Author: Cheryl Morgan

We don’t yet have Paramount + here in the UK, and anyway I’m ambivalent about paying for a streaming service just to watch Star Trek. I can’t think of anything else they offer that I’d want to watch. So I’d kind of resigned myself to not seeing Prodigy. But then I discovered that it is on Nickleodeon, and I have that channel as part of my Sky subscription, so I promptly binged the first season.

Key points: firstly Prodigy is animated. And second it is very much aimed at kids. If you are OK with that, it is a lot of fun.

Far in the depths of space there is a lonely mining planet ruled over by a creepy guy called The Diviner and his robotic henchman, Drednok. The miners are all slaves, and they are of such a variety of species that they can’t even talk amongst themselves to plot rebellion. Nevertheless, some try.

Most notably there is the notorious terrorist known as Zero, whom Drednok has repeatedly failed to capture. Then there is Dal, who is neither a genius nor super-powerful, but is possessed of a boyish enthusiasm, an anti-authoritarian streak a mile wide, and a desperate desire to escape.

After another failed attempt at escape, Dal ends up in the deepest mines along with a young Brikar, a species of alien that owes their morphology to Ben Grimm. Rok-Tahk, it turns out, is an eight-year-old girl with a passion for anything cute and fluffy. How do we find that out? Well, Dal and Rok stumble across a starship hidden deep within the planet. It is still operational, and it has a universal translator system. It belongs to a group of people called The Federation.

Through various adventures, Dal and Rok manage to escape. Along with them they bring the notorious Zero, a troll Tellarite called Jankom Pog, and an amorphous blog of something creature called Murf. They also take along The Diviner’s daughter, Gwyn, as a hostage.

In order to escape the crew needs to work out how to fly this ship, which is called the Protostar. (Hint: never volunteer to fly a ship that is called proto-anything.) They discover that the ship has an on-board AI which manifests as a hologram of a humanoid called Kathryn Janeway. She mistakes our heroes for a bunch of Federation cadets and starts to teach them how to be a proper crew (which occasionally annoys our bunch of teenage runaways no end).

Of course The Diviner is none too pleased to have this great prize stolen from under his nose. He’s not overly happy about losing his daughter either, though that’s very much a secondary issue. Plot ensues, in which we start to learn a few things about the history of The Diviner and the Protostar.

The animated format allows the scriptwriters to do a few fun bits of fan service. That is not dead that cannot be animated. Consequently one episode involves a holodeck training simulation in which Dal gets to meet some famous Starfleet officers, including Mr. Spock and Montgomery Scott. Archive audio of Nimoy and Doohan is used, alongside similar footage of several still-living actors, to provide the voices.

While the crew might be a bunch of foolish, and occasionally annoying, kids, this is very much a Star Trek story, and one which I think will be enjoyed by many fans of the series. If you have access to Nickleodeon, or sign up for Paramount +, do check it out.

Jean Luc Picard has many, many loyal fans, and Paramount seems determined to milk them for all they are worth. This means re-visiting themes from the original Next Generation series. In the first season of Picard, that meant Data and related artificial beings. In this one it means mainly the Borg, whom we are supposed to have got rid of, and Q, whom sadly we haven’t.

I realise that this is not a commonly held view, but whenever I see anything Star Trek related that involves Q it is usually a signal for me to stop watching immediately. The fact that I sat through all of Picard: Season 2 suggests that I too have a fondness for Jean Luc that is easily exploited.

Having said that, Q is mercifully absent for most of the series. His role is largely to set up the plot, nudge an antagonist into action when one is needed, and then wrap things up at the end. In the meantime, things happen and…

Oh no, time travel! Multiverse! It seems like some sort of virus has infected Hollywood.

So, the Borg re-appear, and are just about to destroy an entire Federation fleet, when Picard and his pals are flung back in time to a world in which Earth has become a Fascist dictatorship. Romulan Legolas gets killed by the bad guys, and the rest of the team get sent further back in time to try to prevent the pivotal event that causes this new history to come into being. It is, you may have noticed, a Legends of Tomorrow plot.

Time travel stories are often an excuse to skimp on production costs by setting the story in the present day, or near as damnit. Here Michael Chabon and the script crew redeem themselves slightly with a sub-plot about a street clinic set up to help illegal immigrants. ICE are major villains for a couple of episodes.

But this series is all about nostalgia, and going back in time means a visit to the original 10 Forward bar where we get to meet a much younger Guinan, which in turn sets up a guest appearance by Whoopi Goldberg in the final episode.

