After we spent an illuminating hour chatting with Star Trek: Prodigy’s Aaron Watlke last month for our fascinating two-part interview about “Kobayashi,” checked back in with the writer/producer to talk about last week’s winter finale, the surprise ending, and some familiar Trek imagery returning after two decades.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
TREKCORE: Before we even dive into “A Moral Star,” my kids are anxious to know if you’ll share just how long poor Rok-Tahk was on her own during “Time Amok.”
AARON J. WALTKE: Too long!
TREKCORE: I knew that was going to be your answer! Rok’s experience really got to them — not just on a metaphysical level of loving Rok as a person, but on a theoretical level of how that time anomaly worked. They’ve been talking about it nonstop!
WALTKE: That’s really gratifying to hear. That is the kind of stuff that had me staying up late under my covers as a kid, thinking about the latest TNG episode. I would just think long into the night about these conundrums like how “Yesterday’s Enterprise” and “Redemption” worked with Tasha Yar’s timeline.
It was delightful for me, so maybe I’ve created a monster in your own kids!
TREKCORE: You have! But let’s talk about the big new reveal of the finale. What’s Vice Admiral Janeway’s time in Starfleet been like since we last saw her — and when and where is her flight on the Dauntless taking place?
WALTKE: Hologram Janeway mentions the stardate in her closing log entry, so as I promised on Twitter recently, that’s an accurate stardate to reference — so that puts the series officially in the early stages of 2384.
As for Vice Admiral Janeway, the last time we saw her, of course, was in Star Trek: Nemesis where she was behind a desk giving orders to Picard to go check out that strange dealings going on over at Romulus. She continued to rise to the ranks at Starfleet, until Chakotay was lost aboard the USS Protostar.
Clearly, she pulled some rank, and got one of the top-five fastest ships that Starfleet has begun to build using the technology Voyager brought home — including all of that delightfully game-changing FTL technology like quantum slipstream and Borg transwarp drives, coaxial warp drive, enhanced warp drive, and more.
Clearly, the events of Voyager’s “Endgame” were not forgotten in our show. We knew that Star Trek: Picard wouldn’t really be touching any of that Voyager story, so where better to explore some of that than our show? In many ways, our two versions of Janeway are inextricably tied to the foundation of our story.
That was by design and intention — because I think for a lot of fans, even when you’re tracking the storylines of our main cast and crew, Voyager was for a long time the last we heard from most of the 24th century characters, outside of just the isolated Nemesis story.
But the Federation and the galaxy is very big, and we wanted to see what’s going on elsewhere in the Alpha Quadrant.
TREKCORE: So Admiral Janeway went back ‘into the field’ specifically go lead the hunt for Chakotay?
WALTKE: Yes — admirals don’t typically command starships unless they pull rank, and Janeway was like, “I’m doing this one myself.”
TREKCORE: That said, when did Chakotay set out from the Alpha Quadrant in the Protostar?
WALTKE: Some time after the events of “Endgame” and Voyager, but before the Prodigy pilot episode “Lost and Found.”
TREKCORE: The “All Good Things” Starfleet combadge, also used in “Endgame,” is an iconic one — typically showing an alternate future from Star Trek’s ‘present’ time period. Why use it here?
Aaron Waltke: If you recall in “Endgame,” that combadge came into the prime timeline for the first time when the older Admiral Janeway went back in time from her alternate 2404, bringing Voyager a bunch of future tech.
But more important than the technology, I think, was the game-changing future-altering event that was “Endgame” itself. Voyager arriving home 16 years early — wearing all of that game-changing technology — changed the direction of the Federation, because the Federation itself is built on exploration. If you come back and give them a bunch of technology that lets them explore further and faster, it’s going to speed up the timeline a little bit.
It’s also in some ways answering a question that was opened by Star Trek: Picard — because the 2399-era combadges used in that series have a style that looks like it evolved from this one. I think a lot of people saw Picard and were like, “Well, what about the ‘All Good Things’ combadge?” They wanted to see that design!
Basically, this is a prototype combadge that is going to start slowly being phased into Starfleet use by the early 2390s and then presumably we’ll see the successor — the Picard combadge — arrive by the the late 2390s. That’s the thinking behind it; it’s all the aftermath of Voyager’s early arrival home.
TREKCORE: Is the badge attached to a specific Starfleet division?
Aaron Waltke: Yes. Essentially, the idea is that we’ve always seen coexisting uniforms on Star Trek. On Deep Space Nine, you see characters arrive to the station in their TNG-style uniforms, then change to the DS9 designs; you have the test pilot uniforms on Voyager, and there are other examples.
