LizstarTrek - Prodigy Season 1 Episodes 11 - 20

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.

Asylum - PRO 7/10

The crew are trying to sneak around on a planet and stop some poachers from killing Space Whales, while obeying the Prime Directive, which they 100% fail at cause Gwyn is having some PTSD visions about not needing to go. But they BARELY succeed and approeach the closest Federation comm relay station, asking them to pls don’t be upset that they stole their starship.

The only Federation person on the station is a Denobulan. Neat! He’s a friendly guy who’s anxious cause he’s cooped up in the furthest reaches of Federation space. He checks them all in, says they’ll be allowed in the Federation no problem, scans them, aaaand Dal is labeled as the alien species known as “IMMEDIATELY REPORT TO STARFLEET COMMAND”. Uh oh. Well hey, they know what he is! They do NOT know why Gwyn is, mind you.

Some kind of virus in the ship makes the base go nuts. Gwyn is nearby killed in a med pod. The Denobulan assumes they did this which like, good guess I guess, as the station tries to blow itself up. He takes the only escape pod and leaves these literal children to die. The federation’s finest :)

Ooh, another one of these gifs.

They go space walking and jump to the ship, which is wild. They barely make it cause Janeway tractors them in (tractor beam is shockingly kind on the body), as Gwyn remembers everything. That only took one episode!

Meanwhile, REAL Janeway makes it to the prison planet and finds the Diviner. Still alive, but barely. Yeah they were just gonna let that guy die.

Let Sleeping Borg Lie - PRO 3/10

Everyone watches the holodeck playback. I dunno why they didn’t do that already. Zero has panics about his being a weapon, as they all try and hunt for where the Diviner’s weapon is. They find it in a hidden subdeck on the bridge.

They find the weapon, which is some kinda future thing that protects itself and can’t be stopped, or turned off, seemingly. They then run into a Borg cube and Dal decides they’re going to fucking board it. Why? Cause they might find something in their systems to turn off the weapon. Man, there’s a lot of moments in this show where children do something stupid that’d easily get them killed but we know it’ll be fine cause it’s a kids show.

Meanwhile, Janeway is still trying to wake up the Diviner.

This Borg Cube has been brought to you by Xbox.

Dal, for SOME REASON, comes to the conclusion that they need to force assimilate one of their own to gain access to their systems and learn about the weapon. This is stupid as hell. Why is this guy captain? Zero volunteers, and the Borg IMMEDIATELY wake up. Cause yeah, obviously that’d wake them up. They very quickly just fucking abandon Zero and run away, and we get a Borg scene where they slowly walk towards them as they fight them off at a distance. The Borg are just fucking zombies now. I hate it. They’ve never felt like more zombies than now, and I saw Star Trek First Contact.

Do you think Murf can be assimilated?

They all get captured, because of course they do, as assimilated Zero starts to assimilate them as the other Borg just hold them for some reason. We have a “you’re still in there somewhere!” speech and the power of friendship overcomes the Borg assimilation and Zero knocks all the Borg out.

There’s also some stuff about “I hurt others in the past, now I will help” and it doesn’t really resonate, unfortunately. Also they learn NOTHING. The weapon cannot be stopped or shut down.

This episode was weirdly annoying, and had some dumb lines. The Borg clearly don’t work well in kids shows.

All the World’s a Stage - PRO 8/10

The crew gets a distress call and goes to check it out. There’s some interference, they can’t see what’s going on, but go down and fiiiind

James T and Soo’lu. They’re with the Fed’ration and are very excited to see their distress beacon. They are basically playing cosplay dressup, but slightly mangled. This is wild. Starfleet needs a Galaxy Quest protocol.

They basically worship Starfleet, and especially their bravest warrior, En’son the Red Shirted. They worship a redshirt who went down to help them out. They believe a prophecy that Starfleet will come back and save them from some nebulous threat, The Gallows. Dal thinks this is stupid as hell, and it kinda is. He’s like “these people are living a lie. Just like us.” so that’s the theme of this episode.

Dal gets infected, and they need to go to The Gallows to find a cure.

There’s some good stuff about “obviously we’re not Starflight. Duh. We don’t have starships or technology. But you don’t need those things to believe in what it stands for.” I like that.

