EnbySpacePerson

I really wasn't expecting the first review on my blog to be of Star Trek: Prodigy's second season. I wrote on my memes and reviews Mastodon account that I was going to give it a few days to percolate before I wrote about the second season. It turns out what I have to say is not going to fit in several Mastodon messages.

Prodigy's second season isn't perfect television but it's damn good. It outshines Strange New Worlds season 2 by leaps and bounds. It fixes a lot of issues I have with Star Trek: Picard. Sounds like hyperbole? It's not.

For this review, I'm going to copy a format I see YouTubers do. Upfront, low-spoiler overall thoughts and then detailed thoughts with spoilers later. This isn't my usual review format.

Background

At the end of season 1, most of the cast joined Starfleet as enlisted officers with basically the lowest possible non-commissioned rank while they wait to find out if they can go to Starfleet Academy. In season 2, the overall arc is the kids trying to save their friend, Gwynn, from dying because of time-travel incidents that threaten more than just Gwynn.

Low / no spoilers section

Structure

In this season, the show tries to balance the adults' stories with the kids' stories. I'm not sure how well that works for their intended audience but it mostly works for me.

Supporting character arcs

Tysess was mostly just a jerk in season 1. In season 2, he gets some depth and demonstrates an affection for the kids. Chakotay becomes an almost fully realized character. We see what he experienced through ten years of isolation and grief and we see his reluctant journey to become an active Starfleet officer again. Wesley Crusher becomes a full member of the cast. Mostly that doesn't work for me. More in the spoilers. Gates McFadden as Beverly Crusher gets some cameos. Her role is a little stereotypical but we still get a good feeling for her character prior to the show Picard.

The Doctor returns but the writers resort to some caricature with him. The Doctor can be silly and vain but he's also one of the most passionate and principled characters in the Star Trek universe. In the past, we've seen with Naomi Wildman just how good he is with kids. I found myself a little disappointed in how his character was used in S2.

Janeway gets an actual arc too. Talking about it in too great a detail would lead to spoilers but it's an intriguing take on the character.

Protagonist arcs

For the kids' side of things, the season starts with the struggles that the kids face trying to integrate into Starfleet. Rok-Tahk has become very serious, anxious, and tense. She wants to become the perfect Starfleet officer so they will have no choice but to admit her. Jankom tries to become a more polite person, figuring that his Tellarite culture of (comparatively) brusque and rude language won't be a good fit for Starfleet. Zero struggles with the nature of non-coporeality. He wants to ... eat vegan cheeseburgers probably. This isn't a kids blog but I'm reviewing a kids show. I'm not getting into it. The Universal Translator still doesn't speak Mellanoid slime worm so it's hard to say what character development Murf may have had. Dal R'El and Gwynn's stuff is the most important to the arc of the show.

Dal wants to be in Starfleet but he struggles with the actual studying. The show treats his distaste for studying as a character flaw but, speaking as someone with Autism and ADHD, I don't think struggling with a learning method that doesn't work for you is a character flaw. Maybe his attitude is a character flaw. I can tell you I have a bit of an attitude about constrictive and flawed learning methods myself. Is that a character flaw in myself? Maybe. I'm not the one making the curriculum or structure of formal education on this planet. Dal also struggles with the question of whether the ambition he set for himself is really the right one to have. I think the show loses its footing with Dal's development in a few places but it's quite a strong season for him despite a painful start. I love learning. I hate every formal educational experience I've ever encountered. I know from other reviews that some folks disagree with me on Dal's arc. I respectfully disagree.

The main arc of the season revolves around what Gwynn needs. It's hard to have character development when you're living with what's effectively a terminal illness. The show manages to keep that real and present without overwhelming the characters or the audience with the gravity of that situation. One thought I kept coming back to throughout the season was how everyone came together to support her and try to save her. I think there's a powerful message there.

The character development for Rok-Tahk and Jankom ends up being a little lackluster. The development for Zero ends up leading to some of the most heart-warming moments of the show. There's a new character I don't discuss here and her development is a little under-done too. I want to discuss her more but I'll do that separately.

Summary before the spoilers

S2 has some missteps with characters and plot. It's not a perfect season. I'm also not sure universe-ending stakes are the right call for a kids show. But it is one of the strongest seasons of any modern Star Trek. It's funny, fun, scary, thought-provoking, and kind. It understands what Archer means when he says “(T)he next profound discoveries are not necessarily beyond that next star. They're within us. Woven into the threads that bind us. All of us to each other.” (Star Trek: Enterprise S4E21 “Terra Prime”)

Should you watch it? Hell yes! Start with Season 1. This isn't an ad so I'll let you figure out the best way for you to do that.

Detailed breakdown

Nostalgia bait

Nostalgia bait is the bane of big, long-running properties like Star Wars and Star Trek. Show runners and movie makers keep trying to bring out the old familiar toys (characters, species, ships ... specific baseballs) to appeal to an older audience but just having cameos or call-backs isn't compelling story telling. Works that over-rely on this technique suffer.

Most of the time Prodigy includes nostalgia or call-backs, it does so in a way that's either invisible to an audience watching Star Trek for the first time or is explained well-enough and not included gratuitously. To use a specific example, when Janeway disobeys Jellico, she doesn't say “As I once told Samantha Wildman when Seven of Nine was lost, the three rules of being a captain are (...)”. She just says the three rules. It needs no explanation. It provides its own context. It occurs at the exact right moment. With a stunning delivery from Kate Mulgrew, it's as touching as it was the first time she said it. Prodigy doesn't always stick the landing with its references but it's a damn sight better than, say, Picard season 3.

