Friday’s Rag Tag Crew: Star Trek Prodigy

Of the two, Star Wars has always had a more obvious lean towards kid’s TV than Star Trek. Sure, Trek did have its animated series in the 1970s but Star Wars has a longer history of kid friendly animated shows from Droids & Ewoks through to Clone Wars and later Rebels. The Star War’s animated shows highlight one of the creative ironies of children’s television. Such shows are often commissioned for the most cynical of reasons (selling toys and building an audience for the main ‘product’) but they often allow more creative freedom for writers and directors, which then can pay-off handsomely for the more cynical minded bean counters.

So it wasn’t a big surprise that a kid’s animated Star Trek show was created but rather that it had taken so long and even then the powers-that-be behind it have been less than committed to the idea. The first season of the show was released in 2021 on Paramount+ and Nickelodeon and a second season was made but the whole show was cancelled in 2023 without the second season being released. Since then, the show has had a reprieve and is now available on Netflix.

The premise of the show is 100% within the template of what I call the Rag Tag Crew subgenre. A disparate group of young people come together through hardship and happen-chance, steal/rescue a spaceship that they don’t know how to fly and head off into space pursued by bad people and (later) the authorities. On the way, they work through their differences and become a more functional crew/found family. At least in season 1, where the show will go in its second season is a different question.

This first season is 20 episodes long and split into two parts. The first part centres around a dystopian mining operation far away from Federation space. On a strange asteroid, a being called Diviner has an enslaved workforce mining in the pursuit of some hidden object. The Diviner is aided by his daughter Gwyndala and an evil robot called Drednok. Meanwhile, among the enslaved miners, teenage Dal R’El dreams of freedom.

To help keep the miners from banding together, they are drawn from multiple species and automatic translators are forbidden, preventing easy communication among the workforce. Meanwhile Drednok and his robot sentries are searching for an escaped prisoner called Zero…

Matters come to a head when Dal R’El discovers the secret hidden within the asteroid, a functioning Federation starship called the Protostar. The ship gives Dal access to a universal translator and with the help of Zero, a big rock-like alien called Rok-Tahk (who is actually an 8-year-old girl) and a Tellarite engineer called Jankom Pog, they manage to escape with the ship. In the process, they also inadvertently kidnap The Diviner’s daughter. In addition, there is a pet-like creature called Murf and the ship’s training hologram which happens to be a simulation of Captain Janeway of Voyager fame (voiced by Kate Mulgrew).

These first episodes wobble between the plot about freeing the miners enslaved by The Diviner and a more didactic aspect of learning about Starfleet and the Federation and Star Trek backstory. This baby’s-first-Star-Trek aspect is less good but doesn’t derail the overall plot. However, each time it dips into how great Starfleet is (particularly in the earlier episodes) it makes the show feel like it is some kind of propaganda material from within the universe of Star Trek — like Starfleet commissioned a kid’s cartoon to encourage teenagers to enlist.

There are a couple of more stand-alone episodes in the first half but I thought episode 8 was particularly good. Entitled “Time Amok” it is essentially a time-goes-wacky standard Star Trek episode but it manages to have a more interesting premise than a basic time-loop episode. After an accident, the crew find themselves separately alone on the ship with only ten minutes to stop the ship from exploding. In fact, each character is in their own mini-timeline with the added twist that time is progressing differently within each timeline. Luckily the Janeway hologram can communicate between the timelines. Everything works out in the end with a moral about everybody working together but the unusual structure makes that moral feel a lot more earned.

The mid-season two-part finale is also pretty good, with the crew returning to rescue all the other enslaved miners.

In the second set of ten episodes we learn more about The Diviner and the crew of the Protostar find themselves pursued by the Federation (led by the actual Admiral Janeway). The grand final ends up with another circumstance in which all of Starfleet finds its ships subverted by a nefarious plot to destroy the Federation but in this case I think the underlying motives of the villains and also the ‘how’ of what turns the ships against themselves is better done than it was in Season 3 of Picard.

Overall, pretty good. You need to give it some allowance for being a show aimed at kids but there is a decent science-fiction show here with likeable characters. Season 1 is a complete story in itself with a satisfying plot arc.