The overriding impression I got from the series was of a deliberate change of course by senior management. The first series set Picard up with a brand new crew, of whom Seven of Nine was the only survivor of previous Trek. The new series sets out to jettison them in various ways. Romulan Legolas gets killed early on, though of course that may mean little as it happens in an alternate reality. Chris Rios gets left in the past (spoiler, sorry, but it becomes obvious very quickly that it will happen) and Agnes Jurati gets a whole new life where she’s not just an insecure genius whom everyone mostly ignores. I hear that in the next season several members of the old Next Gen crew will join the cast. So yeah, the idea of Picard leading a new crew has been abandoned, and nostalgia has become the order of the day.

What else? Brent Spiner gets to have fun playing Adam Soong (again). There is a whole backstory about Picard’s childhood trauma that does sort of have a role in the plot, but is mainly there to allow Patrick Stewart to show off his acting talent. And there is a guest appearance by, of all people, Wesley Crusher, who now works for the Time Variance Authority or some such.

If you sit and think about it for too long, it is all very silly. Thankfully there are some well-scripted episodes along the way, so if you don’t think too hard it is quite enjoyable.

Which should perhaps be all that needs to be said, except I want to stop and think a bit about the Point of Divergence that causes Earth to tip into a Fascist dictatorship. It turns out to be the success or failure of a manned space mission to Europa. I realise that this is Star Trek, and that therefore the entire rationale of the series is heavily bound up with the space programme, with looking outward from Earth, and boldly going. But arguing that without it we will inevitably sink into Fascism? Really? That seems an awfully big claim to be making.

Season 4 of Star Trek: Discovery had a difficult time in the UK. First it was announced as streaming on Netflix. Then it was pulled the day before the first episode was due to drop. We were told we’d have to wait months for it to be available on Paramount +. There was a huge outcry, and mysteriously the series appeared on a live streaming TV platform called Pluto which I’d never heard of before.

I tried, I really did, but I cannot get used to this idea that a TV programme is screened live at a particular time on a particular day and if you miss it, well, bad luck. What do they think this is, the Twentieth Century? Also the early episodes of Season 4 were Not Good, and they were screened late on a Friday when I often had other things to distract me. After a few weeks I missed an episode and gave up.

And then, totally out of the blue, I discovered that the season was available for purchase on Amazon Prime. It didn’t cost a lot, so I went for it.

It gets better, sort of.

The season has an overall arc which is about an existential threat to the galaxy. A mysterious “Anomaly” (aka a rift in the space-time continuum) turns up and starts eating solar systems, starting with Book’s homeworld. So we have an epic piece of fridging that is intended to turn poor Book into a revenge-obsessed vigilante. Michael, it seems, can’t be allowed a relationship with the dishiest man in the galaxy. Something has to turn up to ruin it all.

Anyway, the Federation needs to get a handle on the Anomaly quickly, before it eats any more heavily populated worlds. This results in much handwavium on the part of Stamets & co., and a lot of politicking amongst the Federation and independent worlds. Eventually they track the thing down to an unknown species who live on the edge of the galaxy where no man has, you know. And we then have to decide whether the Anomaly, which is clearly massively superior technology, is a weapon of war, or a superior species accidentally stepping on an ants’ nest.

Along the way various cast character arcs are explored. Stamets and Culber get to be Gay Dads for Adira and Gray, which is charming. Tilly discovers a new vocation as an Academy lecturer, which may be a way off the series for Mary Wiseman. Then again I thought at the end of Season 3 that Saru would be gone now that Michael is Captain of the Discovery, but instead he’s back and having a very awkward love affair with the President of Vulcan. There are attempts to give other members of the Bridge Crew a place in the spotlight, but they are very awkward because those characters don’t have the personality of Chekov or Sulu.

There are good bits too. I liked the side story about the Discovery’s computer system becoming sentient. Jett Reno is brilliant, and has enough personality to make up for an entire Bridge Crew of non-entities. Stacey Abrams got to guest star as the President of Earth. And possibly my favourite bit was Tilly and Admiral Vance sharing a whisky as they waited alone for the Anomaly to destroy Earth. (Spoiler, it does not.)

Eventually we get to the end and discover that someone on the script-writing crew is a huge fan of Arrival and wants to re-create it in Star Trek without all that weird timeline stuff.

