Star Trek: Prodigy - Season 1 Review, Part 3

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I've reached the halfway point of Star Trek Prodigy's first season! Every other current Star Trek series is getting just 10 episodes a season now but Prodigy is going crazy with massive 20 episode seasons... that are split down the middle, giving us 10 episodes a year. In fact I'm just going to call this its own season and write a little season review thing at the end.

I'll be writing about these three episodes:

• 1-08 - Time Amok
  
• 1-09 - A Moral Star, Part 1
  
• 1-10 - A Moral Star, Part 2
  

There will be SPOILERS here for Prodigy and other Star Trek series, but only up to the point in time these episodes were released. So if you haven't seen anything after episode 10 you've got nothing to worry about here. Not that there is anything after episode 10 right now.

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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
1-08	Time Amok		7
Episode: 008 | Writer: Nikhil S. Jayaram | Director: Olga Ulanova & Sung Shin | Air Date: 20-Jan-2022 The crew's morale is low after how they screwed up first contact last episode and Holo Janeway's attempt to give them a teambuilding exercise in the holodeck backfires. In fact a frustrated Dal finally admits that they're not Starfleet cadets! Meanwhile the Diviner hacks into the ship from thousands of lightyears away and uploads Drednok's schematics into the vehicle replicator. Even worse a tachyon storm interferes with the protocore's containment causing the Protostar to explode! One version of it anyway. Holo Janeway finds that the crew has been scattered across different versions of the ship, with time moving at a different rate for each of them. She helps each of them come up with part of the solution, until she's deleted and it's all up to Rok-Tahk in the slowest timeline to save the day. Which she does! Though we never learn just how long she was alone. We're eight episodes in and now Holo Janeway finally knows that the crew aren't really cadets... but it doesn't really change anything as she's still helping them out the same as ever. The bigger reveal in the episode is that we actually get to see what's on the other side of those giant windows along the edge of the saucer section! It's... some kind of lounge I guess, so pretty much what you'd expect. We also get to see that the protodrive core is exposed to space when the ship transforms, which seems kind of unsafe. I mean someone usually needs to be down in that engineering room to do engineering. The trouble I had with Time Amok is that I was distracted trying to figure out what was actually happening. Holo Janeway describes the rules of this temporal weirdness clearly enough for a scared young kid to understand and I still don't quite get it. Okay as far as I can figure out they're not in a time loop, but the ship is split into several versions that exist simultaneously at different rates of time... kind of. Rok-Tahk's version of the ship is still there despite Jankom Pog's ship exploding, because time is moving slower for her, but it can't be the same ship otherwise she'd see the other characters moving slowly and Holo Janeway wouldn't remember that it had exploded. But she is able to receive the message from Gwyn somehow. And Gwyn inherited Dal's device. And they all remember being blown up at the end, even though they're alive. Man, I really don't get it. My confusion hurt the drama a little for me because when Holo Janeway got deleted I didn't realise that it was a big deal as I figured she'd still exist on another version of the ship. Still, it was dramatic enough when Drednok's replicated copy turned up on the bridge and used Chakotay's access code to make himself at home! That's another hint about what happened to the original crew and it's not an encouraging one. Though it's interesting that the Diviner apparently wasn't the one to classify parts of Holo Janeway's memory. I suppose we'll be finding out what really happened there fairly soon. At least I hope so. I did like that the way they got Drednok onto the ship, confirming that 4000 light years is still a really long distance for people with regular warp drives. Though they say the Diviner's ship will take months instead of years to catch up with them, so it's apparently way way faster than the USS Voyager is. Otherwise Voyager would've ended before season 6. This week's lesson for the crew was about teamwork... despite the fact that it split them up and kept them isolated for the entire story. I thought that was very fitting, as they each contribute to the solution by passing what they've created and learned along to the next person. Except for Murf, he really didn't pull his weight this time. But the surprise star player is Rok-Tahk, who got the bulk of the typical time loop story character development after being trapped alone for an unknown amount of time. Enough to make 276 attempts at fixing Holo Janeway before she figured it out. The fact that Holo Janeway won't tell the others how long she was stuck there makes it seem worse somehow. Still, she's now a far more educated character who's apparently going to be stealing some of Zero's technobabble in future. And she got her hug in the end! • IMPORTANT OBSERVATION The episode takes place on Stardate 607125.6... except not really, as Holo Janeway's temporal settings are messed up. According to an online Stardate calculator, the wrong date would put the series in the year 2930, in the 30th century.
