In the final seven episodes of Star Trek: Prodigy’s first season, our heroes—emboldened by seeing how Starfleet ideals have improved the lives of the Enderprizians in “All the World’s a Stage”—decided to contact Starfleet one way or another, dagnabbit! Their journey to do so starts at the Denaxi Depot on an ice planet in “Crossroads,” which starts them on an odyssey that leads to a rather nasty set of confrontations in the two-part “Supernova” season finale.
SPOILERS FOR THE ENTIRE FIRST SEASON OF STAR TREK: PRODIGY!
That journey is not quite as smooth as one might like—either in-story for the Protostar crew, or plot-wise for the viewers. One of the things I’ve really liked about Prodigy is that I’ve rarely had to say, “Ah, well, it’s a kids’ show, we should make allowances,” because it hasn’t really had to make those allowances.
These final seven episodes have broken that streak, starting with “Crossroads,” which is a comedy of errors that isn’t really that much of a comedy and winds up being the show’s first big error. Dal and the gang have buried Protostar beneath some snow, since it has a weapon that will destroy Starfleet. But also on that planet at the Denaxi Depot (where the kids are trying to find a ship to hire) are Barniss Frex, who wound up there in his escape pod after the outpost went boom in “Asylum,” and the Dauntless, which is looking for Frex.
Our heroes almost get to make contact with Admiral Janeway and the Dauntless crew, but cheap circumstances contrive to keep them from actually telling the Starfleet personnel the truth. It starts with Pog bumping into Doctor Noum, a fellow Tellarite, but Pog is distracted by Noum dismissively calling him a runt (the name “Pog” generally refers to those “short in size and vocabulary”). Then Dal is about to talk to Janeway when the admiral is interrupted by news from Frex. And Gwyn meets Ensign Acensia, but the latter tells her that another of her species is on board; Gwyn is devastated by the news that her father is still alive and on Dauntless. Then, when they dig up Protostar to run away, Murf (who came out of his chrysalis now having limbs) sits on the weapons console and accidentally fires weapons on Dauntless.
All of this combines to keep our heroes from actually talking to Starfleet, with Starfleet viewing them as terrorists, and it’s patently ridiculous. Just one simple conversation would have done the trick, and the fact that it was avoided was purely one stupid writer trick after another to keep the plot mechanics moving.
Almost as bad is “Ghost in the Machine,” which is Yet Another Holodeck Episode, the very thing that this show was not crying out for. Worse, it’s Yet Another Holodeck Malfunction Episode, a type of story that wore out its welcome pretty much from the first time that trope was used in 1988. It has even less appeal here than on the other Trek productions. On the live-action shows, which are limited by budget and location availability, doing a holodeck story enables you to change up the locales and the costumes and such to provide something visually different. But Prodigy has such superb animation and lush visuals all the time that the holodeck is less exciting. Plus the actual story in “Ghost in the Machine” doesn’t really track, as the Janeway hologram is compromised by the living construct—the super-weapon that destroyed the outpost in “Asylum” and is keeping them from even making subspace contact with Starfleet—to keep them busy in the holodeck, even going so far as to disengage the safeties. Besides my usual complaint as to why safeties aren’t hardwired on all holodecks, there’s the fact that this nasty subroutine should just kill the kids, but it doesn’t, because they have plot armor and it’s a kids’ show. Sigh. It also doesn’t help that all the mysteries and clues and such are just not that interesting. Finding out that Zero is a nerd for a good mystery is entertaining and in character, but it’s not enough to hang a whole episode on.
However, other episodes beyond those two clunkers do provide us with a series of revelations that bring a lot of what’s gone before into focus. We start with “Masquerade,” which finally answers the question of who and what Dal is: a genetically engineered mutt. He’s a mix of dozens of different species, and the reason why he doesn’t remember his parents is because he doesn’t have any—he was grown in a lab. Dal is given an implant that allows him the opportunity to access more directly the various abilities of the species he has floating around in his DNA, which proves useful when the kids wind up in a chase with some nasty Romulans, but he abandons the implant by the end of the episode.
