Star Trek Prodigy is the sequel to Voyager.

It’s not just for kids, although intended for a family audience.

My partner and I had a blast watching it.

I wanted both.

But with a truncated 5th season and the very long lead time required for animation, I can see why the animated version ended up being dropped.

Treklit - both comics and books gets short-shrift in promotion.

No idea why, but it’s definitely a longstanding and worsening trend.

We’ll have to see whether David Ellison reorients the scheduling strategically. It’s hard to imagine he will not.

5 years ago, as the transition was happening after the remerger, the demographic statistics I saw showed that CBSAA/P+ had the best range of demographics. And it had the best youth/teen/kids audience after Disney+.

Unlike, NBC Universal’s problem with Peacock and Discovery+, which had two very different demographics with little interest the content the other offered, Paramount+ launched with a broad and diverse base.

But the programming and production choices of the past five years have brutally squandered that. It seems that the millennial, middle age Bro, and older male audience has been the target — live sports, Taylor Sheridan everything etc.

It already feels as though P+ has been reprogrammed to make the current US administration happy, pushing a certain kind of American exceptionalism, but that’s not a successful global business strategy.

It’s really only the content coming in from CBS linear and Star Trek that’s kept the balance on the platform.

We keep hearing about content being produced in Paramount’s South American studios or in agreements with partners in Spain and France, but none of that richness in offerings are making it to the North American platform. Netflix remains dominant in offering high quality content from outside Hollywood.

I agree. The more we see, the more enthusiastic I am.

The concept of an Academy show was in development hell for so long - basically, since the hiatus after Discovery’s first season.

And we know that it was originally kicked around before TNG went into production.

So, this seems to have been a hard one to make work. The cost to produce a high quality VFX-rich show that appeals to a teen and young adult demographic, requires that the show must also be rich enough elements to draw the wider Trek base.

I’m hopeful that, as with Prodigy, Starfleet Academy may be one of the rare shows that satisfies a mass demographic despite the streaming era.

The risk is that, like Prodigy, Paramount may not promote it broadly enough.

However, with A-listers heading the cast, one can hope that it will get a lot of promotion beyond the genre media.

Commodore should be abbreviated to Cmdre (Canadian Navy), CDRE (former US Navy) or CMDE (several including India).

But given all the oddities of NCOs in Trek, this a weird acronym for Commodore seems on-brand.

Still, I think it may be some kind of physicians’ designation the writers came up with. One would expect some kind of Medical Officer such as CMO, but could it be Commanding Doctor or something bizarre like that?

That makes sense. Something like this would need a lot of runway and would involve contractual obligations that could not be easily terminated.

This sounds very cool and a spectacular way (literally) to raise the profile of SNW and Trek generally with the SDCC attendees.

I just can’t square it though with firing the entire department at Paramount that made The Ready Room and other online promotional content that gets beyond the US market. The cost cutting choices are not obviously justifiable.

I’m going to say any or none of the suggestions here may be right.

And some of them, like Inner Light, are awful choices simply because their impact is very dependent on having the context the rest of the series and characters.

The main thing is that Star Trek has a wide variety of tones. The way to success is to provide excellent examples of very Trekie episodes that are in the genre or tone that your brother already likes.

Don’t show them action if they like cerebral mystery. Don’t show them romance if they like action. Don’t show them intense drama if they’re into comedy. If they’re into animated comedies or anime, start with Lower Decks or Prodigy not TNG.

Examples from this perspective…

If they like psychological horror, then TNG’s ‘Schisms’ or Voyager’s ‘The Thaw’ might be best.

If they like action, Discovery’s two part pilot might be the one or even the movie Star Trek (2009).

It seems that Christina has been able to convince the Showrunners to incorporate some of her own enthusiasms into La’an’s character.

In a TrekMovie piece, she’s quoted saying that she and Ethan Peck had a total of 75 hours of dance and fight choreography preparation over the season. The heaviest episode is in the back half of the season.

While I enjoyed the edgier La’an, Goldsman seems to have a very rigid idea that, in drama, trauma is the foundation of character development. It’s tiresome when every single character has to have a traumatic backstory, experience trauma in the show, or look forward to trauma (in Pike’s case).

