Star Trek: Prodigy 1x8 "Time Amok" Review

rating: ***

the story: Our crew ends up split in time.

review: Well, gosh darn it...I may actually be a fan of this show now.

This is my favorite episode of the first ten.  Typically I'm fairly generous with four stars/classic status (I guarantee you will find very few fans who have not only watched the whole franchise but enjoyed a lot of it).  It's true that even calling "Time Amok" my favorite I'm still not awarding it four.  I reserve that for when I think a real contribution has been made to franchise lore.  What I mean to say about this episode is that it has officially made it safe for me to believe Prodigy will reach that point.

There will be newer fans who will be absolutely flabbergasted even at that.  This is a version of Star Trek we've never seen before.  It's a true entry point, and it's perhaps for some new fans the only Star Trek that is going to make any sense at all to them, at least for the foreseeable future.  That's a plain fact.  

For me, until this point, the series was too self-conscious, too caught up trying to justify itself, too worry about what its characters were doing to just allow them to inhabit an episode.  In this one, for the first time ever, Janeway challenges them and they're...ready.  They just are, and all it takes in one purple wave to run through the ship and split them up.

The biggest beneficiary is Rok.  For all her early appearances this was the "gentle giant" whose main distinguishing factor was the little kid's voice.  While Dal spends so much time doing a bad impression of a Lower Decks we're-not-gonna-grow-up!!! attitude (which is mostly absent from the episode, another point in its favor), Rok has been waiting patiently for a spotlight.  The best tradition of Star Trek storytelling is that every main character eventually gets at least one.  What helps sell it is that the episode doesn't even worry about it, but just lets it happen.  In fact, other than the recurring bit about not wanting to be seen as "security material," there's no indication at all that this is a Rok episode until it turns into one.

It's truly organic storytelling.  Sometimes serialized TV finds this the hardest accomplishment, so busy just trying to move a story along.  Other than Gwyn's daddy arc, it really seemed as if Prodigy simply wasn't interested, and so my attention had faded.

It's not lost on me that the title of the episode deliberately riffs on a classic one (from the original series, and I will not tell you which one, even if you are new to Star Trek).

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Here's where I nominally dock a point.  You don't need to be an existing fan to understand this one at all, which is actually a good thing.
• series - Achieving a longstanding goal of getting the crew to function together by splitting it up.  Brilliant!
• character - Rok, who, as it turns out, rocks.
• essential - For Prodigy, a breakthrough moment to be celebrated.

notable guest-stars:

Robert Beltran (Chakotay)

Star Trek: Prodigy 1x7 "First Con-tact" Review

rating: **

the story: Dal reunites with the Ferengi who raised him.

review: The thing that's gonna be a problem for a viewer like me is that I'm not the target audience, and so will be asking questions the show is either going to address later or possibly not at all, and that's hard to swallow.  The Ferengi character introduces the biggest stumbling block yet, and the episode makes no effort to explain the apparent difficulties.

This is a series that begins in the Delta Quadrant.  The Delta Quadrant, as very emphatically stated in Voyager, is too far from the Alpha and Beta Quadrants (where the majority of the franchise takes place) to make casual journeys practical.  There's always the chance of random transplanting (as Voyager itself represented), and of course a few Ferengi in The Next Generation did exactly that (which, too, was featured in Voyager).  But the chances of a Ferengi raising Dal, who we find in the Delta Quadrant, ending up in the Gamma Quadrant (no hint of close association with which was ever uttered in Voyager or Deep Space Nine), it just complicates things too much, with again, no attempt at all to throw existing fans a bone in untangling it.  

Conceivably, Dal's Ferengi pal traveled to the Gamma Quadrant from the Bajoran wormhole, although at what point even that is difficult to determine.  Women in Ferengi society didn't receive mainstream rights until the end of Deep Space Nine, which introduces a very short window for this one to have begun operating as a typical Ferengi (which itself is also anachronistic, because soon after Deep Space Nine give Ferengi women rights, it also reformed Ferengi society itself to be less driven by profit)...Anyway, I don't think Prodigy expects its viewers to be worrying too much about any of this, much less why the Dominion and the Borg Collective apparently never bothered each other, so...let's just move on.

The story itself is another episodic one, involving the Starfleet standard of first contact protocols (the name of the episode, as spelled in the episode itself, is exactly the same as the Next Generation episode, and the second Next Generation movie, but in all other references emphasizes the Ferengi's true motives with a single hyphen).  Dal surprisingly isn't the villainish character this time, and comes up with a quick heroic solution in the end, but the Ferengi is not only villainous but even willing to immediately transmit her knowledge of Dal's whereabouts (and that of the Protostar) to the Diviner.

