LizstarTrek - Prodigy Season 1 Episodes 1 - 10

Every Sunday my Twitch subs and I watch Star Trek in my Discord. Here are my reviews and thoughts on each of the episodes as I see it. If you’re curious about a nerd’s views on Star Trek episodes, please read on, I go quite in depth with some of these episodes! I’ve watched some Star Trek before but not all of it!

This is an interesting one. Fully 3D animated, so the third animated Trek show, and Trek does quite well in animation, though it’s never been 3D. This one is ALSO… for kids! That’s not a bad thing. Some of the best shows of all time are for kids. I don’t expect this to be like, Avatar or Gravity Falls levels, but I expect this to be the real last bright spot in the Trek ouvre.

Lost and Found - PRO 7.5/10

We start by seeing Dal R’El, our hero, stuck on a prison colony. He can’t communicate with anyone else because translators were banned. He’s watched over by big scary robots, who ask him if he’s seen “fugitive zero”. He has. They are gonna torture it out of him, but then fugitive zero does a big splosion and Dal R’El tries to escape in the progress in a big exciting escape scene whiiiich ends in failure, whoopsies.

We then get the big bad robot working with some girl who communicates with a Kazon. Ooh, Delta Quadrant stuff, huh? She’s the daughter of someone important here, “The Diviner”, though seems to be just being used by him. She has to translate for them, and slave trades some cute cat creature. She’s pissed that it’s a kid, and tells off the Kazon. This gets her in kind of hot water with the superbot and her dad, though he lets her off the hook. He’s also worried about the Federation for some reason, which is interesting since they’re so fucking far away.

Dal is given a chance to escape. The “progeny”, Gweyn, will get him off this rock if he can tell her how to find “Fugitive Zero”, who is a Medusan. Medusans were in the TOS episode “Is There In Truth No Beauty?”, which is a WILD callback, that’s not even a very important episode. They’re a telepathic species that drives people mad.

There’s also lots of stuff about Dal not knowing who or what he is. Apparently that’s a point of angst for him, not knowing his species. I don’t see why that matters that much but I guess I have a different opinion on that kinda stuff.

While mining and looking for Fugitive X, Dal and a big rocky friend he makes enemies with crash into a cave and find a hidden Federation ship just… sitting there. As soon as the ship activates, they can actually communicate. The rocky friend is actually a girl, and a kid, her name is Rak-tak.

Zero shows up and now that they have a BETTER way off this rock, they’ll all work together, they just need an engineer to fix it. So they get a Tellarite Engineer named Jankom Pog. God, that cannot be his name. He’s poggers, is he?

Rok invites someone she always liked and wanted to communicate with. A cute little slug being. She wanted to know what he’s like! He is… not intelligent. That’s cute. Pet Slug! His name is Murf :3

Since Dal couldn’t find Zero (he doesn’t rat them out), he’s thrown onto the surface, which is very dangerous and no one survives who’s sent there. Gwyn is unhappy he’s sent up there but can’t do anything about it. So it’ll be super hard for him to escape right? Actually it’ll be super easy. Barely an inconvenience. Gwyn helps him escape so that he can lead them to Zero.

What results is a giant battle. They need to escape in the ship while trying to kidnap Gwyn and hold her hostage as a bargaining chip. The ship, “the protostar” as the Diviner calls it, is almost destroyed in the battle but then blasts off.

Dal has to have one last big climactic battle with the big evil robot Drednok who is TOTALLY not General Greivous. I’mma be real, getting BIG Star Wars Clone Wars vibes from this show already. That’s not a bad thing.

The day is saved by Murf pressing the phaser button. He’s a non sapient weapons specialist :D

They make it out and into space! “Okay so where are we going?” “I have no idea.” And then the ship for some reason FINALLY activates his hologram.

Hologram Janeway is here. I guess if it’s gonna be a Delta Quadrant show she should be here?

For a pilot of Trke, this is up there. Its pacing is a bit weird but hey, it’s alright!

Star Struck - PRO 6/10

Janeway gives them a crash course on what the Federation is. Everyone is super into it, but Dal is not. He thinks the Federation won’t do anything to help them, they’re just fugitives in a stolen ship anyway. I mean, the Federation is basically just the Borg, right? Anyways, now it’s THEIR ship, and Dal claims to be captain.

