When it doubt, Anika and Liz seek advice from a whale. Yes, we’re talking about the Star Trek: Prodigy episode “Observer’s Paradox”!
- Kathryn Janeway pours a shot of espresso into a larger cup of coffee and then gives it to a teenager; she should not be allowed to care for children
- Murf definitely knows everything about the USS Discovery
- After thirty years, Chakotay is finally linked to a real Indigenous nation: the Nicarao people of Central America
- If we’re not meant to be shipping Janeway/Chakotay, then why does this episode exist?
- The Antimatter Pod Shipping News: Anika has a terrible new OTP
- We have questions about the Doctor’s holonovels, but ALSO romance novels are an important force for marginalised groups getting their work in front of audiences
- When the adult in the room is a whale
Anika: Welcome to Antimatter Pod, a Star Trek podcast where we discuss fashion, feminism, subtext and subspace hosted by Anika and Liz. Today, we’re discussing the second season episode of Star Trek: Prodigy, Observer’s Paradox.
Liz: So we open with the montage of the kids being interrogated, which is actually one of my favorite things going back to that episode in season one of The Next Generation. That was definitely my first encounter with the trope. And I always love it when this trope comes up.
I remember there was a bit in one of the trailers where Janeway pours an espresso into an existing cup of coffee. And we’re all like, yes, that’s peak Janeway. But then in context, it’s even more peak Janeway, because then she gives that loaded coffee to a 17-year-old.
Anika: Yeah.
Liz: Do not let this woman be in charge of children. It’s a mistake.
Anika: No. It’s bad. Bad news.
I love the scene for storytelling purposes. And I think only because we’re podcasting, did I even have anything to say beyond that.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: However, I have to say that I think they forgot that they were children.
Liz: Oh, no, definitely. They definitely forgot that they were dealing with children.
Anika: This was not appropriate for most of the kids, but definitely Rok-Tahk.
Liz: No, I know.
Anika: And Rok-Tahk was having a breakdown about it. She was clearly traumatized by the whole thing. And again, it was all played for laughs, and it was funny, and it was good storytelling, and it’s a trope, and it’s great, and it’s a show. So whatever. But in reality, if I was actually seeing this play out, I would have some questions for the crew. And they would start with, why are you bullying an eight-year-old?
Liz: No, no, that is exactly it. I, as usual, identified very deeply with Rok-Tahk in that scene. And what they really needed was to like sit her down on the couch with Janeway and go, okay, now tell us what happened, you know?
My thought that again only occurred to me because we’re podcasting and that requires me to actually think about things is that this whole episode is about how no one can communicate with Murf, but yet they interrogate Murf. And he sort of tells his story via the medium of interpretive dance, which is great.
I love that none of these adults are willing to admit that they don’t understand Murf, which I think is a really kid level joke that really speaks to the child experience of dealing with adults. But I was purely because I was overthinking. I was kind of, guys, guys, I have questions.
Anika: Yeah, specifically Noum and the way that, because he’s counsellor and it’s sort of his job to interpret people, like, it’s literally your job. And he was the most checked out of that whole experience because he didn’t understand Murf at all. And like, again, it was funny and it made sense, but it was just like, no, no, no, no, no.
It’s not a drama, so it’s fine. But my brain was going other places.
Liz: Prodigy exists in a funny space where it is telling a serious, dramatic story and has real weight and gravitas. But also it’s for kids. And there is going to always be a point where, if they have to go for the serious business or the laugh, they’re going to go for the laugh. And that’s why it’s such a good kids show.
But I think also putting these kids in the same space as the adult authority figures for the first time this season really highlights that you do need to suspend disbelief when it comes to the decisions of the adults in the room.
Anika: Right. And they’re on probation, they have restricted access to the ship and they get stuck with the Doctor as a babysitter. They were punished for all of this. So that interrogation wasn’t just a debriefing, it was literally an interrogation and they resulted in punishment.
I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be consequences for stealing a ship and losing it, and screwing up the whole mission that this ship was on. There should be But they also have to take into consideration the fact that these adults put those kids in this situation.consequences for that.
Liz: I kind of feel like the punishment or the consequences are reasonable. You guys stole a ship, we’re restricting your access. You’re sort of on probation because you are interns and yeah, you actually do need closer supervision of a responsible adult. Is the Doctor a responsible adult?
