I finished the first season.

Wow.

I know I just wrote about Prodigy last week, but I have to weigh in again.

This show is magnificent. I’m really looking forward to watching the second season. I’m also baffled; I struggle to understand how any producer would look at this show and decide that it was not worth keeping it around.

This show is good art. I’m biased as a Star Trek fan, but seriously. I don’t know how else to say this. This is a well crafted all-ages show. I teared up repeatedly in the last few episodes, taking off my glasses to wipe my eyes as the show went from high point to beautifully planned emotional high point.

I already said so much in my review last week, and I don’t want to spoil this for you. I will try to stick to abstractions and generalities.

I love this show. As someone who loves the idealistic aspirations of Star Trek (imperfect as it may be) this show feels even more powerful.

Star Trek: Prodigy is a show about yearning, about aspiration, and about reaching beyond yourself and trying to make your best dreams reality instead of surrendering to fear and despair and despondency. It’s a show about connecting with others who may not seem like you at first glance. It’s extremely Star Trek.

One of my friends mentioned this on a panel we were on a while ago. She was talking about how good Prodigy is, and I nodded along because what she was talking about (I still hadn’t seen it yet) sounded pretty great. But she pointed out that Prodigy is possibly the best way to introduce people (especially kids) to Star Trek—and I, honestly and perhaps foolishly, offered up Lower Decks as another good entry point.

As an aside, I stand by that. Lower Decks is great. It can be a fun way to learn about Trek. I still think I was right.

I was also wrong. I hadn’t yet watched Prodigy. I didn’t understand just how wonderful this show is for how it introduces you to Star Trek.

I think her point was something like this: other Star Trek shows put you in the position of already being inside the Federation. You’re picking up the truths of the Federation, and its ideals, and everything else the way a fish learns about water (except when the writers get really clunky with their exposition). You don’t have a chance to see what it’s like to learn about the Federation as someone outside of it.

Prodigy allows you to experience learning about the Federation alongside a group of mostly-kids who’ve all had difficult and painful lives. It is a story meant to be accessible to kids (and enjoyable by all ages of audience), but it’s also heart-wrenching when I pay close attention to how these children react to the ideas and ideals of the Federation. If I were one of those kids, I don’t think I’d trust what I heard about the Federation either.

Yet Prodigy takes us, the audience, from that place of being outside the Federation to the place of recognizing and embracing the shared ideals of Starfleet. We can watch the transformation of the crew through the course of the season. It’s heartwarming, and it’s a far better way to come to understand Star Trek than any other show I can think of.

Damn this show is good.

Also, I think I have another comp title for Bury’em Deep.