Is that a reference to how the eugenics wars were supposed to happen in the 90’s but obviously those came and went so they’re softly retconning when the eugenics wars took place?
I kinda like this theory. The temporal wars are still affecting the timeline, but time is pushing back to repair the timeline. In-universe reason to both retcon and act as a story element as well (with hopefully a Wesley Crusher appearance at some point?)
This was definitely my favourite episode of the season, and possibly of the series. I thought Kirk was badly cast, but actually after seeing him in this episode, I get it. He is not our Kirk, but he actually does bring something very Kirk-ish to the role that I hadn't appreciated previously.
That is an excellent way of stating it, re Kirk. He wasn't doing it for me, and I thought I had it figured. He looks like Pine, who tried to mimic Shatner's mannerisms, but didn't really deliver the Shatnerisms. Here I was able to accept him as his own thing, and it was fine.
The more I think about this episode the more impressed I get. There's so many small moments where they could have taken the easy, obvious choice and it would have been fine, and instead they were just a little more thoughtful and a little more creative and it shows.
They could have just had Pelia push a secret button to reveal her stash of alien tech, and that probably would have been fine. Instead they show her as this woman who's very smart and obviously immortal but otherwise...just a person living through history, which is so much better. Imagining the 250 years between the present and when she's one of the most famous engineers in the fleet is fun.
They could have had the Romulan agent just be a cold, ruthless assassin from the future who's here to get the job done, and that would have been fine. Instead she's this slightly unhinged woman, trapped out of time, stuck undercover on an alien world for thirty years on a mission that she's not sure exists anymore and I love the way she starts losing it at the end, that she just wants to kill this kid and be done with it.
They could have cast Khan as a hot 20 something available in the Toronto area and had him to a Ricardo Montalbán impression and give us a tense standoff, and I would have been annoyed at that, but it probably would have been fine. Instead they show us an actual child, and remind is that Khan was a horrifying monster, but he was created by a world with monsters of its own, monsters who built a child in a laboratory and raised him in a basement, and suddenly its a piece of implied context made explicit that I didn't even know I wanted.
And of course they could have just had Kirk agree to fix the timeline because its the right thing to do, or because he loves La`an, or because...honestly, because the plot has to happen, this is something that so many stories would just gloss over to keep the story moving. And instead we get one line, "Sam's alive?" and my heart jumped to my throat a little bit and immediately we understand why he's willing to go through with this.
I'm really really impressed with the writers on this episode.
Although it does remain very funny that they're doing this much work to make us care about Sam Kirk, a character who's fate is to die off screen to a brain parasite before the episode even starts. Sorry Sam.
They could have just had Pelia push a secret button to reveal her stash of alien tech, and that probably would have been fine. Instead they show her as this woman who’s very smart and obviously immortal but otherwise…just a person living through history, which is so much better. Imagining the 250 years between the present and when she’s one of the most famous engineers in the fleet is fun.
It’s not just fun–but it speaks to a different demographic than most shows speak to.
It’s telling older women that it’s not too late to change and grow and learn. Here she is, obviously having already lived a long life–but then we learn she hasn’t ALWAYS been an engineer from the start. She did not begin as someone obviously fascinated by science.
She realized later in life. And then she was able to SUCCESSFULLY pursue her career and become an expert. Just because she wasn’t a child prodigy didn’t mean she couldn’t learn and grow. There’s SO many stories focusing on people who have things 100% right immediately out of the gate. Top grades in school, top performance at work, accolades, reccomendations from the time they were teens.
But this story is of an ordinary eccentric retail worker…who goes back to hit the books and succeeds with her change.
This lesson will go over 75% people’s heads…but in true Star Trek fashion, even if it elludes many, it’ll hit home with the demographic it’s meant to talk to. Older women who feel like they’re too old to change. That they shouldn’t even try. It’s talking to THEM like so many other characters in Star Trek talk to other overlooked people.
And that makes this detail–one out of many in this excellent episode–top Star Trek.
Just as Roddenberry's utopian future transcends sexism, racism, ableism and other isms, so too does the cold-blooded calculation of the corporate accountant. Networks will cancel shows that lose money and renew shows that make money over whatever timeframe their cost/benefit ratio is run on. Personally, I think Prodigy is a breath of fresh air for the franchise, and cancelling it/removing it the network is a mistake from a brand/franchise/portfolio management perspective. But spinning its cancellation as an example of misogyny is silly. You might as well argue that Paramount hates kids cause there are many more children as main characters in the show and only one adult woman.
I agree these kinds of assessments require a bit of a deep dive.
Let’s look at the business case then, the economics and the long haul marketing strategy.
Does the narrative around Prodigy being unprofitable, a write off hold up? Could Whitbrook be putting his finger on something valid?
