The fact that PRO made Chakotay fun and watchable and left me wondering what his character would do next should mean that the series gets a bare minimum of ten Emmys.
Spoilers Star Trek: Prodigy General Discussion Thread
- Thread starter The Overlord
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Your objection is self-contradictory. Getting people into Star Trek means introducing them to the characters and story elements of Star Trek. How does including the very thing being introduced go against the effort to introduce it?
You also make the common mistake of assuming that a story can only serve one purpose or one target audience, that two goals can only be mutually exclusive rather than complementary. Yes, it incorporates continuity elements, yet it does so in a way that explains them to new viewers. The characters and elements that are reused are used in a way that's relevant to the Prodigy cast and the show's mission. Janeway is the character that serves as the kids' gateway into Starfleet. Chakotay's mission is what put the Protostar in place on Tars Lamora and motivated Janeway to seek it out, setting the whole storyline in motion. Wesley Crusher is their guide through the temporal dynamics that drive the season's crisis. The Romulan evacuation is seeded throughout the season as a justification for why no help is coming and the main characters have to fix things on their own, and is then a catalyst for a new status quo that gives the main characters their own ship pursuing its own mission. It's not just "memberberries," because the returning characters and story elements are advanced and used in a way that serves the story, rather than the story serving the nostalgia like in Picard season 3.
The way they handled Chakotay was particularly good. They didn't just rely on audiences having prior familiarity with the character. They went out of their way to have the core characters realize that they owe their freedom from Tars Lamora to Chakotay because of his decision to send the Protostar back through the wormhole. They established clearly why Chakotay matters to the main characters, why it's important to them to save him, in a way that requires no prior knowledge of Voyager.
He said "our show is not just a Voyager sequel." He did not say "also." It's inappropriate to put something in quotation marks if it's not an accurate quote. And he did not mean it the way you're disingenuously interpreting it to mean. He meant the show is its own thing rather than being merely a sequel to something else. He did not mean it was a sequel and something else.
After all, Wesley Crusher was not part of Voyager. Admiral Jellico was not part of Voyager. Tribbles, the Mirror Universe, the Romulan evacuation -- the show draws material from all over the franchise. As well as introducing a lot of new characters and story elements of its own, notably the Vau N'Akat, the Protostar, the Loom, etc.
You’ll get no argument from me that current Trek is steeped in nostalgia bait. But I’d argue that much of Hollywood is in that trap. Doesn’t make it right or not. I would prefer to see something interesting and different. But anytime someone tries to do that, people whine. So I can’t blame them ultimately for going along with the crowd here.
No. It was not. I’d also argue that one does not need to see Voyager or TNG to understand the characters crossed over to Prodigy. Does it help? Sure. But having characters from a broad ranging franchise and using them in a new way that doesn’t really speak to heavily from the source material is actually pretty clever.
Indeed, yes. I think it speaks to some of the strength of the writing in that I'm a bit more interested in what happens to Gwyn or Dal than whatever reference pops up.
That stuff is the gravy, as it should be.
Right. You don't need to know the Voyager or TNG backstory to follow the plots in Prodigy any more than you needed to see the fight on Rigel VII to understand "The Cage," or to have seen a prior Stargazer series to understand "The Battle." All stories rely on the characters' history to some extent; it's the storyteller's job to make that history clear and accessible whether it comes from a previous story or not.
Really, PRO relies very little on specifics from VGR. We know Janeway is an admiral who used to command a ship called Voyager, Chakotay was her first officer that she cares for a great deal, the EMH was her medical officer, and... that's about it. It uses the characters, but uses them in a way that's specific to this show and its storylines. The continuity nods to things like the Rubber Tree People and the Emergency Command Hologram are just grace notes.
I do have to give the PRO Season 2 writers credit for restraint in never even making passing reference to Seven of Nine given how important a supporting character she was in all three seasons of PIC.
Star Trek: The Next Generation didn't rely on Vulcans, Tribbles or the "Mirror Universe" to introduce new viewers to Star Trek.
Yes, he did.
I'm interpreting this as making Prodigy not a Voyager sequel was a second consideration.
You're willfully taking it out of context to suit your preconceived notion. It's clear from the entire quote, not just the sentence you cherrypicked, that he's refuting the fan perception that it's just a VGR sequel, as part of his larger point that it's an introduction to the entire universe.
Forgot about that! But it was so subtle it's masterful.
And the fact the writers managed to pull that off in the equivalent of less screen time than a typical season of Voyager (season 1 notwithstanding) is astounding.
Are you counting both seasons of PRO in that? Since twenty 25-minute episodes is less than sixteen 42-minute episodes. (Although I still consider VGR's first season to be twenty episodes long, even if four of them had delayed broadcasts.)
Personally, I think the season did a better job rehabilitating Wesley Crusher than Chakotay. Yeah, they did give Chakotay a bit more edge, but that got pretty much sanded off once he was back home, and he was basically just there from then on. And Beltran's performance was okay but unremarkable. But turning Wesley into a mad time wizard and leaning into the mature Wil Wheaton's edge and quirkiness as a performer was an inspired choice. Not to mention that the season fixed Picard's oversight by having Wesley actually talk to his mother.
Loved this season. The show deserves a third season. It was just so well done. I want to see more adventures with these charactees.
I have just finished S2 via a binge over the weekend.
