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Star Trek: Prodigy is a Science Fiction animated series created by The Hageman Brothers (Trollhunters; Ninjago). The series premiered on October 28, 2021, first on Paramount+, then on Nickelodeon. It is the third animated Star Trek series, following Star Trek: The Animated Series (1973–74) and Star Trek: Lower Decks (2020–24), and the first All-CGI Cartoon.

In 2383, a motley crew of young aliens trapped on a prison colony in the Delta Quadrant find an abandoned Starfleet ship, the U.S.S. Protostar. Taking control of the ship and making their escape, they must learn to work together as they make their way towards the Federation — aided by the ship's Emergency Training Hologram, a duplicate of Captain Kathryn Janeway. Meanwhile, the real Admiral Janeway seeks to find out what happened to the Protostar and its original crew.

The series was originally ordered by Nickelodeon for 40 episodes across two seasons. Shortly before its premiere it was announced that the series would first stream on Paramount+ before airing on cable: the first season was released in two halves, concluding in late 2022. In June 2023, with the second season still in production, the series was expunged from Paramount+ and Nickelodeon; four months later, it was confirmed that Netflix had picked up distribution rights to the show in several regions including the US.^note This excludes Canada, where the series remains on CTV Sci-fi Channel, the rights-holders for every Kurtzman-era Trek series in said country, and the countries where SkyShowtime operates, as they are keeping the show. The entire second season was released on Netflix on July 1, 2024 before being removed on December 25, 2025.

Previews: Main Titles; Teaser; Official Trailer

This series contains examples of:

• Aborted Arc: At the end of season 1 Janeway recruits the Prodigies and commissions the Voyager A, wanting to keep Dal nearby so she can unravel the secret behind his origins, which seems to be rooted in a Starfleet conspiracy. Season 2 completely ignores this, diverting into a Clock Roach subplot led by Wesley Crusher, with Dal's origins receiving only one off-hand mention and not being otherwise addressed. By the end of the season the Prodigies are given a new ship and sent out to seek their own adventures.
• Alien Non-Interference Clause: In the future, Starfleet's First Contact of Solum caused the planet to enter into a civil war with those for or against joining The Federation. And because of the Prime Directive, they didn't interfere with the conflict which escalated the planet towards its ruin.
• All-CGI Cartoon: The series is the first animated Trek series with this visual approach. The initial trailer demonstrates Alex Kurtzman's statement of wanting a more "cinematic" feel with luscious and vast environments, paired with stylized character designs.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: On display more than usual for Star Trek since makeup isn't required, with Dal’s deep purple complexion, Rok-Tahk’s bright pink rocky exterior, and Gwyn being a shade of pale grey-blue.
• And Starring: Kate Mulgrew as the holographic Captain Janeway, and later the actual Vice Admiral Janeway.
• Artificial Limbs: Jankom Pog has one of his hands replaced with a transforming multitool.
• Artistic License – Space: The Protostar's drive system is apparently powered by a literal protostar that they have on board. This in spite of the fact that protostars weigh trillions of tonnes and don't undergo nuclear fusion.^note Protostars are still relatively poorly-understood due to the fact that they output very little visible light. However, remote observation suggests that, while they don't undergo fusion, they do output spectacular amounts of infrared radiation. For a society with Artificial Gravity and the creation of Antimatter, containing a protostar and harnessing its radiative output would be fairly easy. The real question is if it would generate more power than the Matter/Antimatter reaction they already use to power ships
• Asteroid Miners: The main characters are initially part of such an operation, though not by choice, digging up something called “chimerium” on an asteroid called Tars Lamora, run by the mysterious “Diviner”. The mining operation is actually a cover to search for the Protostar, though the mineral has value and the Diviner keeps the operation running as a source of funds while he searches for the Protostar.
• Audience Surrogate: The crew are this by design. Like the target demographic (kids who haven't watched other Trek shows), they have no familiarity with the Federation or Starfleet until Holo Janeway brings them up to speed.