Dal isn’t the only one to have that implant, though: Acensia has one, too, and she’s truly another Vau N’Akat like the Diviner and Gwyn. She goes by the Vindicator, and she even has her very own Drednok…
The very next episode provides more revelations, for both the good guys and the bad guys. With the Diviner still amnesiac, the Vindicator has to provide the full Vau N’Akat story, which we only got the first half of in “A Moral Star.” (Amusingly, Jameela Jamil reverts to her natural British accent as the Vindicator, after faking an American accent for Acensia.) The Protostar traveled forward in time through a wormhole and wound up at the Vau N’Akat homeworld, where the crew was either killed or taken prisoner. They put the living construct on the Protostar, but before they could use it, Captain Chakotay and his first officer were able to send their ship very far back in time so the Vau N’Akat couldn’t use it. After that, the Order was created, of which both the Diviner and the Vindicator are two of the hundred who were sent back in time to find the Protostar and finally use it to destroy Starfleet. The temporal confusion of the early episodes, particularly regarding how long the Protostar was buried on Tars Lamora, is finally explained!
Meanwhile, the kids take a break during repairs of the Protostar to tell each other their origin stories. Rok was an arena fighter who was the evil monster who always lost to the noble hero; when she had the temerity to win a fight once and actually get cheered by the crowd, her partner betrayed her and sold her to a Kazon slaver, who sold her to the Diviner. (This explains why she doesn’t like to fight.) Pog was on a Tellarite sleeper ship, got woken up from stasis by mistake, and wound up being stuck fixing everything that was wrong before being forced to abandon ship to save everyone else. (This flashback also provides an amusing reason why Pog always refers to himself in the third person.) Zero was part of a group of Medusans who were exploring the galaxy, but was caught by some Kazon slavers who lay in ambush for them, though Zero was the only one they actually caught. Points to the scripts for providing good backgrounds for all three, and especially to Rylee Alazraqui, Angus Imrie, and even Jason Mantzoukas who provide useful illumination of Rok, Zero, and Pog, respectively. (Mantzoukas is not a favorite of mine—his recurring role of Adrian Pimento is one of my two least favorite aspects of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, a show I adore otherwise.)
The kids make a last-ditch attempt to contact Starfleet without using technology, and that leads to another old standby, though one that’s not as unwelcome as the holodeck one: the body-swap episode! I’m more forgiving of this overused trope because it’s always fun to observe as an acting exercise. With Zero’s help, Dal and Janeway switch bodies, and both Brett Gray and especially Kate Mulgrew absolutely nail it. Gray channels Janeway’s calm compassion, while Mulgrew hilariously embodies Dal’s seat-of-the-pants approach to, well, everything, not always to a good end. There’s simply no way an ex-slave kid who’s lived the crazy-ass life Dal has is going to be able to properly impersonate a vice admiral, and the Dauntless crew wastes no time in putting Janeway in the brig under medical supervision.
This is a problem insofar as Janeway now knows the whole truth from her time in Dal’s skin. The problem is that the admiral has been declared medically unfit for duty, not aided by “Acensia” working against her secretly.
The two-part finale brings everything together, as the Protostar is now facing a fleet of Starfleet vessels, and the Vindicator is able to get the living construct to activate, causing all the ships to fire on each other and lock out the crews from all systems. It also deactivates the universal translators, so they can’t even all talk to each other.
Here, Gwyn gets to save the day, as she speaks multiple languages, and she puts out a call to the Federation’s allies and civilians to come in and help by using their shields to block the weapons fire that is destroying all the unshielded ships. The problem is, more Starfleet ships are also showing up, and they’re immediately compromised by the living construct.
The carnage here is tremendous, and while the show avoids actually showing people dying, there’s absolutely no way this didn’t result in hundreds, if not thousands, of casualties. By the same token, when the Vindicator, the Diviner, and Drednok board Protostar, for some reason our heroes aren’t killed. Drednok neutralizes everyone but Gwyn, who gets into a swordfight with the Vindicator after the latter locks the Diviner in the belowdeck chamber housing the living construct. The Diviner winds up sacrificing his own life to save Gwyn, and the Vindicator and Drednok escape to presumably continue to be antagonists in season two. John Noble, who was criminally (ahem) underused as the bad guy in the back half of the season, will be seriously missed (though I can think of several ways for the character of the Diviner to appear in season two without reversing his sacrifice here), and I’m glad we still have Drednok, as Jimmi Simpson’s quiet menace is very effective.