Anika: No. No.
Liz: Again.
Anika: Absolutely not.
Liz: Again, that’s the joke.
Anika: That’s the joke.
Also, as you started this conversation with, more evidence that Janeway is actually not good at supervising children because she didn’t know. It was almost like she’s like, well, the Doctor’s kind of a lot to take in and of himself. So if we shove him together with the kids, that’s fine too. It’s basically what she did with the Doctor and Seven.
Liz: Last week in my Voyager rewatch, I watched Collective, the episode where they find a bunch of kid drones. And Janeway is like, oh, we have to save these kids. We have to look after them. That’s so important. Seven of Nine, you deal with them. At no point does she intend to have extensive one-on-one interaction with these kids.
Anika: No.
Liz: And I genuinely love this about her. I think she is a great mentor and she is in some small ways a maternal figure to young adults. And by young adults, I mean in their 20s, Seven of Nine and Harry Kim. But children, teenagers?
Liz: She’s better interacting with them than Picard. But I would say she’s actually less interested in them than Picard.
Anika: In psychology, we talk about how abuse, from the perspective of the person who is being abused or neglected, abuse is better because it means that someone is paying attention to you.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: And they have feelings for you. Whereas neglect is just, you don’t even exist. So your reality is, I am not being acknowledged as having space.
Liz: And that’s why some kids act out, because the discipline is a form of attention.
Anika: Right.
Liz: And that’s Dal.
Anika: Right. I’m not saying that Janeway is neglectful. I’m just saying that there is psychology behind what happens in these circumstances. And that Picard being averse to kids is more of a feeling than Janeway just being like, whatever.
Liz: Yeah.
Anika: “Are you even here?”
Liz: And again, it’s simply that Dal needs a relationship with Janeway to reflect the relationship that he had with hologram Janeway. And she doesn’t have that context. She didn’t watch the show. She understands on an intellectual level that this is who Dal is. But I don’t think she’s had much experience in dealing with young kids who come from his sort of unstable background.
I have never rewatched the episode where Q turns his son over to Janeway for discipline. But my vague recollection is that Janeway immediately puts him in the hands of the Doctor and Seven and possibly Neelix. I might be misremembering. I don’t really care for that episode. But again, this is not a close one-on-one relationship.
I think what I’m saying is once again, just because a lady is in her 30s or her 40s or her 50s and is a woman doesn’t make her a maternal figure.
Anika: Childless cat ladies unite.
Liz: Childless cat ladies unite. Or dog ladies, I guess.
Liz: We should definitely make that graphic. I was going to say and sell it to raise funds for Harris, but I don’t think I can do that legally, but you can.
Anika: I can. I can make that happen.
Liz: Thank you.
But Janeway and Dal agree on one thing, which is that we have to fix the timeline. Save Gwyn, save the world. Also Chakotay, I guess.
Anika: I really like that parallel, that the two of them are the captains, quote unquote, and they both are just sort of like, yeah, whatever, details. But the point is, we need to fix this. In both cases, the crews are like, okay, but what about this thing? And they’re like, no. Janeway is very much like, I’m not listening to you guys. I had a plan, it got screwed up, but you were on board with my plan, and therefore, you’re going to continue being on board with my plan, the end.
Liz: But also, she’s driving them away from unreasonably holding the kids responsible. For all we know, if the adult crew had gone down, the same thing would have wound up happening.
Anika: Or, if you believe Zero, it would have been worse. Because the kids were supposed to be there and this was supposed to happen.
Liz: Yeah. If Janeway had turned up, Chakoday would have known instantly who she was, obviously. And her crew are immediately identifiable as Starfleet. The timeline would have been irrevocably changed, even if they had held off until after the escape. Which may not have happened at all because the kids weren’t there.
Anika: And I just also really like that Dal, he feels that this is doable. Dal just believes in himself and now, as an extension of himself, his crew. So he’s just like, yeah, we screwed up, but that doesn’t mean that everything is screwed up. Now we fix it. That’s just how it works. And that’s how it’s worked in his life. So it makes sense.
I just really like that optimism. It’s both young, but also his life has been really hard. So it’s like it’s a hard-won optimism.