Let’s also keep in mind that the head of scheduling for streaming at Paramount has been saying that their business strategy for Paramount+, as they integrate Showtime, has said repeatedly that their streaming strategy is built on ‘the 3 Fs’:
Fandoms, franchises & familiar faces.
Prodigy quite obviously was designed to tick off all three elements of the strategy, so what’s the failure point or mismatch as they winnow?
The narrative that Prodigy wasn’t popular enough on Paramount+ doesn’t scan.
First, from what metrics we have available publicly for 2022 (Parrot Analytics mainly),
Prodigy was one of only two Paramount+ animated originals that performed well in audience demand, falling slightly behind Lower Decks.
Overall demand for the franchise and subscription uptake continued to build during Prodigy’s run in the fall-winter of 2022-2023 in contrast to the acute fall-off earlier in 2022 during the runs of Discovery season 4 and Picard season 2.
Star Trek and the Sheridan Yellowstone franchise accounted for half of Paramount+‘s subscription demand in 2022, with net subscription increases during the runs of SNW, Lower Decks and Prodigy.
So then, if Prodigy is doing well in attracting and retaining subscribers and Star Trek is one of two principal franchises supporting their business strategy, where’s the problem?
Let’s look at Nickelodeon, the original destination for the show.
Nickelodeon’s linear audience numbers have been falling overall. Prodigy’s numbers aren’t great on Nick, but none of Nick’s new shows are taking off as they once were.
Going into the pandemic, Nick was such an important anchor for cable in the US that Paramount was obliged to make promises for content exclusivity windows for Nickelodeon when it negotiated its last carrier contract for the US with Comcast. When the pandemic came, suddenly kids were online as never before, and Nickelodeon quickly diminished in its power to attract linear viewership.
So, one can draw an inference that it’s Nickelodeon, not Paramount+, that’s financial trouble is a key point in the decision. Nick is losing money on Prodigy, that needs an exit pathway for an expensive show it can’t afford to partner in.
BUT…
Why then, given Paramount’s 3F streaming strategy, animated shows less expensive and underrepresented in Paramount’s streaming offerings, doesn’t Paramount just rework the deal between the streaming side and Nickelodeon?
Here’s where systematic bias may be coming into it -
Paramount+ has been successful in building a broad subscriber base across ages, genders, race and ethnicity while still gaining ground in ‘middle America.’
This is not the case for other streamers. MAX is struggling to bring together the male-skewed HBO audience and the older-female Discovery one.
Let’s look at what else was cut along with Prodigy.
a show targeted at the LGBTQ audience canceled during Pride month
a show targeted at a niche female demographic
a family show headed by one of the strongest female leadership icon characters of the 90s, with another principal character voiced by a Black actor.
Paramount used a lot of dense marketing technobabble about fit and alignment to explain that the choice to cut and write this particular set of 3 shows. They’ve previously talked about popularity during the cuts of Showtime’s more niche, arty products.
If we listen to them, and accept their justification, the implication is that these LGBTQ, women and black targeted shows no longer are their demographic priorities. They don’t fit with where P+ with Showtime is going even if they all obviously check the 3F boxes. Meanwhile, there’s been no language backpedaling on the 3F strategy.
At the same time, Paramount Global is trying to sell off BET and BET+.
The conclusion isn’t necessarily misogyny, but clearly that Paramount Global is no longer strategically prioritizing its diverse representation of demographic groups.
They are telling us, their advertisers and their investors that Paramount/CBS is turning the entire business back towards prioritizing a much less representative audience.
There’s an implicit assumption that they can continue to retain the demand of women, racially diverse and LGBTQ demographics, while skewing their new investments towards the older, middle American audience of the Yellowstone franchise and the slice of the Trek audience that Picard season three was targeted to draw back in.
My conclusion - Whitbrook has a point. They wouldn’t have done this with Picard or Kirk.
It says more about Paramount’s strategic shift away from prioritizing representation and diverse demographics more broadly.
It’s not just misogyny, but it’s in there. Without unconscious bias and systemic misogyny, the scheduling folks wouldn’t assume that they can hold girls and women as an audience while taking them out of principal roles.
@StillPaisleyCat I appreciate the long, well-thought out reply. But I'm not convinced. Lower Decks has a black woman, Tawny Newsome, first on the call sheet and Mike McMahan has said (IIRC) that by default all of the characters in the show are bisexual (something that's been shown in various ways on-screen), so I don't think you can point to Prodigy's cancellation due to some bias against LGBTQIA+, women or people of colour when you have a counterfactual right there in its sister show. In fact, every modern Trek show has its diversity boxes well and truly checked, but nobody is accusing Paramount of cancelling Picard because of some network executive's bias against an interacial lesbian relationship in Raffi/Seven.