Now, Lower Decks has basically codified that by the 2380s, there are coexisting uniforms and badge designs based upon where officers are assigned. Whether that’s a new policy in Starfleet or a return to form like what you saw in early seasons of TNG, it’s up to you.
Even on TNG, you saw different combadges used at the same time, whereas these all silver combadge worn by Wesley Crusher, the black-rimmed combadge and so on. This is an era of experimentation, and that includes fashion. In this case, certain divisions are still using trusty 2370s-style uniform — and others, like the teams managing the Romulan evacuation are using the uniform seen in the Picard Season 1 flashbacks.
When we get closer to 2385, you will see that Picard flashback uniform starting to show up and roll out other places in the Federation. That’s our thinking.
TREKCORE: And then there’s the Dauntless. It’s clearly inspired by the original Dauntless from “Hope and Fear,” but it seems like it has some of Rick Sternbach’s original Voyager design in there.
WALTKE: I think that Rick Sternbach himself said he puts a lot of thought into this. Specifically with the arrowhead design and the variable nacelles and stuff in terms of faster and faster ships; he felt like the actual shape of the ship mattered when you were trying to breach some of those upper limits of speed.
It made sense to us that the shape of the original Dauntless was the reason why it didn’t constantly go off track while in slipstream, the way Voyager did when they were trying to use that technology on their own it in episodes like “Timeless.”
We also wanted to acknowledge this wasn’t just an exact copy of Arturis’s Dauntless; that maybe Starfleet tried to add some of their own improved designs — hence why the nacelles are a little bit different and whatnot. I think Starfleet would happily integrate new technology they find into their own… they’re like a nicer version of the Borg that way!
TREKCORE: That idea that shape promotes successful slipstream speeds is another concept inspired from Trek novels, right?
WALTKE: Yes! That’s not to say there aren’t other shapes that might work, but there are two variables that meant quantum slipstream was not scalable fleetwide — even though we see it’s still occasionally used in the far future after the Burn.
One of which I think is like designing the ship so that it navigates well; the other one is that the required benamite crystals seem to be very rare, and they take years to synthesize.
It’s more of something for specialized ships that just need to go very fast — which Janeway totally does, especially if she’s going to bother to go back into the Delta Quadrant. She wants to be able to get back home again!
TREKCORE: Is this new Dauntless a prototype, or the first of a new fleet? Unlike the Protostar, it’s labeled with an ‘NCC’ designation, rather than an ‘NX.’
WALTKE: There was a lot of debate about how there was technically another previous version of this ship, fully functional, but it was really an alien ship.
In the 2380s they were doing a lot of experimentation with all this technology that Voyager had brought back from the Delta Quadrant, and ultimately we figured that Starfleet probably built a testbed ship that worked, and then they decided to build least one more — Admiral Janeway’s Dauntless — and put it into use for quick, short bursts.
TREKCORE: What was the thought process for choosing an antagonist like The Diviner for a children’s show, who has such a complex motivation factoring in both time travel and revenge?
Aaron Waltke: Obviously, he has a little bit of scenery-chewing in the classic vein of any great Star Trek villain — but we didn’t want his motivation to be purely, “I hate Starfleet, because I hate freedom!” We wanted it to have both a personal motivation, and one that you actually understand. For The Diviner, we wanted him to be a bad guy, but not without principles that gives every villain in a way as a hero of their own story.
When we were developing the character, we spent weeks saying, “Why is he after this ship specifically? Why doesn’t he try something else?” We realized the answer is not just getting to the Federation or whatnot — it was because there was something specifically on the Protostar that he needed, a weapon from the future that was capable of destroying Starfleet.
As to why he might not just go and talk to Starfleet… well, you saw how he thinks they treated his people! I don’t think he would trust them to keep their word after that. As for why maybe he wouldn’t just trust the kids to deliver the package himself, I don’t think he would trust them to do that either.
He’s spent 30-plus years or whatever trying to achieve this singular goal, he’s going to see it through to the end because that is his task as given to him by the mysterious order. You will find out more about what was going on with all of that as the show continues, but we definitely wanted it to be I think like all great Star Trek villains and have these great conundrums that you come up against.
It’s very rarely black and white. It’s situations based around a misunderstanding or a tragic collision of philosophical ideas. I think how we navigate through them ultimately is where perhaps we can get a little closer to the truth which is something that Starfleet has always strived for. Always striving perhaps never truly achieving.
Star Trek: Prodigy will return for ten more Season 1 episodes later in 2022; the series has already been renewed for Season 2, expected in 2023.