Liz: And it’s also sort of the Voyager attitude. So many Voyager episodes were like, oops, we did something wrong. Now we have to fix it. Oops, we stole energy from this nebula to make coffee. And it turns out it was a person.
Anika: This is also like five episodes.
Liz: At least. So many episodes. But also in this series, the nebula is also a person.
Anika: The nebula is a person. Those space clouds, the space clouds are almost always a person. I just want you to watch Star Trek, understanding that this is a principle of the universe. The space cloud is probably alive.
Liz: And then Murf. This is a great episode for Murf. Literally the first thing the Rok-Tahk does when she comes aboard the Proto Star is try to communicate with Murf. And he’s still not getting the power of speech on a permanent basis, but we now understand how to set up a situation where we can communicate with him.
I love that your note here is that he’s a merman. I watched this episode on the train the first time. And again, I was just thinking they should animate water in every single episode.
Anika: It’s so pretty.
Liz: So pretty.
Anika: And Murf is so pretty, too. Merman Murf is very pretty.
Liz: I love the gag that for the brief moment that the Universal translator works for him, he’s saying disco, mushrooms, bounce, Saturday. I don’t know the significance of Saturday, but I like it.
Anika: Those are words that have meaning that he could be using. Because even when they do communicate with him, it’s mixed up.
Liz: Yeah, yeah. It’s like he’s dyslexic or…
Anika: Or he’s Yoda, you know, he doesn’t speak in the same speech patterns that we do. Which makes perfect sense.
Liz: Of course, of course. He has a completely different sort of biology in his brain as, I assume, transparent goo. I love him.
Anika: I know.
Anika: I know. We love him.
Liz: But also, what he says in those moments with the Universal Translator, if this was a weekly release, I would be arguing so hard that Michael Burnham is Nebula Guy. So hard.
Anika: So hard. Because of mushrooms.
Liz: And disco.
Anika: Yeah.
Liz: Bounce.
Anika: They’re great. We were robbed.
Liz: But also I’m adding Murf to my list of people who know everything about the USS Discovery.
Anika: Because Murf, again, we don’t know what he can and can’t do. So maybe he like puts his hand on a computer and just like, gets all of the information from it, including the classified stuff.
Anika: Totally reasonable.
Liz: Also, it just seems like he spent a really long time chatting with Nebula Guy and, you know, what were they talking about? Maybe Nebula Guy was just glad to have a friend.
Anika: “I’m going to have a chat and it’s not going to change the timeline anyway, because no one can talk to this creature, except me. So it’s okay for me to like, actually have a real conversation with them.”
Liz: Yeah.
As someone who has a lot of feelings about Gillian Taylor and marine biology, how did you feel about Gillian the whale?
Anika: I got, like, I remember when it first happened and I was like, it’s just so rewarding. It’s just so rewarding. Cetacean Ops as introduced in Lower Decks, seemed to be more about SeaQuest than Star Trek.
Liz: And I wasn’t mad about that.
Anika: It was fun and great. And I love it. I love it. But it was also sort of like this funny, silly, wouldn’t it be great if we had creatures who lived in the water and they were on our ship and we got to have them? As opposed to “Gillian Taylor created this”.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: Like she came to the future and she was like, oh, I have toys now. I have all of this that I can create. Watch me create.
Liz: I saw a theory and it’s purely a fan theory, but I love it, that Gillian the whale is George and Gracie’s daughter.
Anika: Yes. I have seen such things as well. And I love, like, it’s neat and sweet in Commodore Paris, of them all, but like I also love Commodore Paris, like to a ridiculous amount. So 100%, that’s reality. Why not? That’s a humpback whale. And, you know, all G names and like, come on, it makes perfect sense. And they loved Gillian Taylor. Spock told us so.
Liz: Yeah. They’re very fond of her. They’re not the hell her whales.
And meanwhile, Chakotay is not in this episode. And yet he gets possibly some better development than he had all through seven seasons of Voyager in that he’s connected to, is it an actual Indigenous tribe?
Anika: An actual tribe. I looked it up.
Liz: Amazing.
Anika: It’s a real tribe. It’s a real tribe that is in Costa Rica and Nicaragua. So Central America, Robert Beltran has Mexican ancestry. And like they’re all mixed up, like all of those tribes, much like Indigenous and American tribes, there are many and they’re all across the different places. And the island, which I didn’t write down, but it’s like Omatape, maybe something like that. And even Wikipedia has a picture of ruins that are a rock with a spiral.
