Star Trek: Prodigy
“Ouroboros, Part II”, Season 2 Episode 20
What do I know about this series going into it?
I was a massive Star Trek fan as a teenager. I have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything that happened through the end of Enterprise, including all of the movies and almost every episode from that era.
I tried to get into the new iteration, but found Discovery unbearable and dropped it after two and a half episodes. Out of nostalgia I still generally keep up with what’s going on in the universe, but haven’t watched any episodes directly (save for the Lower Decks/Strange New Worlds crossover episode, which was excellent).
I have a vague knowledge of the plotlines in Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds, but about Prodigy I know nothing other than it is an animated show for children.
Recap
We start with the opening credits, showing the classic Starfleet vessel flying through space.
I recognize a lot of names in the cast: Jason Mantzoukas, John Noble, Robert Beltran, Robert Picardo, Kate Mulgrew, Jameela Jamil, Wil Wheaton, and more that I couldn’t write down in time. The ship in question is the USS Protostar.
The episode opens on a planet, with people looking up at an ominous portal in the sky. A woman, in despair on the ground, is hauled away by some guards. “They’re coming,” she says. “What have I done?”
Admiral Janeway, on the bridge of (I assume) the Protostar, calls for Red Alert. Wesley Crusher is on the bridge of another ship, and explains to a group of characters that he created this wormhole so that it leads to the past. They need to go through the wormhole before the “Loom” enter the Prime Universe.
A series of explanations follow this, which go a little bit too fast for me to track. There are two Janeways – one on each ship, so presumably one from each universe – plus a Chakotay. It sounds like the Protostar, which contains one Janeway, altered history by accident and found itself in a parallel future where it met the Voyager (which is the other ship). To fix the timeline, they need to take the ship through the wormhole and leave it where their past selves found it empty.
If they don’t, Wesley explains, the Voyager and “everything you touched” will disappear. So that sounds like either they accidentally stole the ship from their past selves and need to return it, or they need to close a stable time loop where they found the ship, used it for a bunch of stuff, and now must go back in time and leave the ship where they will later (earlier) find it.
Meanwhile, squid creatures - I assume the aforementioned ‘Loom’ – have come out of the wormhole and are landing on the planet, trying to kill and eat everybody. The Doctor from Voyager is on the bridge of one of the two ships, handling… weapons?
The main characters assume that this time-fixing adventure is what they were assembled to do – apparently Wesley told them it was very important for the universe that they be together - but he corrects them. The universe actually needs them together for “wondrous and terrible things yet to come”.
The Protostar and the Voyager both enter the wormhole, and seemingly with no effort make it through the swarm that wants to eat them. Halfway through the wormhole the swarm vanishes; the second half is clear, and they start seeing temporal echoes of their ship, which is apparently what happens when time is repaired.
Then comes the part where they leave the ship in the past. They need to leave it on a planet called “Tars Lamora”, with one of the Janeways on board (who it turns out is a hologram, and in love with Chakotay). But she can’t be allowed to remember them, nor can she remember “the weapon” that’s on board the ship, so they have to erase her memory. That way the main characters – who are all kids, aside from the characters I recognize from previous Star Trek series – can find the ship empty, with its hologram not knowing anything, and history will play out the way it is supposed to.
So they erase the hologram’s memory and set the ship on autopilot to land on Tars Lamora. Admiral Janeway (on the Voyager – I finally got that straight) beams them all out, then the Voyager does a U-turn in the wormhole to return to the future.
There is a series of clips from across the series, after which the Protostar lands on a planet filled with reddish crystals. The kids at (I assume) the beginning of the series board the ship and wonder where its crew is.1
Meanwhile, the Voyager has returned through the wormhole to the planet we saw at the start. The wormhole closes and the squid creatures stop killing people, take off, and vanish into thin air. All temporal incursions are closed.
One of the kids takes off her armband and is told “she’s here to stay”. My guess is that’s some sort of stabilizer that keeps her in this universe, and with the temporal incursions closed she doesn’t need it anymore.
In the denouement:
Wesley Crusher calls up his mother, Beverly. She hasn’t seen him since presumably his cameo appearance in Star Trek: Nemesis. He can’t stay long: “The universe needs me.” But Beverly first tells him to meet his brother.
The Doctor has no better a bedside manner than he did on Voyager.
Chakotay is now a captain.
