Star Trek: Prodigy Is The Perfect Voyager Spinoff

The irony here is that it’s tempting to skip Star Trek: Prodigy for most fans who grew up watching Voyager. This animated show is the first Trek venture aimed directly at children, and as such, it features a crew of plucky young aliens who find a Starfleet ship and claim it for themselves. That ship has a holographic version of Janeway (sadly, she doesn’t say “please state the nature of your coffee emergency” when she appears), but by the second season, these kids are working alongside the actual Janeway, now an Admiral who has been back home for five years.

Understandably, the Star Trek: Prodigy show mostly focuses on the young protagonists, but there is so much Voyager DNA in this cartoon that it serves as a great spinoff of Janeway’s original show. And Janeway isn’t the only member of the original show to make a cameo. Chakotay and the Emergency Medical Hologram return, and like Janeway, they are voiced by the original actors.

If you’ve been holding off on watching Star Trek: Prodigy because it just seems like a kid’s show, then you might think the presence of these beloved Voyager characters would be the only reason for older audiences to turn in. You’d be wrong, though. There are constant references to earlier eras of Star Trek, which simultaneously gives the young fans new things to check out while giving older fans some welcome hits of nostalgia.

While we’re mostly focusing on how Star Trek: Prodigy is a not-so-secret love letter to Voyager, you should know that writers and animators have crammed so much love for this universe into each scene that it gives off Clone Wars vibes in the best possible way. Just as that show embraced every aspect of George Lucas’ galaxy far, far away, Prodigy embraces all of the craziest ideas of Gene Roddenberry and those inspired by him. Our characters eventually have to deal with everything from Jellico (now an Admiral) and the Mirror Universe, all of which is very entertaining for old-school Star Trek fans.

Speaking of old-school fans, perhaps the most compelling reason to watch Star Trek: Prodigy isn’t that it’s a low-key Voyager spinoff … it’s that this show carries the adventurous spirit of that golden franchise era.

Shows like Discovery and Picard have their strengths, but they often come across as edgy fan-fiction where the writers wanted to focus on war, violence, android slavery … all things that seem counter to Gene Roddenberry’s ideals.

Prodigy, by contrast, is all about exploring strange new worlds while helping everyone out, and these feel-good stories feel that much better to anyone who is completely over the grimdark NuTrek era of storytelling.

If you were like us and held off on watching Star Trek: Prodigy because it looked like nothing more than a kids’ show, it’s time to stream it on Netflix, and not just for the Voyager cameos. At this point, it seems like we’ll never get a Janeway show or a Star Trek: Legacy show, which is bitterly disappointing. But we still have Prodigy, a nostalgia-heavy show that joyously carries the spirit of the franchise forward, and it’s important to watch now so this amazing series will get renewed for a third season.