Star Trek: Prodigy will let the characters grow up on the show

Star Trek: Prodigy returns this year to air the remainder of the first season.

Star Trek: Prodigy was always intended for young audiences. It was geared that way to appeal to kids who’d never seen a Star Trek property and could be introduced easily with the help of hologram Captain Janeway. And as its popularity shows, it’s working. The series will return later on this year for the second half of its first year season, and there’s already another season as well.

Though the series is made for the younger crowd, the characters won’t stay perpetually young like the characters on The Simpsons. Instead, they’ll be allowed to grow and age, according to co-executive producer Aaron Waltke who appeared in a TrekMovie’s All Access Star Trek podcast [via Trekmovie}.

"Will the tone change a little bit from season to season? Of course, because they’re growing up and we want our characters to grow up. We don’t want Bart Simpson to be eight years old for 20 years. And we want the real events of Star Trek that happen in canon to have an impact on our characters, too. And there’s some stuff coming up in the 2380s that we’re not just going to ignore."

But the characters maturing won’t be the end of Star Trek: Prodigy.

At least not if Waltke has his way. He doesn’t see a limit to what the characters can do and go through on the series. He wants to follow them through Starfleet Academy and even to the point where they get assigned to their own ships. And he wouldn’t stop there. He’d want them to become captains and fight in space wars.

As Waltke put it, the story isn’t about the characters being children. “It’s about children at that crucial threshold of adulthood.”  He added that he didn’t think we’ve ever seen a show where the characters start so far outside of Starfleet and end up rising through the ranks, which means, for Prodigy, the possibilities are endless.

We’ve also never seen a Star Trek series that focuses solely on alien characters until now so watching them become adults and having a career in Starfleet would be another unique edge to this series.