Star Trek: Picard took Star Trek: Prodigy’s story-arc
Star Trek: Picard has tickled a lot of people’s nostalgia bone this season, hitting everyone with cameos, returns, and easter eggs that would make a good number of fans very happy. Yet, it’s fair to say the story has lacked at times, and beyond the emotional notes that are popping up, it feels like the story was rushed. Dare I say, even copied and pasted?
The season has lacked originality, and there isn’t any real debate about that. At least, not anymore. While the season has done a good job resetting and retconning the first two seasons, it hasn’t done a good job creating new content that stands on its own.
Especially with its finale. The last few episodes of the series have seen the Borg return in full force. The Changelings, the red hearing for the season, used Picard’s Borg-laced DNA and distributed it throughout the fleet by teleporting to various ships and leaving behind trace elements of this. So, anyone who teleported would have the Borg-DNA implanted as part of them.
This Borg-DNA would go on to affect only people 25 and younger (because that makes sense), and those who were affected would become new Borg drones. Then those drones would go on to claim the fleet as their own.
With every ship under Borg control, it’s up to one lone Starfleet vessel to save the day, which is basically the plot of Star Trek: Prodigy
Star Trek: Prodigy did Star Trek: Picard’s finale better
In Star Trek: Prodigy, the Protostar contained a weapon called the Living Construct, a Borg-like device that would work its way into other ships and take control of them. Not too dissimilar from what happened in Pcard, but against the ships and not the crew.
And just like in Picard, it was up to one lone ship to save Starfleet from total annihilation. The lone difference was what was targeted, in Prodigy it was the ships, and in Picard, it was the “yutes”.
Shockingly enough, both shows also relied on past captains (Jean-Luc Picard/Kathryn Janeway) to save the day, though, in the case of Janeway, it was actually the Emergency Command Hologram.
Though, now that I think about it, this isn’t that much different even in that aspect, as Picard isn’t a human anymore, as he’s a golem made of biotechnology. Now, if Picard goes on to sacrifice himself to save the day, just like the ECH did, I hope Terry Matalas at least shouts out the writing crew of Prodigy for their ideas.