• Bad Future: The entire motivation of the primary villains is to prevent one wherein their planet, Solum, is all but destroyed in a civil war caused by first contact with the Federation. Though ironically Asencia very nearly ends up causing it with her actions.
• Beehive Barrier: The Protostar's shields are shown as a honeycomb barrier that stretches over the ship like a second skin.
• Big Bad:
  • The Diviner rules Tars Lamora with an iron fist and has mysterious designs on the U.S.S. Protostar.
  • The Vindicator (AKA Asencia) gradually supplants him as the main antagonist, carrying out their anti-Starfleet vendetta with even greater dedication and ruthlessness
• Blob Monster: Murf is a friendly one.
• Brown Note Being: Zero is a Medusan, who can cause corporeal beings to go insane just from visual exposure. Before escaping, the Big Bad used them to Mind Rape prisoners into being mindless slaves. This is also the reason Zero now wears a containment suit.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • The only other time we've seen a Medusan on-screen was in a single episode all the way back in the original series.
  • The now-promoted to Admiral Edward Jellico (voiced by Ronny Cox) reappears (a news ticker in Lower Decks had previously noted his promotion).
  • After his fate was left uncertain for 30 real-world years of Trek canon^noteexcluding a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo on Star Trek: Picard, Wesley Freaking Crusher finally makes a triumphant return to the Alpha Quadrant.
• Canon Immigrant:
  • The Brikar species. They made their first appearance in the Starfleet Academy novel Worf's First Adventure, but this is their first on-screen appearance.
  • The mineral Chimerium first appeared in the Starfleet Corps of Engineers novel Invincible by David Mack and Keith R.A. DeCandido. Mack serves as story consultant on Star Trek: Prodigy.
  • Rok-Tahk's explanation of how different people can seem so far away from each other in the holodeck through "motion floor tracking" and "visual horizon manipulation" comes from the "Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual" reference book.
  • Janeway's sister, who was mentioned several times on Star Trek: Voyager, is finally given the name Phoebe, which was first established in the 1996 Voyager novel Mosaic, written by Voyager co-creator Jeri Taylor.
  • The U.S.S. Sovereign NCC-73811, the (second) protagonist ship of the video game Star Trek: Bridge Commander appears at the head of the Starfleet armada that intercepts the Protostar at the end of Season 1.
• Casual Interstellar Travel: Space seems to have gotten a lot smaller post-Voyager, with ships like the Protostar and the Dauntless capable of flying to the Delta Quadrant and back more or less at will. It's justified in their case, being equipped with a protostar drive and a quantum-slipstream drive, respectively, but there's also a lot more overlap between Delta Quadrant and Alpha Quadrant species — Dal's adoptive "mother" is a Ferengi trader doing business in the Delta Quadrant, Kazon smugglers clash with Xindi-Reptilian guards at remote Federation outposts, and four of the main cast belong to Alpha Quadrant species (Brikar, Medusan, Tellarite, and human Augment) that wound up on Tars Lamora independently from one another. One of Janeway's Instagram logs explains that the Kazon, at least, are using the Borg transwarp network to get around, Star Trek: Picard and Star Trek: Discovery both having featured the conduits as methods of quick (if unsafe) travel.
• Clock Roaches: The Loom. When they attached their tentacles to an individual, that being was erased from existence, with all memories of them were lost as if they never existed.
• Close-Enough Timeline: In season 2, Starfleet's Temporal Mechanics 101 course promotes this theory of time travel. Time travelers can affect small things without meaningfully changing history as a whole, as long as the big things happen the way they were supposed to. Dal and company accidentally change history by allowing Chakotay to successfully steal back the Protostar rather than send it through the temporal anomaly on autopilot, and from that point forward the goal becomes finding the ship and getting it to Tars Lamora so he and his friends can find it and escape, thereby setting history straight despite a bump in the road.