Liz: Oh, wow. So they actually really did some research.
Anika: Yes, they put efforts into creating this and giving us what we’ve been asking for, for all these years.
Liz: And the serendipity of it fitting in with a spiral motif that has always been part of Chakotay’s theme. You know, there’s a small spiral on his tattoo, that carved rock has been part of his medicine bundle since, like, the episode with the space cloud, I believe.
Anika: Right. So, the episode with the space cloud, but yes. Since we first saw his medicine bundle and got the concept of it. And he was briefly in this episode, but it was in a flashback.
Liz: Okay. Yes. I did forget that.
And there is also the detail of the mirror in Janeway’s ready room that she touches and remembers, which I did not know this because I don’t really pay close attention to the books, but there was a short story where in an explicitly romantic context, Chakotay gives her that mirror.
Liz: And the short story is by Kirsten Byer, who wrote most of the Voyager novels and also has written Discovery and created Picard. And the novels aren’t canon, but sometimes they’re close to canon.
Anika: Right, we get bits and pieces that are, that lend things from the novels.
Liz: I do kind of wish that it had been the watch from Year of Hell. But I also like the nod to Kirsten Beyer, who I think has not really been treated very well by television Star Trek. She created Star Trek: Picard but didn’t get to showrun it. And then her only writing credit since then was that episode of Strange New Worlds that was literally unwatchable because the sound design was so bad. Among the Lotus Eaters. Erika is the pilot, she flies the ship.
Anika: Yeah, I feel bad that that’s her contribution to Strange New Worlds. It’s a meme, a meme and a joke. That’s not her fault, right?
Liz: No, no. But she is capable of better, and I appreciate this nod to the work that she did, which for a long time was the only canonical Janeway/Chakotay explicit romance.
Anika: Are you trying to say that this is an explicit romance?
Liz: I think by the standards of romantic relationships between adult characters in a kids show, this is as explicit as it gets.
Anika: I mean, I didn’t write it down here because of my answer to this question, but what I was thinking, watching this is, if you didn’t want us to ship this, why does this scene exist?
Liz: No, no, no.
Anika: And the concern is that I don’t ship it and yet that scene exists. And that the scene really wants me to ship it. And I almost do, but I almost do accidentally, like because of how Chakotay is well-known for giving gifts to Janeway. He does it on multiple occasions. It’s a thing that Chakotay does. I mean, and we can go back to my theory that Chakotay is fully in love with Janeway and she’s just not that into him.
Liz: Oh my God. Oh my God. Do you know what their vibe is? It’s the interstitial in the Oops! I Did It Again video. “Britney, I got this for you.”
“But I thought the old lady dropped it in the ocean.”
“Well, baby, I went down and got it for you.”
“Oh, you shouldn’t have.”
Anika: Exactly.
Liz: I do appreciate that the shipping is somewhat deniable. I think we’re going to argue about this later in the season, because I remember we disagreed on this topic when we started this season. To me, this is the most overtly romantic Janeway and Chakotay have been outside of Resolutions. But I also appreciate the ambiguity in that their relationship in the past and going forward can be anything we as fans decide.
Anika: Right. Yes.
Liz: Which is the best type of Star Trek romance.
Anika: Exactly. And I wanted to ship it after this scene.
Anika:
Anika: And if I put in two different other characters and did the exact same scene, it would be like, oh yes, obviously, they are very much in love.
Anika: So it’s just my block against these particular characters.
Liz: And Chakotay as a character and Robert Beltran as an actor, have not really earned your goodwill over the last 30 years.
Anika: Right.
Liz: No, I completely understand that. And if I had not shipped it at a very impressionable age, I would also be more indifferent. But I see them interact and 14-year-old Liz comes out and she’s like, look, look, they’re standing next to each other. They’re making eye contact.
Anika: I mean, I understand that because I, again, do it with other people very easily.
Liz: Oh yeah, yeah.
Liz: 40-something Liz does the same thing.
Anika: So I completely get you. It’s just that particular, and it’s, you know, because that wasn’t my Voyager OTP.