I will (metaphorically) fight anyone who says Lower Decks's references are gratuitous. That's not what this review is about. The closer to a successful, respected Starfleet officer a Starfleet character is, the less frequently they use references. Non-Starfleet characters basically never use them. It's a character trait and world-building. It's ok if you don't like it but it has a Doylesian reason for being there beyond just “easy” jokes.

The Wesley Problem

I almost called this section “Shut up, Wesley.” Not because I feel that way about Wesley but because it kind of works as a reference to ... Datalore and as an example of bad nostalgia baiting.

The new Wesley is basically the Doctor ... from Doctor Who, not Voyager. Which Doctor depends on the person watching him. He reminds me of Matt Smith's but I've heard people compare him to David Tennant or even a less salty Peter Capaldi. I love Star Trek. I like Doctor Who. I don't like this. It doesn't work for me. The upside is that Wesley doesn't have anything that could be described as a TARDIS or a Sonic Screwdriver. If you can get past the “Doctor Who of it all,” Wesley's character is really interesting in Prodigy.

Like the protagonists, he was a child prodigy. He took on way too much responsibility. He left Starfleet when it turned out it wasn't for him. And then he became the last of the Time Lords and took on too much responsibility all over again because he was the one left holding the bag.

He also knows what you can get done outside of Starfleet and mostly encourages the protagonists in their choices. If he wasn't such a big character in the season, he wouldn't be getting his own section. There are parts of his story I love and parts I hate.

Weird dialogue

Throughout the season, there's dialogue that's just ... slightly off. Characters word things in weird ways that don't fit them and seem out of place. It's most noticeable with the Doctor and Chakotay but Janeway and even the protagonists suffer from it a bit. I feel a bit bad talking about it but it was a distraction in far too many episodes. I sometimes wondered if they adjusted the dialogue slightly to make it easier to dub into other languages. If that's what's happening, I appreciate the effort but they need to adjust course slightly.

Strange New Worlds and New Civilizations

Like Strange New Worlds season 2, Prodigy season two leaves some characters underutilized and under developed. SNW isn't trying to have arcs so I'm going to ignore that part.

The thing I will say about Prodigy S2 that puts it above SNW S2 is that SNW S2 has far too many otherwise solid episodes that fail to nail the ending. While I personally loved Ad Astra per Aspera, homophobes and transphobes do too. They absolutely didn't get the message and that is a problem. Subspace Rhapsody misses the point by having the key moment be the characters realizing how important Starfleet is. Contrast that with the TNG episode Ensign Ro.

Ro: I always thought Starfleet had a lot to learn from me, Captain.

Picard: That's an attitude that I've found common among the best officers I've ever served with. Well, you're not one of them yet, but you could be, if you worked at it.

Prodigy S2 is also a compelling season on its own merit. SNW felt like it floundered and failed to find itself.

Because it was no longer Starfleet

It wasn't believable that Starfleet and the Federation would avoid a mass exodus after the Synth ban.

Despite Measure of a Man, we had already seen Starfleet and the Federation making and using synthetic life forms as slave labor (Author, Author) so I won't say that's contrary to the values of the Federation. It clearly isn't and it's a mess I'm not really sure the writers realized they stepped into. The people who worked with Data or admired him from a far would have had a hard time with people like him being banned from the Federation. Voyager's many in-universe fans would have had a hard time too.

Prodigy addresses this by showing that the newly rebuilt fleet (needed to be rebuilt after the Dominion war) had been destroyed by the Construct. A lot of people died in the battle with the Construct. The fleet at the Utopia Planitia shipyards was the replacement fleet. Starfleet was only able to (barely) maintain Federation security and those who wanted to leave the service could be pressed back into duty by Jellico and whomever else.

Some people probably left anyway but those who remained probably felt they were doing the best thing they could do or what they had to because of literally being conscripted. Not every little thing needs to be explained but it was incoherent in Picard why these upstanding people we admire would stay in Starfleet with such an atrocious call. The creators and show-runners of Picard didn't do anything with it because they didn't see the problem.

All they had to do was drop in a line or two about “A lot of people left around that time” from Picard in that interview. Give us that look. Then pause. Let us feel the weight. And then the reporter switches to another question because she's been pressured not to let Picard speak about the synth ban. Or do it in some other way. Just don't try to make us think that Picard was the only person principled enough to leave Starfleet and make it seem like half of that was because of letting most of the Romulans die.

Prodigy's fixes for Picard as subtle as that adjustment, by the way. It doesn't tell us “this is why people are staying around.” Instead, it shows Janeway getting pressed back into service with a room full of other people in the same situation. It doesn't explain to us that some people would have stayed behind because of the need to protect “the borders.”

Instead, it explains that the fleet that was supposed to be evacuating Romulus has been pulled back to protect the borders. It shows us what's going on in a way that can help to explain what we have every reason to believe was the uncharacteristic behavior of our heroes across three other shows (TNG, DS9, and Voyager). It also does it in a way that doesn't patronize to its own intended audience. The intended audience mostly have not seen every single episode of TNG, Voyager, DS9, and Picard.

By tying itself into the pre-story of Picard, it inadvertently turns itself, its hypothetical next season, and Picard into a prophetic metaphor for the world we find ourselves living in now.

I don't think they saw the world we'd be living in but they still said to that world “you can find a way to be your best self while surrounded by an apparent galaxy of people who have other priorities.”

I don't love S2 because it fixed a problem with Picard. I love it because it says “you can find a way to be your best self” with others in this moment. I love it because it's about found family. I love it because I love the characters and I understand their struggles. I love it because it makes me cry. I love it because it understands that the deeper messages of Star Trek aren't about Starfleet.

And I love it because it looks to a world without much hope and says “we will be that hope.” Not “them.” Not “me” or “I.”

“We.”

Here's to many more voyages!

#StarTrek #StarTrekProdigy #Review