Of all the TV Treks to date, “Star Trek: Voyager” is the one with the most definitive ending. From day one, the show was on a mission to get Captain Janeway and her lost-in-space crew back from the distant Delta Quadrant. Once that objective was achieved in series finale “Endgame”, however, there wasn’t much left on the ledger labelled “unfinished business”. The series certainly wasn’t calling out for a follow-up, but two decades later it’s got one — and it’s great.
Okay, “Star Trek: Prodigy” isn’t technically the eighth season of “Voyager”, but it’s undeniably the ’90s show’s spiritual heir. Unlike “Picard”, which used its third season to deliver the perfect send-off for the “Next Generation” crew, “Prodigy” substitutes wall-to-wall nostalgia for youthful exuberance, to tell the story of a bunch of kids who stumble on a grounded Starfleet vessel in the Delta Quadrant.
They’re a likeable group seemingly focus-grouped to look good on a lunchbox. Indeed, on many levels, “Prodigy” is the quintessential Nickelodeon animation, working through a playbook that’s been serving Saturday morning cartoons since the ’80s. A gang of mismatched heroes with plenty to learn? Hat tip to “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”. Characters trapped in an unfamiliar and hostile alien location? Thank you, “ThunderCats”. A cute, wise and indecipherable sidekick? That’ll be Brain in “Inspector Gadget”. They’ve even brought the obligatory mentor along for the ride.
But while it would undoubtedly have been easier to set a fun, kid-friendly cartoon in a loose facsimile of the “Star Trek” universe, “Prodigy” goes all in and embraces the franchise’s history with the same reverence “The Clone Wars” and “Rebels” had for the “Star Wars” movies. That aforementioned mentor is an Emergency Training Hologram based on a certain Captain Kathryn Janeway (voiced by original actor Kate Mulgrew), and she ties the voyages of the USS Protostar to nearly six decades of “Trek” storytelling — while helping her protegés to learn the ropes, and shape the future of the universe.
The show is ingeniously structured, drip-feeding the “Star Trek” references to keep older viewers interested without alienating new recruits. Like most of the show’s younger viewers, the rag-tag crew of the Protostar (each one an extra-terrestrial) have no knowledge of Kirk, Spock and the rest of the Federation. But with Janeway as their guide, their close encounters with Tribbles, the Borg and even the Kazon (Klingon-esque antagonists so lame that “Voyager” quickly left them behind) provide a gateway to “Trek”‘s wider universe, plotting a course for the real story to get started.
“Prodigy” may be targeted at kids, but it’s hard to imagine how any show could more embody the values of “Star Trek”. As in “Voyager”, the crew of the Protostar are charting a course through an unknown region of space, working as a team to science their way past the obstacles they encounter, while formulating theories that (almost) sound plausible.
As with all the best Starfleet crews, the chemistry is fantastic, all the way from conventionally cocky Dal R’El, to malleable Mellanoid slime worm Murf, and — perhaps best of all — Zero, a telepathic, non-corporeal Medusan. Their species first appeared in “Star Trek: Original Series” episode “Is There in Truth no Beauty”, and they have to keep their true form hidden in a robot suit to avoid driving shipmates mad. (Just as “Voyager” did with the entirely CG Species 8472, “Prodigy” relishes the fact its alien lifeforms aren’t limited by what’s feasible for human actors in prosthetics.)
The production also features none of the “it’ll do…” mindset you’d once have expected from a kid-oriented spin-off. The theme is by top Hollywood composer Michael Giacchino (whose previous credits include “Rogue One”, “The Batman”, JJ Abrams first “Star Trek”), while the voice cast is packed with top talent like John Noble (“Fringe”), Daveed Diggs (“Snowpiercer”) and Jameela Jamil (“The Good Place”). The space battles are pretty spectacular, too.
And for anyone expecting a dumbed down plot, “Prodigy”‘s second season shoots preconceptions down faster than you can say “Temporal Mechanics 101”. The foundations of season two were laid in season one, when the real Janeway (now a Vice Admiral, as revealed in “Star Trek: Nemesis“) learned that an experimental starship called the USS Protostar — under the command of her former first officer, Chakotay — had been located on a planetoid called Tars Lamora, and was now under the control of a bunch of fugitive kids.
Without venturing too far into spoiler territory, what follows is a complex and sophisticated story involving time loops, a first contact scenario gone horribly wrong, and an antagonist with a serious (and, arguably, understandable) grudge against Starfleet. It has monsters (known as the Loom) who can erase their victims from history, and a brief excursion to the Mirror Universe — where, yes, goatee beards are still a surefire giveaway that you’re talking to a villain. It also features some refreshingly familiar voices (Robert Beltran as Chakotay, Robert Picardo as the Doctor, Ronny Cox as Admiral Jellico), and a pivotal role for a former boy wonder who quit Starfleet to play at being Doctor Who.
If “Prodigy” is not quite “Voyager” season 8, it’s definitely season 7.2, a passing of the torch to the next, next generation. This show was never about Janeway, Chakotay or the Doctor but its wonderful, cynicism-free celebration of “Star Trek” could never have worked without them.
As this era of Starfleet deals with synth uprisings and the evacuation of Romulus — events destined to leave lasting scars on Jean-Luc Picard and the Federation — it’s good to know the crew of the Prodigy are still out there, somewhere in the cosmos. There’s no question they deserve a third season to see what strange new worlds they might find.
Every episode of “Star Trek: Prodigy” is available to stream on Netflix.
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