The gang is able to figure out, in true Trek style, a technobabble solution to the problem: destroy the ship. The problem is the protodrive exploding will cause the equivalent of a supernova, which will wipe out the fleet (and all the allies who’ve shown up to help). But they figure out a way to engage the protodrive while overloading the regular warp drive, spreading the carnage out over several light-years, muting the damage.
Unfortunately, hologram Janeway has to sacrifice herself to make this happen (she’s had so many experiences with the kids that her program has gotten too large to fit on an isolinear chip, so they can’t copy her over as hoped).
These episodes have some fun tie-ins to the greater Trek universe, and also a potential explanation for one of the crappier aspects of one of the other current shows. When they’re in the Romulan Neutral Zone, there is mention of negotiations, and the timing of this is that it must be negotiations regarding the evacuation of Romulus in anticipation of the supernova (established in the 2009 Star Trek) that Picard was the spearhead of (established in Picard’s first season). Picard later resigned when Starfleet withdrew the support for Romulus after the synth attack on Mars, but now we have something else to go with the Mars attack: the fleet has been devastated by what happens in the “Supernova” two-parter, and that, combined with the attack on Mars, makes Starfleet withdrawal of the support for Romulus make a bit more sense.
That’s my headcanon, anyhow. Beyond that, we’ve also got a couple of appearances by old friends: Ronny Cox returns to voice now-Admiral Jellico (from The Next Generation’s “Chain of Command” two-parter; he was also seen as an admiral in a lot of tie-in fiction over the years) in a couple of episodes, and Billy Campbell does likewise with a now-silver-haired-and-eyepatched Thadium Okona (from TNG’s “The Outrageous Okona”). There are fun touches all over these episodes, from Denaxi Depot being run by Xindi (the first time anyone from that multispecies race has been seen outside of Enterprise), to the Kazon slavers using the same visors Spock used in the original series’ “Is There In Truth No Beauty?” to keep from being driven nuts by seeing Medusans, to Dal’s creation being the continuation of genetic engineering work done way back in the twenty-second century by Arik Soong, as seen in Enterprise’s fourth season.
Buy the Book
Wild Massive
My favorite, though, is a bit that probably will go over the heads of most of the kids watching this, but it warmed my heart anyhow. An ensign guarding the brig on Dauntless turns out to be one of the Brenari refugees that Voyager rescued from the Devore in “Counterpoint.” I just love the notion that the Brenari made it to Federation space and that at least one of the kids joined Starfleet (this season of Prodigy is nine years after “Counterpoint,” so the timing works).
For the first time since this season began, I’ve been less than impressed with the writing, as there are far too many stupid writer tricks to drag the plot out, but the final two-parter (written by creators/show-runners Kevin & Dan Hageman) works very well, with plenty of pathos—the loss of both the Diviner and the Janeway hologram—heroism, and idealism. And in the end, all but Gwyn are accepted into Starfleet—not as Academy cadets, as there’s a process for that, but as warrant officers who will study under Janeway and perhaps be able to enter the Academy down the line. Even Dal is allowed in, even though he’s an Augment. (A stupid rule, that, so I’m happy to see it bypassed. See also the likely plotline for Number One in season two of Strange New Worlds.)
Gwyn is going off to the Vau N’Akat homeworld to try to head off the civil war that causes all this at the pass. Most interesting of all, the destruction of the Protostar has opened another Wormhole To The Future! (the name of my next band), where Chakotay is still in trouble with the Vau N’Akat.
We don’t know exactly what our heroes will be doing in season two—the finale ends before we find that out, though going after Chakotay is one possibility—but they’ll be serving under Janeway in some capacity, which is good, as the true star of this series has been Kate Mulgrew. She’s, in essence, played four different roles: hologram Janeway, evil hologram Janeway as reprogrammed by the Diviner and the living construct, Admiral Janeway, and Dal in Janeway’s body. And she’s played all four superbly. I particularly like how she’s differentiated the Janeway hologram—who’s pretty much the captain of Voyager we watched for seven years two-and-a-half decades ago—from Admiral Janeway—who is very obviously older and crankier but also wiser.
