Star Trek: Prodigy - Screen Scene

RE: Star Trek: Prodigy

Matt Zimmer — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 12:13:48 +0000

Adding to the drama: Amazon took down the listing for the Blu-Ray and DVD, which probably means Paramount isn't releasing it. I am pissed.

Edit:

Still available for preorder from Target. We'll see what happens.

RE: Star Trek: Prodigy

Matt Zimmer — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 18:43:35 +0000

Forgot this. The bad news: Supposedly canceled. It's been removed from Paramount+. Season 2 has been indefinitely delayed until it either finds a new home to stream or Paramount+ comes to its senses.

The good news: The second half of Season 1 is coming to Blu-Ray September 26, 2023:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0C9VWYB3R/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

RE: Star Trek: Prodigy

Matt Zimmer — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 10:17:58 +0000

Star Trek: Prodigy "Supernova, Part 2"

Solid finale.

I would be more saddened by the death of Hologram Janeway if I thought she was really gone for good. I doubt she is.

But the kids making it to Earth was a big moment.

The idea of a future wormhole and the search for Chakotay sounds like a solid plan for Season 2. Bonus points because the Diviner will still be alive. And he won't have been redeemed either. But knowing he COULD be, makes me hope for that.

I like the compromise Janeway found for the kids at the end. It was realistic and a way for everybody to be happy. I could see legit cadets upset these guys were pushed to the front of the line, but this idea is actually clever and fair.

I don't think Star Trek is a franchise that lends itself to a kids shows, and no lie, this show has had its share of problems with the juvenile tone. But the truth is the show is also better than I believed it would be when I heard it was coming out. It went through some awkward growing pains (it DOES star kids) but I think it sort of found itself by the second half of the season. ****.

RE: Star Trek: Prodigy

Matt Zimmer — Sat, 24 Dec 2022 07:06:41 +0000

Star Trek: Prodigy "Supernova, Part 1"

Nicely done. The drama was played to the hilt and the arc of things getting progressively worse was expertly built into the writing.

And I love Dal kissing Gwyn because it was a complication she didn't see coming in a situation that was already beyond complicated.

Also nice and refreshing to see a bit of redemption for the Diviner before he died. But seeing how his arc was progressing this season, it also wasn't unexpected. It felt like a natural progression for his character.

I have a hard time understanding how English is referred to as "standard." Universal translators are the one bit of futuristic tech you never want to pull threads about, but even I think that sounds unlikely.

Janeway making friends on Voyager continues to pay off.

Really looking forward to next week. ****1 removed link

RE: Star Trek: Prodigy

Matt Zimmer — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 18:04:25 +0000

Star Trek: Prodigy "Ghost In The Machine"

It was only all right but I liked the surprise ending. I wonder what Kate Mulgrew thought about it. She must have either hated it or loved it. No way her opinion was agnostic.

Don't need to overthink a review this week, but it's a fabulous point for me to reiterate how boring I think Holodeck programs are. The Tellarite fighting program and the Pirate ship are okay, but I don't want to live in an "enlightened" future where the most fun videogames in existence are a black and white nightclub simulation and the edgiest, most cutting edge music is smooth jazz. Just so long as we're being honest, I'd prefer living in 21st Century USA during the Trump era to the "Utopia" of Dixon Freaking Hill. Humanity may currently suck, but we're freaking INTERESTING, man. Hell is where the best company exists, and Roddenberry was a fool for believing differently. 3 1/2 stars

Star Trek: Prodigy "Mindwalk"

I'm thinking Kate Mulgrew must have had a lot of fun with this one.

Starfleet's rules about Augments have always been majorly unfair. It's a bummer the organization apparently learned nothing from between Strange New Worlds and this show.

Also Bashir is an Augment! Can't there be special circumstances for Dal too?

Alexander Siddig should guest star on this show at some point as an advocate for Dal. He'd be a better guest star than Okana at any rate.

I love when the Diviner finally gets "Janeway" alone he frees her in repayment for her unexpected kindness. That says good things about a previously irredeemable character. Maybe he's actually reachable after all.

And sorry, Brannon Braga, the Kurtzman era once AGAIN affirmed the worst Voyager episode ever "Threshold" IS, in fact, canon. You are not off the hook for that mess, and the current producers appear to be sticking your nose into the carpet and rubbing it in until you understand what you just did.

Fun episode. Can't wait for next week. 4 stars.

RE: Star Trek: Prodigy

Matt Zimmer — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 10:09:31 +0000

Star Trek: Prodigy "Preludes"

Interesting origin story episode.

The coolest part for me is getting some context of what happened to Chakotay. Now we didn't get the full story. But we got some of it.

The Diviner describing his daughter turning on them because she met a boy suggests he understands what's going on there better than either Gwyn or Dal do themselves.

Jankom's story is interesting because it explained what a Tellarite is doing in the Delta Quadrant and why he's never heard of the Federation.

Cool ep. ****.

RE: Star Trek: Prodigy

Matt Zimmer — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 09:40:59 +0000

Star Trek: Prodigy "Masquerade"

I think the narrative and the arc to the show is really starting to come together which is nice. The heel-turn from the Trill Commander being the same species as the Diviner was a great twist, and I honestly would not have predicted either that Dal was an Augment with a connection to Arak Soong, or that that would be revealed in this specific episode.

Do I have any gripes? I do and they aren't pleasant ones. I'm not going to say Okona was wasted, because he's always been a crappy character from one of the worst episodes of the entire franchise. What I will say is that if the series brought him back hoping to redeem his reputation in the audience's mind, it was a complete failure. And I say this knowing he'll be back.