But I am willing to ship someone with Janeway this episode.
Liz: Oh my God. So I guess we’re fully into the Antimatter Pod shipping news right now. Tell me about your terrible new OTP.
Anika: I’m so angry about this, but I fully ship Janeway and Jellico. And right off the bat, they had this scene and I was like, oh, like he literally says, I’m sorry, Kathryn, this is bigger than Chakotay. And I was like, they have had this conversation in bed. I am sorry, that’s what happened.
Liz: And it is absolutely the kind of messy polyam situation where they’re in bed talking about her need to rescue her primary partner.
Anika: Exactly. Okay, cause look, the reason that I don’t ship Janeway and Chakotay is because Janeway is like, I like him too much to have a relationship with him. She can have a relationship with other people because, you know, and she can have feelings for those other people, but they’re not as important. Chakotay is important to her, so she’s not going to do that.
Liz: Yeah, that makes sense.
Anika: That’s the way I see it. And so Jellico is a great sex buddy. Let’s just get all of our pent-up energies out. But our pillow talk is going to be about the guy I actually care about.
Liz: No, no, it’s great. They have completely different approaches to command and not particularly compatible ones. And also, setting aside the shipping, I really like that this is again, the first time we see Janeway acting within the chain of command and following orders that make her personally unhappy and that she disagrees with. But she follows them because she believes in Starfleet and she believes in the chain of command. And is she right to do so? Is she wrong? I think that’s a question that we can argue forever, but I think it’s an important side of her character that we’ve never seen before.
Anika: Yeah, because she didn’t have Starfleet when we got to see her.
Liz: Right. And the few times that Starfleet Command was able to send her orders late in the series, there was nothing she disagreed with there. Nothing that was personally harmful.
Anika: Right. And it was really traumatic when they blew up the wormhole. That was really sad. She had to leave.
Liz: Yes. Not to make this about Season 1 of Discovery, but first of all, “this is bigger than your personal feelings” is something that Kat also had to say to Lorca, or the guy she thought was Lorca. And secondly, Janeway destroying the wormhole reminded me of Lorca destroying the USS Glenn. Janeway does it with the Doctor at her side and Lorca does it with Landry at his side. Sad captains need a trusted confident, even an evil one.
Anika: Even the evil sad captains.
Liz: I mean, look, it’s just dynamics that I really enjoy and they’re recreated throughout Star Trek and I love them.
Anika: So yeah, it was a very powerful episode for people who care about Janeway, care about Chakotay and care about Janeway/Chakotay.
Liz: Yeah. And there are some other cool things among Janeway’s captains’ trinkets too. There’s the hairpiece that she wore as Arachnia and a couple of other things that I didn’t closely recognize. But yeah, it was nice to see.
Anika: But she has a little collection. They’ve done that for a lot of the characters recently. They’ve allowed us to see these personal items and it’s character building even if you don’t recognize it, because it matters that you think about why would they have that, or if there’s no explanation, which they don’t have to, show don’t tell. Character building through visuals is a good practice that I like that they have worked into a lot of modern Trek.
Liz: I think from the very first episode of Discovery where Georgiou’s ready room is very, very intentional in what it contains. We have her puppets, her bottle of Chateau Picard, which I assume is the same bottle that literally everyone has that just sits there, undrunk through the ages.
Anika: One of my favorite bits in Picard is how he gives his wine to everybody and none of them want it.
Liz: I really do think that in the years that Laris and Zhaban worked on that vineyard, they have been making a really outstanding wine if you’re Romulan or Vulcan. If you’re human or Klingon or whatever, it’s like, what is this garbage?
Anika: Picard doesn’t drink his wine.
Liz: Or the change has been so gradual that his palate has altered.
Anika: Adjusted.
Liz: Yeah.
Anika: Because he drinks too much of his wine.
Liz: He drinks way too much of his wine.
Anika: That is 100 percent. Like in the first episode of Picard, after he like screws up on television, and he has like, he has an Olivia from Scandal wine glass.
Liz: Yeah. An Alicia from The Good Wife pour. A me pour.
But yeah, we were talking about captains’ trinkets, and the only captain we’ve seen, I think through the entire reboot era, who hasn’t had significant trinkets is Lorca. He just has his tribble and his bowl of fortune cookies. And that’s because he’s a liar.