1-09	A Moral Star, Part 1		6
Episode: 009 | Writer: Prodigy writing staff | Director: Ben Hibon | Air Date: 27-Jan-2022 The Diviner uses Replicated Drednok's head to send the crew a message: if they don't return his ship he'll start executing prisoners. So the crew returns to Tars Lamora and gives the Diviner what he wants... including Gwyn. In exchange he opens fire at Tars Lamora, taking out the gravity, then flies away and leaves them to die. He also reprograms Holo Janeway to be on his side. Fortunately Zero is actually Murf in disguise and he's eaten the protocore! The real Zero brings them all jetpacks, all part of the plan, and now they have to save everyone and get their ship back. I was expecting the Drednok clone to be a major threat in this story, but it turns out that he didn't survive Time Amok and now he's just a pile of wreckage. Unfortunately he's wreckage who carried an ultimatum from the Diviner. I wonder what would've happened if the crew had ignored the Diviner's recorded threat though. Would he have gone through with it and murdered all of his own workers even though the Protostar crew would've never known about it and it'd achieve nothing? Here's another question: what was the point of having prisoners mining that asteroid after the Protostar left anyway? Was it mostly just to earn some cash to keep his own ship running? The series made it clear that the Protostar crew would eventually return to Tars Lamora when it reminded us that the Caitian kid had been left behind, but I wasn't expecting they'd be doing it so soon. I mean the title's a bit of a giveaway perhaps, but it didn't seem all that plausible that the crew were ready to pull off... a task. These guys couldn't even get a fox, a chicken, and a bag of grain across a river last episode and now they need to pull off a rescue mission. The kind of mission so daring that it involves giving up their ship and trusting the Diviner to leave them alive. So it's fortunate he did really. They even made sure not to let the audience in on the plan, which is surprisingly canny for them as it means it's almost certainly going to work. Though the downside of them not telling me the plan, is that I never had any idea of what was going wrong and what was just part of their scheme. I was also a bit confused about what the Diviner shot with the Protostar's phasers. I thought he'd hit his old ship at first, but then the gravity for the asteroid shut down. We know the prison doesn't rely on the ship for power because it's flown away before, so he must have shot something else right? I'm sure a rewatch would clear it up. They gave us another evil Janeway in this story and this time she was going with a goth look. Hopefully Holo Janeway's just faking it though, as we did get a mention of upgrades earlier and it'd suck if she was deleted the same way two episodes in a row. Also it was a bit weird that the Diviner's version of Holo Janeway is still wearing a badge, as the Diviner really hates those badges. In fact the episode raises the question of why the Diviner hates Starfleet... and we don't get an answer here. This is very much a part 1. We do learn that Murf can swallow a star, which is a nice trick. Also they can apparently beam a star with the transporter, because they must have gotten it out of Murf and back into containment somehow. It's funny, I've always thought it was a bit strange how much Zero looks like the protostar core and here they hid the core inside a replica of his suit! I wish I could say that I'm hyped to see how things resolve in part 2... but I watched the two episodes back to back before I wrote this so I've already seen it. There was no way I was going to wait after that cliffhanger.  • IMPORTANT OBSERVATION The title A Moral Star is an anagram of the name of the Diviner's prison Tars Lamora. Prodigy likes to be clever with its titles... and I fully endorse this.
1-10	A Moral Star, Part 2		6
Episode: 010 | Writer: Prodigy writing staff | Director: Ben Hibons | Air Date: 03-Feb-2022 Dal finds a way to for all the prisoners to understand each other, allowing them to properly work together. Jankom Pog and Rok-Tahk work to repair the Diviner's ship, with Rok-Tahk taking over the repairs when it's clear she knows more about how to fix it now. The Diviner returns in the Protostar and sends Drednok to recover the protocore, but the robot's overpowered by the prisoners and decapitated by the Caitian kid! Meanwhile the Diviner brings Gwyn to the holodeck to show here the reason he's doing all this: he's from a future where his world tore itself apart after first contact with the Federation, and he wants to destroy Starfleet first with a virus from a trojan starship. The others use the Diviner's ship to punch a hole in the Protostar's shields and