1x07 First Con-tact

Character design, set & tech design, and animation remain flawless and gorgeous.

This is one of the Prodigy episodes where I wonder who the heck this show is for?

This episode has the formulas of an educational show - more than any character development or plot, we're here to learn about transporter technology, and secondarily about cloaking technology & Ferengi greed/dishonesty.

Focusing a Star Trek story solely around core Star Trek tech is never a good idea - Star Trek has never spun out the implications of its technology because that would really limit the stories that could be told. The transporter, treated realistically, is a superweapon that means anyone not within a shielded location can be remotely murdered or instantly imprisoned, and that anything can be stolen or destroyed at any time. Relying on transporter mechanics for key plot movement is super unsatisfying, because the mechanics of transporters are just whatever's necessary to make the story work.

The mechanics aren't even consistent within this episode: Murf needs to be fed a com badge to be teleported, and attaching one to the crystal lets it be beamed home, but the pies don't need one, and Dal doesn't need one to be teleported to safety; Nandi can teleport the chimerium off of the Protostar only because their shields are down, but presumably Nandi had her shields up when she's flying away.

I usually don't care about this because I'm watching Star Trek for characters that become dear over time, for the ways that new life and new civilizations can raise interesting questions about our own, and for the ethical competence fantasy. This series is capable of hitting all of that, and sometimes delivers! But there's none of it in this episode.

Basically: fans don't need the transporter tutorial provided by this episode. Newcomers to Trek are going to be bored and confused by it.

Also, DS9 did so much work to develop the Ferengi beyond their antisemitic origins - it's a real bummer to be back to the starting line with a one-dimensional villain who sold a kid into slavery.

]7.4/10] Holy hell, this episode was dark. And I don’t mean in tone or atmosphere. “First Contact” has the same jokey, over-the-top adventure vibe the rest of the series does. But good lord. We already know that Dal was an orphan who ended up kidnapped in a mining colony without knowing who his parents were. Now we learn that his foster mom, the only person in the world he considers family, sold him into slavery and was ready to sell him out and/or leave him for dead all over again.

Good lord! This is some frickin’ Livia Soprano kind of crap! The episode doesn’t linger on it for too long. Dal is definitely a bit angry, and definitely a little down at the revelation, but by the end, Gwyn is reassuring him and letting him know that it’s a worthwhile experience because now he knows who really has his back.

I like that tack to a point. The reveal, once again, brings Dal and Gwyn closer together, with each knowing what it’s like to be betrayed by a parent and be there for one another when they need it most. And look, this is a kids’ show. I’m not sure how deeply I want it to delve into the profound psychological damage and emotional abuse Dal and Gwyn have suffered under their horrible parental figures like some grimdark prestige drama. But man, as a grown-up watching this show, it’s hard not to see the subtext to all of this as one of the darkest things Star Trek has ever done.

Despite that, I’m still on board with it? More or less? Nandi, Dal’s Ferengi foster mom, is over-the-top evil. But she makes sense as a parental influence for Dal given what we know about him. She’s a con artist, someone prone to emotional manipulation and looking out only for herself. As much as Dal has a heart of gold and is breaking away from that sort of self-interested thinking and veering more toward a Starfleet-style sense of the common good, you can see how those parts of her “parenting style” still have a hold on him.

More to the point, we see a bit of Dal as a Dickensian (or given modern sensibilities, Harry Potter-esque) orphan forced to live in a hammock under the engine. I know this is all light adventure storytelling, but again, it’s really sad. Maybe as you get older, it’s just harder to watch stories where kids are mistreated, whereas when you’re a kid, it’s (hopefully) more abstract.

The episode uses Dal’s terrible childhood, but one he still has affection for, to build the central emotional conflict. Does Dal trust his foster mom, and stick to her plan he’s uneasy about, or does he stick with his friends and Starfleet values, to do what’s right? The writers dramatize that theme by forcing Dal to decide whether to steal a valuable crystal from a preward civilization on a nearby planet or leave these beings in peace. It’s a bit stock, but it works on the show’s terms, with Nandi’s deceptions and emotional manipulation balanced by Dal’s loyalty to his new friends and growing conscience.

Prodigy puts a thumb on the scale given how plainly evil Nandi is. If anything, I wish she was a little more nuanced -- maybe genuinely having fallen into debt at the dabo tables, maybe having had a rough upbringing herself, something so there’s more to her than sheer terribleness. Even so, her stealing the Protostar’s fuel to use her cloaking device, explaining how she traded Dal in for a robot who wasn’t so mouthy, and trying to sell him out to The Diviner is just abject awfulness, the sort of which you don’t normally see in even Star Trek’s worst villains.

On the visual front, Prodigy continues to be a dose of heaven and hell. The series’s creative team follows in the footsteps of Dorothy Fontana and The Animated Series to create visuals and scenarios that would be much trickier to pull off in live action. The beings on the nearby planet -- who look like translucent floating sea creatures, and create beautiful music and even more beautiful structures out of sand using harmonic resonance -- are a triumph of the animated medium for Star Trek. There’s an ethereal beauty to the whole thing that’s not only visually pleasing on its own terms, but sells the wrongness of any action to disrupt such wonders.

On the other hand, Nandi falls squarely into the uncanny valley, looking like she comes from an entirely different show and art style from Dal and the gang, and moving with weird gestures and inaccurate weight. Despite some triumphs in big setpieces, Prodigy still isn’t a treat to look at on a scene-to-scene basis, and it’s the type of thing fans will just have to get used to, since I wouldn’t expect the art style to change substantially from here.

Otherwise, the whole thing builds to a solid sequence of escape and rescue, with quick-thinking and clever ploys from Dal as the student becomes his teacher. It requires a little hand-waving (How was Dal not just able to beam the crystal off Nandi’s ship using his combage, but beaming back into the exact spot/vine it was in on the planet?) But it works in the moment, especially with the setup of the gang playing with the transporter earlier in the episode.

We also get one more tease about what happened with Captain Chakotay on the Protostar before all this started. With some CSI-style enhancement, Holo-Janeway discovers that Drednok, or another killer robot who looks an awful lot like him, was on the ship in the last holo-recording. Dun duuuun duuuuun. I can’t say I’m super invested in the answer to this one, beyond the novelty of seeing another Voyager castmember in action, but the show’s tossing out a sufficient number of breadcrumbs.

And it’s also tossing out a sufficient amount of really bleak material. Look, this isn’t season 4 of The Wire. I’m not expecting Prodigy to dig deep and seize on the tragedy of children who are hurt, abused, or abandoned by the authority figures and systems they rely on. The show’s been too jokey, too whimsical, and too aimed at a younger audience for that. But despite it’s bright and sometimes goofy tone, it’s packing some harrowing material under the hood. I don’t know if the show will follow other animated series with a bent toward grown-up issues and truly digest that darkness in the text at some point. But for now, it’s enough for me to be gob-smacked at how rough the life of this quippy teenager is when you step back from the fun and acknowledge the darkness.