The Chase Is On As Star Trek: Prodigy Returns

The season premiere seemed to weaken the threat of the secret weapon. I thought the idea was that if they made contact with Starfleet, the destructive program would infiltrate Starfleet’s comm network and spread throughout the entire fleet before destroying it. Instead, we see that it almost instantly destroys the relay after infecting it, before it can pass it along to any other Starfleet computer. Which defeats the whole purpose. It felt like kind of a cheat.

Anyway, I think Jankom already knew he was a Tellarite, but he didn’t know they were a founding species of the Federation — though you’d think that would’ve been in the Protostar‘s data banks.

I thought “Let Sleeping Borg Lie” handled the Borg moderately well. It was kind of a throwback to “Q Who” — a first contact where the boarding party goes unnoticed as long as they don’t interfere with the Borg’s activity. Once they do get noticed, they quickly overwhelm the crew, and it’s only Zero’s experience at separating themself from a hive mind that enables them to free themself and the others. The one way the Borg are nerfed is that they don’t immediately inject the boarding party with nanoprobes, but instead just strap them into an assimilation machine of some sort. But we never saw the Borg in TNG use nanoprobes; that retcon was introduced in First Contact. So maybe there are variants of the Borg that don’t use them.

“All the World’s a Stage” was fun, but it doesn’t make any sense conceptually. There’s no way Kirk’s Enterprise could’ve gotten to the Delta Quadrant, unless there was some kind of space warp the episode doesn’t bother to address. Also, even if Garrovick told them about the ship and crew before he died, how did they know the crew’s speech mannerisms and the design of the bridge’s technology? How did they know how to operate its controls so well if their knowledge of even the most basic things like the name of the fleet was inaccurate?

What’s interesting is how the Endaprizians are all in green, but “En Son” Garrovick is singled out as special by his red shirt. It’s fitting, because this episode at once puts Garrovick in the cliched “redshirt” role, a security officer who dies on a mission, yet at the same time it elevates the role of the redshirt far beyond the cliche, making him an entire culture’s savior figure rather than interchangeable cannon fodder.

Eric Bauza does a good Sulu impression. I almost thought it was George Takei.

@4/C.T. Phipps: “I think this really proves PRODIGY is written for both new fans and old ones because only the most die-hard Trekkies would get 90% of these jokes.”

I wouldn’t say that. You don’t need to be a die-hard Trekkie to know the names of the TOS cast and their stock caricatures. Most of this was entry-level Trek knowledge. I mean, Dee Bradley Baker was not doing an impression of William Shatner, he was doing the pop-culture caricature of Shatner, which is one of those memes that everyone probably knows even if they aren’t familiar with Shatner’s own body of work (like how, as a kid, I was far more familiar with Humphrey Bogart from all the comedy impressions and caricatures of him than I was from his actual movies).

The only moderately deep cut I noticed was the name Ensign Garrovick. And Sool’U saying “My, my,” a reference to Takei’s “Oh my” meme, but that comes from his appearances on Howard Stern’s show, not from Trek. So yeah, there were a few less obvious inside jokes, but I have no doubt that the writers put those in for their own amusement. Everybody talks about what audience a story was made for, but the thing laypeople don’t consider is that writers are usually writing for ourselves and hoping it will appeal to an audience with similar sensibilities. Especially when it comes to in-jokes. My writing features plenty of in-jokes that I put in strictly for my own amusement and don’t expect anyone else to even recognize.

@6/garreth: “showing that they’re not completely decimated post-Voyager“

The language pedant in me is compelled to point out that “decimated” literally means that only 10 percent of a thing is destroyed, so in that sense, it may well have been decimated. But “Endgame” never claimed that the Borg were wiped out entirely.

“although according to Picard something at some point catastrophic will occur to the collective”

I thought that was only in the Confederation timeline.

@8/garreth: Yes, but neither “decimated” nor “hobbled” means “destroyed.” I covered “decimated,” and to hobble something is to impede it, to slow it down — for instance, to hobble a horse is to bind its legs so it can’t run. So Jurati was only saying the Borg had been weakened, not eradicated.

