Star Trek: Prodigy may be returning a familiar ship in season two

Star Trek: Prodigy just concluded its massively successful season one, and this post contains spoilers from the season finale.

As successful as season one of the freshman series, Star Trek: Prodigy, was, it’s no surprise discussions about what to expect in season two are already underway. We don’t know when the second season will premiere on Paramount+, but the season finale dropped a lot of hints that has us excited about what we’ll see next. One of those hints was Vice Admiral Janeway’s new ship which will have most of the crew from the Protostar aboard.

Toward the end of Supernova, Part II, Janeway tells her new recruits that Starfleet has offered her a ship of her choosing to expore the new wormhole which was created by Hologram Janeway after the Protostar exploded. That wormhole replicated the one that sent Captain Chakotay into the future. And Janeway is going to be on that mission. Since the USS Dauntless is out of the picture, unless it goes through a major overhaul between now and the start of season two, Janeway is looking at a brand new ship, and the hints Prodigy dropped have us looking back instead of forward.

Star Trek: Prodigy teased “something much bigger” than the Protostar.

Though a new Protostar-type ship was shown to Dal and his crew, Admiral Janeway said she had something much bigger in mind for her next voyage. That something much bigger could be the newest version of the USS Voyager. As Trekmovie points out, the crew from the Protostar are rescued in San Francisco Bay by a shuttle with the NCC-74656-A designation. As the original USS Voyager had the designation NCC-74656, it’s safe to assume these shuttles are from the newest Voyager.

And Kate Mulgrew made clear which starship is hers when she was on an episode of the Ready Room. 

"“I have an absolute fidelity to [the] Voyager Intrepid-class. That is my starship. That is where my captaincy rooted itself. And that’s where Admiral Janeway went down [in “Endgame”].”"

There is a question as to why Janeway wasn’t given the USS Voyager-A to look for Chakotay. It’s possible the ship wasn’t complete, although, Prodigy takes place six years after the end of Star Trek: Voyager. But that’s not going to be as important as hopefully seeing Janeway on the bridge of the successor ship of the one that brought her and her crew home after seven years in the Delta Quadrant.

Right now, this is all speculation, but these are some pretty strong reasons to speculate. And it’s a good bet that this would thrill Voyager fans. So why wouldn’t the producers want to bring in the USS Voyager-A when it would clearly be a good thing for the series?