Similarly, I really dug the idea that Star Trek: Lower Decks posited in its second season that Jellico was considered one of the very worst captains in Starfleet, and a cautionary example of how commanders should NOT behave towards their subordinates. The show retconning that and giving him a higher admiral ranking than Janeway? That STINGS, man. You want to cast a stick in the mud Admiral, get back Necheyev. Hell, I'd even accept an Admiral Shelby in a pinch. But Jellico bossing Janeway around feels wrong on every single level. I barely tolerated how he treated Riker and Troi on Next Gen. This is just plain wrong.

Lower Decks loves bringing back fringe Star Trek characters too. But they always bring back the ones the audience either likes, or at least found interesting and would be happy to see again. Neither Jellico or Okona fits either of those definitions. To put it mildly.

It's a shame it's the Star Trek portion of the episode I'm criticizing. The arc of Admiral Janeway's cat-and-mouse with both the kids and the Romulans is actually progressing quite wonderfully. I could do with that bit of great storytelling in an episode not featuring either Jellico or Okona. ***.

RE: Star Trek: Prodigy

Matt Zimmer — Sat, 19 Nov 2022 06:20:41 +0000

Star Trek: Prodigy "Crossroads"

Wow, that was pretty great.

I thought that the episode navigated something near impossible decently. Not WELL, exactly. But I can accept the way the episode made it so that none of the kids meeting a member of Starfleet made them able to warn them about the weapon. It's stupid, and unlikely, and the way the series handed it made it SLIGHTLY plausible, if not very. That's more than most franchises would do with an idea that dumb.

I was excited to hear Billy Campbell was returning as the Outrageous Okana, because that was literally one of the worst Next Generation episodes of all time (which is a statement) and I was looking for a little redemption for that much-hated character and episode. Didn't happen here. Good news is he'll still be around next week. It's still possible. But I wasn't very impressed with him this week.

The Xindi, huh? The Kurtzman era of the franchise has gotten a LOT of (deserved) crap for ignoring what came before it. But I think the cartoons Lowers Decks and this show actually mine the canon for ideas.

Take the idea that different Tellarites can look vastly different in appearance. That goes down to the fact that in every Tellarite appearance we've seen that species, the design is always changing and evolving. Good for this show to find a way to suggest that's not a mistake and just the way things are on that world. Like Enterprise putting in all that legwork to explain away human looking Klingons on the Original Series, there is a large chance a future iteration of the franchise could retcon or complicate that idea, but for now it fits and I'm glad.

Murf's toddler form is cute, but it's going to take some getting used to. Frankly Murf being a cute slug was sort of the selling point of the entire character. I think the new design has made him lose some of his appeal.

Can't wait for next week. ****1/2.

RE: Star Trek: Prodigy

Matt Zimmer — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 11:37:12 +0000

Star Trek: Prodigy "All The World's A Stage"

I might be wrong, but I believe this episode has a lot of history. It literally could have been nearly 30 years in the making.

For the 30th Anniversary of Star Trek, both Deep Space Nine and Voyager were commissioned with creating special "Anniversary" episodes to mark the occasion. Voyager did a flashback story with Captain Sulu, and Deep Space Nine ultimately did the much-loved episode "Trials And Tribble-ations". But before they decided on that, one of the ideas being bounced around was the Defiant landing on the planet Iota from The Original Series episode "A Piece Of The Action". In that TOS episode the humanoids aliens there aped everything from 1920's Chicago Gangland on Earth. The idea for the DS9 episode was that after a hundred years, the new fad the Iotians followed was mimicking Starfleet and Captain Kirk's ship and crew. The initial idea for the episode was encountering an entire planet of Star Trek fans, and their entire civilization would look like a sci-fi convention.

I have not gone online and looked at the story behind the making of this specific episode. But that must have been it, don't you think? It's got the silliness of the premise down to the letter, with some added First Contact pathos to keep things interesting.

I'm not sure WHY DS9 nixed the idea, but as seen here, it totally would have worked. I'm guessing back in 1996, perhaps stars of the original series would find something like that (especially a character mocking William Shatner's lilting speaking voice) to be a little insulting. And frankly, if you ask me, the original stars got insulted by things like that SUPER easily back then. George Takei is funny and down-to-Earth in 2022. In 1996, he was like the rest of the cast and a total bummer, stick-in-the-mud who took themselves too seriously. It wasn't just Leonard Nimoy and Shatner. It was all of them.

Think I'm wrong? "Trials And Tribble-actions" created an "uproar" because the original cast believed they deserved bigger credits and paychecks for their footage being in the episode. I love the original cast, but back in the 1980's and 1990's they were pretty much all insufferable. If you told me back then that Takei would wind up as awesome he is now in the future, I'd never believe you.

For the record, Takei abstained from that controversy back in the day if only because Sulu wasn't in "The Trouble With Tribbles".

Also for the record, all this goes for Patrick Stewart too. As long as we want to be fair about it.

But yeah, that fun, and worth waiting 30 years for a cartoon to actually do it. The ironic thing to me is this is a kids show, and embraces that fact. But I don't think kids will actually respond to this episode. This one will mainly please adults. And not the kids' parents. Their grandparents. The target audience of this specific episode is quite unusual for Nickelodeon (to put it mildly). ****.

RE: Star Trek: Prodigy

Matt Zimmer — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 05:41:47 +0000

Star Trek: Prodigy "Let Sleeping Borg Lie"

I think the problem with the plan to go to the Borg ship for answers about the weapon is it was their first idea. There have to be easier and less dangerous ways to get the answers they wanted. And I would think Hologram Janeway could have pointed that true thing out.

I also dislike how unprofessional on the missions the "crew" is, specifically Jankom. Janeway's impressed they survived the Borg. That wasn't skill. That was luck.

I didn't much dig this week. **1/2.