Janeway has retired early.
The kids have enrolled in Starfleet Academy and are reminiscing about their adventures.
But the denouement is suddenly cut short by a red alert: something has happened at Utopia Planitia Shipyards on Mars, where they’re building the new fleet. 20,000 vessels have been destroyed. This is awful!
A shuttle lands next to Janeway’s garden and Chakotay steps out. He tells her that the “synths” turned against the Federation2 and destroyed everything that was being built. With the deactivation of all artificial life-forms, Starfleet has massive cutbacks and manpower shortages, so all exploration is being curtailed. Starfleet has to focus on protecting the Federation and can’t engage in exploration for the foreseeable future.
Janeway is incensed at this but can do nothing to change Starfleet’s overall policy. The only thing she can do: call up the kids from the series and give them control of the USS Prodigy, a Protostar-class ship that is designed for exploration but would have been decommissioned under Starfleet’s new priorities. She hands the kids their first pips. They’re thrilled: “We’re ensigns?!”
And finally, the Doctor, Janeway, and Chakotay give the kids a new copy of Hologram Janeway, one that kept her memories of their adventures together. One kid, Dal, was expected to take the captain’s chair, but he recognizes he isn’t ready and instead gives the captaincy to “Gwyn”, agreeing to be her number one.
Unresolved questions
If the kids found the Protostar empty because they delivered it to themselves in the past, who built the ship in the first place?
What is the future event that Welsey Crusher felt was so important?
How much maintenance does a ship like the Prodigy need? Are the kids capable of giving it the upkeep it requires to continue running? Or does the commission to ensign include the right to bring the ship into a Starbase every once in a while? If so, is Starfleet also going to be giving them orders? How long will Janeway’s favors stick before Starfleet decides to force-decommission the ship anyway, or just reassign it to patrol duty inside Federation space?
Ratings
These ratings evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. The analysis accompanying each rating is written from that point of view as well.
The ratings do not necessarily apply to the episode if it is watched in the proper context. And it should go without saying that none of them apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
Story: 2/10. This episode suffers from a severe flaw: the previous episode.
Now, I don’t actually know what happened in the previous episode. All I know is that this episode is called “Ouroboros Part II”, and the previous episode clearly ended on a cliffhanger. But whatever that cliffhanger was, it was clearly a very silly one:
Problem: If we don’t fly the ship back through the wormhole, everything we did with it will be undone.
Solution: Fly the ship back through the wormhole.
You simply can’t do that with a two-part episode. Set up a problem in part 1, with a one-step solution that is depicted in part 2 exactly as described? Part 2 is half an hour long! Either the solution needs to be complex enough to justify the runtime, or you need to introduce complications that prevent the one-step solution from being executed so easily.
But the writers did neither. (The swarm of squid creatures in the wormhole do not qualify as a complication; their role in the plot was resolved by adding three lines of dialogue describing shooting at them.)
Instead, the first two-thirds of the episode is filled with padding (see Writing, below), then it takes a sharp right turn into a completely different plot, after which there is more padding. Only two actual events took place in the entire half-hour.
Now, a lack of plot doesn’t have to be a bad thing. I have on multiple occasions heaped praise upon a finale that deliberately lacked a plotline for artistic reasons, or that was thin on plot but had writing good enough to make up for it.
Does Star Trek: Prodigy fall into one of those categories? Well…
Writing: 3/10. The writers simply didn’t know what to do when faced with a four-minute plot resolution and 24 minutes of runtime to fill. So we got four minutes of the characters worrying about how they can possibly fly through this swarm of squid aliens; three minutes of the ships flying effortlessly through the swarm of squid aliens (see Production, below); two minutes of flashbacks; two minutes of repeated explanations that the ship needs to be empty; a two-minute personal log that consisted of philosophic rambling rather than deeply personal feelings; and 1,013 variations on the phrase “boldly go”.
And despite - or perhaps because of - all that padding, the attack on Mars was rushed. Within seconds of the red alert about the attack in progress, the Vulcan kid says “20,000 ships, gone”, as if summarizing the events hours or days later. That’s not a realistic depiction of the initial reaction to a disaster in progress; it’s a stitching-together of the episode’s two unrelated subjects as hastily as possible. There was something almost disrespectful about it.3
Those two issues together suggest a common solution: the episode should not have been about leaving the Protostar in the past at all. It should have focused entirely on the reaction of Janeway and the cadets to the synth uprising that killed tens of thousands and upended all of Starfleet.
