Some Blundering About Star Trek: Prodigy 1×10: A Moral Star, Part 2

I guess we’re backing away from the Protostar gang for a bit in order to get Back to the Future next week. And we see them off with an episode that isn’t quite what I wanted, but my word did this go to some much richer, deeper, and at times darker places than I was expecting.

We’ll work back-to-front by leading off with my great disappointment: pretty strong confirmation that no, those weren’t hints; the show really is set exactly when it claims to be, some time probably between Lower Decks and Picard. Because Admiral Janeway is out there in the USS Dauntless (A ship which is very clearly modeled on its namesake, the fake USS Dauntless – an alien ship that was disguised as a Starfleet prototype as part of a plot against Voyager), looking for the Protostar – or more immediately, its lost crew. It sure does look like Janeway is going to be the unwitting antagonist of the next arc, as the episode’s big reveal is that it is absolutely critical that the Protostar not return to the Federation, as it’s been infected with a computer payload that will destroy Starfleet.

Some – though not all – of the oddities in the timeline do get explained, though, with the reveal that while the show isn’t set in the post-TNG-era far future, the Diviner himself is a time-traveler. The “betrayal” he blames Starfleet for hasn’t happened yet. And, got to be honest, while his emotions feel legitimate, his plan has a lot wrong with it. This is a lot to go through from a place of irrational anger; it requires a level of planning that one would hope would take long enough that anyone rational enough to pull it off would at some point during the execution stop and say, “Wait… There’s actually much easier and less insane ways to accomplish my goals here.”

The Diviner’s planet destroyed itself in civil war following the social upheaval triggered by first contact. That’s it. That’s his motivation. He has traveled back in time and spent two decades pursuing the Protostar in order to give it a computer virus, in order to destroy the Federation, in order to prevent them from making First Contact with his planet.

Okay, I get the angry and tragic obsession. But this is a deeply stupid plan. I mean, leaving everything else aside: it would take him no more than a few months to travel to the Federation. Why did he spend 20 years hunting the Protostar? We established last week that even without the protodrive it’s possible to send messages between the quadrants in real-time and travel between them in far less than the length of Voyager’s marathon. So why invest so much in the Protostar? He doesn’t need the special high-warp prototype; any Starfleet ship would do. Misplaced Starfleet ships are a dime a dozen in the Alpha quadrant.

No sooner do we get this reveal, of course, than we trivially dispense with the Diviner as a villain, and holy crap, you can do this in a kids’ show? They defeat the Diviner by having Zero reveal its true form, thus destroying his mind and rendering him permanently insane. What? Wow. The balls on this show. Also ballsy: the cute little cat person comes back and flat out murders the fuck out of Deathlok. There’s a great bit of thematic satisfaction out of the whole thing, because The Diviner has turned the defenses back on and sent down his murderbot to restore order, but the Unwanted are no longer isolated and alone: they can communicate now; they can work together, and because they can do that, not only can they overcome these previously insurmountable obstacles, they aren’t even hard. That theme is reiterated over and over again, with the Diviner gloating in his victory over Dal only to have Zero trivially defeat him specifically with the reveal that Dal wasn’t alone. Dal saving Gwynn from her father’s fate by just having her look at him.

And oh my oh my. That scene where the two miners come into range of Dal’s translator and for the first time are able to communicate. That is fucking beautiful. The affection between those two dudes is so obviously and straightforwardly romantic, and it is the gayest thing I have ever seen in a kids’ show (Gayer, even, than the fact that on the past season of Power Rangers they gave Izzy a girlfriend) and I am so glad that it was Star Trek that did it. How far we’ve come from the TNG era’s well-meaning but terrible, “Beverly Crusher isn’t picky whether her lovers are alive or not, but does require them to have dicks,” or “Riker tries to rescue the only straight woman from the planet of the angry lesbians,” or, “Everyone’s bi in the evil universe.”

So the tease for the next arc leaves me just a little cold, I think, but I’m really enjoying how this show works on multiple levels, so I’m happy to give it a chance when we return to it later this year.