At a point when there have been new Star Trek series of one kind or another – or, more recently, of every kind spread across a calendar year – there’s literally a show for every Star Trek fan, or future Star Trek fan, in the audience. And while all five (!!) of the current series have come to exemplify the compassionate, positive, inclusive Star Trek ethos to varying degrees, perhaps none of them is more purely Star Trek than the animated series Star Trek: Prodigy – despite the fact that its opening two-parter seemed like it was as far away from Trek as you could get. In the copious bonus material featured in this two-disc set of the first half of the 20-episode first season, Prodigy’s creators, Dan and Kevin Hageman (of Trollhunters fame) describe Prodigy as an “on-ramp” for younger viewers to begin exploring the rest of the Star Trek franchise. The first ten episodes, and the bonus material accompanying them, leave virtually no room to argue with that assessment.
In brief, Star Trek: Prodigy chronicles the adventures of a group of mismatched youngsters, all of different species (and none of the human), who we first meet as slave laborers on the planet Tars Lamora, working for a merciless overlord known only as the Diviner. He is forcing countless wanderers into servitude, mining both the surface and beneath the surface of the planet, but in actuality the mining a cover: he’s looking for a powerful ship buried somewhere beneath the surface, something which the mining activity will eventually find for him. His daughter, Gwyn, acts as one of his enforcers, though her commitment to that role is doubted by his major domo, a robotic being called Drednok. Two of the enslaved youngsters, attitudinal teenager Dal R’El and a powerful hulk of a being known as Rok-Tahk, find the very ship that the Diviner is looking for and board it, discovering a Starfleet combadge that finally breaks the language barrier. Rok-Tahk is revealed to be a small child of her species, and Dal decides that the abandoned ship is his ticket to freedom. They enlist fellow slaves – a Tellarite named Jankom Pog, a Medusan who has been given the name Zero, and an expressive but slimy creature who Rok names Murf – to help them get the ship running for an escape attempt. They’re found out by Gwyn, but when she tries to tale the ship from them to deliver to her father, Dal takes her prisoner and effects their escape from Tars Lamora. And that’s just the first two episodes. As you can imagine, the Diviner is eager to recover the wayward ship, the U.S.S. Protostar, and his daughter… though he quickly reveals to all, including Gwyn, that he’s more concerned with the ship than with Gwyn’s safety. Gwyn realizes that, in truth, she too has been freed, and reluctantly joins the Protostar’s new crew, who receive advice from a hologram of none other than Captain Janeway, formerly of the starship Voyager.
As un-Star-Trek a setup as this seemed on first broadcast, it’s a brilliant way to “back into” the franchise: Janeway, believing that her unruly new crew is simply a particularly dysfunctional bunch of Starfleet Academy cadets, introduces them to the big Starfleet conceits: warp drive, phasers, tricorders, peaceful exploration, cooperation, and thinking before acting (and certainly before fighting). While this was all old hat to me, just the thought of a new generation of young fans being on-boarded into the Starfleet way of thinking along with the characters in the show made me watch the show with wide-eyed wonder. Watching Star Trek: Prodigy is a great way to fall in love with Star Trek all over again, even at my age. But the show never betrays the high-concept tendencies of its predecessors: Time Amok is one of the best-executed time travel stories I’ve ever seen any sci-fi series pull off. Dreamcatcher and Terror Firma, effectively a two-parter in their own right, make good use of a well-worn sci-fi plot setup but startle with some genuine scares (including a scene or two that I found myself thinking might be too much for some of the show’s youngest viewers). First Con-tact presents a situation where our heroes have to learn to communicate their intentions to life forms who don’t understand them even with the benefit of the universal translators. Kobayashi seems, at first, like it’s a nostaglia-fest to keep the older fans on board, but it drives home valid points about leadership as a service to others, not as an excuse to lord over others. Not every episode of every Star Trek series has a moral point to make; these do, and they do it through skillful storytelling, world-building and character-building.
Of course, if you’ve already streamed these episodes on Paramount Plus, what does this Blu-Ray set have to offer? Some surprisingly meaty behind-the-scenes features, totaling around 75 minutes, digging into many of the creative decisions that went into creating Prodigy’s universe. (Without spoiling too much for those who are having to wait for a physical media release to see episodes 11 through 20, these first ten episodes seem to be at something of a remove from the rest of the Star Trek saga, but that changes markedly in the second half of the season.) The Hageman brothers are present for virtually all of the bonus material, along with director/co-executive producer Ben Hibon, several cast members and numerous key designers of both characters and settings. But at the heart of all of the bonus features is how well Prodigy connects to the rest of the Star Trek universe. Concepts such as tricorders and phasers get explored in more depth for those curious, but so do things like the Prime Directive and the Star Trek brand of morality. It’s easy to be cynical and think “Oh, they’re just winding kids up to ask their parents to get every other Star Trek show on disc,” but there’s more going on here than just merchandising.
The end result of the bonus features is: knowing how much care that Star Trek: Prodigy’s creators took in integrating it into the Star Trek universe, while also constructing an opening volley that would suck viewers into the story even if they have no prior knowledge… just makes me love the show that much more. I’m also eager to see what bonus features we get from the inevitable “Season 1, Episodes 11-20” release. 
It’ll probably be toward the end of 2023 before we get to see the second season of Prodigy, but with the nice spread of bonus material here, this is something to tide us over until the show continues. Bring on the second set, and I might just be able to make it to season two.