The use of familiar interference protocols is about as subtle as it was when Discovery attempted it in its first season.  Again, younger viewers aren't going to be quibbling with any of this, and most of the time there's little reason to believe Prodigy has much interest in anyone else's opinion.  This is disappointing for fans who might think otherwise, and who've made it this far watching the whole franchise without blinking when so many have cherrypicked their way through.

And very little effort is even made to advance the Chakotay subplot!  Why must they these things out???

criteria analysis:

• franchise - The crew again attempting to familiarize itself with Starfleet standards at least gives casual viewers something to latch onto.  That and the Ferengi.
• series - A moment that ought to have deepened show mythology feels like it leaves too many unanswered questions. 
• character - Points for adding some depth to Dal.
• essential - And taken, for thinking new and old fans will be happy with how little is actually done with it.
• notable guest-stars:
• Robert Beltran (Chakotay)

Star Trek: Prodigy 1x6 "Kobayashi" Review

rating: ***

the story: Dal tries his luck with the Kobayashi Maru training program.

review: In all three Star Trek shows that've broadcast new episodes in the past few months, either the Kobayashi Maru program itself or something similar (in the case of Lower Decks) has been featured.  The fourth season premiere of Discovery was even titled "Kobayashi Maru," and now Prodigy builds an episode around the program, with the title "Kobayashi."  I don't know if the writers of these shows cross the hall, visit the same writing rooms, or there are producers suggesting any of this common material, but anyone actually watching all of it (Star Trek fans usually don't go out of their watch to watch all of it, as we all discovered in the '90s) might begin to consider the material somewhat repetitive.  Again, there's no reason to expect every fan to see all of it (resources like this blog in which one person does are probably rare), but those that do, it's an odd choice, whether deliberate or remarkable coincidence.

There's the good enough excuse that each of the series is approaching this material from different vantage points and theoretically even for different audiences.  Prodigy, for instance, is obviously intended for younger viewers, most of whom will probably never have seen any Star Trek before.  They might later track down all the source material for the dialogue uttering from the mouths of famous franchise characters like Spock, Uhura, Scotty, Odo, (and the new stuff from Crusher) (I don't know why Enterprise in particular should have been left out), or, eventually, attempt to watch all of it, I don't know.  The effort of putting this material together is itself perhaps the most ambitious and fan-friendly thing Prodigy has done, something those who haven't been watching, and perhaps don't intend to watch again might very well consider, as with the Deep Space Nine episode "Trials and Tribble-ations," is worth the odd visit.  So it can be an experience for both new and existing fans.  

I haven't dubbed an episode of the series worth classic status yet.  This one comes closest.  The reservation, as always, comes with lead character Dal, who still doesn't feel like he's overly worth getting attached to, who keeps stumbling up against his limitations without really growing from the effort.  In a format like this it probably feels like exactly the right thing for the creators to be doing, since they're serializing the whole season, and thus don't want to be making definitive points too soon.  Which is, for me, a huge part of why this kind of TV should always be approached with caution, especially when the show goes out of its way, at the start, to let you know that the journey is going to be the whole point.  

The cast around Dal continues to be engaging, although they're increasingly one-note characters, except for the only other one, Gwyn, with an arc, and as of this episode, possibly not even exactly what it had previously seemed.  Her bad dad, the Diviner, hasn't given up yet his quest for the wayward Starfleet ship that also offers up tantalizing answers to its own mysteries, including a glimpse at Hologram Janeway's old running mate, Chakotay.  What if the Diviner isn't quite the villain he seemed?  But also, crucially, how does he stand even a remote chance, under his own power, of reaching the Protostar, which has leaped to an entirely different quadrant?  Unless Gwyn can convince everyone it's in anyone's interests to make it happen?

criteria analysis:

• franchise - All those familiar faces, and voices! are like puppy chow for fans.  Hard not to love. The Kobayashi Maru simulation is itself enticing, although the show's demonstration of it circles far around its parameters.
• series - A few tantalizing clues about why lies ahead, including our first glimpse at what lay behind.
• character - Dal is, for me, as hard to like as always, but placing him into familiar context at least places his struggle into a palatable light.
• essential - It's strange, for a series built around borrowing one familiar face to throw so many others at the viewer, and only a glimpse of the one who actually serves a purpose to the plot.  It's an episodic adventure that both yearns to be more than the series has been and sinks into the poorer instincts that have saddled it since the start.  

notable guest-stars:

Robert Beltran (Chakotay)