• Continuity Nod: has its own page
• Continuity Overlap: While it's only alluded to in passing during Season One, Prodigy is running parallel to the backstory of Star Trek: Picard (as the Romulan Evacuation is currently underway off-screen). The ending of Season Two finally syncs up with the events of "Children of Mars", as the Synth Attack on Mars is acknowledged and will affect the series moving forward should it be renewed for Season Three.
• Continuity Snarl: A background LCARS screen lists some of the crew of the U.S.S. Dauntless, including several characters who had also served on Voyager. Curiously, this list includes Joseph Carey and Aaron Cavit, both of whom unambiguously died in Star Trek: Voyager (the latter in the very first episode).
• Cool Starship: In the Crapsack World Used Future mining camp of Tars Lamora, the sleek U.S.S. Protostar is clearly the coolest thing on two nacelles.
• Crapsack World: The asteroid Tars Lamora is a miserable mining colony and slave camp ruled with an iron fist by the Diviner. Translator Microbes are outlawed so no one can communicate, and hope is disallowed as well. It’s no wonder our heroes want to escape.
• Dangerous Interrogative: In the pilot episode, after Rok-Tahk accidentally activates the Translator Microbes, Dal realizes that the apparent Rock Monster is actually a little girl.
  Dal: And you're not a big fella. You're a...
  Rok-Tahk: What?
  Dal: Not what I expected.
• Darker and Edgier: Within the context of being a Nickelodeon show, it's definitely darker than what they normally do. Scenes involving enslavement, torture, and the morality on what is or isn't right to do make it quite a bit more mature than their usual output.
• Dark Lord on Life Support: The Diviner is mentioned by this article to be in a state where his body is failing him and an official image shows him in some kind of tank. He only leaves it when the Protostar escapes, as he needs the ship for an unspecified reason and will do anything to find it.
• Deconstruction: This series can be seen as a deconstruction of the Federation's visiting of new races and planets, and their non-interference policy. It was revealed that the main villain of the series The Diviner is from the future and was a member of a race called the Vau N'Akat from the planet Solum. In the future, the Federation had visited the Vau N'Akat. Two factions developed: one that wanted to join the Federation and be part of the Galactic community, and the other that wanted to stay in isolation. This led to a Civil War that destroyed the Vau N'Akat; what’s worse, the Federation refused to get involved or offer any help to survivors. As a result, the surviving members of the Vau N'Akat try to prevent tragedy by going back in time and destroying the Federation before contact. This shows that contacting a new alien race that has no experience with other races has consequences, and non-interference does more harm than good in some situations.
• The Dragon: Drednok, a cybernetic enforcer and right hand man to the Diviner.
• Dyson Sphere: Not that big or a sphere but the Protostar has a protostar powering its engine.
• Evil Counterpart: According to this article, in addition to being expies of Khan Noonien Singh and Maximillian, respectively, the Diviner and Drednok are also The Kirk and The Spock in terms of dynamics.
• Expy:
  • Jimmi Simpson say this about Drednok, "he's there to serve", adding that he's like Maximillian in The Black Hole, but more verbose.
  • The Hageman Brothers describe the Diviner as one for Khan Noonien Singh.
• Face Framed in Shadow: Rok-Tahk is made to look more intimidating (and male) at first through the use of shadows and goggles that obscure her complexion and facial features. It's only after the Protostar boots up and she can be seen in good lighting that her Tertiary Sexual Characteristics become apparent.
• Falling into the Cockpit: Deconstructed. The crew find the U.S.S. Protostar and decide to make it their own, but quickly realize that running a starship is not a simple affair, especially for a bunch of teenagers with almost no experience between them in that area. Hologram Janeway has to explain the controls to them, as they can only puzzle out the bare minimum from the labels.
• Fictional Disability:
  • the time paradox causes Gwyn to have to constantly wear a temporal stabilizer to avoid phasing in and out of our timeline, which also causes them to lose the ritual that allows Asencia to rise to power. It turns into a Disability Superpower when Gwyn is able to use it to unravel a secret message.
