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Thoughts on Star Trek: Prodigy’s Second Season

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I recently got done watching the second season of Star Trek: Prodigy, the franchise’s entry into the realm of children’s cartoons. Despite my ambivalence towards kids’ media and disdain for the current direction of the franchise, the first season blew me away, and I was glad to see the show saved by Netflix after it was axed by Paramount. Given Netflix’s recent history, I’m assuming this will be the show’s final season, but we’ll see.

Promotional art for Star Trek: Prodigy season two.Unfortunately I was a bit disappointed by this season. It’s still more good than bad to be sure, but it’s definitely a more uneven experience than season one.

My biggest issue is that they went all-in on fan service this season, to a really excessive degree. To be clear, I think playing to nostalgia is a perfectly fine thing for a story to do — I’ve sunk thousands of hours into World of Warcraft almost entirely on the basis of Warcraft III nostalgia — but it has to be done the right, and anything can be toxic when taken to excess.

Prodigy’s tie-ins to other Trek shows this season are problematic both because there’s so many of them, to the point of crowding out Prodigy’s own stories, and because a lot of it feels unnecessary.

I’m a huge fan of the Doctor, so I was super hyped when I heard Robert Picardo was coming back to reprise the role, but to be honest… he didn’t really need to be there. The Doctor is clearly just there for the sake of nostalgia bait, and in nearly all of his scenes he could be replaced with any other random Starfleet officer without changing the plot in any meaningful way. There are only a handful of exceptions, such as a lovely but all too brief scene in which he bonds with Zero over their shared experiences as beings of pure energy.

Robert Picardo's The Doctor in Star Trek: Prodigy season two.By comparison, I was never that big a fan of Janeway or Chakotay, but because they’ve been woven into Prodigy’s story from the start, their presence feels earned and natural, and I ended up loving all the stories with them this season. That’s an example of nostalgia bait done the right way.

But my biggest complaint is definitely the extent to which throwbacks to the past left so little room for new stories to flourish. Given how much of the season revolves around Solum, the homeworld of the Vau N’Akat, I was super excited to learn to more about their history and culture… and we got almost none of that.

Instead it felt like fully a quarter of the season was devoted to bringing back an old face from the past that I don’t think many fans even wanted to see again. It bothers me that two seasons in we know almost nothing about Gwyn’s people and even less about Rok’s people, but they found time to devote multiple episodes to one of the franchise’s least popular characters.

I know the (star)ship sailed on this before the first season even finished, and it may not be the most popular opinion, but I think having the crew join up with the Federation so early in the series was a mistake. I loved the angle of a crew who isn’t under the direct guidance of Starfleet but is trying to live by their principles anyway because they see it’s a better way to live. It was such a great way of taking the franchise in a new direction while staying true to its roots, and I wish that had continued for longer.

A shot of the crew in Star Trek: Prodigy season two.There’s also a lot of plot holes and sloppy writing this season, both on an individual episode level and a big picture level. Bluntly, the meta plot for this season makes no sense at all. Time travel can always be a bit messy, and it’s never had a totally consistent portrayal in Star Trek, but this season manages to contradict all we’ve seen before while failing to adhere to even the most basic kind of logic.

That said, I do find this a lot more forgivable from Prodigy than it might otherwise be, thanks to the generally light-hearted tone of the show. I’ve said in the past that the problem with modern Trek is not so much that it’s super dumb, but that it doesn’t know it’s super dumb. The most ridiculous, nonsensical plots are treated with such breathless gravitas.

Prodigy doesn’t fall into that trap. It’s not pretending to be anything more than it is: a goofy pulp adventure story. So while I’d prefer something closer to the cerebral Trek of yesteryear, Prodigy failing to live up to that is merely a hiccup, not a fatal flaw.

And there are plenty of other things to like about this season. The core cast remains a delight. I love how Rok-Tahk is the living embodiment of Star Trek’s wholesomeness, and I love how Zero exemplifies the wisdom of, “Beware the just anger of a gentle heart.” There’s also a great new addition to the cast in the form of the Vulcan cadet Maj’el, and I enjoyed seeing her grow into part of the team.

Cadet Maj'el in Star Trek: Prodigy season two.Most importantly, Prodigy remains a show built on the optimism and sense of wonder at the heart of Star Trek. It is not burdened by the depressing cynicism that has defined all other modern incarnations of the franchise. Whatever other flaws it may have, this is the kind of Star Trek I loved growing up.

My favourite episode this season involved the crew setting literal sail across an alien cloud sea. It was whimsical, exciting, and just plain fun — joyful sci-fi adventure at its very best. That’s the spirit of exploration that Trek is all too often missing, especially these days, but Prodigy hasn’t forgotten what it means to boldly go.