Zero beams over to get revenge by driving the Diviner mad. Unfortunately Gwyn is also affected and forgets that the Protostar is a threat to Starfleet. The crew decide to set a course to the Federation... while Admiral Janeway on the USS Dauntless discovers their location and sets a course to come after them! Stuff definitely happened in this episode and it was fun to watch even if I didn't always get exactly what was going on. I was a bit confused by Dal's trick to turn all the manacles into translators for example, because how does that even make sense? Do they have communicators built into them capable of running remotely downloaded universal translator software? It was cool though that they used communication to empower the prisoners to save themselves, especially as it'd been set up all the way back in episode 1. Saving the day by giving people the ability to talk to each other is very Star Trek but I can't remember it ever happening before. I think Prodigy should earn bonus points for that. The series also gets bonus points for the conclusion of the 'rescue the cute little Caitian girl' arc. I was waiting all this time for them to come and save her, and then she shows up to rescue them instead by taking Drednok's head off with her claws! I am suddenly even more scared of Dr T'Ana on Lower Decks. I guess it would be very easy to bring Drednok back after his execution here, he does like to copy himself, but it still surprised me to see him 'killed off' so soon. I also didn't expect Zero to go full Medusan on the Diviner and drive him crazy, and the reflection from the Starfleet badge giving Gwyn a bit of madness too was a nice touch. The final fate of the Diviner is just bizarre though. I can imagine Dal thinking it was a good idea to maroon his nemesis on a dead world (he repeated the first five minutes of The Wrath of Khan over and over in the holodeck back in Kobayashi but he never got to the Khan bit), but the others probably wouldn't go along with it, especially not Holo Janeway. The weird thing though, is that when we see him he's not wearing the suit he needs to keep him alive. That seems like a big clue that all is not as it seems. We finally got some answers from him first, though not the ones I was expecting. I figured we'd learn how he swiped the Protostar from Chakotay, but instead we got his motivation for taking it. Turns out he's a bit like Nero from Star Trek '09: a time traveller out to get revenge on the Federation for the destruction of his world decades from now. Only he's smart enough to realise that while he's in the past he also has a chance to save it. If he was a little smarter he would've realised it'd be much easier to tell Starfleet not to contact his people than it it would be to annihilate them entirely, but I guess he wants wants to be sure. The stakes are kind of high. Unfortunately the episode ends with the crew being completely clueless about the Protostar having a weapon that can destroy Starfleet on it, and it's all Zero's fault! Oops. Though the series has been very good at seeding important concepts for later stories inside earlier ones, and in Time Amok we saw that their time in the holodeck had been recorded. Maybe the important info about the fate of Gwyn's world and the Trojan Protostar is right there in the computer waiting to be played back... carefully. We also got the surprise reveal of Admiral Janeway and the USS Dauntless, which really cements Prodigy's place as a successor to Voyager. It's strange that the series has given her a near duplicate of the original Dauntless though, with the same name, as this means it's a Starfleet ship designed to resemble an alien ship disguised to resemble a Starfleet ship. You'd think they'd change the interiors at bit at least! They did change the outside of it a little though to be fair. Unfortunately they made it ugly. We see the 'someone else designed it but it looks cool so we'll steal it' ethos in the ship's uniforms as well, as Actual Janeway is basically wearing the same thing as the alternate Admiral Janeway from an averted future in the episode Endgame, except with black shoulders. That means that the All Good Things future combadges on display in Kobayashi suddenly make a lot more sense. It's a bit weird that the Protostar crew are back out of their own unique new uniforms by the end, but that's fine with me. I wasn't all that keen on them anyway. Seems that Holo Janeway's keeping her new look though, sadly. I mean the Protostar uniform, not the goth look. Overall this was a solid two-parter that managed to tie up a bunch of stuff much quicker than I expected, and introduced some new complications. There's no way the crew are going to just meet Actual Janeway, hand the ship over and live happily ever after, especially with that anti-Starfleet weapon built into it, so they're going to end up back on the run again. Except this time they're up against another prototype Starfleet vessel commanded by one of the franchise's main captains! They escaped the Diviner's pursuit a few episodes back just by learning what the buttons did, but escaping Janeway is going to require them to step up their game.