Fourteen months ago I called Prodigy the best of the new Trek series, and while SNW is challenging that position, and while these final seven episodes didn’t all cohere as well as the previous thirteen, I still stand by it, and I say that as someone who likes a lot of what Secret Hideout has been doing since 2017. What I especially love is how well the crew has come together as a team and as a family, and how each character has grown. The best thing about every Trek series has been the characters, and Prodigy continues that, from the diamond-in-the-rough that is Dal to the tragic Gwyn to the earnest Zero to the eager-to-learn Rok to the dirty-hands-zany Pog to the adorable Murf.
Looking forward to season two…
Keith R.A. DeCandido wishes everyone a very happy new year!
It was okay, but I have some issues. One is a really annoying mistake that the Trek franchise has been making since “The Deadly Years” in 1967: having Romulan ships just casually hanging out in the Neutral Zone, directly opposite Starfleet ships in the Federation/Neutral Zone border. The whole reason it’s called a Neutral Zone is that it’s an act of war for either side to enter it. It’s meant to keep their forces far enough apart to prevent conflict. Yet too many writers treat it as if it were part of Romulan space, as if they don’t recognize that “Neutral” is a word with an actual meaning rather than just a random sound.
Although in this case I think the blame lies with the animators rather than the writers, because the dialogue suggests that the Romulan ships are not allowed in the zone, despite the animation showing them directly nose-to-nose with the Starfleet ships. It’s been a recurring problem in the Secret Hideout shows for the visuals to conflict with the dialogue, like Discovery showing Starbase One in Earth orbit when dialogue said it was 100 AUs from Earth (i.e. 100 times the distance to the Sun).
I also have a hard time reconciling the timing with Picard. This is only a year before the synth attack on Mars, so by this point, we should be well past “negotiations” about whether Starfleet ships can enter the Zone. The Zone shouldn’t even exist anymore at this point, since Starfleet ships should already be regularly crossing it to evacuate the Romulan people.
Another trope that really, really burns me up is the idiotic notion that the crew would be unable to understand each other without the Universal Translator. That makes no sense. Any competent military would train its personnel to do every important task manually as a fallback in the event of equipment failure. It would be absolutely, unconscionably stupid to depend entirely on technology to do something people are more than capable of doing themselves, i.e. learning to speak a common language. Good grief, Starfleet officers spend four years going to school to learn how to do their jobs. Why would that not include language courses? This trope is just beyond stupid. I can buy it for the Protostar crew, since the Diviner intentionally prevented the Tars Lamora captives from learning to communicate, but there’s no excuse for it with the Starfleet crews. The only way I can make sense of it is if the Construct didn’t just shut down the translators, but scrambled them so that they actively prevented people from understanding each other even when speaking the same language.
Incidentally, the Hagemans initially intended the characters to be admitted as cadets. We owe the warrant officer idea to Keith’s and my friend David Mack, the show’s consultant, who pointed out that becoming cadets wouldn’t be that easy. https://www.cinemablend.com/interviews/star-trek-prodigys-showrunners-share-the-original-plan-for-season-1s-finale-and-why-it-didnt-happen
Like CLB I thought the notion that Starfleet cadets wouldn’t learn a common language seems pretty silly. I’m sure translators are very reliable in the late 24th century, but even very reliable things can break. At any rate, I thought the back half of this season was fine. As a middle-aged man, I’m not its target audience, but I do appreciate when it tosses me a nugget. I want to echo Kieth’s praise of Kate Mulgrew. She’s terrific throughout. I’ve been a fan of her voice acting for a long time, and so I’m not surprised that she is such a good fit for this show.
Notably, the universal translator moment was the Construct causing chaos on the ships, and wasn’t critical to their destruction — they only say that the translators are malfunctioning and being disrupted by the quasi-sentient AI. It’s entirely possible the Construct was forcing them to speak their own languages in that moment; on the Protostar, Gwyn was able to communicate thanks to Hologram Janeway’s help. It would be in keeping with the Vau N’akat’s xenophobic tendencies to “drive species apart.”