So, as an example, it seems that the only way for Ortegas to have a character arc is for her to be traumatized and go through the process of overcoming that.

In that case, it’s better to have La’an move on. Between Tomorrow cubed and Hegemony II, we’ve seen two very significant life events for her that make it credible that she could finally more on.

As a TAS fan, it’s great to hear that Alonso Myers and Goldsman are enthusiastically weaving in TAS elements where they can.

Between them and McMahan helming Lower Decks, we’ve had genuine determination to weave TAS into live action and put aside the claims that it isn’t canon.

I’m somewhat sad about the lack of Kzinti though. Larry Niven would be enthusiastic to have more Kzin in Trek from everything he’s written on that point.

So, this makes 5 different Star Trek series where John De Lancie has appeared as Q (if we’re taking Akiva Goldsman’s offscreen confirmation).

Doesn’t that put him in a tie with Jonathan Frakes as Riker?

I’m glad to get any kind of 5th season.

If there’s a new show, I would rather that they time skip forever to the end of TOS, after TAS.

A late year 4 and year 5 show would fit with the age of the cast, especially Paul Wesley as Kirk. Even Celia, who was a young Uhura in the first season of SNW is catching up given the slow pace of production and release with the pandemic and strike impacting timelines. Even if they just carried on, a TOS-based SNW spin-off wouldn’t be premiered before late 2027 or early 2028 at best.

Disappointed, but not surprised that SNW was sold as the lead into TOS - the entire show seems to have been based on that pitch to the senior executives obsessed with reboots.

It’s a great show but not what it could have been but likely the only version of it that could have been greenlit in this past decade.

I find I am delighted with Quinn’s Scotty.

I could have waited another season for him to be introduced - but I also could have been happier if SNW wasn’t so laser-focused on building the backstory of legacy characters vs giving us more of the new ones - and the cipher that was Number One.

Anyways…

Here’s a complication of TAS Scott images. I think that TAS Scotty looks somewhat in between Quinn and Doohan.

I’m rather interested to see where they go with Korby.

It’s important for Christine Chapel’s character that the backstory they are developing for the TOS relationship is credible.

It was really rather sad and mortifying for Chapel in TOS to be shown as a intelligent and successful scientist, who took a Starfleet starship posting as a nurse to track down a missing fiance only to have him revealed as a dark mastermind turning people into androids.

Having what appeared to be a one sided, unrequited longing for Spock as well, made Chapel come across as pathetic, and very much shifted it to misogyny. Or, at least a complete failure of a Bechtel-type test where a female character exists for more than her interest in male characters.

(Even Majel Barrett’s Number One in ‘The Cage’ was put in an unrequited attraction situation with Pike.)

I have started (another) rewatch of TAS recently.

This time, what’s struck me is how much the Kirk in TAS aligns with Paul Wesley’s performance.

Despite TAS being animated to look like Shatner’s Kirk and Shatner voicing the part, somehow there’s less swagger and a more intellectual Kirk in TAS.

It’s in the writing surely but perhaps the creators had a sense that they needed to shift the tone to sell the drama on an animated show — especially one that took advantage of the medium to show even more trippy aliens and phenomena.

I wasn’t looking for it but there it is.

The Animated Series that ran in the mid 70s although it was originally just called ‘Star Trek.’

It had the same cast as TOS. Roddenberry was the showrunner again (after leaving before season 3 of TOS) and DC Fontana was the Supervising Editor in charge of the scripts.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Animated_Series

At 22 episodes total, and only 6 in TAS second season, it could go either way.

I am willing to concede so that those who don’t love TAS much as I do can get their proper closure to the 5 year mission.

And then there’s part of me that very much wants Vanguard to be the new, darker station-based serialized ensemble show to fill the DS9 niche we haven’t quite had in this era.

TAS is the 4th season of TOS - with some of the scripts adapted from the prep for a live-action TOS season 4 that never happened. (Yes, TAS IS canon!)

Now, we know that Arex and M’Ress are difficult to bring to live action, but who’s to say that their rotations on Enterprise aren’t done, and Chekov isn’t back, as year 5 begins?