CONCLUSION

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We've had Star Trek without a starship, Star Trek without the Alpha Quadrant, Star Trek without the Federation and Star Trek without the captain being the hero, but we've never had Star Trek without Starfleet officers before. There's been a trained, competent crew that believes in the ideals of the Federation right at the core of every Trek series up until now, even Deep Space Nine, Picard and Lower Decks. But Prodigy asks the question: what if a bunch of teenage prisoners from a labour camp got their hands on a Federation ship? (The answer is that they nearly fly it into a star).

When I first heard about the premise years ago it didn't entirely fill me with enthusiasm. Even Star Trek: The Animated Series had the sense to have actual adults pressing the buttons, and that was a series where Kirk saved Lucifer from the Salem witch trials by fighting a wizard battle. Sure I had more hope for it than I do for the upcoming Starfleet Academy series or the upcoming Section 31 series, but it really sounded like they were throwing away plausibility in order to attract younger viewers.

But Holo Janeway is the twist that makes it work I reckon. The first episode feels like it could be from a Star Wars series or a Guardians of the Galaxy series, but once she showed up it became clear that Prodigy is about the characters learning how to be a Starfleet crew and why that's a good thing. In fact it takes the concept of a Starfleet Academy series, but puts the story out in space where all the mind-reading Murder Planets and the time anomalies are, instead of at a school where any exciting life-threatening adventures should result in instructors getting fired.

I was a bit worried that these writers might not really get Star Trek... but then I saw Kobayashi. I am still a little concerned though that they think that putting the Protostar in the Delta Quadrant next to the Beta Quadrant border puts them next to the Federation as well. We're seeing a lot of familiar races and starships here even though they're 30 years away from where Next Gen and DS9 take place. With the conventional warp drives that everyone else is using anyway.

Another concern I had is that Prodigy would be too childish for me to get into. Fortunately it's definitely in the Pixar zone, where it's clearly aimed at children but adults aren't being left out. So far it does feel a bit more childish than series like The Clone Wars and Rebels, but I guess I'm judging them by their later seasons after they'd matured along with their audience. Prodigy has done a decent job so far of integrating classic episodic Star Trek sci-fi dilemmas into a serialised adventure, it's a good start, but I'm eager for the characters to grow up a little and get involved in a more serious plot. I feel like these ten episodes are only a hint of what this series is capable of becoming.

My top three season 1, part 1 episodes:

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1. Kobayashi (8)
2. Starstruck (7)
3. Time Amok (7)

I'm stingy with my scores and I don't hand out as many 8s and 9s as I should, so you should be aware that I'm putting Kobyashi on the same level as The City on the Edge of Forever, The Trouble with Tribbles, Yesterday's Enterprise, Year of Hell etc. It's pretty amazing that Prodigy is putting out episodes this good this early. The internet seems pretty fond of it as well, though people don't seem all that keen on Starstruck weirdly. I thought that episode did a good job of showing the crew at their most inept and giving them a place to start from. And the only reason Time Amok's down at #3 is because I didn't understand it!


Bottom three season 1, part 1 episodes:

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8. Dreamcatcher (6)
9. Terror Firma (6)
10. First Con-tact (4)

The Dreamcatcher/Terror Firma two-parter was okay, it just wasn't as entertaining for me as the Lost and Found and A Moral Star two-parters. First Con-tact, on the other hand, just lost me completely. Starting with an impossible coincidence isn't the best way for an episode to win me over, and by the time they visited the planet I was more interested in drawing sketches on my notepad than whatever was happening on screen.


Next time on Star Trek: Prodigy:

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What do I want from the second half of the season? I want a bigger scope. We've had a strange new world and new life, and now I want to see some new civilisations. And some old ones as well, seeing as their ship's fast enough to go anywhere. I want them to visit planets with people on! Maybe they could even find time for some moral dilemmas as well.

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NEXT EPISODE?

Okay that's enough Star Trek: Prodigy for this year. Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm probably going to be writing about Doctor Who's BBC centenary special The Power of the Doctor! Probably. I will have to watch it first.

Thanks for reading by the way. Comments are extremely welcome.