Turns out “The Gallows” was actually “The Galileo”. Fucking GALILEO, AGAIN. EVEN NOW, HUNDREDS OF YEARS LATER, IT BOTHERS US. It’s been leaking warp fuel and causing miasma.

They need crew members to run the ship for a bit and save the others/fix the problem, and they beam the locals up to fly the ship, using holo emitters to make it seem like a 23rd century ship. It even has the noises! Thats cute. This was a good and cute episode. The usual “people influenced by the federation” but flips it into pretty good optimism.

Oh no. Murf is setting off my Tryptophobia ):

Crossroads - PRO 7/10

They decide to bury the Protostar on an ice planet and hitch a ride to the Federation instead.

They find a man and as for a ride. His name is… THADIUM OKONA. HOLY SHIT. YOU REMEMBER THAT GUY? He’s from “The Outrageous Okona”. He’s the Han Solo-ass mfer. He immediately gets

As they’re wandering around trying to find a ride, they keep running into Janeway’s crew. Dal basically sees as that fucking asshole from the other episode tells Janeway how they’re evil. Well great. Luckily, Janeway IMMEDIATELY goes “you forgot to mention they’re children.” so maybe she’ll be smart enough to see through this nonsense.

This base is run by Xindi Reptilians, which is neat.

They run away back to their ship. Janeway is like “oh I’m so happy to see you! How did your adventures go?” “Not great!” lol. Also Okona smuggled his way onboard basically and is with us.

Murf hatches, is now a marketable Minion-style character, aaaand leans on the console and shoots torpedos at them. Oops! They then flee into the Neutral zone at the suggestion of Okona. This guy is NOT a good role model. Janeway WANTS to follow but is stopped by Romulans who un-cloak in Federation space and go “HOW DARE YOU ALMOST ENTER THE NEUTRAL ZONE >:(“ MOTHER FUCKER, YOU’RE OUTSIDE OF IT. WHY ARE Y’ALL ALLOWED TO DO THAT? Cause the Federation is bad at negotations, I guess, wtf are they gonna do about the Romulans breaking the law? Declare war? The Romulans know it.

Masquerade - PRO 7/10

They need to go to a starport to repair the ship. Also everyone is immediately taking a shine to Okona…. except Dal. Everyone thinks he’s a cool swash buckling glub shitto, but Dal is daydreaming about spacing him. He convinces them to go to his “old stomping grounds”, a pirate haven basically. Oh boy I sure do trust this guy.

They have Murf in a baby bjorn. Thats cute.

They go to talk to a geneticist that Okona has connections to, and she immediately knows what Dal is. He’s not a species. He’s a Human Augment, created by the protoges of Arik Soong, the guy from Enterprise. He’s a Human Augment, like Khan. Yep. Plot twist, this is NOT the only show without a human protagonist, it has a human captain!!! Well, he’s also a bunch of other things. Some Vulcan, some Klingon

The geneticist says she can stabilize and improve his DNA. Everyone else is like “Dal you don’t need to be “fixed” that’s dumb” but he immediately goes for it.

While everyone is hanging out on the planet, the Tal Shiar sneak into the neutral zone because of fucking course they do, and try and capture the Protostar, they just need to capture Dal to get its command functions working.

Okona IMMEDIATELY dips as soon as the Tal Shiar show up. Everyone is like “how untrustworthy!” but I’mma be real, that’s the fair and normal reponse, honestly. He didn’t sign up to fight Romulan black ops. He didn’t sign up for anything! Dal tries to use his super mutant powers, beats them up for a second, but hten it goes out of control. He’s shifting into a billion different things, leaking goo, it’s gross. One Tal Shiar trips on the goo and falls. They do a “don’t worry, we can see his jetpack! He’s gonna be a-okay!” Oh also, Murf is their new security officer, he just beats the shit out of them.

Janeway is monitoring this from just outside the neutral zone and shoots some fucking torpedos at the Protostar to try and blow it up, juuuust as Murf beats the Tal Shiar. Oops! They manage to barely fix it, but her ensign watches evily. I don’t trust her.

