me. I did like how he tried to launch a truck into the vacuum of space and planned to figure out what to do next when he got there, mostly because the episode's well aware of how astoundingly dumb that was. I'm less keen on how he survived the fall afterwards though. I mean I'm glad he's still alive, but I don't want things to get too cartoony. We are still in the Star Trek universe here. I'm not sure what I think about Jankom Pog yet. This is the first time we've ever gotten a Tellarite main character on a Star Trek series, and it's a bit weird that he looks like a Talaxian instead. It's also the first time we've gotten a Medusan in the main cast! Zero's a swirling cloud of madness and they might also be my favourite character so far, thanks to their slightly sarcastic attitude. I'm less keen on Rok-Tahk, mostly because she basically switched personality after the reveal that she's a young girl. There's a bit of a message there about not judging a person on their appearance, but the episode didn't really play fair. It didn't get preachy either though, which I appreciate. Plus they've got their own Yaphit too, so The Orville doesn't have a monopoly on blob aliens anymore. It was a nice gag when they brought Murf to the translator expecting him to be able to talk, and I liked how they basically just kept him as a pet afterwards. Finally there's Gwyn, who's kind of been kidnapped. She's on the poster though so I'm sure she'll forgive them. As long as they can forgive her for being the daughter of the man who imprisoned them on an asteroid. It's kind of weird though that the episode spent time introducing the cute Caitian kid as well, and then leaves them stuck in a labour camp at the end! I mean that's an extremely Voyager thing to happen (they did the same thing in the episode Faces), but c'mon. Also this episode has kind of dark themes for a kids show... which probably means they're doing something right. I think they need to work on their action sequences though. Sometimes everything works and it looks great. Other times it's like there's a scene missing. Like their escape from the security droids. They run into the ship with seven million laser blasts in the air and an army of Mass Effect-looking drones right on their heels... and it just cuts to them safely on the bridge. Whuh? They must have gotten that door closed behind them really quick. I know I haven't said much about the plot so far, and that might be because there isn't much of it here. The synopsis is the story. A group of teenagers find a spaceship in a prison camp and use it to escape - that's the whole episode. It doesn't really give much hint on what the actual series is going to be about. Though Holo Janeway appearing at the very end makes it seem like they're going to be learning how Starfleet does things and how to find a moral way to get the job done. Hopefully they'll do better than the USS Valiant cadets did in Deep Space Nine. In fact I came away from this with a lot of unanswered questions. How did a Kazon, a Tellarite, a Medusan and a Federation starship end up in the same place? What happened to the original crew of the Protostar? Why was it buried in an asteroid? The Diviner said he'd been digging for it for years, so how long has the ship been there? In fact I've I just thought of another question: how the hell did he not find the ship himself? It was right there behind a waterfall! Overall I'm not sure what to think about the series yet. The episode was basically a 3D animated kids movie with fantastic production values and animation; fun but not particularly deep. It seems like it's going to be more childish than The Clone Wars, Rebels or The Bad Batch perhaps. But maybe it's something I could get into over time.
1-03	Starstruck		7
Episode: 003 | Writer: Chad Quandt | Director: Alan Wan | Air Date: 04-Nov-2021 Dal sends the Protostar flying towards an actual star after ignoring Holo Janeway's suggestions. Then he manages to flush all their escape pods, release their prisoner and shut Janeway off. He eventually admits he needs help and Janeway tells them how to escape certain death. Meanwhile Rok-Tahk recaptures Gwyn after a fight inside a shuttle that was being constructed around them and Murf tries to eat the captain's chair. Also Gwyn's evil dad finds the Protostar's warp trail and begins his pursuit. I've known for years that the Federation is spread out over the Alpha Quadrant and Beta Quadrant, but I'm not sure where this information came from. It's not something that's really mentioned in the series, as Voyager's always trying to get back to the Alpha Quadrant specifically and in DS9 people are always talking about conquering the Alpha Quadrant. But here Janeway actually mentioned in dialogue that the Federation covers two quadrants, as this episode teaches the kids (and new viewers) what the Federation actually is. In fact we get a much better explanation than we got back in Star Trek 09, which gives me hope that these writers really get what Star Trek's about. We also get lots of scruffy holographic sketches of the hero ships from other series, like the USS Discovery - the ship that [REDACTED] and then blew up. No USS Cerritos, but then it would've been kind of weird if it had been included seeing as the California-class ships get no respect. Also don't think I didn't notice Holo Janeway putting her own ship there among the legendary starships of Starfleet history. The mysteries get deeper here for long time fans though, as a Tellarite not knowing about the Federation is like a New Yorker not knowing about America. Did Jankom Pog come to the Delta Quadrant on the Protostar when he was too young to remember where he came from? I liked how Dal's reaction to hearing about the Federation is that it's obviously too good to be true. Of course someone like him would be suspicious about them, and even if he did 100% buy into the hype (that Trek fans know is legit), he's well aware that even the most enlightened and benevolent civilization would take the ship away from them immediately. Which raises the question of where they should go instead. Like the pilot episode this is definitely a Dal story, but here we get a different side of him. The first episode showed how he's a daring, resourceful maverick, like James Kirk (Kelvin edition), Michael Burnham and Becket Mariner. He earned his spot as the protagonist by pushing the others into action and coming up with the plans. But now that Dal's seized power (and the cosy captain's quarters) he's determined to hold onto it and unlike Kirk, Burnham and Mariner, he has no idea what he's doing. In fact the episode does a surprisingly good job of showing what would happen if a group of untrained teenagers got hold of a spaceship. First thing he does is send them straight towards a star, then he redirects power from the shields and ejects all their escape pods and supplies! I assumed the series would kind of gloss over how they shouldn't be running a ship without training, but nope, it went the other way and hammered home how out of their depth they are. I mean holy crap do they fuck up here. But we get hints at how tragic their lives have been so far as well, with Rok-Tahk requesting prison food from the replicator because she's never eaten anything else. The episode did a good job of making me root for them to pull it together. The episode also introduces Holo Janeway and establishes her role on the crew, making it clear that she's not Captain Janeway and she's not going to bail them out if they're in life-threatening danger. I don't know why her hologram was designed that way, but hey it works better for drama. Plus I like this version of the character, who's there on the ship to encourage, inform, assist, drink huge mugs of holo-coffee, but not interfere. It's a bit weird how she accepts they're Starfleet cadets... in the Delta Quadrant, but then it's possible she knows more than she's letting on. There's definitely more going on with the Protostar than we're aware of, as it turns out the ship has two warp cores and a bonus device in engineering. Not a spore drive, thankfully, but maybe something that could get them to the Federation in less than 70 years. I think I liked this episode, maybe even more than the first one. The crew's already got a fun dynamic going, it's taking its premise fairly seriously, and the effects are beautiful. Plus there was a fight inside a shuttle while it was being replicated! I wonder if Voyager had one of those vehicle replicators installed as well; it would explain so much. It's still not clear where the series is going next, but there's no way the writers didn't know exactly what they were doing when they put a shot of the Caitian kitten in mining gear at the end of the episode. At some point the Protostar's coming back to save that cat, that's just inevitable now. • IMPORTANT OBSERVATION Zero seriously needs to stay out of other people's brains until they've gotten their permission! I know Deanna Troi reads people without consent all the time, but at least she's only sensing emotions.

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NEXT TIME

Star Trek: Prodigy will return in a month or so, but next on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the first four episodes of Star Trek: Discovery season 4!

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