A few character things here. Dal lies a LOT. Rok hates lying. Gwyn wants to be a part of this but is y’know, dealing with the programming of her father.

“I appreciate a gal who knows what she likes” says Kate Mulgrew, as every woman watching this melts into a pile of goo that could rival Murf.

This kids got a lot of growing to do. I don’t like him very much yet, but I do like everyone else. Obviously he’ll get better. His stupid hard headedness makes him do stupid stuff that deactivates power. Of course, this releases Gwyn, and Rok has to go try and recapture her. We get a cool exciting fight scene where they fight in the middle of a ship as it’s being replicated. Almost like animation is a great medium for Trek!

Shit is bad and they’re about to die, so Dal gets his head out of his ass and admits he needs help. Janeway fixes everything.

Janeway gives a good speech about how the Federation didn’t come out fully formed. People need to learn to work together for a better future. It’s cute.

Also the Diviner is chasing after them in what I can only describe as a Reaper from Mass Effect. It’s like they hollowed out a Crystalline Entity and painted it black and red. It’s so amazingly obviously evil.

Dream Catcher - PRO 7/10

Janeway tells them of an M-Class planet nearby and that they need to explore it. It’s in the Hirogen system. Oh god, this is gonna end with a Hirogen skinning Murf.

They keep lying and pretending their cadets, and I think it’s kinda obvious Janeway is just humoring them. She’s a Trek hologram, she’s pretty smart.

They go out for a walk on the planet, taking the Mako. Somewhere, Picard salivates at this thing. They all IMMEDIATELY split up. This is gonna be another “we gotta learn to work together as a team” type episode. It’s honestly wild to make a show like this in Trek, where we know people die all the time from unsafe and mistakes. And they are being VERY unsafe. Obviously no children are gonna be killed, but y’know.

Gwyn breaks out and takes control of the ship EXTREMELY easily. She’s kind to Murf, which is good. Murf is our boy

We get some seperate stories. Pog finds a house and steals some soup. Rok finds some cute animals that clearly want to eat her, but she’s a rock. Zero is scanning for samples.

Dal meets some psychic root people that want him to stay so they can give him all he’d ever want. They are creepy and scary and represent themselves with Janeway. All this to eat them. Only Dal and Gwyn notice that these psychic hallucinations are real. Dal, because Janeway said she can’t leave the ship, and Gwyn because its her deepest desire. Her dad tellins her he’s proud of her, which he’d NEVER fucking do.

Gwyn tries to take off, and the Protostar crashes. She manages to escape in the shuttle, rescuing Murf, but now they’re all stranded.

Terror Firma - PRO 8.5/10

They have 10km to walk to get back to the ship, and Gwyn has injured herself, but she uses her weird metal shaping powers to make herself a cast. Dal is very cross with her. She’s OBVIOUSLY a good person and I can’t wait for this show to get past this point so she can join the crew properly. Y’know, in the same way I couldn’t wait for Catra to stop being programmed and kiss She-ra.

Especially since she’s like, the only competent one on the crew. She sets the planet on fire and they manage to escape as it tries to eat them. It had been tricking them by terraforming itself so they’d get lost. They hide in a fallen Klingon ship. Apparently the Klingons made it far out here. Dal and Gwyn have a moment together, and they decide to use the stars to navigate to the ship.

The bad guys show up, and Gwyn FINALLY betrays them to save the others.

This is some Lord of the Rings Nazgul-ass shit.

Dal leaves Gwyn behind because even if she saved them now, she’s the one who called htem here, so she “made her choice”. Aaand then the Diviner shows up, sees her dying, and is like “oh hey, sorry, but I gotta go to that ship” and goes to take the Protostar. ….Except it’s not real, it’s the fucking vines. lol fuck you buddy. The show has a good fakeout about this.

The others make it to the ship, then save Gwyn.

Dog, it was that or die, what the fuck did you expect

He tells her to “do the right thing”. She does. She engages The Protostar. Not the ship, but the protostar that’s inside the engine. They have a star inside the ship, which has a unique kind of warp, and BOOM off they go.

I liked that final scene. I think I’mma like Gwyn a lot.

