CAPTAIN'S LOG: Dal's Ferengi mentor tricks the crew into helping her.
WHY WE LIKE IT: Ishka's revolution really took hold!
WHY WE DON'T: Watch the colonialism, kids.
REVIEW: While I continue to have questions about the traffic between the Alpha and Delta Quadrants, more so after this episode, I am glad to see the female revolution led by Ishka and Grand Nagus Rom worked out. We discover Dal was raised on a Marauder by a female Ferengi DaiMon, perhaps not quite as glamorous as Gwyn thought, but definitely consistent with the selfish attitude he exhibited until recently. The episode doesn’t dwell too much on his secret origin, but he’ll discover his story isn’t exactly the one he thought it was either. Female or not, Nandi is Ferengi through and through, well in fact like all the females we’ve ever encountered. He wasn’t kidnapped and put to work in a mine; she sold him to the mine (and by episode’s end, will be eager to sell him again). A ruthless “parent” is something he has in common with Gwyn, I guess.
Nandi, mistress of lies, promises him a Klingon cloaking device - which coincidentally works on chimerium, the stuff they mined for the Diviner - if only he’ll help her make first contact with a new species from whom she hopes to procure a crystal and pay off her Dabo debts. Well, of course she’s going to steal the thing and cause an incident - Janeway was right to make a face as soon as she heard the plan - but it’s nice to see the kids quickly getting the point of the Prime Directive and realizing it would be wrong to take the crystal even if offered. Dal even thinks a couple steps ahead - he knows Nandi by heart - and quickly get the crystal from her and restore it to its rightful place. It’s a clear victory and it may surprise the audience that Janeway is so angry and still contends the Prime Directive was broken. One hopes leaving a Starfleet badge behind will make the “Cymari” think of the Federation as a possible ally and not paint every alien with the same brush. I put their name in quotation marks because Rok names them, which is my one complaint about the episode (albeit, not a big one). I get these are kids who don’t know what they’re doing, but it’s rather colonial of her to name a species who probably have a name for themselves. They communicate with acoustics and do not speak (or at least, we never get to the point where they can be translated), but I would still have liked Janeway to say something about that. Not that she was necessarily monitoring, and she of course had bigger lessons to teach.
These are proper aliens too, made all the more possible by the CG animation, and though desert planets are old hat (Star Wars has overdone it, we’re in the middle of an epic Dune adaptation, and everything shot in L.A. gets desert vistas anyway), the way the sand is animated here and used to construct environments is actually beautiful. There’s a lack of photo-real detail in Prodigy, but it does feature some of the prettiest and most unusual places in the franchise. Some other quick notes… Nandi’s robot companion Pik-Pox looks like a rusted Companion Cube from Portal. I want more. The Phage gets mentioned by Nandi as part of a scam, which again, makes me wonder where we are (the Vidiians were super-far away, but the AQ stuff makes it feel like we’re close to a border that doesn’t exist - these two Quadrants are opposite to each other). After Dal is dressed down by Dal, he doesn’t sit in the captain’s chair, but the shot lingers on it, nicely done. And as for the teaser, it’s silly stuff for the smaller kids who might think eating pie off the floor is funny and for whom Murf was evidently designed, but it’s also part of the show making the kids discover one technology at a time. Here, transporters, because they get used in the body of the episode.
LESSON: You only get one chance to make a good impression.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium-High: Interesting revelations about Dal and a good use of the Prime Directive trope.
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