After the fast pace of the last five weeks, Star Trek: Prodigy takes a moment to regroup in “Preludes.”
 
Framed with stories from our characters’ pasts, the episode drops some juicy revelations about the Vau N’Akat — and the fate of Captain Chakotay’s original Protostar crew — while also gifting us some lovely particulars about how our gang ended up at Tars Lamora in the first place. It’s a poignant bonding interlude to pass the time while the Protostar gets repaired ahead of the last run of fall episodes.
 

As Admiral Janeway slowly starts to realize that these kids aren’t the villains here, our Protostar crew is holed up in the Neutral Zone, repairing the ship. As he helps repair the ship, Dal wears similar welding glasses from his time mining Tars Lamora in “Lost and Found” — continuing the nostalgic ambiance started by seeing Admiral Janeway review the “unwanteds” mugshots from their Tars Lemora escape.

The reflective mood is set and the crew finally have a moment to catch their breath. It’s story time, and as Dal tries to work through the bombshell of his Augment origins revealed in “Masquerade,” the crew share their own sad origins in solidarity.

First up is Rok-Tahk, who tells the story of how she was a prisoner even before Tars Lamora. She was forced to fight for gamblers and her wrestling character, “The Monster,” was meant to always lose. One day she didn’t take a dive, she lost her captors’ money, and as a punishment was sold to a Kazon slave trader who sold her to The Diviner.

While incredibly sad, out of all the stories, this one rang slightly hollow. It was too similar to her time at Tars Lamora to elicit feelings, and it felt just a little too on the nose to have her be forced to be a fighter. It also didn’t go far back enough into her origin, because we don’t know how she ended up as a captor at the fighting arena in the first place.

Not getting to see her original abduction made it not as impactful as it could have been, and also missed a golden opportunity to add to the lore of the Brikar — an opportunity that both Zero and Jankom’s stories take advantage of for their respective species. Since we know almost nothing about the Brikar canonically, it would have been great to get some world building on this fascinating species.

Zero’s story, on the other hand, beautifully showcases the Medusan hivemind, previously only mentioned in Trek but never seen. We learn that Zero’s hivemind were a group of explorers themselves, and while they were on a strange new world, their misty group was hunted by Kazon slave traders.

The hive is absolutely gorgeous: beautiful bulbs of all different colors swirling around each other as if dancing in the wind. The beautiful animation manages to wordlessly convey the sense of a vibrant and loving community and you can feel Zero’s deep sense of loss as he is picked off and separated from them. A true masterpiece.

Jankom’s story also manages to convey that same sense of loss, but with a dose of humor that made this vignette the unanimous favorite of my kids. Jankom was an orphan on Tellar Prime — during a time before the Federation — who got sent on a deep space mission aboard a sleeper ship in cryogenic stasis. He gets awoken early to fix things around the ship. At this point he’s only an engineer-in-training, so this doubles as an origin story for all his experience in fixing things.

One thing breaks, and as he fixes it something else malfunctions, and he ends up getting experience in repairing almost every area of the ship. We even get to see his first experience using his beloved “percussive maintenance” techniques, which got a chuckle out of my kids. They got a lot of laughs from Boxy, the robot who dishes out repair jobs to Jankom. Zehra Fazal’s deadpan yet soft delivery playing great off of Jason Mantzoukas’s patented levels of absurdity as Jankom gets more and more flustered with the situation.

When Jankom finally completes the to-do list, it’s discovered that there is no longer enough oxygen for 30 Tellarites, only 29. Jankom wordlessly and quickly decides to do the heroic thing and leaves in an escape pod — but there’s still time for one last laugh, as he asks Boxy to tell them of his sacrifice and she forgets his name again. My kids loved this bit.

Despite the lightheartedness of this tale, the most poignant moment of all three stories belongs to this one as Jankom looks back on the ship from his escape pod and with a mixture of satisfaction and sadness delivers one last: “Jankom Pog fixed it.” A touching moment, especially when combined with all the times Jankom hasn’t been the first to volunteer for danger. We know now that when it’s truly important, the young Tellarite is as brave as the rest of them.

Those three stories deepen our connection to the characters, but we also get a story that deepens our understanding of the overarching narrative of the whole first season. Thanks to “Asencia,” we also get the full backstory of The Diviner — and along with that the full story of what happened on Solum when Chakotay and the Protostar arrived.

