Thoughts on the Cancelation of Star Trek Prodigy

Yes, I’m bitter that Paramount canceled Star Trek Prodigy.

In March I wrote an almost identical sentence about the cancellation of Star Trek Discovery. What I disliked about that move was not just that a show I enjoyed was ending prematurely, but that Discovery was the live-action show that seemed the most interested in pushing the boundaries of what Star Trek does. Ending that seemed like an action that didn’t speak well to the long term health of the franchise.

Prodigy was also a show that didn’t easily fit into the existing framework of “what Star Trek is” and it was therefore exciting to see how their stories would play out. It didn’t give us a crew of highly trained and slightly boring Berman-era (minus Deep Space Nine) Trek characters. It gave us teenage characters who’d never heard the word “Starfleet”. It didn’t center the initial action in a location the audience has been to three hundred times. It was new.

The effect of aiming the series at a younger demographic can’t be overlooked. Before the series aired, I figured I’d watch the first couple of episodes with the expectation that it wasn’t aimed at me (I’m more than old enough to be a parent to the usual Nickelodeon watcher) and I’d probably lose interest. Instead, by the time I got to the end of the first batch of ten episodes I thought it was the best Star Trek spin-off since Deep Space Nine (the subsequent ten episodes did nothing to change my opinion). Focusing it at a different age group gave the show a refreshingly different feel to it.

In many ways, writing for kids (or with the expectation that young kids are in the audience) makes the writers work a little harder for the credible emotional beats in an adventure story. You can’t rely on sex and violence to make a quick point. You can’t score a cheap emotional thrill by bringing back a beloved character from thirty years ago and killing them off two minutes later. Death is not something to be used willy-nilly. You have to dig a little deeper into the world and characters you’ve created.

I think that this cancellation coming soon after the heels of the Discovery announcement really bodes poorly for the future of Star Trek as a growing, healthy, interesting franchise looking to meaningfully expand its audience outside the existing, aging fanbase. Paramount currently seems uninterested in boldly going where no Star Trek show has gone before.

Let’s look at the state of the franchise as it exists now.

Star Trek Discovery was not pushing the boundaries of television drama, but it was at least trying to push the confines of what makes up Star Trek. It was the first to get pushed out.

Star Trek Strange New Worlds is a good show and I enjoy it a lot. But almost one and a half seasons in, it is very content to just fool around with the existing Star Trek tropes rather than try to develop new ones. It’s still playing it very safe and hasn’t yet lived up to the “strange” and “new” in its title. It also has the unfortunate tendency to recycle old continuity references and characters as if it doesn’t trust the audience to become invested in something that doesn’t already have an existing Memory Alpha article. The producers bring back Captain James T. Kirk in “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” and then go out of their way to explain that he’s from a completely different timeline (and birthplace!). They could easily have made this character someone new, but then they couldn’t use “Kirk” in the promotional material to draw in the fans who have fond memories of watching Wrath of Khan on VHS.

Lower Decks is another good show, but leans completely into being a show that exists within the framework. If you’ve never seen TNG-era Trek, LD may be amusing but I can’t imagine the more self-referential jokes make a huge amount of sense. Definitely a show that needs to run in parallel to everything else instead of forging its own path.

Star Trek Picard over its three seasons is perhaps the poster child for this sort of fear of looking beyond the past. Picard started as a show that wanted to say important things about the current state of the world. It ended in a final season that jettisoned most of what it had created in favor of a paint-by-numbers nostalgia ride that revived the The Next Generation cast (and ship) for “Best of Both Worlds Part III”. This is a show that brought Data back from the dead… twice.

So what is the future of the franchise?

The as-yet-untitled Section 31 movie we know very little about other than Michelle Yeoh will star in it. Section 31 is in that strange middle ground where it’s a firmly established thing yet we know so little about it that any exploration would probably feel new. Will this film launch a new TV or movie series? Maybe? I have doubts.

Star Trek Legacy is a show that apparently hasn’t even been pitched to anyone yet (and presumably can’t until after the WGA strike). Again, we know very little about this show other than the format seems extremely familiar and the new characters it would bring from Star Trek Picard season 3 are defined entirely by being the literal offspring of characters from TNG. Would it go off in new bold, innovative directions? Perhaps, but there’s no indication of that in the little we do know.

So while the future of the Star Trek franchise doesn’t seem to be particularly healthy now, I can at least look forward to the remaining ten episodes of Star Trek Prodigy that are still in post-production and to-be-released. And I can hope that some other network or streaming service out there will recognize the potential for Star Trek to grow in a way that Paramount itself seems uninterested in pursuing.