Anika: And he has like his closet of creepy things that he’s collected.
Liz: Oh man. Not to make this more about Discovery, but I do wish now that we had gotten a glimpse of the USS Antares and Rayner’s captain’s trinkets. Now I have to think about what his captain’s trinkets were.
The other thing I was going to say is that I actually think this goes back, like obviously Picard has this Shakespeare and his fish and all of that. But—
Because again, it’s an easy way of telling us about these people. So yeah, it’s not like it’s new.
Liz: No.
Anika: But it’s been intentionally inserted.
Liz: I think Picard’s was a bit of a generic, what do we put in this room? “Well, Patrick Stewart’s a Shakespearean actor, so I’m just going to put this folio in.” And a fish.
Anika: And a fish. Obviously.
Liz: Like, is there a fish in Chateau Picard? Who is feeding Picard’s fish? Anyway, completely off the topic, and I’m sorry, but…
Anika: There’s one more ship I want to talk about.
Liz: Is it Dal/Gwyn?
Anika: No.
Liz: Really?
Anika: It’s Rodrigo, his holo duplicate Rodrigo, and all the other Rodrigos.
Liz: I love that The Doctor is just not a very good writer, and he is basically writing trashy romance holo novels.
Anika: Trashy romance holo novels about selfcest.
Liz: Look, we don’t know that the Rodrigos themselves were hooking up.
Anika: I guess not. But he calls it a love hexagon, and the only characters we learn about are Rodrigos.
Liz: Yeah, now I have questions. And Zero is like, he’s probably adding more Rodrigos. Oh no.
Anika: It’s just delightful to me. I mean, I can imagine it as kind of a Jem and the Holograms situation, where Jem and Jerrica are dating the same person. He doesn’t catch on, even though it’s the most obvious thing. But it is also like, why is this a secret? There’s no reason for this to be a secret from your boyfriend. Like, no reason whatsoever. Maybe, like, maybe, you know, like in a Hannah Montana kind of thing, it’s okay to keep it from your fans, but why is it a secret from your boyfriend?
Liz: Welcome to Antimatter Pod, a Jem and the Holograms podcast.
Anika: Hey, Holograms is in the title, that means it’s related to the Doctor. Rodrigo and the Doctor.
Liz: I was thinking that this is something I’ve seen with Indigenous Australian lit, that a really good way to sort of Trojan horse white people into reading fiction from a marginalized group is romance novels and chick lit. 15 years ago, the only Indigenous books that were on shelves were either very serious business literature that no one read, or chick lit, commercial women’s fiction. And now there’s a much, much wider range of Indigenous fiction across genres, and also literary novels that people actually seem to read. So I think the Doctor is doing important work.
Anika: One of my stupid jobs way back when was at like a health care conglomerate, whatever. But the people that were my friends there, and that I ate lunch with every day were three Black women. And they brought me all sorts of chick lit by Black authors that I read and loved. Because, you know, it was good, right? Ten years later, I was like, oh, they were teaching me. I figured it out eventually. But yeah, exactly. It’s like, we want you to get it.
Liz: And romance, it’s not my jam, but it’s a very accessible and popular genre. If you want someone to get out of their comfort field and they’re already a romance reader, then reading the romance of your people is a way to do it. Also, crime fiction, that’s a little more problematic. I’ve been reading a lot of Maori crime fiction lately as prep for my trip to New Zealand So I’m probably not going to die at the hands of a serial killer, but who knows. Anyway.
Anika: I hope not. I will just put that out there.
Liz: Fingers crossed. It would be inconvenient.
Anika: Let’s try to avoid that.
Liz: Yeah.
Liz: The last thing I want to talk about is how Ma’jel kind of shuts down the budding friendship between her and the Prodigy kids and returns to her more socially approved group of friends. And I think that’s very understandable of her. And it’s also kind of the thing that Tilly did in season one of Discovery where initially she doesn’t want to associate with Michael or even work alongside her. Because that social taint of chaos is threatening.
Anika: Yeah. And she legitimately says, I can’t.
Liz: Yeah.
Anika: Like it’s not like I’m not going to, it’s not like I’m choosing this instead. She just says, I can’t. The way that I see the world working, this is where I’m supposed to be, not with you people.