I haven't watched any of the Yellowstone shows (they're on my list) but I understand that franchise has Kevin Costner, Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren in its stable. A show starring these actors is just going to do better than a show starring Kate Mulgrew (who's last-billed, albeit with the "and" credit), just as a show starring Patrick Stewart as the lead is inherently going to do better numbers than a show where Kate Mulgrew is a supporting character. Bring in, oh say Beyonce, as a lead on a Trek and I'm pretty sure the ratings will spike through the roof. It's not because they're white or male, it's because they're more famous.
They wouldn’t have done this with Picard or Kirk.
Maybe, maybe not. But if not, it's because Picard and Kirk are more iconic, more well recognised characters than Janeway. Star Trek was never more popular in the mainstream than in the mid 80s-early 90s, with the TOS movies and TNG TV series both in full flight. VOY ran during the Berman era's middle-age as Trek's star (nyuk nyuk) was beginning to fade. Fans know who Janeway is, but most people on the street wouldn't, whereas most people on the street would recognise Captain Kirk and the bald English guy from that space show.
By the way, I say all this as someone who thinks that Prodigy is a far more worthy addition to the franchise than the fan-lauded season 3 of Picard.
Bleh. I got Crave for Star Trek stuff, but wouldn't have if it didn't have other things I wanted to watch. What even is CTV Sci-fi? Do I have to get a cable subscription for this?
Wow, I've only read the preface so far (I'm at work) but it looks amazing! Very much looks like an official book, and reads like a real reflection from after the Borg attack. I am very much looking forward to sitting down and reading this.
Shared a photo of our Kelvin D7 last week here. Looks great.
My spouse seems to want to decorate every available spot with Klingon vessels. It’s hard to argue. …. Even when extra birds of prey mysteriously appear.
But then I quickly remembered “… All good things”. Time travel, big CGI thing in the sky, reuniting with old characters (Tasha, O’Brien) … and it works very well, especially as a send off.
I’m thinking that there’s a kernel in there as a farewell to TNG era trek. Maybe not something where Picard becomes a literal Time Lord, but more where a drastic event has forced time-bending onto everyone at the epi-center of the event and any attempt of take advantage of it also entails some cost and the only way to fix the “breaking of time” is to do something incredibly starfleet.
There’s no evil per se just things breaking and people taking advantage of it. And Borg 🤷 .
I feel like with this instance being this small right now, it would probably not be best use of resources to create a community just for a handful of people that would do it. It might work if you can guarantee like 30 people will engage during the 40-ish minutes of an episode. For now, wouldn't it be better to test interest by creating your own viewing party posts in the main !startrek community and go from there?
That’s a fair point, although the original sub wasn’t about interacting during the episode. It was more like a book report format, but done chronologically throughout the series. So they would have a set day where the thread for each episode would go up, people could watch it in their own time, then talk with other people who also had it fresh in their minds.
You are right though, might as well start it in the main community. I am a big TOS guy but I wonder if it would be better to start with that or TNG
I don't think you can go wrong with either one! I love TNG and rewatch it constantly. You're right that TOS has fewer takers but I'm sure there will be some who will want to re-watch to refresh their memories on the details of the episodes. My partner and I rewatched Balance of Terror, the Cage, Arena, and Space Seed because of SNW. I'm sure others wouldn't be here if we weren't down to discuss any Trek in some way.
All absolute banger episodes 🤌 I think TOS gets a bad rap because people see the clip from Arena taken out of context, and imagine that Zapp Brannigan is one-to-one Captain Kirk, but there is some great stuff in there. And when you watch it knowing the context of its era it really shows how ahead of its time it is.
You know, the feeling I'm getting is that !startrek is a lot more general than r****t startrek was. There's only three boards here, so everything goes in one of the three. And the vast majority goes into this one.
I suppose the other two are more tightly defined than this one. The question would be do we want this one to be a generalised, anything Star Trek community, or to have its own specific niche and create a fourth community for things like community requests and instance discussion.
It’s a matter of having enough posts and comments to have additional subs or communities.
The mod of this one @ValueSubtracted has replied to other similar questions that, as there is volume and interest, other communities (subs) can be added here.
(I previously posed the same question about establishing a Treklit or trekbooks one.)
There’s definitely and interest and an open invitation to mods of other Trek-related subreddits, to set up and find a home here.
For now, the three communities that exist cover the waterfront from more serious to humorous, with the general StarTrek one also being the meta discussion for the community.
Yeah that makes sense, although I would enjoy a Treklit community. I haven’t read any Trek books for probably well over a decade now but I read so many when I was younger.
I think I have a serious case of canon brain, but then again I watched through all of TAS even though it really stops being good at Yesteryear.
Also, how good is Yesteryear? I was so surprised that such a good story could be found in TAS, and with enough respect to the main show to put a reference in to a throwaway line from TOS about a Vulcan “teddy bear”.
Oh none of this was a criticism of how this community is being run. I just like talking Trek and this is by far the best place for general Trek talking.
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