Ultimately my complaint is not that the second season wasn’t good, but simply that it missed a lot of opportunities to be better.

Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden Review

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I meant to write this several weeks ago when I actually finished playing Don’t Nod’s latest, Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, but I’ve had a dearth of spoons to spare. Still, I didn’t want to go without covering the game at all.

Loading screen art from Banishers Ghosts of New Eden.This is a game I’ve been hotly anticipating for a long time. I’ll say upfront: Ghosts of New Eden is a solid game that I definitely recommend, but it isn’t quite the masterpiece I’d hoped it would be.

Ghosts of New Eden is the tale of Red Mac Raith and Antea Duarte, a pair of 18th century ghost hunters who are also lovers. While investigating a particularly terrible haunting in New England, Antea is killed and becomes a ghost herself. The two must then grapple with the question of whether to fulfill their oath and grant Antea her final death, or use dark magic to try to restore her to life, all while continuing to contend with the powerful spirit who killed her.

Fantastic premise. In practice it feels very much like Don’t Nod’s earlier game, Vampyr, with the player given the choice to sacrifice people to Antea or spare their lives during a series of “haunting case” side quests. Indeed, this feels like it is essentially Vampyr 2 — there’s even an Easter egg that confirms Ghosts of New Eden is set within the same universe as Vampyr.

I enjoyed that kind of moral decision-making in Vampyr, and it’s executed even better here. Almost none of the cases offer clear black and white answers; each is a gripping self-contained narrative, and the game is worth it for the haunting cases alone. It’s genuinely one of the best examples of “choices matter” game design I’ve ever seen.

Red Mac Raith and Antea Duarte in Banishers Ghosts of New Eden.Unraveling the mystery behind the ghost at the heart of New Eden’s curse is also highly compelling. The Nightmare is one of the most memorable antagonists I’ve seen in a video game recently.

Surprisingly, though, I did find Red and Antea’s story a little less compelling. Not to say it was boring or anything, but it didn’t tug at my heartstrings as much as I thought it would. A lot of this boils down to the fact that Antea isn’t actually a very likable character. She’s not a bad person or anything, but she’s frequently abrasive and often hypocritical. This is realistic; nobody’s perfect, and she does feel very three dimensional as a character. It’s good writing. But it didn’t leave me desperate to save her the way I was with Chloe in Life Is Strange.

Red is an absolute sweetheart, though. My efforts to save Antea were mainly for his sake.

I do also enjoy the simple fact that this is a story about an established, mostly healthy couple. That’s so incredibly rare in media, and it’s something I’ve long been hungry for.

This is also another case where I got the “bad” ending, but didn’t really mind. It was a bad ending for the characters, but a good ending for me as the player, answering many questions.

Combat in Banishers Ghosts of New Eden.So the story isn’t quite the emotional tour de force I was expecting, but it’s still very good, and easily justifies the game’s price tag. My true complaints lie more with the gameplay.

At this point I expect the gameplay of a Don’t Nod action game to be a bit janky or underwhelming, but Ghosts of New Eden has what I would say is the worst combat of any Don’t Nod game to date.

It’s not even that it’s actively unpleasant or anything. It’s just… kind of boring. Nothing about it stands out. I like the idea of being able to swap between Red and Antea to combine physical and ghostly powers, but they didn’t give either character a clear role or mechanical identity. You can kind of give them those things with the build system (which is surprisingly deep for this kind of quasi-RPG), but it still never really came together for me.

So the combat isn’t terrible, but it isn’t that fun, either, and gods, there’s so much of it. You can’t walk ten feet without fighting something. And there’s very, very little variety of enemy types, so it starts to feel incredibly repetitive after a while.

The Old Mill in Banishers Ghosts of New Eden.The fast travel system is also a problem. It’s one of those ones where you can only teleport from one fast travel point to another, and there aren’t very many of them. This is a game that involves a great deal of backtracking and revisiting old areas, which I actually like in theory (makes the world feel more cohesive), but it really shines an unwelcome light on the limitations of the fast travel system. And with so much hoofing it through the wilderness, you’ll need to be subjected to a lot more of that endless, repetitive combat.

There’s also an absurd amount of collectibles and non-story side activities, all of which add basically nothing to the game since most of the rewards are crafting materials that you will soon have far more of than you could ever possibly need. At least you can skip those with minimal consequence.

It’s not a great video game, but it is a great story, and the strength of the writing is sufficient to make it worth wading through all those wolves and ghosts.

Overall rating: 8/10