HERE THERE BE SPOILERS

The problem with stealing a ship and escaping into space is that one must then decide where to take said ship, and Dal and his friends face that same issue in “Starstruck.” However, the complicating factor for Dal is that the former Unwanted have even less of a destination in mind than he does. They escaped from Tars Lamora, not to anywhere, and it shoes. Hologram Janeway offers them a destination, but Dal has been around the block one too many times. He rejects her offer and instead chooses a destination at random with disastrous consequences. We, as viewers, understand Dal’s impulse, but in captaining the Protostar Dal must learn that he cannot succeed or even survive if he relies solely on himself. He must ask for help. That’s a hard but necessary lesson to learn, and Prodigy sets out to teach it. Whether Dal fully internalized the episode’s moral is up for grabs, but we as viewers certainly do.

Plot Ahoy!

“Starstruck” picks up exactly where last week left off, with Hologram Janeway offering her aid as Dal and his friends struggle to decide where to go with their newfound freedom. Janeway offers to take them to the Federation, and explains that her mission aboard the Protostar is to guide the Protostar and its crew to Federation space. Of course, none of the former-Unwanted have the first clue what the Federation actually is, so Janeway explains to the “cadets” the ideals behind the Federation. Jankom Pog immediately hops on board Team Federation, and Zero doesn’t lag too far behind him. Dal, however, refuses even to consider the idea, rejecting the idea out of hand. He looks around the map Janeway manifested and selects a random red dot. Janeway tries to warn him, but Dal refuses to listen, instead asking her to tell him the location of the brig.

As he escorts Gwyn to the brig, Dal explains to his “subordinates” that Janeway’s promises regarding liberty and cooperation must be lies crafted by authority figures because, he contends, that anything that sounds too good to be true must be. While the Federation may offer the utopia it promises to others, he believes that the promises it offers are not for former fugitives. Zero, Jankom Pog, and Rok-tahk accept his reasoning. Dal and Zero continue on to the brig with Gwyn while Jankom Pog and Rok-tahk head to the mess hall.

In the brig, Dal exults in his newfound power over Gwyn, but she warns him that her father will come to rescue her. Dal shrugs off her warning and heads out to continue exploring the ship. He and Zero find the crew quarters, which largely seems to involve a bunkroom and the much more luxurious Captain’s quarters. Dal, of course, claims these quarters for himself. In the mess hall, Jankom Pog and Rok-tahk try to find food, so Janeway introduces them to the replicators. Jankom Pog’s first concern is how to pay for his meal and is thrilled when Janeway explains that currency doesn’t exist in the Federation. He rushes forward and orders a veritable feast. Rok-tahk, however, finds the idea of choosing food to be extremely difficult and defaults to the nutria-goop they consumed on Tars Lamora because she has never eaten any other food.

After eating, Jankom Pog heads down to Engineering where Zero meets him. Jankom Pog explains that the Protostar has two warp cores. Zero, however, identifies an object and queries as to what it is, but even Jankom Pog doesn’t know. A red alert cuts their musings short, so they all return to the bridge. There, they discover that the Protostar has fallen into the gravity well of a dwarf star that’s eating a red dwarf, and in short, unless they can escape, they’re doomed. Zero, Jankom Pog, and Rok-tahk all look to Dal, who flounders. Janeway appears and offers her help, but again, Dal refuses. He orders power diverted to the impulse engines, so the ship loses not only its shields but also the brig forcefields.

Gwyn takes advantage of the power loss and escapes. She discovers a transportation replicator in the shuttlebay after watching all of the escape pods eject. Gwyn activates the device, priming it to create a shuttlecraft. On the bridge, everyone realizes that Gwyn is free, so Dal sends Rok-Tahk to retrieve her while he continues to scramble to find a solution to their dilemma. Rok-Tahk does find Gwyn, and she stares down her former captor with very real rage, so Gwyn deactivates the ship’s artificial gravity.

On the bridge, Dal finally concedes that he needs help and calls for Janeway who offers helpful suggestions and training. She does not, however, tell them how to escape the gravity well. That, they must figure out for themselves, and eventually Zero hits on the solution. The ship escapes, and everyone survives. The episode ends with Dal congratulating himself and Gwyn returned to the brig. Back on Tars Lamora, the Diviner straps himself into some sort of survival suit and takes a ship to follow the Protostar.

Analysis

Star Trek as a franchise sets itself apart because the show views cooperation not as an unfortunate necessity but almost as a perk. Yes, ship-based shows tend to focus on the developing bonds between crew members, but these shows and stories tend to pit their crews against a greater, more hostile universe. (Expanse, I’m looking at you.) In Trek, the rest of the environment is generally not hostile because Trek tries to portray antagonists more than enemies. A given Romulan captain may do horrible things, but Trek bends over backwards to remind us that the Romulans are people who are going about their daily lives. In “Face of the Enemy,” Troi wakes up to find herself looking remarkably Romulan and must deliver some defectors to the Enterprise, and the episode certainly could have left the other Romulans as simply “evil.” The episode doesn’t go that route because we get Commander Toreth who is fiercely proud to be Romulan military, justifiably angry at the Tal Shiar, and generally competent. She’s not cast as an enemy so much as an antagonist to Troi’s interests. Even the Dominion, which inflicts such horrific punishments on those it perceives to be its enemies, isn’t evil so much as terrified of others.

