Review: _Star Trek: Prodigy_

[jducoeur]

I wound up on a whole pile of panels at Arisia (next weekend), and one of them is a "Nu Trek" panel, a retrospective on the five major series of the new era so far: Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds, and Prodigy.

I'd watched all of the rest already (I've always been something of a Trekkie), but not Prodigy. It's a weird little series: produced for Nickolodeon, nominally a kids' show, and (inconveniently) not currently available on Paramount+. But I'm a stubborn completist, and if I'm going to be on that panel, I wanted to be well-informed. So I bit the bullet a few weeks ago, paid for the series via Amazon, and just finished watching it. Let's talk about it.

Summary: considerably better than the "kids' show" label would imply, and much better than I was expecting. Not the absolute best Trek, but far from the worst -- worth watching.

Mild spoilers for the general shape of the series ahead, but I'm going to avoid any big ones, especially for the back half of the story.

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Setting expectations appropriately: this show is CGI-animated 20-odd-minute episodes. Quality is generally good, but not Pixar-grade. As usual, the aliens (most of the cast) are pretty convincing, the humans a little less so. But there's only one nominal human in the main cast, so that doesn't get in the way too badly.

The story starts far off the beaten path, not even in Star Trek's Alpha Quadrant -- far enough that few people have ever even heard of the Federation -- on a mining asteroid made up mainly of slave labor from dozens of different worlds. It is ruled by The Diviner, a mysterious and not-altogether-friendly figure, who is hunting something around the asteroid.

(An interesting and important twist: this isn't the Federation, and they don't have universal translators. The workers can only crudely communicate, which has helped keep them under the Diviner's thumb.)

Dal, an impulsive teen (and more or less the lead of the ensemble cast) accidentally stumbles across that "something": a prototype Federation starship named the Protostar, which has been lodged in the rock for some unknown number of years. He and a group of his fellow workers manage to steal the Protostar and escape, with the Diviner in hot pursuit.

The de facto crew of the Protostar are:

• Dal: a hot-headed daredevil who just sort of decides that he is the Captain. (And spends much of the season discovering that this is much harder and less fun than it looks on the label.)
• Zero: a Medusan who escaped from the Diviner and has been hunted by him for years. This is a deep cut from The Original Series -- Medusans are energy beings, and anyone who looks directly at one is driven mad, so Zero must always wear her homebrew metal pod in order to keep those around her safe.
• Rok-Tahk: big, strong and apparently made of rocks -- imagine Marvel's Thing with the voice of an eight-year-old girl. She immediately gets assigned to be Security Officer, but there's a lot more to her than this.
• Jankom Pog: a short Tellurite, the ship's Engineer, irascible and probably not quite as young as the rest.
• Gwyn: the Diviner's daughter, who stows away aboard the ship, and is by no means a fast friend of the rest. Her story and arc are pretty central to the series.
• Janeway: the ship's holographic training program for new cadets is based on Captain Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager (and yes, played by Kate Mulgrew). They spend a lot of effort early in the series keeping her convinced that they are Starfleet cadets, despite having almost no idea what that means.
• Last but not least, Murf: a friendly, happy slime mold that can alter its shape arbitrarily and is, to a reasonable approximation, indestructible. (It is pretty ambiguous for a long time whether Murf is a crewmate, or the ship's pet.)

The series is built as two half-seasons.

The first half is all about fleeing from the Diviner, learning how the ship works and what this "Starfleet" thing is, and eventually taking control of their lives and dealing with the problem. Over the course of these first ten episodes, this group of strangers slowly figure out how to be both a crew and a found family. It's fairly episodic and predictable, and what you would expect from a good Nick series (eg, Avatar or Korra), but generally well-written and acted.

The back half gets IMO altogether more interesting and fun, as the crew set their sights on going to the Federation and joining Starfleet. They discover the hard way that it is critically important that they not return to the Federation -- but that becomes much harder when the real Vice Admiral Janeway finds out that the Protostar (originally Captained by her friend Chakotay) has been sighted and goes after it.

Things accelerate from there, with the fate of the entire Federation in the balance and the crew of the Protostar at the heart of trying to save it. Suffice it to say, it becomes a really fine roller-coaster ride, and I wound up wrapped up enough that I just binged the final five episodes back-to-back, effectively a tight concluding two-hour movie.

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Overall, it's solidly good Star Trek. Not as good as Strange New Worlds or the second half of Discovery (or of course Lower Decks, perhaps my favorite of all Trek series), but much better than much of Picard or the first half of Discovery. The plot generally makes sense, and while there is some serious Trekkian timey-wimey going on, it's nowhere near as silly as Trek often gets.

Individual episodes hit all the major Trek tropes, and generally do them well -- the first contact that goes horribly wrong, the holodeck episode, the time-travel story, and so on. (There is one gloriously funny episode about a second contact, "All the World's a Stage", showing nicely why getting first contact right is so terribly important.)

While the animation is only good-not-great by current standards, it's good enough, and the writing, direction and acting are all solid. It's very much a coming-of-age story for most of the crew, as they get to know each other and begin to figure out what they want to be. There are some excellent twists and growth experiences (suffice it to say, Rok-Tahk doesn't wind up the Security Officer): in sum, it's what you want from a good YA series.

It's true enough to Trek that I wouldn't show it to small kids -- there are certainly some scary moments -- but I'd say it's probably great for tweens on up. No major content warnings, except that one major character doesn't make it to the end.

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To my surprise, I discovered when I went to write this that there is a season 2 coming: it was mostly in the can before Paramount+ cancelled the series, but Netflix has picked it up for next year, and they've apparently already started streaming season 1 in preparation for that.

That said, it's worth noting that this is a complete one-and-done story unto itself -- while it's easy to see the plot threads that they'll be exploring in season 2 (there are two major open threads, and I suspect they'll follow up both of them), this story comes to a very definitive and final climax, and ends well. So there's no reason to wait for season 2 -- I hope it will be as good as season 1, but it will be a new story with these characters, not the same tale.

So: yeah, worth a watch. Now that (according to JustWatch, at least) it's available on Netflix, I'd recommend it for any Trekkies who have that. It's good middle-of-the-road Trek, requiring relatively little grounding in the previous history of this universe (you learn about the Federation as the kids do, and Janeway is the only major crossover character), so it's even a pretty good introduction to this world.

Solid B+ work -- check it out!