Terror Firma - PRO 8/10

The proto star sent them 400 light years away. They’re safe, for now, but the proto star shuts down and they don’t know when the Diviner will be back…. so the others band together to ask Ral to go to the Federation.

RAL IS PLAYING THE GAME. JESUS CHRIST.

They go chasing after Murf for his vote, and find him in the holodeck. They discover the Koboyashi Maru in the list, and Janeway tells them it’s a test for the best Starship captains and basically eggs him into doing it. I hope this ends with him realizing he is NOT captain material, and Gwyn becomes captain instead.

Gwyn is too busy being a sadsack though. She feels she doesn’t belong anywhere. Zero talks to her and picks her up. I like Zero.

Meanwhile the Diviner makes a new Gwyn. She’s a clone of him. If Gwyn is a clone of the Diviner… does that mean she’s trans?????

The Koboyashi Maru gives them some legendary heroes. Uhura, Crusher, Odo, and Spock. Everyone but Crusher is voiced by voice lines spliced from old shows. That’s actually fantastic. Amazing solution. The episode is even dedicated to them! Anyways he fucks up bad and is given a very low rating. So he tries it again, over and over. Eventually he gets pissy and kicks Jankom off his crew to be replaced by Scotty.

Murf is a perfect creature. I would die for Murf.

It’s me.

Spock gives Dal some advice through spliced voice lines, and it’s cute.

Meanwhile, they hack the Protostar and get some of the old hidden files. they find…

THE RETURN OF CHOKIE.

First Con-tact - PRO 7/10

They discover the transporter and do tests with it. They need a living test subject, and teleport Murf. MURF, NO!! They’re gonna fucking inside-out Murf. No, he’s just sliding down the front of the ship. What a cold open.

They get a distress call from a poor old crone who’s ship is on fire and needs people to save the orphans. Dal recognizes her as the Ferengi who raised him. They go to visit, she’s so happy to see him. She’s like “I’ve been looking for you for years!” she’s also… VERY obviously untrustworthy. She totally sold him to slavery. She needs some things from a pre-space civilization, and she’ll give them a cloaking device they need to hide.

So it’s time for the “let’s learn about the prime directive” episode!

Ah, there it is.

They successfully make first contact, with Gwyn discovering how htey communicate through resonance. She should be captain, she’s the only person here captable except for Zero, and I don’t think they’d want it.

It’s a species you’d see in Metroid Prime :o

Anyways the aliens gift them… a song :) It’s beautiful and all the crew like it. But the Ferengi is like “fuck that that’s not what I want” and steals their crystals.

Anyways yes, obviously she’s evil and sold him into slavery. She also steals stuff from their ship and leaves in her cloaked ship. With some trickery, they get the crystal back, but obviously they fucked up in many ways. Janeway is NOT happy. They lost supplies, they did seriouis harm to the development of this species, and Dal is real depressed cause his mommy is evil ): Gwyn can relate.

First Con-tact - PRO 7/10

Janeway needs to try and get them together, so she makes a wheat/chicken/fox puzzle, aaand it goes poorly too. Dal freaks out and comes clean about how they stole the ship and aren’t a real crew.

Meanwhile, now that they learn where the ship is, the Diviner hacks their systems to create a robot to hunt them.

A Tachyon storm causes a temporal blast, which seems to rip Janeway into multiple pieces. They all appear to be in seperate timelines or universes of some kind. Jankom’s explodes and he dies. rip.

Janeway finds herself in another temporal phase with Rok, and figures out what’s going on. Everyone IS on the same ship, but is just in a different temporal phase. For Rok, it’s going very slow. For Jankom, is moved VERY fast. Janeway tries to get Rok to stop the warpcore breach, but she panics and turns her off. At least Zero is ACTUALLY competent and fixes the problem, giving the solution to Janeway so she can pass it to the next person. Whoever the next person is will have to save us all- oh it’s Murf. Fuck. It’s okay Murf, we don’t blame you.

It’s Dal’s time, but he’s still a sad sack. Janeway gives him a pep talk about Apollo 13. Cute. He still fails, but at least his failure will pave the way for learning how to fix it in the future.