But how could they do that? Didn’t they need to resolve the cliffhanger?
Well, if you cut the first half of the episode to its bare bones (one minute of worrying about the swarm, one minute of flying through it, one minute of explaining what they need to do, and one minute of flashbacks because I’m not heartless), that’s four minutes of runtime. I’d be very surprised if the previous episode was so tightly written they couldn’t find a way to squeeze those four minutes in and resolve the plot.4
Call that episode Ouroboros, and call the finale To Boldly Go. Then devote the finale to a character piece: four minutes of denouement, interrupted by the attack on Mars; four minutes, not four seconds, to the attack on Mars and the immediate reactions to it; eight minutes of the main characters processing it in the aftermath, each in their own way (mixed with the loss of their beloved friend the Janeway hologram); and then close with the receipt of the Prodigy and catharsis at getting the Janeway hologram back.
It would still be an episode without a plot, but it would be an episode with character (see Characterization, below).
Production: 6/10. Some very odd decisions were made in the direction given to the voice actors; the lines “What’s happening?” and “Wondrous and terrible things” stand out as having particularly questionable readings.
The animation was high-quality and quite beautiful (if a bit strange), but somebody missed a memo when it came to drawing the space battle. Nobody hit each other!
On-screen, no damage was seen done to either ship5. On-screen, not a single phaser impacted a squid. They devoted so much effort to telling us how difficult and dangerous the flight through the swarm would be, and then showed none of it. The swarm just flowed around the ships like a stream encountering a pair of rocks. This obviously didn’t help with the impression that the scene’s purpose in the episode was to pad the runtime.
Characterization: 2/10. It is clear from context that the children are meant to be the main characters. And yet the only individual actions were taken by supporting characters: Wesley bringing warnings about the future, and Admiral Janeway fighting against Starfleet’s new direction and granting the children a new ship.
The rest of the crew didn’t behave individually; throughout the episode they acted as a single unit. The crew flew through the wormhole; the crew the ship in the past; the crew enrolled in Starfleet Academy; the crew were horrified by the attack on Mars; the crew were given a new ship. Not one of them acted - or reacted - in a meaningfully independent way.
The only thing I know about any of the main characters is that Dal wants to be captain and up until now has refused to acknowledge he’s not ready for it. And I only know that because it was said spelled out in words, not shown to us in his behavior.
Accessibility: 8/10. I may be scoring this a bit high, because I’m well used to how time-travel shenanigans work in Star Trek and many other science fiction series. But even if I weren’t, they spent so much time explaining the premise that I couldn’t help but understand it.
I’m less certain about the other major event in the episode. The attack on Mars was so sudden - and so brief - that it I suspect it would have gone completely over my head if not my knowledge of Star Trek: Picard.
Closure: 9/10. Closing a stable time loop is about as much closure as you can get. The only reason this isn’t getting a 10 is because of the “And the adventure continues…”-style ending – which I hasten to emphasize is not a bad thing.
Do I want to watch the series now?
Sadly, this episode represents Star Trek at its worst: a thin plot, with no attention paid to character development, and the cracks papered over with technobabble and phaser fire. These are flaws from which almost every Star Trek series has suffered from time to time. But usually the finales avoid this behavior; even the awful Enterprise finale was an attempt at showing the characters making individual decisions.
In writing this blog, I’ve noticed that many action series, in the attempt to make the finale spectacular, go all-in on the spectacle and forget that a good TV show needs other things as well. So it’s possible that the show is ill-represented by this episode. It just doesn’t make me want to watch the rest.
Why did the clips come before this?
Luckily I know that this is the plot at the start of Star Trek: Picard, otherwise I’d be completely mystified.
Contrast this with how it was treated in the “Children of Mars” Short Trek, with stress and uncertainty and news footage showing the attack in progress.
If I am wrong about this, and the previous episode really was so much more tightly written than this one, then you need to move things in the opposite direction. Take the last five minutes of Part 1 and put them at the beginning of this one, then add some padding to Part 1 to make up for what’s missing. Spread out over a whole episode, those five minutes would be far less noticeable and problematic than they are concentrated at the beginning of the finale.
Shields were down to 89 percent, according to a line of dialogue - but we never saw anything hit the shields either.