In many ways Discovery is better now that the ship and crew has been dumped into the far future rather than trying to ret-con the past. In other ways it is suffering from dodgy plotting. But it is still Star Trek, it still loves science fiction, and it still wants to annoy basement-dwelling dudebros, so I guess I shall keep watching. In any case, I will need Paramount + to watch the next season of Lower Decks, and so I might as well watch Discovery as well.

There is a lot of Star Trek on TV right now, and Lower Decks continues to be among the best of it.

I suspect that there were no plans for a second season, because Season 2 starts by necessarily undoing parts of the first season finale. If you’ve seen that you will know that Ensign Boimler managed to get transferred to serve under Captain Ryker on the Titan. Clearly Lower Decks can’t continue without him, so they had to find some way to bring him back. Also Lieutenant Shaxs, the Bajoran Head of Security, died in Season 1. He’s back in Season 2, and everyone just mutters mysteriously about how that always happens with Bridge Officers.

This highlights that fact that, while Lower Decks is clearly made by people who love Star Trek and its history, they don’t take it at all seriously at times. Indeed, half the point of Lower Decks is to poke fun at the weird and silly things about the franchise that fans have come to accept and love. They haven’t had an episode about holographic lungs yet, but they did do an episode featuring Tom Paris, including salamander jokes. If you’ve managed to squirm your way through watching Voyager you will know what I’m talking about.

They are also having lots of fun in other ways. The Tom Paris episode also includes a fabulous section in which Tendi and Mariner have collect an old family heirloom for Dr. T’Ana, the feline ship’s doctor. That had me laugh out loud at the end. There’s also an episode in which the crew of the Doritos Cerritos are sent to guard an endangered species, and save them by explaining to the Ferengi poachers that it would be much more profitable to open a wildlife park.

This does bring us to one of the less savoury aspects of Star Trek, its tendency to include thinly veiled racist jokes. Lower Decks has a particular obsession with the Pakleds, whom I didn’t know much about before. They are a “dumb and ugly but dangerous because slightly smarter than they look” race of aliens who seem very much an exercise in comedy by punching down. I guess that, being a comedy show, Lower Decks was going to make use of them. I’m still waiting for them to do something interesting.

The show also buys into Trek racial stereotyping in an episode that features lower deck crews on Klingon and Vulcan ships. This is much better, and is a hint of things to come because there is actually serious plot happening. It sows some seeds that appear to flower right at the end of the finale when there is a massive shock plot twist. Lower Decks has suddenly got serious, and I’m now very much looking forward to Season 3 to see how the crew of the Cerritos deals with this.

Season 2 of The Witcher was much more of a conventional story arc. Personally I didn’t have any difficulty with the multiple timelines of season 1, but then again I have read an awful lot of speculative fiction. It was disorienting in Iain Banks’ Use of Weapons, now it is just normal.

Rather more disorienting was the sudden change of Ciri’s look from frightened child to confident and sexy young princess. How she managed it overnight without access to make-up is a bit of a mystery, but then this is a fantasy series.

But while there is a story arc of sorts here, this season felt a lot like the middle book of a trilogy. There was a lot to be explained, a lot of character background filling to do, but not a lot happening. Even the “Yennifer loses her magic” thing didn’t seem to have much point to it. It was nice to have a thinly disguised version of Baba Yaga as the big bad of the season, especially as we got an actual hut with chicken legs, but again it felt that this was something inserted to provide conflict, not something central to the storyline.

Rather more interesting was the Jaskier’s reinvention of himself from Witcher Sidekick to Social Justice Warrior. He’s involved in some sort of underground railroad helping elves escape Redania. This is especially poignant now as the series is based on fiction written in Polish, and one of my Polish friends is currently involved in a project to help marginalised people escape Ukraine. Anyway, it was good to have Jaskier back.

It was odd to have Jaskier do the “first they came for the elves, but I was not an elf…” thing, but little political moments like this are increasingly common in TV (see also Star Trek). Hopefully it pisses off the Puppies.

The real plot, however, revolves around Ciri, her uncontrollable magic, and her role in the destiny of the Continent. This is the point when it becomes useful to have a geek like Istredd involved, because someone has to do some actual research. I confess to having been highly amused by the scene in which Geralt and Istredd finally meet up and have a pissing contest about whose pet name for Yennifer is correct.

The season ends with a massive shock reveal and the hope that season 3 will be more focussed on the main plotline. We might event get a classic fantasy trilogy plot structure rather than an aimless “more stories set in the world of” thing. For that they are sensibly doing spin-offs. So yes, next on my list to watch will be Nightmare of the Wolf.