Star Trek: Prodigy’s Kate Mulgrew is back for another lesson.
Star Trek: Prodigy is made with kids in mind, but that doesn’t mean it’s dumbed down or a show adults can’t get into it. They can, but these shows have lessons in them as Star Trek should. It turns out that Star Trek was for the kids after all.
In the latest episode of Star Trek: Prodigy, “First Con-tact” Dal runs into the woman who raised him, a Ferengi named Nandi. Nandi is not a good person as we find out, having sold Dal to the show’s main villain, The Diviner.
Dal and Nandi crossed paths once again during the events of the most recent episode and despite his feelings for her, he learns to trust his gut and see her for who she really is. This is a big lesson for the younger viewers to take to heart, as Kate Mulgrew explains in her recent “lesson” for Paramount+’s YouTube channel.
Star Trek: Prodigy is bringing the Trek lesson to a new generation
The whole “don’t trust your bad-friends” storyline is as old as the very concept of telling stories. It’s often seen in a lot of media aimed at kids these days, with big examples being basically every episode from Boy Meets World that centered on Shawn.
So while it may seem like a kiddy lesson, it also embraces the Star Trek-lesson idea, which was a big selling point on the show from the 1960s. Not only did the crew of the Enterprise fight aliens and explore new worlds, but they often did morality plays, trying to show the error of someone’s ways.
A great example of that was the message against racism in the original series episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”. In that season three episode, two men who are almost identical are engaged in an intergalactic conflict that has unknowingly to them, ravaged their homeworld. They hate one another for being different, even if both men have the same black and white faces, just reversed.
It was a poignant story on not letting the differences of people lead us to conflict.
Prodigy seems to be taking up that mantle from past shows, by teaching lessons to its audiences as well. A noble quest from a fun show.