However, the distinction between enemy and antagonist more often than not is one of understanding and perception. We have to meet Commander Toreth to come to an appreciation of Romulan society just as Troi does. Just as Odo does, we have to interact with the Female Founder to come to understand how deep her fear of solids goes. We, as both viewers and adults, possess the information and the tools to grasp this nuanced distinction. Dal has neither, and “Starstruck” serves as a painful reminder of how young he and the other members of the crew really are. Moreover, all Dal and most of them know is trauma; even the term the Diviner uses for them is awful. They are the “Unwanted,” which is why he can abuse them so easily. Society has failed these children horribly and cut them adrift.

Dal comments at one point that the brig is nicer than most prisons he’s occupied, and that statement more than either the rant about authority figures or even the nick in one of his ears tells us everything we need to know about Dal. It provides even more illumination than Zero’s decision not to probe Dal’s memory further because it conclusively indicates both that most, if not all, of Dal’s experiences with authority and structure are not good ones and that he has been alone for almost all of them. Dal therefore equates societal structure and authority with harm, not safety. Once we realize that, Dal’s complete unwillingness to trust command of the Protostar to anyone else makes sense. He doesn’t trust Janeway because he has no reason to do so and every reason not to trust her in his own black and white view. Dal believes he has no trust left to give and would not offer it even if he had it in spades. For Dal, the only being upon whom Dal can rely is Dal himself.

We know Rok-tahk shares similar trauma to Dal’s. The most heartbreaking line in the whole episode goes to her when she explains to Jankom Pog that she has never eaten any other food than the food served on Tars Lamora. The prison colony represents the totality of her life experience as she knows it. That’s why she’s so incensed when Gwyn explains that she was told the Unwanted were criminals. Note, Gwyn doesn’t exactly say she believed it, which is an important distinction. Rok-tahk cannot be a criminal because she knows nothing beyond the prison. There’s no before Tars Lamora for her; her entire identity has been “Unwanted.” When juxtaposed with Jankom Pog’s gleeful sampling of what I assume to be Tellarite delicacies, Rok-tahk’s sadness hits all the harder, and her rage with Gwyn then becomes all the more understandable. That’s good storytelling.

Hologram Janeway offers these kids a vision of freedom that we, as viewers who have lived with the Federation for years, know to be true, but they do not. Furthermore, in almost any other franchise, we’d accept Dal’s argument as being good sense, but Prodigy plays with that expectation by juxtaposing our knowledge with Dal’s. Hologram Janeway stands there as both a reminder that the world of the Federation still exists and a as a teacher who will hopefully guide these kids if not to the Federation but then to its ideals. That’s why she doesn’t simply tell Dal what to do; he must first learn to ask for and accept help when he’s out of his depth. Asking Janeway for her help represents a first step for him, not just toward being a captain of a functioning crew but toward being a Starfleet captain because it’s part of learning how to rely on others.

Yes, Zero, that kind of interspecies cooperation is possible, and you’re about to experience it first hand.

Rating:

Four and a half full crates of Chimerium

Stray Thoughts From the Couch:

1. I have to admit that I do wonder how much of the Prodigy set up is designed to resonate with kids who have spent the last year or more in lockdown. For Dal and his crew, the Protostar represents freedom, which in any other year, we’d probably take for granted. However, the pandemic forcibly stripped that from us, so I think kids have a much deeper understanding of how restricted life has been for Dal, Rok-tahk, Jankom Pog, and Zero than they otherwise might have had. Please note, I’m not saying that responsibly staying home in a pandemic is akin to being imprisoned because staying home is absolutely the right and responsible choice. I’m just saying that in terms of an emotional landscape, today’s kids appreciate lacking freedom better than I did at the same age.
2. Even Jankom Pog has no knowledge of the Federation. That’s weird. He’s a Tellarite?
3. Janeway drank coffee. I loved it.
4. Oh, that mysterious Omega 13 Device in Engineering won’t be important or possibly the key to Solum’s desire for the Protostar. Oh no.
5. I do wonder what happened to the Protostar’s original crew.
6. I feel like the transport device replicator is both an answer to the question what will happen now that the Protostar has no escape pods and a nod to Voyager’s seemingly infinite supply of shuttlecraft.
7. I’m still loving Gwyn’s semi-sentient mesh weapon.
8. The Diviner is unrelentingly evil. We know this because he sent a kitten to work on the asteroid’s surface, which we’ve already established is obscenely dangerous and generally fatal. Not cool, show. Not cool.
9. Also, I’m pretty sure Hologram Janeway pulled some images from TAS for her “Intro to the Federation: 101” lecture, making Prodigy the second franchise installment to reference TAS.