A nod to Real Star Trek

The Paramount/Nickelodeon series “Star Trek: Prodigy” is very definitely a kids show. The main characters are kids, the plots are generally kid-friendly, the writing is pretty much kid-level. Given how the last three Star Trek live action series – STD, STP and SNW – have all to greater or lesser degrees crapped on the legacy of Star Trek, it would be both easy and fair for an actual Star Trek fan to simply give “Prodigy” a pass. But I am becoming more and more of the opinion that prodigy, like fellow animated series “Lower Decks,” is *actual* Star Trek worthy of attention.

Prodigy has started in on the second half of the first season. The most recent episode, “All The World’s A Stage,” has our heroes stumbling across a primitive society that was previously contacted by the USS Enterprise under Captain Kirk a hundred years previously. As happens rather a lot in Star Trek, there was cultural contamination and the locals have picked up on Starfleet appearances, iconography, technology and ideology, though incompletely and somewhat inaccurately. But what *is* accurate: when it came time for “Star Trek Prodigy” to depict the shuttlecraft, phasers, uniforms and bridge of Kirks Enterprise… they used TOS designs. Not Discovery, not Strange New Worlds… The Original Fricken’ One And Only Series.

It is somewhat amazing to me that the people behind the friggen’ *cartoons* care vastly more about canon than the people with actual vast sums of money to lavish on the live action shows. While the animated series have from time to time dropped little nods to the Crap Series like STD and STP, when given the option they go with the good stuff. This indicates to me that the two animated series (three if you want to go back to the 70’s) are canonical with TOS and TNG and DS9 and VOY, while STD, STP and SNW are not.

The video below is by a couple of guys who arguably spend *way* too much time on this sort of thing. Here they’re geeking out over the appearance of true TOS in Prodigy. Included are a number of screenshots, including several when the bridge of the USS Protostar is holographically reconfigured to have TOS crew stations. And these guys are correct: it looks *glorious.* There was never any good reason to redo the TOS aesthetic.

By the way: I know a lot of people liked “Strange New Worlds.” Compared to STD and STP, it was a massive step up, but it was still a massive step down from proper Star Trek. The link to Discovery was enough to mean it’s not canonical, but the show was *filled* with evidence that SNW cannot be considered to exist in the same universe as TOS. Besides the various carryovers from STD (including the fact that the Enterprise is like 50% bigger), there are two main discrepancies within SNW:

1) They run into the Gorn, again and again. They’ve had direct interactions with them, met them face to face, have detailed scans and biological samples. This is around ten years before Kirk & Co. were supposed to have run into the previously wholly unknown Gorn for the very first time.

2) The season finale had Captain Pikes mind projected into an alternate future where he was still captain of the Enterprise during the TOS “Balance of Terror” episode. In the end, his mind is returned to the “present,” and he decides to choose a path that won’t lead to that divergent timeline. Great, wonderful. But… he *remembers* that timeline. The McGuffin that permitted the time travel, a Klingon “time crystal,” is a previously established thing that Starfleet is fully aware of. So doubtless Captain Pike will promptly file a report. A report that will tell Starfleet that:

A) The Romulans are a Vulcan offshoot

B) The Romulans are working on their plasma weapon

C) The Romulans are working on a practical cloaking device, and methods to detect it

D) The Romulans will attack this, that and the other outpost on such-and-such dates.

In the SNW universe, when “Balance of Terror” does eventually roll around, that Romulan warbird will get blown to smithereens the moment it first drops its cloak, because Starfleet will have had a decade to prepare. So, no… SNW is not in the TOS universe.