This was a lot of information all at once. Seeing it in flashback form was a great device to help my kids digest everything easier than if it was just dialogue. Also, it’s exciting! What a riveting tale!

We are reminded of the civil war that raged on Solum after the Starfleet’s first contact, and learn that the Federation didn’t intervene. When Chakotay and the Protostar came through an anomaly, the Vau N’Akat took the crew prisoner and installed the Living Construct — with the intention of driving the Protostar back through the anomaly and destroying the Federation.

But they didn’t realize who they were dealing with: Chakotay and his crew member escape, and manage to send the Protostar back through the anomaly uncrewed. His little smirk as he foiled their plans, even though he was condemning himself and his crewmate to being stranded in the future, was pure Starfleet bravery, and a little hubris — I almost cheered out loud. His decision had shades of Janeway’s decision to strand them in the Delta Quadrant in “Caretaker,” which made it even more epic.

I felt like I was watching the cliffhanger of a particularly action-packed Voyager two-part episode here. It was thrilling to see.

It turns out Ensign Asencia is actually “The Vindicator” — a fabulously over the top villain name — and she and the Diviner are both part of “The Order,” which is a group of Vau N’Akats tasked with going back in time to chase after the rogue Protostar. Jameela Jamil is deliciously evil as she recounts the tale — the Vindicator’s true voice and attitude coming out as she describes the show she put on as Ensign Asencia for the three years since she’s been in the “present.”

The time travel aspect of this adds another interesting wrinkle as she and the Diviner were contemporaries before entering the anomaly. Her need for vengeance is still fresh while he has lived with his for 20 years.

At the end of the tale, The Vindicator wonders why Gwyn would “betray” them and The Diviner tells her, sadly, “She met a boy.” This was infuriating. How dare he reduce Gwyn’s journey to that? Even coming out of the mouth of a villain, it still came out of left field and felt misplaced.

After the crew bonds, and we get a story from Murf in the form of a belch (always good for a laugh from my kids), the crew asks about Holo Janeway’s background — and for a minute there I thought we were going to get an animated Voyager flashback. Alas, not, but the reference to Janeway’s dog Molly was sweet.

Even during an interlude like this, Prodigy knows how to end an episode… as Admiral Janeway discovers the two Vau N’Akats conspiring, and gets knocked out with a good karate chop to the neck. My kids audibly gasped, leaving my youngest to ask if he killed Janeway, and seemed relieved when I told her Janeway was just unconscious. I tried hard not to laugh. What a wait it will be to find out what happens next!

OBSERVATION LOUNGE

• Admiral Janeway listens to Chopin’s Prelude Number 4. Fitting, as we get four “preludes” in this episode — but it’s also a nice continuation of Trek’s love for classical music.
• The Medusan ship landed on the planet Zero gets abducted from is similar to the Medusan ship seen briefly in the remastered version “Is There in Truth No Beauty?”
• The hivemind was very specifically targeted, as the Kazon had the special containers and red safety glasses seen in “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” as well.

• The Starfleet ship which makes first contact with Solum is a Prometheus-class vessel, easily identified by its distinctive four-nacelled design.
• The Tellarite sleeper ship is similar to the Tellarite ships seen in Star Trek: Enterprise, fitting since it’s from the same pre-Federation timeline. Jankom first mentioned the Tellarite sleeper ship during his Murder Planet illusion in “Terror Firma.”
• Chakotay’s first officer is a bird-like crew member, possibly an Aurelian, maintaining the tradition of bird people in animated Star Trek adventures.
• It’s an interesting decision to make all the slave traders Kazon — you’d think the nomadic race would have learned their lesson after their experiences with the Trabe. (I can see why the Borg deemed them unworthy of assimilation!)

With only ten episodes in which to tell this part of the story, “Preludes” is a smart way to give us details we need to know, while also adding in a little helping of character deepening, heartwarming fun. What a joy to see the Protostar crew bond in this way — as a true found family with love, support, and affection for each other.

It’s a nice respite before the action inevitably cranks up again!

Star Trek: Prodigy will return with “Ghost in the Machine” on Thursday, December 8 on Paramount+ in the United States, and on December 9 in Latin America, Australia, Italy, the UK, and additional territories.