@krad I’m surprised you didn’t mention Star Trek science advisor Erin Macdonald’s cameo as Dr. Macdonald, the scientist who suggests to Rok a career in xenobiology.
EricLesch: I had a lot to cover, I missed some stuff. *wry grin*
And it was a well-deserved tribute to Dr. Macdonald……..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I agree with CLB’s comment about the universal translator; one of the reasons why they even have a language called “Standard” should surely be so that all of the races of the Federation (or at least the ones capable of making certain mouth-sounds) have a language in common. I was also frustrated by the fact that the Protostar and the Dauntless were close enough for the crews to look at each other through their windows and it didn’t occur to any of the kids to just write out a sign “Hey, we’ve got an evil AI on board; can’t answer hails! :(“
As for the existence of the Neutral Zone, I actually thought that they made it fit surprisingly well with what Una McCormack established in Last Best Hope, namely that much of the Romulan government remained paranoid and mistrustful of the Federation well into the evacuation, and that negotiations as to the scope of the evacuation effort were ongoing, rather than a one-and-done affair. Also, evacuation or not, there’s a very real difference between having scheduled flights from relief ships and transports crossing your border and having heavily armed capital ships coming into your space willy-nilly.
Beyond that: the characters continue to be fun and interesting (though I liked Murf better as a blob), I liked the added context for Picard‘s backstory, and I look forward to seeing what they find in the (alternate) future when looking for Chakotay. I’m also curious as to how they will adapt to being warrant officers, though it seems like it runs the risk of stepping on Lower Decks‘s toes.
@6/jaimebabb: The idea that there is a language called “Federation Standard” is an invention of Star Trek tie-in novels that was never canonized until the past few years. In the pre-streaming shows, they always just called it English.
As for the Neutral Zone thing, I don’t remember the details of the novel that well, so I’ll take your word for it. I do wonder, though, why the timelines of these shows are so weirdly staggered, with no two in sync with each other, yet so close together that they run the risk of bumping into each other.
And yeah, the meta-Murf-osis was kind of underwhelming in its payoff.
The warrant officer thing concerns me a bit, since in season 1, the kids were pursuing their own quest, but it looks like in season 2, they’ll be supporting Janeway’s quest for Chakotay. And that would seem to make the show less of its own thing and more of a sequel. I hope there’s more to their season 2 plans than that.
jaimebabb: To be fair, the notion of a language called “Standard” is purely an artifact of the tie-in fiction. Such a language has never been established in any onscreen production.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@8/krad I think Janeway just used it onscreen in the penultimate episode, but yeah, fair enough.
I agree with Jamiebab that I prefer Murf as a blob. There really wasn’t any reason to make him more humanoid. One of Star Trek’s weaknesses is the lack of non-humanoid intelligent species. In my own books I try to mitigate that and out of dozens I have addressed only about a dozen are “humanoid” and most of those appear only in passing .
@8/krad: “Federation Standard” has been referenced in the modern shows, as I said. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Federation_Standard
I’m buying into the belief that some online outlets have that Season 2 will have Janeway and the kids on the Voyager-A. I also hope she gets to keep her Andorian XO whose name escapes me at the moment.
I’m pretty sure she called him Antennas.
oh wait,that was Dal…
@@@@@ 8 – TILLY: Oh, it’s extreme lensing. Two-pi steradian solid angle.
RILLAK: In Federation Standard, please?
BURNHAM: Gravitational distortion. Hit the side of the station, must’ve taken out the relay, as well.
Discovery – Kobayashi Maru
I like the retcon that they’re not all just speaking English, but again, if there *is* a Federation Standard, then having the Dauntless crew completely paralyzed by a UT failure seems silly.
I binged the season over the last week and loved it. I had originally not planned to watch it. The trailers really made it look like it wasn’t for me. Hearing people who’s opinions I respect talk about how good it was, convinced me to give it a try and boy am I glad I did. Kate Mulgrew is absolutely fantastic here, as are the other characters. Fun stuff.
I agree with Christopher about the Neutral Zone. I point out that the Romulans are violating the treaty to warn Starfleet not to violate the treaty. Hmmm… Always makes me scratch my head.