@9/jaimebabb: “On the subject of the Enderprizians, I don’t know if they’re even still supposed to be in the Delta Quadrant. The impression that I got was that they’ve spent several months gunning towards Federation space with their protostar drive, so they might be far across the Beta Quadrant by now.”

That’s still a journey of decades for Kirk’s Enterprise, so it’s a difference that makes no difference in this context. Even if they’re close to the 24th-century limits of Federation exploration, that’s still far beyond the 23rd-century limits of same.

I would’ve liked the episode better if it had laid off the TOS in-jokes and just had it be another Starfleet vessel that somehow got space-warped to the Delta (or Beta) Quadrant. Aside from the continuity problems, I’m just sick of having the ships we see on TV being the only ones that ever accomplish anything. I’m tired of modern Trek constantly depending on references to old Trek. It’s lazy and self-indulgent and it comes at the expense of new worldbuilding. TNG, DS9, and VGR didn’t go around referencing TOS every other week. They succeeded by expanding the universe in whole new directions, only rarely drawing on the franchise’s past.

@31/Robert: I’m glad we didn’t get the “Iotia turns Starfleet” story onscreen, because it’s based on a facile interpretation of how Iotian culture would work. The idea that they just blindly imitate things is nonsense; if all their culture is imitation, who did they imitate before first contact? “A Piece of the Action” was a sci-fi riff on the the “cargo cult” phenomenon, misunderstood by Westerners to be just blind copying, when in fact it was a choice to adapt outside elements and influences to serve the needs and agendas of indigenous peoples. It stands to reason that some branch of Iotian culture adopted “The Book” as its template because its gangster culture corresponded with that indigenous group’s beliefs or ambitions, and so they were able to exploit the cachet of “The Book” evidently endorsing their views, using it to rally the people around them and take over globally.

What was smart about “A Piece of the Action” is that Kirk didn’t try to erase the gangster culture. He understood that after a century, it had become intrinsic to their own culture, something that entire generations had grown up with, knowing nothing else. So rather than trying to change it, he found a way for them to work within it and turn it in a more positive direction. The Iotians had an incentive to keep their culture the way it was, the way they’d chosen it to be. So it’s facile and demeaning to them as a people with their own agency to assume that they would just throw out a century of cultural heritage and blindly copy Starfleet.

And it’s not what the end of the episode implied. Yes, Kirk was concerned that this people that had managed to recreate 20th-century industrial civilization based on only a handful of textbooks would be inventive enough to figure out 23rd-century technology from a single transtator. But he didn’t expect them to turn into Starfleet clones; rather, he was concerned that they’d come to demand “a piece of our action,” implying that he expected the gangster culture to endure, just with more advanced technology. That’s the way the novels have gone in depicting 24th-century Iotians, in the Corps of Engineers novellas and the Picard prequel novel Rogue Elements. It makes much more sense that way.

The portrayal of the Endaprizians has some of the same issues. I would’ve liked to see more of a blend of indigenous cultural elements and “Star-Flight” elements that they adapted to fit their pre-existing belief structure and iconography. But I suppose that some of the changes that superficially seem like “getting it wrong” could actually be that kind of adaptation. Like, perhaps “En-Son” is a meaningful phrase in their own language, or the name of some ancient mythical hero, rather than just a misremembering of “Ensign.” That could be why they remember Garrovick by that name instead of his own. They could have identified him with some religious or historical figure from their culture, rather than inventing a belief system around him out of whole cloth. That would be more realistic.

The ending of this week’s episode didn’t make much sense to me. The show is set in 2384, just a year before the synth attack. The detection of the impending Romulan supernova should’ve happened 2-3 years ago. The Neutral Zone should already be a non-issue, since Starfleet ships should already have been evacuating Romulan worlds for at least a couple of years.