  • In "Veritas?", Zero gains a physical body, allowing them to finally experience sensory input, but the body begins decaying soon after they leave the planet, causing difficulty walking and shaking hands. Also becomes a Disability Superpower when Asencia's weapon is ageing everyone with chroniton radiation; Zero's body is already decaying and even if it ages and dies, they can be placed into a new container, making them ideal to defuse the weapon.
• Five-Second Rule: After the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits learn about the transporter, they put it to the test by beaming a slice of pie all around the ship, then are amazed that it's still hot when it beams. At one point, Gwyn even picks it up off the floor and eats it, declaring it delicious, with Jankom Pog even marvelling at the idea of "floor pie".
• Foreshadowing: Janeway reprimands the crew for the events of "First Con-tact" and makes sure that they know they did not "fix it" just by giving the Cymari crystal back—they've left an indelible impression on the Cymari, which is why Starfleet is so concerned with making sure first contact missions aren't going to give bad ideas to pre-warp species. It was the repercussions from a first contact mission that sparked a civil war among the Vau N'Akat that devastated the Diviner's homeworld.
  • When Murf's language can not be translated into StandardSpeak, Rok speculates that his language is too complex to decipher. Season 2 reveals that it's actually because his language is meant to be heard underwater. Gillian the whale navigator is the only one who can understand his speech, once he joins her in the whale tank.
• Future Me Scares Me: Ilthuran experiences this, but it's a somewhat unusual variation of this trope as they never meet, and Future Him is Killed Off for Real before the current-day character is even introduced. Asencia is a much more straight-forward version.
• Heel–Face Turn: Gwyn undergoes this in episode five, having been left for dead by the Diviner and subsequently rescued by the crew.
• Hostage Situation:
  • Our heroes are forced to take Gwyn captive in order to escape Drednok and get the Protostar airborne. Little do they know that the ship itself is the hostage; simply being in control of it prevents the Diviner from attacking them for fear of damaging it, regardless of Gywn's presence there. The pilot ends with her still tied to the captain’s chair. He does care that they've taken her once he's aware of it, but the ship is his prize.
  • The two-parter "A Moral Star" has the Diviner demand the return of the Protostar in return for the lives of all the miners.
• The Kirk: Two big examples:
  • Dal is this for the heroes. He’s brash, impulsive, emotional, and the self-proclaimed Captain of the Protostar.
  • The Diviner is an evil version of this trope. He’s more emotional and prone to outbursts compared to his stoic underling, Drednok.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In "The Devourer of All Things", When Dal asks where Chakotay and the ship are, Wesley tells the Protostar crew they're "halfway there". This two-parter marks the actual halfway point of season 2.
• Leitmotif: Scenes involving Vice Admiral Janeway and/or Chakotay will have bits of the Voyager theme playing in the background.
• Little Green Man in a Can: Well, Energy Being in a can. Zero the Medusan is a non-corporeal life form in a robotic containment suit to protect others from seeing their true form.
• Locked Out of the Loop:
  • The Diviner has worked to keep the young slaves (and his daughter) ignorant of the universe beyond Tars Lamora - including the Federation and Starfleet. Thus, Hologram Janeway has to fill them in.
  • Janeway. As far as she is apparently aware, the kids are Starfleet cadets, not escapees from a mining planet. There are also ship records that are classified even to her, which include the Protostar's original mission and crew.
• MacGuffin: The Diviner seeks the Protostar for an unknown reason, and decides to pursue the gang into space when they steal it first.
• Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter: Gwyn seems to fall into this, being the daughter and a reluctant dragon of the series’ Big Bad, the Diviner.
• Meaningful Name: The Protostar isn't just the name of the ship, it's the name of its power source.
• Mind Rape:
  • Zero does this just by visual exposure to people. They were not happy being used like this to turn the other prisoners into mindless slaves.