Correctly. Turns out she’s ALSO Vau N’Akat, and is evil too! She makes another evil robot, too. God, we can’t get rid of that guy. Also this makes sense, she’s been consistently trying to push to get to the Protostar, her secret mission.

Preludes - PRO 7/10

We seem to have a mini clip show, all about the way the kids showed up at the jail.

Rok’s backstory is she played a monster for a guy’s circus troop, basically. She liked it at first, but didn’t like being seen as a big scary monster. Eventually she got fed up, then sold into slavery.

Zero’s is a lot more simple. She was just captured by slavers. He was living normally and happily with friends, then shoved in a box.

We also get the Diviner’s backstory, as this new girl tells him his backstory. The Protostar fell through a temporal anomaly into the future. Aaaand Chakotay sent it back into the anomaly without his crew. Why did he do that?

They REALLY wanted that fucking ship though, so they all sent themselves through the anomaly. They sent their last 100 ships into it, and only a few survived, unsure of when and where they’d end up.

“Why did your progeny betray you?” “She met a boy”. YEAH, THAT’S WHY. NOT YOU BEING A SHIT-ASS DAD.

We get Jankom Pog’s backstory. He was on a cryosleep ship, and was the only person who the malfunctioning AI woke up. It keeps asking him for his name and query, and it eventually turns into a bit of a tick, where he just says his name. He eventually sends himself out of an escape pod so that the other crewmembers could survive, and is captured by slavers.

Janeway researches the kids too, and is like “These are run away slaves, and they’re just kids. They’re not CRIMINALS. Clearly we’re wrong about something and just scared them.” THERE SHE IS, GOOD JOB. She goes to ask the Diviner what’s up, walks in on their little party, and is knocked out.

Ghost in the Machine - PRO 8/10

The kids are trying to use the holodeck to figure out how to communicate with Janeway without communicating with her. This fails. They go to enjoy an icecream party, but then some weird shit happens, and they realize they’re still stuck in the holodeck. Oh boy, malfunctioning holodeck episode!

They get stuck in a few of their hologames. First Zero’s, which is a mystery game holonovel.

The holonovel suddenly shifts into a streetfighter hologame that Jankom plays to unwind. This is where they find out the safeties are off, and that’s bad. “When the safeties are on, nothing hurts you!” Uh, O’Brien broke his fucking shoulder.

Aaaand then it shifts to a black and white and noir. Animation is a great vehicle for Star Trek.

It’s Murf’s holo program. “He’s singing!” “Or he’s lipsincing very convincingly.” That’s so fun.

Dal’s program is a pirate program where he’s captain. Set sail for one piece! It combines with Rok’s, which is an animal vet sim.

Turns out the holodeck was a ruse set up by… HOLO JANEWAY! Dun dun dun! She was hacked by the weapon to send the ship to Federation space. While they were in there, Janeway hacked the ship and sent it out of the neutral zone, locking them out. Then her mind was wiped, she has NO recollection of it at all. Fucking horrifying. She’s REALLY freaked out by this, understandably.

Mindwalk - PRO 8/10

They go RIGHT to the Dauntlet, but the ship makes itself run away. The Admiral is currently knocked out, they have no way to communicate, and they’re running out of time. Either the ship blows up the admiral’s, or gets to Starfleet and blows up Starleet. They need to communicate somehow. So Dal and Zero connect their thoughts together and telepathically try to speak to the Admiral. It goes wrong, of course.

THEY SWAP MINDS. AND KEEP THEIR ORIGINAL VOICES! :D Kate Mulgrew flexes like CRAZY here, pretending to be a teen in her body. Dal pretending to be Janeway is VERY funny. “Hello! Starfleet… person!!!” Imagine if you’re fucking Admiral said that to you. “Attention, sir, I’ve found the Admiral, and she’s like, really, REALLY drunk.” SHE DOUBLE FINGER GUNS. THAT’S SO FUNNY.

“As your doctor, I ORDER you to drink this coffee”. LMFAO.

Janeway (in Dal) talks to Holo Janeway. They show this by letting her be Janeway’s body and voice for now, which is good. I love animation.

THEY FUCKING REFERENCE THRESHOLD. HOLY SHIT.

