WHY WE LIKE IT: Dal's final sacrifice.
WHY WE DON'T: The Picard connections don't sit well.
REVIEW: Okay, maybe Asencia is just distraught. She realizes she's done something terrible. Better than lobotomy, but not as good as redemption. It doesn't happen for her, nor would it seem possible. As we leave Solum behind, we're also left without a reasonable explanation as to why Ilthuran, Gwyn's father, doesn't become the Diviner. The explanation, suggested a season ago, is that the Diviner is from an alternate timeline and that's okay with space-time. It's messy because THIS season's storyline presents time as solid and immutable, with great danger triggered by a potential change. I think we needed new dialog to explain it. As it is, I had to research it.
The previous episode's cliffhanger, with the Loom arriving early from the wormhole, seemed to promise a lot of difficulties to occupy both the kid and adult crews, but nah. It's pretty much over in 9 minutes, and we're headed for a series finale epilogue by 12. That's unfortunate, because after all this, it's all a bit of an anticlimax. The Loom bounce off the temporal shielding. Holo-Janeway's program is saved on a disc, no fuss, no muss. The Protostar slides into place on autopilot... There's not much to recommend here, except perhaps seeing just how Cetacean Ops works (very cool). Instead of plot mechanics, the finale instead focuses on a montage of where we'd been before, giving us the series' two seasons in montage form, with the best of the show's dialog covering it. When Dal places his combadge on the floor where he and Rok had found it, we've closed the loop, and it does feel rather sweet.
From sweet to bittersweet then, because the epilogue kind of gets T-boned by Picard continuity. It starts off well enough - the kids finally become cadets, Zero and Ma'jel are in a relationship, Janeway retires to the farm, Chakotay takes command of Voyager, the Doctor amusingly finishes his new novel, and Wesley meets his baby brother Jack - but then the shipyards are attacked by the synths, exploration is put on hold as is the Romulan evacuation efforts, and we're wondering what kind of future the kids will actually have in this contracted, isolationist Federation. Janeway, like Picard, is dead set against it, but we're into a dark patch that doesn't really work with Prodigy (nor Lower Decks, which is perhaps why that show had to end in 2382, the year the Protostar was lost - well, could have gone at least 'til the year Prodigy ended!). Prodigy ends with a connect-the-dots that only reminds us of some less than popular events in the Star Trek universe.
Well, almost. At Janeway's behest, the new Protostar design, only good for exploration, is launched with a training crew aboard. It's our young heroes, now ensigns, with an acting captain in the chair, and holo-Janeway as Emergency Command Hologram. And the adventure continues - except it doesn't, but it's all open to alternate media or even future television stories - set to fulfill Wesley's prophecy of big things to come for them. At the midpoint, we get a great speech from Janeway, but the end belongs to Dal who steps aside and gives the captaincy to Gwyn, his old rival who should always have been in charge. Very strong character arc for our boy Dal to get him to this point, and though it's played like a big, loving goodbye, you really wish it wasn't.
LESSON: Know yourself and you'll do better by others.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium, but just: An anticlimax, followed by rampant continuity stuff... Thank the Great Bird of the Galaxy for that final scene aboard the new Protostar (and more generally, the sentimentality we want when losing a show).
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