Star Trek: Prodigy 1x1/1x2 "Lost and Found" Review

 rating: ***

the story: Inhabitants of a penal colony in the Delta Quadrant find an unexpected opportunity for escape when they find a Starfleet ship.

review: There's a lot of chatter online about Prodigy being the first time parents have been able to show their kids Star Trek they end up actually interested in.  Of course that's the whole point.  As a Star Trek show it's certainly unique.  It's the first time ever there's a crew made up entirely of characters who aren't in Starfleet (the Janeway hologram doesn't count).

The results have to be interpreted through that lens.  Fans have long clamored for something like this, but they usually envisioned the results to be a familiar alien species like, say, the Klingons.  There are no familiar aliens in Prodigy's main cast (except the Tellarite, who doesn't really look like a Tellarite, and the Medusan), even though they're all Delta Quadrant natives and of course that's where Voyager spent its run.

That means that the vibe is very, very different.  The main conflict is similar to a subplot of Discovery's third season (intentionally or not), and as it plays out feels more like Star Wars than Star Trek (an assessment many fans still hold over the Abrams films), which is not necessarily a bad thing, but very unfamiliar franchise territory.

The cast of characters, unlike Lower Decks (for a whole host of reasons), feels like traditional animated characters, especially as you would find in an animated film.  (The animation itself would be subpar for an animated film.)  Every character is meant to stand out as a unique type, and they're fun to watch, but not even the ostensible lead, Dal, is close to traditional Starfleet material, more like the vision fans always had of what the Maquis ought to have been like.  

(In fact, you might view Prodigy as what fans thought Voyager should have been like as a whole.)

So far the standout characters are Zero, who sounds like Helen Mirren, and Rok-Tahk, the proverbial gentle giant, whose arc is particularly well-crafted in this debut episode.  The others are works in progress, although the goop creature Murf is fun.

Since this is very much serialized material, the overall strength of the storytelling is going to rely on how well individual beats are handled, and the cumulative effect.  Once more Star Trek sails into the unknown...

criteria analysis:

• franchise - A bold new vision of Star Trek.
• series - It's a solid setup that introduces all the characters and the central premise.
• character - Even if I'm not sold on all of them, the cast is well-represented.
• essential - It's such a radical departure, and the familiar elements saved for so late in the episode, that it's difficult to judge how well this succeeds as a Star Trek series on the pilot alone.