Bobby
I admit, the only reason I began watching this show was because I knew it had a mystery involving Chakotay and I was curious. When I watched the pilot, I thought the animation was beautiful and the mystery was engrossing but after five episodes, all I really cared about was “what happened to Chakotay?”
Then, at some point into the back ten episodes, I actually began to care about the Protostar kids. It was no longer “I just want to know what happened to Chakotay”, I was fully invested in all these characters.
As for “Crossroads”, I can see how them not actually talking to the Starfleet seems contrived, however, I give them passes because they are just teenagers.
Really looking forward to next season!
As a lifelong Trekkie mother (my mother rocked me to sleep to first-run TOS, and like you, Keith, I grew up on those early evening Long Island reruns), I would like to comment on the effectiveness of this show at introducing Trek to kids. My partner and I were excited to use it as our kids’ introduction to Trek. It turns out, my 10 year-old daughter hates it – she just couldn’t get into it at all. She also doesn’t like to read fantasy/SF. But my 7 year-old son is entranced, and would eagerly ask, “Is there a new Star Track yet?” So the 3 of us watched while my daughter was out.
The scheduling was not at all conducive to raising interest in children. It’s just not how they are used to watching TV. The long break almost killed even my son’s interest. It would have been more effective to release all the episodes at once, or at least to skip the long break.
The plot was more complex than what a 7 year-old usually watches, so we often had to stop and explain it. He doesn’t fully get it, but enough to enjoy it and he will follow more on re-watches.
It benefited from some prior Trek knowledge, so again, we often had to stop and explain. “OK, that’s a Borg ship. The Borg are…” or “That’s the holodeck. Do you know what a hologram is?” “Yes. A hologram is a fake person you can walk through.” “OK, good enough. Well the holodeck is…”
And the Borg episode was borderline too scary for my 7 year-old. I don’t think he would have handled it well even a year younger.
So, excellent family entertainment that could be tweaked a little to pull in younger viewers.
Since I don’t often post online I will take the opportunity to tell you, Keith, that I have read pretty much everything you have written here about Trek and greatly enjoyed it. And for my money, the best new Trek is DISCOVERY!
@18/Nancy: “The scheduling was not at all conducive to raising interest in children. It’s just not how they are used to watching TV.”
Really? I find it pretty consistent with how Nickelodeon has been scheduling its shows for decades. Shows like Danny Phantom and Avatar: The Last Airbender would often have long breaks within or between seasons, or get new episodes released on unpredictable schedules. I found it hard to follow, but since the network kept doing it for so long, I figured the kids watching must have been okay with it. When I was a kid, I had a high tolerance for watching reruns over and over, so I was sure to be watching when they finally did run new episodes. So I figured the same probably went for Nickelodeon shows.
But I suppose with streaming these days, the way people watch TV has changed, and that would of course apply to today’s kids as well.
Thanks, Nancy!
FWIW, the original intent was to release the first season on Nickelodeon straight through, but then 2020 happened, and everything changed. Paramount+ wound up developing an entire kids’ line, of which Prodigy was (and still is) a big part, which was at least in part due to the recent apocalypse.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I feel comfortable in saying this was the best, most solid first season of any Star Trek series since TOS. Kudos to all involved in its making. The overall feeling I have is that it’s charming as heck and captures the essence of what Star Trek is all about: hope, exploration, optimism, and the betterment of one self. And this was done without any of our protagonists being human! What I especially love is that despite this being a “kid’s show,” the storylines and characterizations are such that I (and I’m assuming most adults) are still enthralled.
Kudos also to the writers for not at the last minute saving the Starfleet armada before the destruction actually began. That is some heavy, heavy stuff for a “kid’s show” even without showing that people are getting killed. This is wide-scale destruction that exceeds Wolf 359 with the Borg and more on par with a Starfleet battle against the Dominion in that particular war as depicted on Deep Space Nine. I pretty much doubt that Prodigy will deal with the ramifications of such destruction but perhaps another series will or at least in someone’s tie-in novel. Regarding the particulars of said destruction, it seemed really slow and inefficient for the Living Construct to just enable phasers of the Starfleet vessels to fire at one another. What of the photon and quantum torpedoes? Surely this would have hastened the destruction even quicker.
Really looking forward to next season and seeing what happens with our new warrant officers and the search for Chakotay.