Liz: Way back before we knew anything about Prodigy, all we knew was that all the kids were aliens. And I was like, oh, what if one of them is a Vulcan? What if one of them Tuvok’s granddaughter? Obviously, I was wrong. But I do think that a traditional Vulcan in amongst a bunch of chaos monsters is a really fun dynamic.
Anika: Yes. Like you said, the first season is perfect and wasn’t missing anything, but they looked at it and were like, you know what’s missing? This Vulcan girl.
Liz: But also I just think you do need to change the dynamic up.
Anika: I like that that’s the direction they went.
Liz: And then this is a great episode for Dal and Gwyn, because they just support and respect each other so much.
Anika: It is very, very much so. It’s all really to the forefront.
Liz: Dal is concerned for Gwyn, but he comes to understand that he has to let her go to hang out with the nebula, because that’s what the mission needs, and he has to trust that she’ll come back, which is a really hard step for him.
Anika: Yes. Trusting anything is a really hard step for him. And he trusted her to go on her own mission before, and it resulted in her nearly dying. So I understand why he might be a little gun-shy about the whole thing.
Liz: He’s definitely feeling away about it, but he also lets her go, and he’s not being the toxic, overprotective boyfriend. He doesn’t really have that arc at all, and I respect the choice not to do that. think Dal is a really well-calculated character in that he can be annoying, he can be cocky, he can be arrogant, but it’s always for a good reason. And as his layers get peeled back, his behavior makes more and more sense at every turn.
Anika: You know, even if you don’t peel back anything, he’s a 17-year-old boy.
Liz: Right! Right! Have you met a 17-year-old of literally any gender? I was 17 once. It was a bad time. And no one was asking me to be responsible for anyone’s life. I was barely responsible for myself.
Anika: Again, we go back to the beginning of our episode here and be like, these are children.
Liz: They are children. And I do appreciate that Rok-Tahk is back on board with the shenanigans and the cockamamie plans.
Anika: She needed a way in that was — I say somewhere here that she’s the Wesley we deserved.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: Because they go to her because they know that she can fix this, that she’s already been trying to fix this for the whole time. She wants to communicate with Murf more than anyone. And so they acknowledge that she’s the smartest of them, even though she’s the youngest, and they go to her and ask her for help. They don’t bully her into it. They just lay it out as like, you can solve this problem for us. We know you can.
Liz: And they respect her desire to not be involved.
Anika: Right. They don’t go to her until they need her.
Liz: And then Gillian, who I think we can assume is some sort of authority figure. She’s a whale, but she’s got seniority over Rok-Tahk, because literally everyone has seniority over Rok-Tahk, is the one who gives her the final push.
Anika: And shows her that there are different ways to follow the rules.
Liz: Yes. Good on Gillian, who is in her own way an important mentor.
Also, I just loved the detail in the animation, that when Rok-Tahk goes in the water, she literally sinks like a stone. How did she get out?
Anika: Maybe Gillian, you know, helped her.
Liz: Maybe Murf pulled her up.
Anika: Like in Free Willy.
Liz: Oh, the other thing I noticed is that Cetacean Ops is on two levels. And it really looks like if this was live action, it would make use of the two-storey set that Discovery has used as the Shenzhou and Federation headquarters and all of those. And like it feels like this was designed with a live action setting in mind. Which generally Prodigy doesn’t do. Generally Prodigy is like, hey, we can do whatever we want. We’re animated. And that’s why it’s striking that this specific setting looks like a real set that they’ve reused.
Thank you for listening to Antimatter Pod. You can find our show notes at antimatterpod.com, including links to our social media, credits for our theme music, and transcripts of our episodes. You can follow us on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and Blue Sky, all at Antimatter Pod and on mastodon at @antimatterpod@tenforward.social.
Funny story, I deleted my Facebook account just because it was showing me nothing but really racist Star Trek fans. And too late, I realized that this means I can’t update the Antimatter Pod Facebook page.
Anika: Oops.
Liz: If you like us, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you consume your podcasts. The more reviews, the easier it is for new listeners to find us. And join us next week when we recap Prodigy’s next two episodes, Impostor Syndrome and The Fast and The Curious. Because with respect, the Kazon don’t deserve a whole episode to themselves.
Anika: That’s fair.