The Diviner is returning to Tars Lamora, and the marooned crew of the Protostar doesn't have much time to get ready for him. Meanwhile, aboard the Protostar, the Diviner reveals to Gwyn the purpose behind all he has done.
Prodigy continues to be good at straddling the line of being sufficiently "for kids" and "like Star Trek" at the same time. It's not like those are wholly incompatible goals; the themes in this story of helping people in need, fostering communication, and working as a team certainly hit a sweet spot for both audiences.
But interestingly, I think the Star Trek that this episode felt most like was actually the first movie from J.J. Abrams. This was a largely action driven episode, featuring a villain who turns out to have time-traveled from the future to exact vengeance for an apocalypse perpetrated against his people. Being a TV show, Prodigy actually had the opportunity here to shore up the one big weakness of that movie: it could spend more time with the villain and really flesh him out.
It sort of did, and sort of didn't. Yes, we've gotten a lot more time with the Diviner over these first 10 episodes of Prodigy. Yet I do wish that we'd learned the what or why of his evil plan a little bit earlier than this, to round him out more as a character. He has what seems to be a legitimate grievance here, even if Gwyn rightly points out that his method of redressing it is monstrous. Maybe that's not the kind of nuance you really look for in a kids' show.
Or maybe we're not really done with the Diviner yet, despite where this episode leaves him. He's a time traveler, so some other version of him could show up. And who knows how many bodies Drednok has stashed around. Plus, John Noble and Jimmi Simpson are both part of the credited cast of this show; was that really just for 10 episodes? (And don't forget, we still need to find out what happened to Chakotay, making flashbacks another means these villains could still be around.)
On the other hand, the end of this episode certainly teased a change in direction for the rest of the season, giving us a tantalizing taste of the real Kathryn Janeway, on a new ship with a new crew. A lot is possible, really, which is quite fun!
I'll just jam a few other random thoughts in here at the end, as I usually do when reviewing older Star Trek episodes:
- They didn't save the cat, the cat saved them!
- I'm not sure it really made sense for Holo-Janeway to keep playing "evil" for as long as she did, but whatever.
- It's funny what a difference pacing makes. I bumped a bit on Dal just suddenly turning manacles into universal translators as a plot convenience... but I don't seem to have much of a problem when hour-long Star Trek reconfigures one bit of imaginary tech to be something else (which happens basically every episode).
I'd call "A Moral Star, Part II" a solid B+. As Prodigy heads off into hiatus, I'd summarize it in this way: it hasn't yet reached any of the "highs" other Star Trek can reach (and maybe it never will, for a longtime adult Star Trek fan). But it also has never really given us a dog of an episode either. If it can maintain that standard as it produces more and more episodes, it may well go on to be the most consistent of all the Star Trek series.
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