Dreadnok is fully built on the ship in Gwyn’s time, and fucking deletes Holo Janeway. He uses Chakotay’s command codes. Of COURSE he didn’t voice lock them. Gwyn blows him out of the airlock, but that blows out the thing they were using the fix the engines aaaand it blows up, too.

They have one last hope. Rok is still alive! She gets a message from Gwyn’s time, about how they all bnelieve in her, and not to doubt herself. She rebuilds the coupler, and also rebuilds Janeway while she’s at it. Thankfully time is moving so slow. Very slow. Very, very VERY slow. She was in there for… “too long”. She studied a lot.

Then we get a fun cliffhanger… Drednok is still out there! Dun dun dunnnn.

A Moral Star Part 1 - PRO 7/10

Drednok’s remains deliver an ultimatum: If they do not return the Protostar, he’s going to kill all of his slaves. They can either go back to the prison and TRY to save them, probably fail, or possibly trust the Diviner which they totally cannot. Orrr jump to the Federation, hoping they can jump fast enough to save them, but probably not.

Everyone is down to go except Dal. He’s scared. He doesn’t trust that he can do this correctly, but he has his friends to help prepare plans. We get a cute montage of them working together to come up with a plan.

They get cadet uniforms and blast off. As Janeway says, they are doing a dangerous mission and risking themselves to save others. They’ve earned Starfleet. It’s a cute moment.

They are tractor beam’d in, but they have a plan. It goes a little out the window as the terms change and he demands Gwyn too. Of course, she sacrifices herself for the others “to make it right” for not doing anything to help them sooner.

GOTH MOMMY JANEWAY.

Surprise, a guy who does child slave trading betrays them and blows up their engines, killing their power, gravity, and eventually oxygen.

lol it’s all been a trap. They knew it’d go like this. Zero was actually Murf in a fake Zero, and Murf is fucking EATING the protostar. MURF ATE A STAR. I love you Murf.

They just hope they have time to do the rest of their plan.

A Moral Star Part 2 - PRO 8.5/10

The miners can now talk. Two of them are gay. I was gonna make a joke about them but then they just fucking did it. They out-joked me!!!

Rok and Jankom are trying to fix the ship, while Zero and Dal are trying to get all the miners ready to get on the ship and escape. They turn everyone’s ankle bracelets into translators.

The miners rebel and immediately kill Drednok, the cat child fucking decapitates him. But not before he transmits Murf’s coordinates and the protocore is transported. You’d tihnk he could just scan for the massive energy signature but maybe Murf dampens it.

We then get a sickass scene where, turns out goth mommy Janeway was upgraded to resist the overrides, and fucking beats the shit out of the Diviner. Unfortunately, the Diviner convinces Gwyn to stop by saying he’ll “tell her the truth”. I don’t care WHAT he’s doing, even if it’s “saving our people”, child slavery kills every possible chance at you being a good guy.

He shows her a holodeck program of what happens to their home planet. Currently, it’s fine. He was sent back in time to stop them. According to him, Starfleet did this. First contact caused a civil war and they all killed each other. So his plan is to go to Starfleet and kill them all. He set up a bomb on the ship to blow up if they ever go to Starfleet. You’d think there’d be a few other options, but nope. Genocide. Thankfully Gwyn realizes how fucking shitty this is immediately.

This is a good line.

Dal beams onboard the ship to try and save Gwyn, buuuut immediately fails. Good thing Zero is also there to…. do this.

The Diviner used Zero as a weapon to drive others mad. Now it’s his turn. He’s stopped, but not before Gwyn sees Zero in the reflection of his combadge. She’s mad ): That’s sad.

They banish the Diviner to the jail planet. So uh, he’s dead, right? He’s insane and stuck on a planet by himself, he’s fucked. That’s just killing him.

With a little bit of medicine, she’s fixed, but forgets the events of what happened. That sucks, cause now she forgot about the bomb. Gwyn is a little apprehensive of heading to Starfleet, but off they go, with a little cute monologue by Janeway.

Their signature is picked up. Janeway is on her way.

This isn’t the end of the season, but like, it had a mini-hiatus and is very season finale feeling.

Over all? Very good! Good characters and plot. The animation feels like a Gamecube game sometimes but thats fine. Thats almost a GOOD thing to me. Excited for more!