Bravo and huzzah to Star Trek: Prodigy for going from “Meh, I’ll watch it because it’s Star Trek” to a show that I simply couldn’t miss all in the span of ten episodes that saw its crew go from a rag-tag group of spoiled, selfish children to a crew I actually cared about.
Now, with “A Moral Star, Part Two,” the crew return to the prison planet that they escaped from way back in the first episode. The Diviner has blackmailed them into giving up the Protostar and now they are in a race against time to regain control of their ship.
I’m never a huge fan of television shows taking uneeded breaks in the middle of their run, but Prodigy sure picked a dandy place to do it. Not only did “A Moral Star, Part Two” tell a compelling story that played off the strengths that the crew gained during the first ten episodes, it was contained, wrapped up a chapter, and felt like a natural place to end the story for now without breaking the season’s momentum. This is in stark contrast to the break that Discovery took earlier this year that left the story half-told and relied on the cliffhanger to keep the audience’s attention — which wasn’t that strong of a cliffhanger, to be honest.
That isn’t to say that Prodigy didn’t have cliffhangers because it did. The reveal of another legacy character at the end in a familiar looking ship and the knowledge of what the Diviner did to the Protostar’s systems leaves a gigantic question mark for the remainder of the season, but unlike Discovery‘s finale, these developments make me want to return out of curiosity, not obligation.
Just about every character in the show had a satisfying arch, the story was well told, and for once, Prodigy’s half-hour runtime didn’t work against it — which means that we need more multi-part stories like this.
This show has gone from a curiosity to a can’t miss and you can be sure, I won’t miss it in the future.
Jason Gaston 