Star Trek Prodigy – Season #2

The animation folks at Star Trek have another huge success on their hands. Whereas Lower Decks manages to love Trek whilst thoroughly taking the piss out of it, Prodigy has turned into a classic Trek series with a full-on space opera story arc and plenty of great Trek moments.

If you have seen Season #1 you will remember that the rag tag bunch of kids who are the stars of the series have made it to Federation Space where they hope to become actual Starfleet Academy Cadets. However, events get in the way of this plan, and they find themselves involved in a mission to rescue Chatokay was is trapped in the past with the Protostar. Meanwhile Gwyn gets sent on a diplomatic mission to her home planet, Solum. Inevitably things go badly wrong, and the kids end up creating a time paradox which threatens the stability of the universe. The rest of the series is taken up with their attempts to put things right.

Of course Starfleet did not send a bunch of cadets on a highly sensitive mission by themselves. They are only there because of their knowledge of the Protostar, and Gwyn’s connection to Solum. The mission is supposedly under the command of Admiral Janeway, so a significant part of the story is essentially a “kids have to save their dumb parents” type story, in which Janeway is their over-protective mom, and the Emergency Holographic Doctor is their incompetent dad.

Along the way there is plenty of character development for the kids, including a fascinating evolving relationship between the energy being, Zero, and an arrogant Vulcan pilot who has the highly significant name of Ma’jel. You can’t give a character in Star Trek that name and not have her play a major role in the story.

There are also some very Trek moments. While the series does have a very clear arc, there are a few filler episodes that introduce lighter themes and provide opportunities for character development. One of them involves landing on a planet where a Klingon scientist has accidentally bred a species of giant, carnivorous tribbles.

Because this is a time travel story, it is inevitable that there is a guest appearance by temporal agent extraordinaire, Wesley Crusher. It is also inevitable that one of the first things Janeway says to him when they meet is, “You need to call your mom.”

All in all, it is a great story that had me bingeing through it as fast as I could because I very much wanted to know what happened next. It looks like there will be more, because our heroes get back to Earth just in time for the attack on the Utopia Planitia shipyards, and an excuse for a whole new season is provided.

Both series of Prodigy have been in the form of 20 half-hour episodes. This seems to give plenty of opportunity for story-telling, and somehow a half hour of animation manages to pack in as much story as an hour of live action. Add to that the fact that it is much easier to do interesting aliens with animation, and you’ve got a recipe for a very successful series. I very much hope that Star Trek does more of this sort of thing.