Also, the episode made the same stupid mistake Trek has been making since “The Deadly Years” — saying that Starfleet ships are forbidden in the Neutral Zone, yet having Romulan ships hanging out inside it ready to pounce. The whole point of the Neutral Zone is that neither side is allowed to enter. It’s a buffer zone between the two powers to prevent conflict by forbidding opposing forces from coming into range of each other. So having Starfleet and Romulan ships nose-to-nose on opposite sides of the UFP/Neutral Zone border makes no sense. Too many writers treat the Zone like it’s part of Romulan territory, as if they don’t recognize that the “Neutral” part actually means something rather than just being a random sound.

Also, I gotta say — the Dauntless is a damned ugly ship. If they wanted to do a slipstream drive ship, I wish they’d gone with the Vesta class that Mark Rademaker designed for the novels.

@44/Iacomina: I read a comment from the producers recently on Twitter or somewhere, basically confirming that you’re right — they are using the Borg transwarp network now that the Borg are less present.

A lot of big revelations this week in “Masquerade.” Dal isn’t just an unknown species, he’s an Augment hybrid of dozens of species, including many Federation members. Evidently there are still some people out there trying to follow in Arik Soong’s footprints and keep Augment experiments alive, even two centuries later. And Ensign Ascensia is not what she seems.

They’re still treating the Neutral Zone in a confusing way. Admiral Janeway is concerned that the Romulans might try “sneaking into” the Neutral Zone, even though the animation shows a pair of Romulan Warbirds just hanging there inside the Neutral Zone border, which should be an act of war by itself. I think this is a case where the visuals don’t match the intentions of the script, which is a frequent problem in Kurtzman-era shows (like that time in Discovery when a starbase said to be 100 AUs from Earth was depicted as being in Earth orbit).

@51/Robert: “I think what I want to compare the Iotian situation to is a technically advanced culture supplying drugs or alcohol…  or maybe guns…  to other people who can’t handle that.”

Except, again, the Horizon didn’t give the Iotians guns or cars or radios. They gave them textbooks describing how to make those things, and then left. The fact that a culture at the barest beginnings of industrialization, working entirely on its own, was able to decipher those books, apply their knowledge in practice, and reach the point of having cars and radios in 2/3 the time it took humans — that’s the Iotians’ own accomplishment, something they chose to do and achieved through their own skill and hard work, not simply something handed to them or forced upon them by outsiders.

Also, if they were already at the beginnings of industrialization, and if they were that smart and learned that quickly, then they probably would’ve invented their own versions of cars and guns and radio before too long. At most, it might’ve taken a few decades longer. And those innovations would surely have caused social upheaval anyway, just like they did on Earth. So arguably, the only real “contamination” the Horizon was responsible for was the specific form those inventions took, mimicking the appearance of their Earth equivalents. The upheaval would’ve happened even without them. It just would’ve looked different, and maybe happened a generation or so later.

@53/jaimebabb: “It presupposes, for example, that there’s such a thing as cultural “purity”. Which I suppose makes some degree of sense if you’re talking about a relatively self-contained system like an uncontacted planet”

No, that doesn’t make sense at all, because no way is an entire planet going to have only one culture. It’s so stupid when sci-fi makes that assumption, and portrays entire planets having less cultural diversity than a single moderate-sized city on Earth. Any plausibly depicted planet will have thousands of different cultures that will come into contact and learn new ideas from one another all the time.

Not to mention that even an isolated culture can have its own internal divisions, conflicts, and generational change. This is something that was pointed out when I studied world history in college — it’s a common mistake to assume that the form an indigenous culture takes at the moment of contact is the way it’s always been since the dawn of time, rather than just the current state of a culture that has its own internal dynamism and growth. If anything, it’s quite normal for one generation to react against the values or strictures of the previous one, to push back against its parents, so that even an isolated society might have a pendulum swinging back and forth between opposing values. For instance, one generation may rebel against an order that’s too strict, while a later generation might believe things have grown too lax and immoral and a crackdown is needed.