  • Asencia appears to be doing this to Wesley Crusher in captivity with a combination of tech and Vau N'Akat telepathy, though it turns out to be (allegedly) all part of the plan and the target is able to eventually recover.
• Morph Weapon:
  • The metallic lattice on Gwyn's arm is a shapeshifting metal that she can turn into a blade just by willing it.
  • Drednok has the ability to turn his body into a giant gun.
  • The Living Weapon stashed on the Protostar as a Trojan Horse to destroy Starfleet is constantly shifting and changing shape
• Motile Vehicular Components: The Protostar is an experimental ship using a new Proto-Warp Drive, which shifts its two primary nacells down and opens at the rear to reveal a third nacelle taking up most of the stardrive section when the Proto-Warp is engaged.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The Protostar seems to be similar in shape to the Voyager concept art (before a decision was made to round the ship off), and (if unintentionally) to the Emissary-class cruisers from Star Trek Online.
  • Dal echos the Romulan commander from "Balance of Terror".
  Dal: You know, different circumstances, we could have been friends.
  • Pog's repulsion at Janeway's smooth forehead is a nod to Star Trek's longtime reliance on Rubber-Forehead Aliens.
  • The vehicle replicator is likely a knowing wink to Voyager's endless ability to replace lost shuttlecraft.
  • The photonic scrubbers resemble exocomps.
  • The Diviner's ship catches up to the Protostar while in warp, with the warp tunnel effect and visuals matching those of the Vengeance catching the Enterprise in Star Trek Into Darkness.
  • Dal screaming "Fire everything!" in frustration during his Kobayashi Maru exam is a clear reference to Nero from Star Trek (2009).
• The Namesake: Most, but not all, Star Trek shows tend to be named after their hero ship or station. Think Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Discovery. As it turns out with Prodigy, the show's namesake vessel, the U.S.S. Prodigy NCC-81084, is only revealed to the viewer at the end of season 2, rather than the start of the series.
• Never Say "Die": Downplayed; "die" is used, but "kill" is not. Torture is alluded to, but never referred to as such.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!:
  • Dal's actions on the Infinity mission cause a Temporal Paradox that summons a swarm of timeline-eating eldritch horrors
  • Gwyn's attempt to establish her legitimacy as a Vau N'Akat through an ancient ritual accidentally paves the way for Asencia to seize control of Solum and enact her vendetta against the Federation
  • Wesley helping the Vau N'Akat develop temporal technology as part of a Batman Gambit backfires massively as Asencia's fleet comes dangerously close to a devastating surprise attack on the Federation when the plan goes off the rails
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain!: In the original timeline the Vau Na'kat experienced a Civil War because one faction wanted to join the Federation, while the other wanted to remain isolationist. Ironically, Asencia appears to have totally averted this future by making herself a dictator, and gaining a 0% Approval Rating. By the time she's done her own past self leads the rebellion against her, and it's implied that she'd managed to single-handedly make isolationism look absolutely insane to almost everyone on Solum.
• No Biological Sex: On more than one occasion in the first episode, Zero states or is stated to be neither male nor female.
• No Focus on Humans: While obviously humans exist in the Star Trek universe this show is set in, there are none at all among the main characters, Hologram Janeway is just a sophisticated simulation of a human, and the action takes place in a part of the galaxy far from human-occupied space. It's not until late in the first season that the plot points start to include real humans.
• No Gravity for You: Normally a rarity in the franchise, this has happened in a few episodes of this series.
• No Name Given: Dal's species is conspicuously unnamed initially. Dal himself doesn’t even know what he is. Eventually it's revealed he's an extremely modified human Augment, with genetic material from 26 other species layered in. As far as Starfleet is concerned, his species, functionally, is human.
• No One Gets Left Behind:
  • Averted in the first episode, which is justified as the crew has just come together. When Dal is captured and put to work on the surface with low chances of surviving, the rest of the group focuses on preparing to leave rather than rescuing him. Dal brushes it off, as they weren't True Companions as of yet.
