Spoilers Star Trek: Prodigy 1x06 - "Kobayashi"

if you call a “clip show” painstakingly recreating the ent-d bridge. It was probably one of the most expensive episodes so far...

It’s supposed to get young people interested in Trek. Some might want to check out this cool Spock guy and their parents will be happy to further introduce him to them!

indeed. We were kinda expecting a big reveal but here dal uses the transporter in the holosimulation. Oh well...

Barclay brings them there in TNG. And they meet huge talking heads that look suspiciously like “God”. Oh well!

 

You do not know what a clip show is.

Children, yes.

 

I liked it, agree or disagree but eventually the show did need to connect to the larger Trek universe beyond holo-Janeway.

But hopefully they don’t go as Easter egg heavy again….that’s Lower Decks shtick.

I’m still confused on the timeline though. How long has the ship been missing. I thought it was only a few years 5-6 max. But it’s been hidden at least 17…interesting.

gave this an 8. Highest I’ve given a Prodigy ep so far.

yeah, coulda had Trip instead of Scotty, Hoshi instead of Uhura or Reed in place of Odo. But that’s a minor nitpick, I’m fine with their choices.

Plus, this shows exactly how you could bring past Trek characters into Disco in the 32nd century as these holograms seemed way more interactive.

 

Remember this is Star Trek, so Time Travel might be involved.

 

Not only were they searching for it 17 years ago in 2366 on Tars Lamora, they said that they’d been searching for it for years already at that point.

The Protostar had been within Tars Lamora for 17+ years, and contained records of Captain Chakotay being in command of the Protostar with Hologram Janeway at his disposal, which would mean Chakotay was given the assignment sometime after Voyager returned to the Alpha Quadrant in 2378. Additionally, the ship’s files contain Holodeck programs with records of Odo, who would eventually serve on a Starfleet station and the bridge of a Starfleet vessel during the Dominion War, but not for another few years after we see it was abandoned in the past with the Diviner’s flashback scenes.

All these facts coexisting, and the record from Chakotay mentioning an anomaly, would be enough to confirm some kind of time travel, but we also have direct confirmation from the author of the episode, Aaron J. Waltke, in an interview released today.

 

Damn, Prodigy went from 'Was this supposed to be a Star Wars show?' to Trials and Tribble-ations in 6 episodes. They're going after Lower Decks here, this is a proper competition now.

That was probably Prodigy's best episode yet and I'm not just saying that because of all the fan service... or maybe I am, it's hard to tell. It amused me how much it was like one of those Trek games where you build up your crew of characters from all the different series. I was a little surprised that no one from Enterprise got picked, but then I guess no one was very happy the last time we got NX-01 crewmembers in a 24th century holodeck program.

The episode went out to tick all the boxes, so we got an introduction to the wider Star Trek universe, clues to what the Protostar was doing in the Delta Quadrant, character growth for Dal, and a fart joke with the funny blob, and I think it nailed it every time. It was a bit weird that Janeway left the 'characters sound like audio taken from a 60s TV show' option enabled, but it must have taken a ton of work to find all of those clips and really it just added to the charm of it for me.

 

gotcha. Thanks for that link.

something else to mention, I forgot how truly great the shows title song is. It may be the best of Paramount+ Trek. Certainly better than Disco and Picard.

 

The ship offers crew members from the 29th century:

 

It may have come down to a simple question of who had the most audio available that could be shoehorned into the episode. Odo had a lot more dialogue than Nog did.

 

Once more, it feels like the P+ era animated Trek has a lot more love for the source material (and audience) than the live action shows. I mean, I'm a grown up. I like complicated, dark, messy world building and stories. But dang, even Black Sails and Hannibal didn't leave me feeling as wrung-out and depressed as Disco and PIC tended to, whereas LDS and Prodigy both keep me waiting impatiently for the next episode. Maybe the live-action writers' rooms are just better at pulling off misery than they are catharsis?

But anyway, enough griping. I'm really enjoying the mystery of the Protostar, watching the kids push through their trust issues with Janeway and each other, and getting to see the Federation through the eyes of outsiders (which was always one of my favorite aspects of DS9). And I grin every single time Holo Janeway plays Dal for the insecure little blusterling he is. The kid'll learn eventually, but I'll enjoy him slipping on banana peels until then. I wasn't 100% comfortable with the holodeck simulation - the affection for the actors and characters from the creative team was obvious (how much time must they have spent going through old episodes to find lines that would work?!), but cutting and pasting so many lines from Leonard and Rene to fit the shape of the episode felt a little like propping up their corpses. And it kept taking me out of the scene when I could identify the episodes the lines came from. It was a neat idea, I just wish they'd at least gotten a VA for Spock, since he had so much interaction with Dal. But that was the only aspect I didn't enjoy. The scenario itself was great fun and I'm looking forward to the next adventure.

 

That would be fine if the other characters, including the computer/"Janeway", didn't defer to his authority with no explanation as to why they do.

Cool. A better actor might keep me engaged in this arc.

 

I really REALLY love this show.

HJaneway's snark was turned up to 11 getting Dal to try the program. I laughed *a lot* at his comments about Kirk, his nicknames for his holo-crew, and his incredible stubbornness!

I love when writers give us answers that lead to more questions, and they did a bang-up job here!

I got misty-eyed hearing Rene and Jimmy and Leonard. And then that dedication...

I was thinking the same thing!

 

It also has a badge from TNG ' Future Imperfect' which wasn't real.
So that means that this is either an easter egg, a mistake or there will be a time when starfleet uses this badge or there's something else going on here.

 

Or, as I mentioned before, SF may have already come up with and used ALL of these designs by the 24th century.
There are vast portions of UFP time we hadn't seen.
In fact, we saw at best 21 seasons of late 24th century across TNG, DS9 and VOY... however, all of these effectively 'overlap' and take place from 2363 to 2378 (aka, 15 years). New badge designs could have been developed every 5 years or so (we've seen 2 different badges as used on TNG and later on VOY).

That would provide SF with potential 40 different designs over just 200 years... we've seen that even different ships can have different badges.

 

Pog keeps questioning his authority all the time, Janeway keeps letting him learn how much he has to learn, Murf doesn't speak in any way we understand, Zero seems to observe more than comment and doesn't seek power, Rok-Tak is too scared and inexperienced to challenge him, and Gwyn lost her motivation for anything. There are 14 episodes left this season. Who should be captain in your opinion?

It's Chronowerx

 

The "Future Imperfect(TNG)" one is just an Easter egg or a mistake. There's no logical reason why it should be there in a Starfleet holodeck database from the 2380s.

 

well, they got giachino for that song...it shows!

A reflection on the varying quality of the audio clips: they probably still have the unmixed audio of all the Berman Trek episodes but it’s likely they only have the master (or even just copies!) from the 60s and cleaning that up properly is quite a task. I’m sure that with a bigger budget they could have done better, but this is what was possible with what they had.

 

Btw, the Klingon captain said peHoHchu' (kill them well!) when they boarded the ship

There is a longer version of the theme:



Really gets my blood rushing when it takes off

 

I am a bit surprised the didn’t get Peck to record Spock…you know for Synergy.

 

Every badge in the program had been seen by a captain who presumably had enough authority to start adding their own characters to the simulation. Riker added Future Imperfect Admiral Picard because he couldn't keep that goatee to himself, Janeway added Captain Braxton because she knew the anachronism would drive him crazy, etc.