@21/garreth: “Kudos also to the writers for not at the last minute saving the Starfleet armada before the destruction actually began.”
At the end of Part 1, I was convinced they’d use the time travel element set up over the season as a way to hit the reset button so none of the destruction ever happened. I’m rather surprised, though relieved, that they didn’t.
But one thing that really annoys me about the streaming-era Trek shows is their depiction of how easy it is to assemble a huge fleet of starships in a matter of hours. Roddenberry never wanted interstellar travel to feel like an easy commute. A “trek” is a long, difficult journey, not an effortless hop. Even in the heart of Federation territory, it should at least take days to assemble the available ships in one place; most anywhere else, it should be a matter of weeks. The modern shows often reduce it to minutes.
And I still say it was a bad design for the Living Construct to drive ships or stations crazy within moments of being signalled. If the goal was to destroy all of Starfleet, it should’ve lain dormant long enough to be transmitted as widely as possible before activating. It’s annoying when writers give the villains’ plan an obvious, dumb flaw that makes it less dangerous than it’s supposed to be. This is right up there with, say, a vast horde of automated ships or satellites that can all be taken down at once by destroying the single control station (which DS9 did once during the Dominion War).
The construct wasn’t shown as transmitting itself to spread to other ships. Once the Protostar moved out of range, the ships stopped firing. Obviously, it was dependent on the Protostar being in close proximity for the ships to be taken over. They had to be within range to be taken over, not like a virus, having something transmitted that would then continue to attack the other ships.
It’s not right up there, it’s the exact same thing except that the ships can’t attack the source. If the allied ships had attacked and destroyed the Protostar, the damage would have been greatly reduced. Of course, that would have likely resulted in the deaths of our heroes barring a last second escape.
If there is one aspect I feel part 2 improved over part 1 is the superlative character work. The crew now feels like a family, which made Gwyn’s departure all the more tragic (though not as tragic as Hologram Janeway’s sacrifice).
And I was caught completely by surprise with the twist. I should have seen it coming. Even as a Starfleet Trill ensign, Ascensia’s actions all but screamed ‘infiltrator’. At first, I thought that was an older, harsher version of Gwyn, before realizing we were dealing with a different person.
I was also a bit frustrated with the attempts at keeping real Janeway and the Dauntless crew at odds with the kids (especially during the ice world episode). But at least the need to keep the virus contained within the ship and not spread across the fleet made for a feasible plot device for most of the season.
Despite a couple of plot stumbles, I was really into their journey. In terms of season-enders, I feel this was one of Trek’s very best. One of the most grueling two parters in a long time. And a massive improvement over Discovery’s Such Sweet Sorrow. This is how you direct and animate starships pummeling each other!
Overall, a worthy sequel to Voyager. And I hope we get to find Chakotay and company next year.
The Dal’Rok(tahk) wakes. But we are ready. In the shadow of the night, he hungers. With a hatred of the ancients, he rages. From the twisted pit of chaos, he approaches. The Dal’Rok(tahk)’s anger is like a wave crashing down on the Starfleet. The weight of its fury threatens to crush us all. The Dal’Rok(tahk) thinks the Starfleet is powerless to defend itself. But the Dal’Rok(tahk) is mistaken. The Starfleet is strong, much stronger than the Dal’Rok(tahk) can ever imagine. With our strength, our unity, we shall drive the Dal’Rok(tahk)—
(The old man collapses and the stream of light stops. The Dal’Rok(tahk)’s ship makes the Starfleet ships shoot each other.)
O’BRIEN: Bloody hell.
(sorry, I had to)
The contrivances that kept the kids from talking to Janeway’s crew in “Crossroads” didn’t bother me, since that’s the nature of tragedy — there’s a situation that could be easily resolved, but circumstances and fate stymie the characters at every turn and make things worse. Or else the characters fail because their own fatal character flaws work against them. That’s what happened with Dal — he still had the reflexive fear of authority that he developed over years on Tars Lamora, so he ran away from Janeway at the first sign of trouble rather than coming clean and trusting her to believe him. Similarly, Pog didn’t take the chance to talk to Noum because he didn’t have enough experience with Tellarite socialization to understand that Noum’s insults were just everyday greetings. (Although that raises questions about his life before he hibernated in the generation ship.) The other way the characters fail is if the villains are working against them, which is what happened with Gwyn and “Asencia,” though we didn’t know it at the time.