  • Further, Rok suggests that they could use the ship to help everyone escape, but they don't have any way to pursue that plan without risking Drednok and the Diviner finding out first. They need to limit their recruits to the bare minimum to avoid drawing attention, and Drednok's arrival forces them to leave in a hurry, abandoning the other prisoners, at least for now.
  • Throughout their time on the Murder Planet, the crew go back and forth as to whether this applies to Gwyn, given that she betrayed them to her father and stranded them on the world in the first place. After her father abandons her to die, and the crew reclaim the ship, Dal decides to save her.
• No Romantic Resolution: Dal and Gwyn. While the two do share a kiss at the end of Season One, there's no romantic follow up in the second season despite the two being very close. Their relationship ends up falling in the close Captain/Number One relationship archetype.
• No OSHA Compliance: Tars Lamora is not a nice place to work. Before starting a shift, Dal and Rok-Tahk have to sit through a training video showing all the ways a worker could potentially get killed. Admittedly that was for a particularly dangerous region, but still.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Drednok's reputation precedes him, and the characters don't bother to describe why it would be bad to be left at his mercy.
  Dal: You know what he'll do to me.
• Oddball in the Series: This is the first series to have an entirely non-human crew and the first full-length series to use CGI animation. It does have occasional moments where it gets darker and more serious.
• Omniglot: Gwyn has learned every language of the aliens at the mining prison, allowing her to serve as a living universal translator. She notes the redundancy, as the security droids have universal translators built in.
• One-Winged Angel: When Drednok takes off his cloak he goes from bipedal robot to giant mechanical scorpion monster.
• Percussive Maintenance: Jankom Pog mentions this by name when working on the Protostar and says it's "kind of [his] thing". Throughout the series, he often fixes mechanical problems by hitting them.
• Poor Communication Kills: From "Time Amok":
  Janeway: But if you could build a warp matrix, why did you need me?
  Rok: No one told me where it goes.
• Projected Man: The "Kathryn Janeway" seen on the U.S.S. Protostar is actually a training hologram designed to assist the crew. She activates upon hearing the word "help".
  • Another hologram character, the Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager, appears on this show, as well.
• Punny Name: Rok-Tahk looks like a rock, who talks.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Deconstructed. In both seasons the crew of the Protostar are only able to eke out a win with A LOT of guidance and tactical support from the Federation.
• Rock Monster: Rok-Tahk looks like one, and Dal initially mistakes her for one (due to the lack of translators), which makes it even funnier when she has the voice of a preteen girl.
• Running Gag: In the first episodes of season 2, Dal is constantly reminded by various characters that he should read the "Temporal Mechanics 101" course, especially whenever he's puzzled by some aspects of time travel.
• Samus Is a Girl: Dal is surprised when he realizes Rok-Tahk is actually a young girl and not a grown man like he initially assumed.
  Dal: [upon hearing Rok’s high-pitched voice] And you’re not a big fella, you’re— you’re a—
  Rok: [angrily] What?
  Dal: Not what I thought.
• Saying Sound Effects Out Loud: While trying to escape Tars Lamora in the Protostar, Dal tells the crew to locate the ship's "pew-pew-pew" button to destroy some incoming debris.
  • While operating the fire control console in Season 2, Murf says "Pew Pew Pew" as he is firing the ship's phasers.
• Scenery Porn: The animators clearly spared no expense to make interstellar space look gorgeous◊. Even the Crapsack World of Tars Lamora◊ is stunning in an ominous kind of way.
• Shout-Out:
  • The scene in which the crew hide from Drednok on the Murder Planet echoes the scene where the four hobbits hide from the Nazgul in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
  • When the crew replicate then transport a piece of pie from one end of the ship to the other, it appears on the floor of the vehicle bay. Jankom yells "Floor Pie!", a reference to The Simpsons.