Def a good season of TV and a great season of Trek. Honestly I enjoyed that more than all of Discovery and Picard.
Did like how they tied things in with the Mars attacks, even if that entire plot from Picard S1 makes no, zero, none sense - if Vat Tash have infiltrated Starfleet/UFP that much why devastate Mars and the shipyards? Why not kill the Synth program in its bed using bureaucracy or even attacking/sabotaging the Daystrome Institute?
Also why are 'thousands of ships' at Mars and the completed ones not off on their mission in Romulan space?
And the biggest unanswered question I still have from the stupid Supernova plot is - why does a Star Empire need Federation help anyway?
Def a good season of TV and a great season of Trek. Honestly I enjoyed that more than all of Discovery and Picard.
Ok, so explain to me how this time loop is sorted out?
2363 The Diviner arrives from future Solum through the collapsing wormhole. He starts searching for the Protostar, and establishes a slave mine colony
2366 Diviner creates Gwyn
2382 The Protostar is lost with Chaoktay and crew - it time travel's to a devastated Solum 50 years in the future: 2436- Chakotay originally sent the ship back through the wormhole remotely and it crashed on Tars Lamora at X point.
Early 2384 Protostar is found by a bunch of kids and they escape the Diviner and the events of S1 play out with the ship being destroyed to prevent the virus weapon taking out Starfleet, which creates a rift that allow them to get Chakotay's distress call from 2436.
Later 2384 The kids create a new timeline where Chakotay escapes with the Protostar back to 2374, spends 10 years on a planet until the kids find him in 2384 and reunites him with Janeway. Starfleet negates the weapon/virus thing.
After some mucking about the Protostar is sent back in time to X point and crashes on Tars Lamora to be found by the kids etc.
However, with Solum now not devastated by civil war in 238x and Ilthuran not becoming the Diviner how is Gwyn even born?
If Starfleet turned off the weapon does the ending of S1 still happen in 2384? Last Stardate we have for that series 61408.8 is before all the events of S2. Was there still a battle then and was the Protostar still destroyed to prevent the weapon infecting Starfleet? Did the ship not need to be blown up then?
Temporal Mechanics are such a pain!
2363 The Diviner arrives from future Solum through the collapsing wormhole. He starts searching for the Protostar, and establishes a slave mine colony
2366 Diviner creates Gwyn
2382 The Protostar is lost with Chaoktay and crew - it time travel's to a devastated Solum 50 years in the future: 2436- Chakotay originally sent the ship back through the wormhole remotely and it crashed on Tars Lamora at X point.
Early 2384 Protostar is found by a bunch of kids and they escape the Diviner and the events of S1 play out with the ship being destroyed to prevent the virus weapon taking out Starfleet, which creates a rift that allow them to get Chakotay's distress call from 2436.
Later 2384 The kids create a new timeline where Chakotay escapes with the Protostar back to 2374, spends 10 years on a planet until the kids find him in 2384 and reunites him with Janeway. Starfleet negates the weapon/virus thing.
After some mucking about the Protostar is sent back in time to X point and crashes on Tars Lamora to be found by the kids etc.
However, with Solum now not devastated by civil war in 238x and Ilthuran not becoming the Diviner how is Gwyn even born?
If Starfleet turned off the weapon does the ending of S1 still happen in 2384? Last Stardate we have for that series 61408.8 is before all the events of S2. Was there still a battle then and was the Protostar still destroyed to prevent the weapon infecting Starfleet? Did the ship not need to be blown up then?
Temporal Mechanics are such a pain!
Did like how they tied things in with the Mars attacks, even if that entire plot from Picard S1 makes no, zero, none sense - if Vat Tash have infiltrated Starfleet/UFP that much why devastate Mars and the shipyards? Why not kill the Synth program in its bed using bureaucracy or even attacking/sabotaging the Daystrome Institute?
Also why are 'thousands of ships' at Mars and the completed ones not off on their mission in Romulan space?
And the biggest unanswered question I still have from the stupid Supernova plot is - why does a Star Empire need Federation help anyway?
Didn't that Star Empire recently suffer losses from the Dominion War, then infighting with Shinzon's coup?
Yes, but still it should hardly be short of resources!
Resources might not be the question but experienced personnel.
The same way the "Yesterday's Enterprise" Tasha Yar remained in existence to give birth to Sela after her alternate timeline was undone, and the same way the O'Brien from "Visionary" remained in existence after his short-term future where DS9 was destroyed was undone. Once you leave a timeline, you're not erased along with it, any more than someone who's already gotten off a sinking ship will drown with it.
The difference is that preventing the Protostar from crashing on Tars Lamora would've changed the entire Prime timeline that Gwyn was in, so really, everything should've changed, not just her existence. But they handwaved that with the shuttle's temporal shields negating the paradox somehow. It didn't really make sense, but time travel "logic" in fiction rarely does, except in fixed-timeline stories like "Assignment: Earth" or The Final Countdown.
Because evacuating the central planets of a Star Empire in just a few years would be a gigantic undertaking. A large empire would have considerable resources, yes, but also a considerable population, and relocating them all would be monumentally difficult. Nobody can weather a disaster of that magnitude without outside help.
Moreover, according to the novels and possibly to Picard itself, there were a lot of political agendas among the Romulans that interfered with a smooth evacuation, much like the COVID denial in the US government in 2019 or so. Starfleet offered its help free of such impediments, at least until the synth attack changed things.
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