This week’s Star Trek: Prodigy outing finally bridged the gap between Dal’s Prototar crew and Admiral Janeway’s pursuing USS Dauntless — but not in the way anyone expected, as the two starship commanders swapped bodies in a hilarious and heartwarming telepathic mixup.
We spoke to the writers of the latest Prodigy episode — sister writing partners Julie and Shawna Benson — about their most recent tale, and what it took to bring the “Mindwalk” story to life.
TREKCORE: How challenging was all that to get your heads around all the storypoints in play as “Mindwalk” began — the Dauntless vs. the Protostar, Asencia and the Diviner, and Janeway’s incapacitation?
JULIE BENSON: It’s a big episode, isn’t it? We get to turn over a lot of cards in this episode, so that was fun.
SHAWNA BENSON: We wanted to have that episode where you saw the backstory of these characters, and you get to this place where your like, “Oh, my gosh. What’s going to happen to Admiral Janeway?” — and then we take you to what’s happening on the Protostar during those events in “Ghost in the Machine” — and now those events have caught up to the present. So, for us it was figuring out how to get it all to meet at the same place so that we could then do this episode and tell this story.
TREKCORE: Where the did the inspiration for the body swap come from? It’s something seen quite rarely in Star Trek.
JULIE: We are just big fans of body swap movies; the Freaky Friday thing is such a trope. In the writers room, we came up with a list of some Star Trek tropes — to see what we could ground certain stories around — and this was on the board. When we realized we had no way for the Protostar crew to communicate with Janeway — and the story got to a point where we absolutely had to have the Admiral learn about the weapon — this was sort of the way to do it.
SHAWNA: Even though it wasn’t a specific Trek trope, it definitely fell into a sci-fi trope. Julie and I were big fans of Quantum Leap back in the day, so we knew there had to be a way to just have this be kind of fun, too. You know — kids are our primary audience, but we want to make sure that everyone remembers that although there is some heavy, serious stuff happening, there is lightness to this show, just like any other Star Trek series, honestly.
It also became one of those things that definitely made even more sense after we explored Dal’s backstory in “Masquerade.” Once we sort of knew what Dal was, we suddenly had an open where somebody could say, “Wait a minute — I think I know how we can do this.”
TREKCORE: And you tapped in the Organians for that.
SHAWNA: That was definitely a little bit of a deeper cut, because we also established that Dal has Vulcan DNA in his genetic makeup, so it wasn’t the only thing to leverage — but Organian really made sense so we said, “Let’s go with that.”
JULIE: And getting to see Kate and Brett — they nailed each other’s vocalizations and delivery so well.
SHAWNA: They were incredible. Amazing.
TREKCORE: Did you give the actors any performance notes, or did they work out all of that on their own?
JULIE: We were quarantined during the pandemic, so all of the recording happened without us — but I did ask Kevin Hageman when I saw him at the Emmys last weekend to confirm a suspicion we had: Brett recorded Dal-in-Janeway’s lines, and Kate apparently recorded Janeway-in-Dal’s lines, so the two were able to hear how the other would deliver the dialogue. That gave them something to work from, which I think is incredibly insightful.
Even if they hadn’t, I think they would have nailed those characters having lived with them this long — but oh my gosh, we were blown away by the final result.
SHAWNA: There’s like four different versions of Janeway that Kate has to play in this episode: Holo-Janeway, Admiral Janeway, Dal-in-Janeway being himself, and Dal trying to BE Admiral Janeway in front of the Dauntless crew — so she really gets to stretch.
We were a little worried. We weren’t sure how she was going to feel about it, but we talked to her at last year’s Star Trek Day event and she seemed so happy with how it all turned out — she got to let her hair down a little bit.
JULIE: I think she got to have a lot of fun.
TREKCORE: How did you put together that lovely discussion between Admiral Janeway and the Janeway hologram? At one point, I think there’s even a moment where you can see three Janeways on screen at the same time…
JULIE: We really wanted it to be a heartfelt scene, where we had to immediately get it across that holo-Janeway would recognize that Dal is telling the truth — and that the real Admiral is inside of him. We just did a lot of research and tried to go back into our own memory banks — since we’d already mentioned her dog Molly in a previous episode, we thought we’d have her talk about her sister and talk about painting, and getting that across really quick. We wrote it as the camera transitions so we finally see them as their true selves, but the animators did it better than we could have ever written.
SHAWNA: There are definitely a lot of great visual interpretations the animators did with that. The way that we had talked about it, the two Janeways would be watching the record of what happened to Chakotay and his crew.
Once Admiral Janeway was on board, we’d have her use admiral command codes which would supersede anything the Vau N’Akat had done. Because holo-Janeway has no access, even Dal’s command code wouldn’t work, so you get to the major override that allows them to see what the true record was.
So when we did that, we were just going to do it on a flat screen in our heads — as we forgot that there are holo-emitters all over this ship [laughs] — so the animators did this in a holographic way…
JULIE: …so you end up with all three of them on camera, which is insane.
TREKCORE: The moment where Dal says, “I’d do anything for Gwyn, too,” is really powerful moment. Can you talk about what the Diviner’s motivation was in letting Janeway free? What state of mind is he in in contrast with Asencia, and how did you make the decision to have him do that?
JULIE: Right now, he’s spent a lot of time aboard the Dauntless, and around Janeway’s crew — Starfleet is very influential and very inspiring. I think he has been seeing the good that they can do, but still has his mission. It’s still very important to him, but here I think it’s a bit of an “I owe you one” act.
SHAWNA: He’s seeing the world through a new filter. He doesn’t have his memory, so he’s not seeing it through the point of view he had — back when all he could see was the terrible aftereffect of Starfleet coming. So now he is sort of seeing the good all around him. And even though Asencia tells him everything, there is still this doubt: “I’ve seen this with my own eyes now, so I don’t know how to feel.”
He wants to do his mission, but he also wants to do right by Janeway. So that is where we came to in the story, with him empathizing, at least, with her plight and wanting to help her.
JULIE: It’s the best thing we learned from working on a show like The 100 before Prodigy, where everything on that series was a shade of grey. Every villain and every hero had to be in the grey, and you had to make the best worst decision out of all the bad decisions you have.
SHAWNA: But for the Diviner, his daughter is the key component. Gwyn is basically the only memory he has been able to retain, and her coming back to him in a way and remembering how important she is to him — but seeing it again through a new lens.
She is not important to him because she has a purpose, she’s important to him because she’s his daughter — and that’s the other switch we made: he stops calling her ‘progeny’ and he starts calling her ‘daughter.’
JULIE: I don’t know if anyone noticed that!
SHAWNA: It was a subtle clue to show that his relationship with her has really changed at this point.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Star Trek: Prodigy will return with “Supernova, Part 1” on Thursday, December 22 on Paramount+ in the United States, and on December 23 in Latin America, Australia, Italy, the UK, and additional territories.