Some Blundering about Star Trek: Prodigy 1×09: A Moral Star, Part 1

Aw man, yeah.

Look, Lower Decks just isn’t my jam; I get what they’re going for, but they keep either trying too hard to channel Rick and Morty or drifting into a kind of Big Bang Theory hatefulness, and when they avoid both of those, you’re left with a show that seems to think that its main appeal is the Memberberries – that you’re here to recognize things and feel good about your geek cred for understanding references (By the way, my favorite “I recognize that reference” joke about Star Trek is from an episode of “The Middleman”. Kevin Sorbo plays a character who’s been frozen since the ’60s, and he makes a Star Trek reference, then explains it because he assumes no one in the future would know about a cult sci-fi show from decades earlier). I love Discovery and I have… Complicated feelings about Picard, but they both appeal to a very different part of me than any past Trek has; neither one is a show that tells the kinds of stories Star Trek traditionally has. And that’s great. That’s what I like about Disco.

But Prodigy? Prodigy actually does do the thing it is there for: it is doing Star Trek in the traditional Star Trek way, only for kids(!).

So this week, the gang is faced with their own Kobyashi Maru: the Deathlok copy from last week, though properly dead, still manages to play a “Help Me Obi-Wan Kenobi” message to Gwynn from her dad, offering to trade the entire slave colony on Tars Lemora for the Protostar – along with the threat of what he’ll do if they don’t. Because of the tight time-table and the protodrive’s cool-down period, the gang is left with an impossible choice. They can surrender the ship as requested, or they can protojump to the Federation. They quietly presume (not without reservation) that the Federation will help if they can, but they know that the Protostar is experimental, and there’s no way of knowing if Starfleet has the capacity to return to the Delta quadrant in time. And this is just fantastic. Because everyone, still high from last week, is working together. There’s no question, even from Dal, of just fucking off into deep space. No, Dal has reservations, but it’s about putting the others in danger: if it were just him, scared as he is, he’d do it.

And so they do what you do to beat the Kobyashi Maru: they cheat. I love their solution and I love the way it’s presented. We don’t quite see what they’re building, we don’t quite see what they’re doing. Everything you need to see is there, but they don’t call attention to it. And if you’re me, at least, you don’t really think, “Where’s Murf?” You might think, “Why is Pog carrying Zero?” But – and this felt so good – it only fully hits you when Zero starts floating off in zero-G and they have to rescue him. “Wait… Can’t Zero fly? Why do they need to grab him with a grappling hook?” And just as you finish processing it, that’s when the reveal comes: cut back to the Protostar, to the Diviner demanding a premature protojump, and…

Bam! What a fantastic reveal. Knowing this was a cliffhanger, I fully expected this part to end with the gang screwed and facing certain destruction and the Diviner seemingly-triumphant. But no, we actually end with the reveal that, despite the Diviner’s double-cross, leaving Tars Lemora powerless, without gravity and about to lose its atmosphere, the gang is still okay. The lack of gravity is a snag, but they’ve got it under control. Because losing Gwynn – who agrees to go with her father to cement the trade – was a snag. Losing the gravity was a snag. But the plan is still in place. The thing they beamed to Tars Lemora before surrendering? Zero. The thing they built? A replica of Zero’s containment suit. And inside? Murf. And inside Murf? Holy shit, this is the payoff from three weeks ago. Murf is indestructible. He’s specifically indestructible from eating dangerous explody things. So they fed him the protocore. This is just an amazing bit of problem solving by our gang, playing to their strengths and their newfound unity as a crew. And it’s also a great bit of storytelling, with all the plot beats hitting home at the right time.

So what else do we have moving forward? Man, we get some good progress on the character of The Diviner of all people – his pain over having hurt Gwynn, and the possibility that he might legitimately have some nobility to him, but calloused over his obsession with his mission. Now, they’re going to have to work around his attempt to kill everyone by shooting up the place on the way out, but they’ve telegraphed a major element of his backstory in that he feels he was betrayed by Starfleet. Depending on how Gwynn takes the details when he reveals them, we might have to endure her allegiance shifting again. I hope not. Now obviously, it’s not going to turn out that Starfleet deliberately fucked him over. But that means that they might be setting up a path to redemption for him in the best tradition of twenty-first century Trek by healing: an eleventh hour revelation that causes him (and possibly Starfleet as well) to realize that the disconnect wasn’t a betrayal. My bet right now is that Deathlok is responsible here – that Starfleet had some kind of deal with the Diviner that would’ve benefitted the both of them, but the cartoonishly evil robot donked things up and let Starfleet take the fall.

Oh, and Evil Janeway. The fact that Kate Mulgrew is credited separately as Janeway and “Corrupted Janeway” could well be a hint that we’re going to see a Good Kirk/Evil Kirk fight scene next week. Man I hope so.

New costumes? Meh.

And hey you know what I never noticed before? Dal’s got a prehensile rattail. That’s nifty.