Star Trek: Prodigy, created by Kevin and Dan Hageman
Star Trek: Prodigy, now available on Netflix, offers a captivating story about the values of curiosity, responsibility, courage, and leadership.
Starring Brett Gray, Ella Purnell, Rylee Alazraqui, and Kate Mulgrew
Distributed by Netflix
Episodes: 40
Rated TV-Y7 for fantasy violence and fear
Children are naturally curious about the world, but all too often, they lose their interest in science, technology, and nature in their high-school years. As science popularizer Carl Sagan once put it, “Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.”1
How can we change this situation? Short of radically overhauling the education system, one effective way to keep kids’ passion for science alive is through exciting children’s TV shows that celebrate curiosity and scientific thinking, along with other life-serving values. A number do this for young children, but there is a dearth of such series for older children and teenagers who are ready for more challenging material. Star Trek: Prodigy, now available on Netflix, helps fill this void with a captivating story about the values of curiosity, responsibility, courage, and leadership.
Making Star Trek accessible for kids isn’t easy. The franchise has always focused on heady ideas—both scientific and philosophic—often making it hard even for adult audiences to get into. Understanding many Star Trek shows requires knowing a least a bit about the franchise’s sprawling lore, which can make them difficult to follow for the uninitiated. Plus, recent installments have trended toward more adult story lines than their 1960s and 1990s predecessors.
Clearly, the creators of Prodigy understood these challenges.
The show follows a small group of teenage aliens from various races who have been imprisoned and forced to work in a dangerous mine by the evil “Diviner” (voiced by John Noble). One of them, Dal (Brett Gray), leads an escape attempt, and in so doing, he finds a lost starship from the distant United Federation of Planets—the USS Protostar. Upon learning about the Federation and its values of freedom, exploration, and peaceful co-operation, Dal and a small group who escape with him on the ship start a quest to find the Federation. Meanwhile, the Diviner sets out in pursuit of them. Dal and company hope one day to join Starfleet, the Federation’s highly demanding exploratory and defense organization. Along the way, they learn all about the Federation’s ideals (including some of the moral questions those ideals raise), about the challenges of space travel, and about the various factions, concepts, and technologies of the Star Trek universe.
This format enables the viewer—alongside the characters—to discover what the Federation, and by extension Star Trek, is all about. Guiding them through that journey of discovery is the ship’s holographic adviser, based on Star Trek: Voyager’s Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), who becomes a mother-like figure for the group to look up to. In the two-part opening episode, “Lost and Found,” Janeway explains the Federation and its values to them, quoting the classic introductory words from the first three Star Trek series:
The United Federation of Planets: An interstellar union of different worlds and species with shared principles of universal liberty, rights, and equality. Starfleet is the Federation’s representative for deep-space exploration, on a mission to maintain peace and freedom, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.2
As well as guiding new viewers through the Star Trek universe and providing a familiar and much-loved character for established Star Trek fans, Janeway acts as a moral compass and a source of motivation for the Protostar crew. In the episode “Time Amok,” in which each of the young crew is separated on different versions of the Protostar moving through time at different speeds, Janeway acts as the link between them, counseling each to have confidence in his or her ability to solve a particular aspect of the problem alone and relaying each character’s ideas or discoveries to the next to empower them to resolve the overall situation together.
Janeway’s guidance is especially important for two characters—Dal and Rok (Rylee Alazraqui)—and in each case her lessons serve to convey one of the show’s key ideas. For Dal, who assumes the role of ship’s captain, Janeway acts as a role model of leadership, reminding him to take responsibility for his choices, listen to those offering him advice and expertise, and practice sound judgment even in the direst emergencies. For the giant rocklike Rok, who often suffers from crippling self-doubt that motivates her to run and hide from challenging situations, Janeway becomes a mentor who helps her build her self-esteem, face reality head-on, and discover her true passion (which, despite others pressuring her to leverage her size and strength as security officer, turns out to be science). After helping her find the confidence to repair a crucial ship component during “Time Amok,” Janeway tells Rok, “Look at you, kid. You haven’t aged, but you’ve certainly matured. But if you could make a warp matrix, why did you need me?”
However, the Protostar crew cannot always count on Janeway’s guidance and must often use their own wits to solve problems. In the episode “Terra Firma,” the children become stranded on a “planet” that is really one giant organism. This creature rearranges the landscape and generates hallucinations to disorient the crew so that it can start to consume them. Dal and the rest must learn to navigate by the stars and use logic to tell reality from fantasy in order to find the ship and escape. In other episodes, Janeway is often incapacitated by technical problems or interference by the Diviner’s agents, and the young crew must think proactively and work as a team to fix the ship, defeat threats, and survive the dangers of space on their own.
Regrettably, Prodigy occasionally conveys somewhat muddy moral lessons. For instance, characters sometimes risk their lives to help others, which is portrayed as a noble act. In itself, risking one’s life for others is not inherently good or bad—it depends on one’s reasons. But in a culture that often upholds the falsehood that people have an unchosen duty to sacrifice their lives, it’s easy to construe the characters’ actions as exactly that: dutiful sacrifices. Although it’s implied, the show doesn’t make clear that these characters take these risks out of a chosen commitment to Starfleet’s mission; they are upholding their values, not sacrificing them. However, on the whole, Prodigy conveys life-serving values with clarity and simplicity appropriate to younger viewers and refreshing for anyone in today’s culture.
The show’s lighthearted, optimistic tone, rich ideas, and short, fast-paced stories make it enjoyable viewing for all ages, but it especially excels at introducing young viewers to the values of science and curiosity. Regular Star Trek fans will recognize many of the tropes and story concepts from other iterations of the franchise, and attentive listeners will notice musical cues very similar to the soundtracks of the Avengers movies and especially Iron Man 3. Nevertheless, these elements combine with the show’s suspenseful yet heartwarming stories to provide a spirit of adventure and discovery that will be novel and exciting for its intended audience.
At a time when few children make it to adulthood “with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact,” shows such as Star Trek: Prodigy are vital for teaching young people the values of science and curiosity.