I would love it if we eventually saw live-action versions of the Prodigy kids which I think is totally possible if we saw them aged up on Picard well-into their Starfleet careers. They could just be little throwaway Easter eggs for fans. Of course the final season of Picard has already been filmed so who knows if this will come to pass but I kind of doubt it.
The discussion of how Starfleet cadets are such an intensely selected group such that it’s not reasonable for the kids to be admitted juxtaposes interestingly with the fact that the Vindicator was somehow able to get in.
Unless she infiltrated at a later point. (By killing the real Asencia?) I don’t expect we’ll ever know the details unless it becomes important for a future story.
@27/garreth The Star Treks seem to be going out of their way to avoid stepping on one another’s toes, so I doubt that they’ll have any characters from Prodigy or Lower Decks on Picard while their fates are still up in the air.
(Although it does make me wonder: when they go to the future to rescue Chakotay, how much of the canon from “Picard” will they retain, and how much will they just write-off as being in an alternate timeline?)
@29/jaimebabb: Well this idea I have is partly inspired by the very fact that there is an upcoming Lower Decks/Strange New Worlds crossover. Therefore, crossovers between other series are not beyond the realm of possibilities.
@29/jaimebabb: “(Although it does make me wonder: when they go to the future to rescue Chakotay, how much of the canon from “Picard” will they retain, and how much will they just write-off as being in an alternate timeline?)”
It probably won’t come up, because Chakotay and his crew were sent forward from sometime before 2384 and arrived in the Delta Quadrant decades in the future. So if they go to Solum in the future, it’ll be detached from anything that happened in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants in the intervening time, so the Picard continuity shouldn’t be an issue. And Chakotay and his crew would know nothing about it.
@30/garreth: The difference is that SNW takes place in LD’s past, so Boimler and Mariner showing up as time travelers won’t reveal anything about their futures that could spoil or conflict with later LD storylines. Establishing what happens to the PRO characters decades in the future would restrict the writers’ freedom in plotting out future seasons.
My issue with the Warrant Officer in training solution is that Warrant Officers are usually enlisted personnel who become Specialists that still have gone through officer training, to become fully commissioned, just not line officers. Them becoming Warrant Officers in training is still them skipping a lot of time, experience, and study that other warrant officers would have gone through. For those unfamiliar, if Miles O’Brien had become a Chief Warrant Officer on his promotion to Operations Chief of DS9. it would’ve been absolutely positively normal and unquestioned. That’s the kind of gap. So in my view, making them WOs in Training is a far worse solution than admitting them to the academy under extraordinary circumstances. In their few short months of working on the Protostar they have more real world starship operations experience than even Wesley Crusher when he entered. It’s not like they’re trying to be James Kirk in the Kelvin Timeline and be Captains in three years, it’s silly to me that they can’t take their tests and get admitted.
@32 they probably could have been called Midshipmen instead. That would have been a more appropriate historical role than warrants who are always experts in their given field.
@31/CLB: Then I suppose it would still be nice to see live-action versions of the species that the Protostar characters belong to. For instance, it would be an awesome sight to see a Starfleet Brikar character whether it was on Picard or Discovery.
@31/CLB do we know for certain that Solum is in the Delta Quadrant? As I recall, the Protostar just ended up there by coincidence after going through (forming?) a wormhole. By the same token, the spacetime rift that HoloJaneway made would presumably be in the Alpha Quadrant somewhere.
@35/jaimebabb: Memory Alpha says Solum is in the DQ, but it’s beside the point. The point is that it’s a world distant enough to have had only brief contact with the Federation, so its people would know nothing about any of the continuity established in Picard; while Chakotay and his crew were flung forward in time from sometime before 2384, so they would have no knowledge of any of the Picard continuity either.
Since Dal is a Soong Augment, any chance Brent Spiner will play him live action?
One thing that struck me during my first rewatch of this season is that it manages to do something no live action Secret Hideout show had accomplished up to this point, and arguably it did it twice, having very successful mid-season and season finales.