They communicate with Dal in the other ship through charades, which is cute. They need thgem to fly out of the ship and touch each other to reset their brains. Unfortunately, Dal in Janeway is captured and knocked out cause like, yeah, she’s clearly not herself.

The Diviner breaks Dal Janeway out, because “you saved my life, now I will save your’s”. Fascinating.

They need to create a conduit. That could either be touch… or a phaser shot. So Janeway Dal shoots her own body, as it’s being tractored in. Cool. Unfortunately, they do not trust Janeway anymore and immediately brig her.

They make it to Federation space, aaaand… it’s a bunch of Federation ships waiting for them. Uh oh. lol remember in Picard season 1 when they just copy pasted the same ship over and over?

Supernova Part 1 - PRO 8/10

The Protostar needs to boost around a field of Federation ships, avoiding phaser fire, as they try to get a way out of there. We get a big sexy space battle, that’s fun.

Janeway is freed by someone who is alive THANKS for Janeway, from that one episode where Janeway risked everyone’s lives to let the Brenari escape in a wormhole. Cute.

Gwyn is gonna tell Dal that he’s not allowed in Starfleet cause he’s an augment. She’s like “I need to tell you something” and he kisses her, thinking it’s a big romantic moment. It is not. Whoops. He takes this to be like “Okay, I have the least the lose. Time to fire on the Federation as they board the ship.”

The big evil robot keeps everyone at bay… except Murf, who kicks his ass. Meanwhile, Ascensia, the secret evil lady, is fighting Gwyn on the bridge. The Diviner tries to stop her from killing Gwyn, and is stabbed, as she accept hails… and sends out the virus code. Whoops, GG bad guy.

But the kids aren’t done yet. They work together to free themselves, and stop them. They burst onto the bridge… just in time to see the Diviner die in Gwyndala’s arms and fade into dust. Some people

The evil code breaks everyone’s translators. But you know who speaks every language?

Dal just… makes Gwyn captain. I mean, I think she should have been captain all show, but it happened kinda randomly. But yay! She sends distress beacons to any ships in range: “PLEASE COME HELP US, NON-FEDERATION ALLIES”. The Klingons seem to ignore them. We then get scenes of a lot of Federation ships being fired upon, and I just know a LOT of people are dying just off screen. Thanks to this episode, this kids show might have one of the highest kill counts of any Trek show. This is Wolf 359-2.

The Klingons are here to help after all, here to beam out survivors. LOTS of Non-Federations show up. Even a Gorn ship! But it’s not enough. More Federation ships beam in to help, and are trapped in the fly trap. There’s not enough allies in the sector to help.

Supernova Part 2 - PRO 9/10

They need to stop the flytrap, but how? Well, the only way is to blow up the entire Protostar. But if they blow it up, the protostar will blow up EVERYTHING. Rok theorizes if they blow it up AT warp, it’ll spread out the explosion across spacetime. Fair enough? But they need someone to stay back. At first, it’s Dal who decides to, but Holo JAneway stays behind instead. She’s “just a hologram”. But she makes a copy of herself on an isolinear chip so they can bring her with them. That’s not existentially horrifying!

….Turns out her program is too big for the chip, so she just… lies and says she copied herself so she can sacrifice herself. Damn, that’s sad as hell.

We get a long scene of sad music as they escape, the protostar blasts off, and explodes. Goodbye, Holo Janeway. This shuts down the viral code, saving everyone.

She left behind a message, telling them how much she cared for them. It’s quite emotional.

They’re lost floating in space, but now we go to Starfleet. The Protostar’s explosion made a rift in space, to where Chakotay is stranded in the future, so they plan to go and rescue him… but not before the kids make it to Starfleet, somehow!

They’re put on trial for stealing the Protostar (I still argue they didn’t steal shit), and Janeway defends them. They succeed. Everyone gets in, and is put under Janeway’s command… except Gwyn. She’s not staying. She’s going back to her home planet to try and help save them.

This time we get a PROPER go to kiss. I didn’t think this romance was really needed, but it’s fine.

They get a new ship, another Protostar ship, and blast off to find Chakotay. Oh, Zero gets a new robo body btw. He’s built by Apple now.

….end of season 1! This was a good show. No 10/10 episodes or anything but like, it was really enjoyable over all.