  • The glowing crystals and tones of the Cymari as they communicate using tones are similar to the exchange with the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the structure they create and their ability to manipulate sand are similar to the creatures from The Abyss, and their water manipulation abilities. They're also similar in form to the creatures from The Abyss.
  • The members of the Vau N'Akat Order abandoned their names in favor of portentous nouns like "the Diviner" and "the Vindicator", just like outlaw members of a certain other famous time-travelling culture.
    • In that same vein, while not explicitly stated, one could consider Gwyn's title to be 'The Progeny'. At the end of Season 1, Dal titles Gwyn "The Unifier".
  • In this Season 2 preview, after hearing an explanation about the difference between the present-day Solum and the future one at the other end of the wormhole, Dal complains that "all this timey-wimey stuff" hurts his head. (Appropriately enough, said explanation came from the Doctor.)
  • Dal's command code for the Protostar is "GB64N32X", a reference to old-school gaming systems such as the Nintendo Game Boy, N64 (and possibly NES) and the Sega 32X add on for the Genesis.
  • The Loom have more than a passing resemblance to Knave of Hearts in that they're both predominantly black amorphous entities with a huge fanged mouth and large number of thick tentacles trailing behind them that glow yellow at their tips that require unconventional tactics to take down.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift: When the Protostar's crew returns to Tars Lamora, they don Starfleet cadet uniforms.
• Sleeper Starship: A line by Jankom in the episode "Dreamcatcher" indicates he was on one of these at one point. This is later confirmed in "Preludes."
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: Drednok never raises his voice above a murmur and is a truly nasty piece of work.
• Spikes of Villainy:
  • The Crapsack World of Tars Lamora is covered in natural versions of these at mountain-sized scale.
  • Drednok's mechanical body has no lack of these either, at least once he takes off his cloak.
  • Vau N'Akat starship design leans heavily into this, especially once Asencia takes over
• Stable Time Loop: Much of season 2 revolves around deliberately creating one of these, after the crew accidentally alter the events that allowed them to find the Protostar in the first place. Buckle your seatbelts, folks. So: in 2382 (approx.) the USS Protostar accidentally passes through a temporal wormhole to Solum in the year 2435, a Bad Future where Federation first contact caused a civil war that devastated the planet. Vau N'Akat agents capture the ship and turn it into a trojan horse to destroy all of Starfleet with malware. Chakotay is unable to escape but manages to send the Protostar back through the wormhole unmanned, where it ends up on Tars Lamora sometime before 2382. The Vau N'Akat send Asencia & Ilthuran back in time to find the Protostar — Ilthuran arrives well before 2382 and the search takes him so long he creates a daughter, Gwyndala, to carry on his work. In 2383, Gwyn and the others find the Protostar and fly it back to Federation space, accidentally unleashing the malware so they blow up the ship to save everyone. This somehow makes a new temporal wormhole to Bad Future Solum, so in 2384 Janeway plans to go through and rescue Chakotay. Dal & friends accidentally go through instead, and alter events so Chakotay and his first officer Adreek-Hu escape in the Protostar, ejecting its proto-core and deliberately crash-landing it on a planet nowhere near Tars Lamora, in the year 2374. This creates a massive timeline-breaking paradox because a) Gwyn now should not exist, and b) there would now be no Protostar for her & Dal to find and use to make the second wormhole. Now they have to get portal'd by Wesley Crusher to Chakotay's crash site, persuade him to stop moping around after Adreek's death, find a way to get the ship into space, recover Adreek's body and more imporantly his comm badge, make a new protostar to power it, erase Hologram Janeway's memory, and leave the ship on Tars Lamora, before 2383, with no one on board. Wesley has to get Captured on Purpose by Asencia to trick her into inventing the wormhole tech they need (and nearly starting a war with the Federation in the process), but it's that or oblivion, so it all works out. Dal even places the comm badge he recovered from Adreek's body, the one that Rok picks up in the pilot, down on the floor in front of the captain's chair allowing him to understand her and begin the chain of events in the first place. Phew!