The idea of a culture as a “pure,” unchanging thing is a fantasy, the result of ignorance about the culture’s complexity, and often the result of racism and ethnocentrism, the assumption that other cultures are primitive or simple compared to one’s own. Which is why it’s so unfortunate that so many Trek writers corrupt the idea of the Prime Directive by misinterpreting it in such terms. It’s supposed to be about respect for other cultures’ equal intelligence and ability to make their own choices, rather than needing us to barge in and tell them what to do. But it’s too often twisted into the opposite of that, the condescending assumption that other cultures are too primitive and simple and have to be protected from our superior knowledge.

“He seems to consist mostly of Alpha Quadrant species, spliced together by the followers of Arik Soong; so how did he get to Tars Lamora?”

Tars Lamora is close to the Delta/Beta Quadrant border, as we know from Dal’s reference in season 1 to having seen a star formation known to a civilization Voyager encountered in season 6 or 7, when it had made it that far. Also, according to the producers on Twitter, in the wake of Voyager, various civilizations have been using the Borg’s semi-abandoned transwarp network as well as finding other cosmic shortcuts and/or faster stardrives. Still, it would be nice if they made that more clear onscreen.

No comments about this week’s “Ghost in the Machine?” No wonder — it was a pretty run-of-the-mill “trapped in the holodeck” episode, pretty much just filling time and setting up the plot twist revealed at the end.

Doing an episode about a computer-generated simulation chamber in computer-generated animation proved to have both assets and drawbacks. On the plus side, it let them show holodeck scenarios in a way that looked more like actual computer games than actors on a stage, like in Jankom’s fighting sim or Rok’s cute-critter-farming game. On the minus side, the “holodeck glitch” of making most of the characters look like Dr. Noum underlined the way the budget limitations of CG animation tend to require reusing stock character models a lot. (All the human patrons in the film-noir nightclub had the same face too.)

Also, I have a hard time believing the crew couldn’t think of a better way to signal the Dauntless. If they thought of firing phasers in Morse code, why not just blink the running lights in Morse code?

@66/jaimebabb: I’d say “develop the characters” is a bit of an overstatement, since it pretty much just illustrated or reinforced what we already know — Dal dreams of being a captain, Rok likes cute animals, Zero likes intellectual challenges, Jankom resents Dr. Noum. The only real surprise was Murf, and that was just a bit of silliness.

@69/northman: “They could very well have attempted the running lights gambit earlier and it would have failed”

That’s exactly the part I find unbelievable. Why would it have failed? The reason the phaser-code plan failed is because the Dauntless mistook it for aggression. Nobody’s going to mistake blinking running lights for aggression, and any competent Starfleet officer should be able to notice there’s a pattern there and figure out what it’s saying. So there’s no good reason to make the arbitrary assertion that it wouldn’t have worked. My whole point is that it should work.

Honestly, this has been a pet peeve of mine about Trek for decades. Every time there’s a story where one ship is unable to communicate something to another because of comms failure or interference, I wonder why they don’t just try blinking the lights. In real life, semaphore light signals are a standard backup technique in case of communications problems, both in aviation and the military. So it makes no sense that Starfleet wouldn’t have its own backup protocol for semaphore communication. It should be taught as standard at the Academy. It should be in every ship’s computers. Holo-Janeway should’ve been able to tell the kids how to do it right off the bat, with no need for days of trial and error, and the Dauntless crew should’ve immediately been able to read it. The premise that this simple thing that’s standard in real life does not exist in the Trek universe is a huge failure of imagination and research.

Although it’s related to the perennial tendency of Trek writers to forget that “sensors” would include telescopes. Like in “The Mark of Gideon” where they’re unable to tell that the planet is hideously overpopulated. Can’t they just look at the surface and see how high the population density is? Is the whole planet under a cloud cover? Do the people all live underground? Too many Trek writers fail to consider what should be observable visually. Ironic given that they work in a visual medium.

@70/jaimebabb: “I think that the fact that Zero not only likes intellectual challenges, but that this interest takes the specific form of a weird “Dark Academia” secret society puzzle-solving game says something about them.”

The format of the game seemed odd, though. Who gets mysteries delivered to them through the mail slot? Until the simulations started blending and they left the library, it seemed to be playing out more like an escape room than a mystery story. Are there mystery games that actually work that way?