Star Trek: Prodigy’s “First Con-tact” does something no other episode has

Star Trek: Prodigy delivered a first during “First Con-tact”.

We thought we saw it all as fans, but Star Trek: Prodigy is challenging that notion. Fans of Star Trek have seen so much in their time watching the series. All sorts of great moments, like births of new characters, beloved characters getting married, fan-favorite characters being killed-off, ….salamander lizard babies….So it hasn’t all been good, but we’ve seen it all.

Or so we thought. Truth be told, there’s still so much in the Star Trek canon that we haven’t seen yet, and maybe we haven’t even thought about it. I certainly didn’t when I saw this tweet.

Prodigy has instead done something that no series, not the original, not The Next Generation, not Deep Space Nine, or Voyager, or Enterprise, or Discovery, or any of them has done. That thing, according to series producer and writer Aaron J. Waltke, was shown the Prime Directive in its entirety on screen.

Star Trek: Prodigy canonizes a book in the process

Waltke introducing the actual Prime Directive to the series in text form for the first time ever is just yet another reason why Prodigy is so impactful. It’s once again bridging the gap between old fans and fans and using the Prime Directive as a bonding agent to do so.

In doing so, they took the text from a book, Star Trek Federation: The First 150 Years by David A. Goodman, to do so, and in doing so gave some much-earned love to a man who spent a lot of time working on Trek.

It’ll be interesting to see what else Waltke and company end up introducing to the fans over the rest of the season. After all, we found out about Chakotay earning his captain’s chair, and now we see the entirety of the Prime Directive; two things we’d never seen before.

What else are we in store for?