• Stealth Pun: DaiMon Nandi's ship is called the Damsel, and she apparently has a history of sending fake distress signals.
• Team Pet: Murf fulfills this role at first, since he doesn’t seem to be able to talk and mostly spends his time trying to eat equipment. Later, Bribble takes over this role, starting with the season 2 episode "A Tribble Called Quest."
• Telepathy: As a Medusan, Zero naturally has this trait. What more surprising is tha Dal also has this as two species that comprise his genetic make-up are Vulcan and Proto-Organian. This becomes a plot point in the episode "Mindwalk".
• Temporal Paradox: turns out accidentally messing with the chain of events that sent the Protostar to Tars Lamora has serious consequences for the timeline, complete with Clock Roaches.
• Third-Person Person: "Jankom Pog understands this trope!"
• Timey-Wimey Ball: Season two centers around the utter complexity and confusion of time travel with Dal even name dropping the trope. Dal, Zero, Jankom, and Maj'El end up in Solum's future and assume they are in a Stable Time Loop of helping Chakotay send the Protostar into the wormhole which will end up on Tars Lamora. However, they end up creating a time paradox in which Chakotay takes the Protostar instead and it doesn't land on Tars Lamora. They then attempt to fix the Prime timeline by finding the Protostar and send it into the past to Tars Lamora.
• Translator Microbes: This series puts more emphasis than previous series on the importance of the Universal Translator:
  • The first episode has translators banned in the mining colony among the workers, making it difficult for Dal to talk to any of them. However, Dal and Rok-Tahk find a commbadge on the bridge of the Protostar that serves as one, allowing them to plot their escape with the rest of the crew.
  • In the tenth episode, Jankom and Dal manage to jury-rig the workers's ankle monitors on the mining colony to work as a Universal Translator, allowing the workers to organise and overthrow their handlers.
  • In the season 1 finale, the Construct activation causes the Universal Translator to fail for the whole fleet, leaving orders unable to be correctly relayed and Starfleet unable to call their allies for help.
• Vocal Dissonance: Rok-Tahk's girlish voice is hilariously out of step with her massive stature and rocky skin. Notably, this is actually a function of the Universal Translator, as without it, Rok-Tahk has exactly the deep, gruff voice you'd expect from a large rock creature.
• Voices Are Not Mental:
  • There is a body swap episode and the voice actors stay with their respective bodies and don't go with their "minds" instead having the voice actors adopting the mannerisms of the other characters so Kate Mulgrew plays a very panicky "Dal-in-Janeway's body", and Brett Gray plays a fairly calm (as it's far from the weirdest thing to happen to her) "Janeway-in-Dal's body" giving the kids the chance to explain the weapon situation to Janeway.
  • A programming glitch causes this to happen to the kids' hologram doppelgangers, causing them to have the same "voice" but the personality, speech patterns and mannerisms of someone else… right down to Gwyn conversing in Murf's usual chirping and fart noises.
• Wave-Motion Gun: Drednok has the ability to transform into one, destroying a massive tower with it.
• We Will Use Manual Labor in the Future: The Diviner uses slave labor to work the mines on Tars Lamora, even though he already has access to a robot workforce (which he relegates to security instead).
• Younger Than They Look:
  • Despite being the largest of the crew, Rok-Tahk is also the youngest at eight years old. However, it's never confirmed exactly how long she spends in the slowest ebb of the time dialation in "Time Amok", but Hologram Janeway's horrified "too long" implies it was a very long time, so she might actually be the oldest member of the crew now and no one even realizes it.
  • Jankom Pog is listed in official materials as being 16 but, being a Tellarite and all, he looks like a 30 to 40-year-old by human standards. At least chronologically, Jankom is actually much older than the rest of the crew, having been put on a Sleeper Starship during the period of Enterprise, i.e pre-Federation founding, and therefore is more than two hundred and sixteen based purely on birthdate, even if cryostasis prevented him aging.